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A Fairly Pleasant Week

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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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The New Year, as We Reckon it, Has Begun

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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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The San Diego I knew and used in Outrageous Fortune

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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.

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Final Revisions and Themes Are in Sight

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My gay, 80s, cinephile ghostly horror novel is now rounding the corner and racing down the stretch as I work on the final revisions hurtling towards the climax.

This has been a very interesting voyage on the writing ship. My first novel written without a guiding outline, my first period novel — albeit a period I lived in and in locations I knew quite well — and a novel that is sounding more and more literary as I grapple with the themes that organically emerged from the crisis and the characters.

The poor thing has had an identity crisis as I struggled to find a suitable title for my creation, but unlike Victor Frakenstein, I did eventually give it a name, Outrageous Fortune. Now, Shakespeare was not in my head when I started writing the text. Very little was in my head aside from certain aspects and things I wanted to play with as a writer, ghosts and a cursed motion picture film on dangerous nitrate stock, but when one of the characters announced that she was unwilling to suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ I knew I had stumbled across the title.

Thematically, my gay horror novel has delved into an existential question about morality in a cold and indifferent universe. If reality has no intrinsic morality — show me the particle that carries the ‘good’ or ‘justice’ between elements of matter — then the only morality that exists is the morality we conjure by our actions and our thoughts. But if we perceive a moral quality to our actions then that becomes something we cannot un-perceive and it is the knowledge of the meaning we have prescribed upon an indifferent universe that binds us.

Outrageous Fortune is quite unique among the novels I have written, the most thematically complex and with the most explicit sex scene of my writing history, only time will tell if I can find a market for it.

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The Neglected Blog

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I have not died, but I have been very tired. Each year from October 15th through December 7th is the Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage plans. It is the period when people who are not new to Medicare can enroll, disenroll, or switch their plans, and my day job deals with those changes, making this time of year a quite busy one. Usually, the workload doesn’t become large and overtime is not offered until later in the AEP, like early to mid-December.

Not this year.

I do not know if more people are retiring early, losing their jobs, or whatnot, but right from the start of the AEP our work queues grew exponentially quickly. I have been taking advantage of the sudden overtime, working 10 hours a day and half a day on Saturdays.

That is not the only reason my poor blog has been neglected.

I have also entered the revise-and-edit phase of my 80s gay cinephile horror novel Final Reel.

Editing and revising is very different than drafting. Now my brain isn’t trying to conjure something from nothing, but rather shape what is already there to the image and form that now exists in my head. This process for my other novel has been mainly one of fixing sentences and paragraphs with minor plot and story changes. Final Reel wasn’t written with an outline—I made it up as I went along. This produced a manuscript where the back half doesn’t fit with the front because it wasn’t until then that I truly understood what I was crafting. So, editing and revising has a lot more revising this time around.

That said, I am extremely happy with it so far, and I think this may be my best novel yet.

However, this poor blog will continue to be neglected for the next several weeks.

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And The Overtime Begins

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The Annual Enrollment Period for people who are on or want to join a Medicare Advantage Plan runs each year from October 15th thru December 7th for enrollment, disenrollment, or plan changes for the following calendar year. My day job is working for a Medicare Advantage Plan provider, a non-profit that I think provides excellent service, but that is personally just my opinion and not an endorsement.

Anyway, the point is this is the busy season for my job. We bring on contract workers and overtime is offered but usually the extra hours become available later in the cycle. People tend to wait and procrastinate about getting in that paperwork so late November is often when my particular team starts being offered that sweet sweet overtime money.

Not this year.

We aren’t a week into the period and already the call has gone out, ‘If you want to work overtime, it’s yours.’

I am up at 5:30 A.M. this morning and expect that to be standard for the next week; it’s going to be tiring.

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The Rocket’s Silver Glare

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This past weekend held no particularly good or bad events but rather mundane chores. Saturday, I took my Soul in to have its oil changed, and following that, I visited my local Kaiser facility for joy with needles.

First a maintenance blood draw, to ensure that my arthritis medications still were not destroying my kidneys or liver. This was followed by dual vaccinations: COVID and flu. I ended up with two needles stuck into my right arm and one in my left.

By late evening, I was feeling the effects of the vaccinations, with the muscles around the flu shot quite sore. I slept very poorly that evening. I am one of those persons that toss and turn in their sleep, and every time I turned onto my left the pain woke me up. In addition to that, for about half the night I seemed to be freezing, and the rest of it until morning I sweated in my bedding.

With that poor sleep and with the vaccinations seemingly activating my arthritis, we skipped our customary Sunday trip to the zoo, and I just tried to do as little as possible until finally in late afternoon when the muscles began to stop hurting.

Then came, quite literally, Sunday’s bright point. We had finished dinner, and as I reclined in my easy chair, my sweetie-wife came into the room announcing you could see a launch out the window.

Indeed, a rocket’s contrail, bright and silvery, was growing up toward the south in the darkening twilight sky. The head looked to be moving slowly as it climbed, but that was an illusion of perspective and distance. Because our home had already passed into night with the sun to the west below the curvature of the Earth but the contrail was in full sunlight due to its altitude, the whole thing glowed with what looked like an inner light.

Occasional flashes of brighter white light appeared in the contrail some distance behind the rocket climbing towards orbit. I was puzzled for a moment; was this a first stage breaking up? Then it hit me. This was a SpaceX Falcon Nine launch. Those white flashes inside the contrail came from the booster firing its engines for its return flight. Of course, the landing itself would be below the horizon and invisible from San Diego, but it was quite a thrill to see what we did manage to witness.

