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Hopefully life will get a little less painful after today.

At my day job where I work in a cubicle, the desks are adjustable for height. There’s a neat little button off the left edge with which you can raise the desk all the way up to a standing desk or lower it enough for a wheelchair user. For most of the time, this has been a godsend. During working hours, I had the desk at the height that was right for the dual monitors I needed to perform my processing. Then on lunch I raised the desk so that it was ergonomically better for spending an hour working on my laptop.

Then the desk broke.

At first when I lowered it, sometimes it wouldn’t stop and just lower all the way, forcing me to scramble out of its path lest my leg get squished. I could then raise it where I needed it, but eventually the motor lost its function and would only lower it, always to the bottom setting. I had to force it up and disconnect the controller. The desk is now at a height that’s right for neither work and is particularly bad for my laptop work, inducing terrible neck pain.

That’s right, it’s literally a pain in the neck.

It has been like this for months, first because the people who maintain the desks couldn’t get the parts they needed, and then because they couldn’t get what they needed to simply replace the desk. Well, today I should be in a much better situation; I am moving to a new cube.

I got to pick out the cube I wanted, making sure I am not next to any of our large windows in the office where intense sunlight could induce a migraine and still positioned well enough away from most of the rest of the floor so it will be quieter for the most part.

With me about to embark on a new novel, this comes at a perfect time.

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After weeks of working overtime and feeling the crush of massive amounts of work, I decided that my mental health required a break and this week I took off Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Now, these days were not entirely my own, but what appointments I had were short and not too troublesome. Monday required a visit to the dentist to have an impression made for the crown of my latest tooth implant. Thanks to the wonders of modern science this time I did not have to hold my mouth closed over a bunch of gunk as it hardened. Instead, they scanned the inside of my mouth with a laser-based measuring device and recreated the contours that way. Very cool.

Tuesday, I visited a speech therapist for techniques that might help control and mitigate the persistent cough that has pestered me for two years.

Wednesday, I took my Kia Soul to our local mechanic for a tune-up as the little car is just about to hit 100,000 miles.

At home during those three days I relaxed and worked on my query letter and I think I have had a breakthrough. The roughest parts of the letter, which is ideally kept to a single page of text, is the paragraphs where you actually pitch the novel. Until this breakthrough I had been focused on describing the plots of the novels I pitched, but I think this theme focused approach might work better. Here is the pitch for the current novel Outrageous Fortune.

In San Diego in 1984 Dave Ludendorff lives a charmed life and is a good man. In spite of being a gay teenager in the ’70s he has never been taunted, hounded, or beaten for his orientation. The arthouse theater he inherited, that Dave has made a sanctuary for the queer and the outcast, thrives. Even with the resurgent Moral Majority of Reagan’s America, his life is good, blessed with friends and health.

The facade of Dave’s life crumbles with the discovery of a film depicting his grandfather leading a human sacrifice, a ritual that brought Dave this preternaturally charmed life. Now, with his grandfather’s cult pursuing him and murderous ghosts unleashed, Dave uncovers that everything he understood about his life, and perhaps himself, is a lie. Only by uncovering his family’s buried secrets can he hope to survive.

The truth, however, forces a terrible choice on Dave. He can accept the benefits of that human sacrifice, preserving his charmed life, but with the knowledge that like his grandfather and father before him he is the sort of evil man who profits from the suffering of others. Or he can destroy the cult, naively face the world without supernatural protections, enduring “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and in truth become the good man he always imagined himself to be.

I am going to do a little more work on it and then we’ll see if this draws better results than the previous version.

Last Sunday was a particularly nice day here in San Diego and my sweetie-wife and I made our regular visit to the zoo. Because we are zoo members, we could ignore the nasty new regulations that are charging people for parking at the Zoo and Balboa Park. With the sun out and hardly a cloud in the sky I brought along my camera and snapped a number of pictures. Here are two, the first shows just how damned nice the paths through the zoo were that day and the second of a hippo, in greyscale, looking like something from a horror film.