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A Touch of Leather and a Taste of Lidocaine

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Two interesting personal developments for me this week.

Almost a month ago I wrote about my less than thrilling or relaxing trip to the wonderful city of Seattle for this year’s World Science Fiction Convention. As I said, the convention itself was really good but losing my wallet and keys during the trip up cast a pall over the entire week that left me terribly stressed and unable to thoroughly enjoy my vacation.

Monday of this week, I arrived at my desk to begin another week at the day job and after pulling out my laptop from my backpack/computer bag I heard something shifting inside. I reached deep into the bag and the tips of my fingers touched …. leather?

I grabbed the leather object and pulled out my wallet. I reached in again and my fingers found my key ring with an assortment of keys.

Clearly what had happened was that at TSA in San Diego after passing through the check point, I had hastily grabbed everything, laptop, iPad, wallet and keys and shoved them all into the bag. The heightened stress and emotional stessors disrupted my memory formation just enough that I had and still do not have a memory of pushing the items into the bag.

It’s good to know that they were not lost and no one got ahold of them, but it is frustrating.

Yesterday, in a quest by my pulmonologist to quiet a persistent cough I have experienced since February of 2024 I underwent a bronchoscopy, a procedure where they put a camera down into your airways and lungs.

The nurses at Kaiser Zion Hospital were excellent but let me tell you having lidocaine sprayed into the back of your throat is a terrible, terrible experience. It prompted gagging and coughing and had a taste I would not wish upon my worst enemy. The procedure itself was hardly a bother, though apparently from the sedation I was out for about half of it. The test results indicated nothing abnormal in my airways or lungs and so the search for a solution to the coughing continues.

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A Little More WorldCon

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So, here is a bit of the vacation that went well.

The World Science Fiction Convention, WorldCon, had loads of good and interesting programming. Over the five days of the convention, I primarily attended panel discussions on horror (both prose and film), space science, and writing strategies.

The Con was well-run and well-organized, taking place in the Seattle Summit convention center, a massive building with five floors and loads of open-air spaces. The convention program was available on the app ‘Guidebook,’ which allowed users to browse the offerings, mark which were part of their personal schedule, and then add those panels and events to the calendars on their phones. This made it easy for my sweetie-wife and me to stay in the loop about each other’s panels.

Also, unlike some conventions, there was adequate cell coverage throughout the center, so there was never an issue with not being able to get a text to someone to arrange dinners and the like.

The con committee also deployed an interesting, if not entirely ready-for-prime-time, bit of tech to help members who suffered from hearing issues. Each room had a monitor that displayed live text of the panelists’ discussion. The AI tech employed did not always understand the words, particularly if they were from a foreign language or were unusual, and in those cases it guessed wrongly, but overall, I think it was a boon for any hearing-impaired fans.

Now, the convention is history, my vacation has ended, and in just a few minutes I will be returning to my day job and wading through an outlandish number of emails that await me.

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A Vacation of Woe and Wonder

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From August 12th through the 17th, I was on vacation from the day job and enjoying my first World Science-Fiction Convention since 2018. Sadly, while the convention itself was quite nice, with nearly every hour presenting me with multiple panels that I wanted to attend and having to sacrifice panel time just to have dinner with my sweetie-wife, the entire time was also the most stressful vacation I have taken.

We flew from San Diego to Seattle on Alaska Airlines, using miles accumulated on my credit card to reduce the cost of the flight to mere taxes. While transitioning through TSA security I screwed up royally but was unaware of the mistake until I deplaned at SeaTac in Washington. I discovered that I had left my wallet, with all of my identification, and my key ring at the security checkpoint in San Diego.

Thanks to Apple Pay, I was not without the ability to pay for things and could function at the convention, but the loss of the wallet weighed heavily on my mind for the entire duration of the convention.

Every morning I telephoned Lost and Found at the San Diego Airport and every morning their answer remained unchanged, no wallet, no keys. I researched how did TSA deal with this issue as I could not be the only person who had some terrible event cause them to lose all of their identification while traveling. TSA deals with it, I learned, by additional security screening, but it is not assured that you will pass it and be allowed to fly. So again, for the duration of my vacation my mind was bedeviled with the possibility that at SeaTac I would be turned away and have to find an alternate method of getting home. Amtrak had only sleeper remaining with costs of over a thousand dollars and Greyhound reported travel times of more than 48 hours.

I was so stressed that in the evenings instead of socializing at the open room parties, after my sweetie-wife retired for the night, I would just go to the hotel lobby and watch videos on my laptop.

The final morning of the convention, not only did Lost and Found not have my missing items, but a neighbor texted to alert us that my car had been broken into, the passenger window smashed with glass scattered everywhere.

Luckily, I made it through TSA enhanced screening and boarded the flight for home, though the flight was delayed a good twenty minutes, so we only got back into our home about 9:00 pm instead what of I had hoped for something more like 8:30pm.

My brilliant sweetie-wife produced spare keys for my car, our front door, and our mailbox. I took my Kia Soul to the dealer to have them replace the smashed window, but they wanted an astounding $1200 for that repair and that amount I was not going to pay. I found an independent service who was able to schedule an on-site fix for my car the next day, today, and do the job for under $300.

So today, I have finally, mostly, rebuilt and recovered from the disaster of losing my wallet and keys. Though a few more issues and details need to be addressed, I am ready to return to work in the morning and put this stressful ‘vacation’ behind me.

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