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I think it is important to remember that the dominant calendar of the world, this Gregorian Calendar is not the only marking of the passing years utilized on this planet. While it is the new year for many of us it is not for all of us. But still, it is here in the United States and so I am observing that personally while keeping in mind that my perspective is not the rules of the universe.

I am not one for making resolutions at the turn of the year. It has never held a great deal of weight for me and the few times I have done so the matter was quickly discarded or forgotten. In their place I like to put objectives that are measurable and within my control but do not attempt a ‘re-invention’ of oneself. I also like to look at achievements, even if they are small from the previous years.

2025 was not the best year I have experienced but by far it was not the worst. I completed the first novel where I used no outline of the plot or characters. Now, I am not proposing that writing a novel without an outline is superior to one that was carefully plotted. Both approaches are valid and what matters is if the process works for the author. Outrageous Fortune could not have been written sans outline if I had not written so many novel projects before it with careful outlines. Structure, the use of five acts, a sense of pacing dictated by the flow of the plot, all came from experience that had been born from those outlines.

With Outrageous Fortune completed, edited, and proofed by my lovely sweetie-wife, I have yet another novel to try and win me an agent and another shot at traditional publication.

For 2026 I endeavor to write a new novel, but I think I shall shy away from a concept that I love but do not feel ready to tackle quite yet.

2026 will also see a fresh assault from me and my doctors on this persistent chronic cough left over from my COVID infection of January of 2024. Towards the end of 2025 I seemed to be responding to therapy, but a sinus infection has wiped out all the progress we made.

I also will try, depending on schedules and such, to attend more meetings of the San Diego chapter of the Horror Writers Association. They are good people, I have kept my membership active, and post on the Facebook page but attended zero meetings during 2025.

This is my look forward to 2026 and I hope that yours is kind, good, and happy.

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My latest horror novel, Outrageous Fortune, is not the first time that my adopted hometown of San Diego, California has been used as a setting for one of my fictions, but it is the most extensive and all the other projects were short stories.

Part of the reason I used San Diego for the novel is because the principal location, the Kensington Theater is a fictionalized version of my favorite theater, the beloved Ken Cinema.

I came to San Diego in 1981 when I was assigned by the US Navy to the USS Bella Wood (LHA-3). At that time this city had a ton of movie theaters, from grand palaces like the Loma out in the Sport Arena area to the grindhouses downtown that played the most interesting exploitive fare 24 hours a day. However, the Ken, a part of the Landmark Chain, was quite special.

The theater was a revival house, played older films in double features that changed on a daily basis and arthouse and foreign films that played longer engagements. From its worn, hard seating, I watched a number of films that became favorites. A double feature of It Came from Outer Space and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, both presented in their original 3-D format. It was at the Ken that I was exposed to David Lynch with a double feature of Little Shop of Horrors(the non-musical original) with Eraserhead.

Such a beloved and treasured space made a natural setting for my story of cursed nitrate film and the ghost trapped in that celluloid.

In the forty-four years that I have lived in this city I have resided in a number of apartments and houses, nearly always with dear friends as roommates. Nearly every apartment that appears in Outrageous Fortune as a character’s home is located in a complex where I lived. These places are vivid in my memory as is Balboa Park — its trails, museums, and eateries — another aspect of my decades living in San Diego.

During 1984, the novel’s setting, I was already a performing member of the shadow cast that participated in the Rocky Horror Picture Show experience at the Ken every Saturday and Sunday. It was among that group of oddballs and misfits that I found a real community where I fitted in with them like they had been a family from which I had merely been absent and not one newly discovered. Once, at a breakfast/brunch with many of them, someone commented to Goldie that I was shy and she exclaimed quite loudly “Bob is shy?” I am quite shy around people I do not know and also in situations that are not a good fit for my personality, the people of the Rocky crowd were not that at all.

So, amid the death, the ghosts, the vengeance, and cultists murdering to advance their twisted and selfish goal, Outrageous Fortune contains love for cinema, for San Diego, and for the Ken Cinema.