First heartbreak

The title pretty much sums it up. This post here is pretty much just going to be a venting session like you'd hear from a sad drunk. If you aren't interested in hearing me mumble over the lessons I've learned over heartbreak, then you'd best move on. But if you're wondering when I'll update another Weird West thing or write another book, you'll have to wait a wee bit. Aside from dealing with this emotional obstacle work has been saddling me with more hours than I ever wanted. Halfway through my shift today my back began burning like someone was holding a butane lighter to my spine and my back muscles were as taut as piano wires. Hard to concentrate with that going on!

Anyway, a month and a half ago I met this awesome gal who hit it off with me almost at once. I should mention that this was the first time I've ever dating the same gal more than once. I'm not exactly a kid, but for my age everyone has responded with astonishment at how little experience I have. I have no clue why, but I've always been terrible at trying to deal with ladies. None have ever showed the least bit interest in me, much to my mystification. And no, I haven't done anything creepy, at least not in my adult years. I'm respectful, kind, witty, funny, and one of the few true gentlemen most have apparently met. Whatever. This time things worked out at first.

This gal was my very first case of absolute adoration. She was my first kiss. She was my first steady date. She gave me my first glimpse of what it was like to love someone and be loved back. It's perhaps the greatest thing I've ever felt, and something I've always wanted. I'm almost the male version of your typical Disney princess, this innocent longing.

Sadly, this one wasn't destined to work out it appears. She has her own issues she has to work through and felt there was no alternative but for us to go our seperate ways when it comes to dating. Thankfully it's not a hostile parting. It's painful, but not foul or on bad terms. We're still darned good friends, but wow does this thing sting like a son of a gun.

It's kind of fascinating though. So many things from movies now make so much more sense to me now. A cool palm rubbing a cheek, the melting looks a couple gives each other as they communicate through just their eyes, the soft crooning voices as they cuddle, such wonderful things that before meant nothing to me, for I had nothing to compare to.
But now that I've had a taste, merciful crap do I want someone to love. Every time I look at a picture of a couple embracing each other it jogs my memory and my heart leaps at the short time I had.

Y'know what the worst part is though? I know that it could have worked out. There was something truly there, something we could have nurtured and blossomed into a beautiful future. I think that's what hurts the most, is that it could have happened...

Sigh. On the plus side, I'm handling it better then I ever imagined I would. I thought after my first breakup I'd spend the first month in bed sobbing while listening to Evanescence and Three Days Grace on an endless loop until I passed out from dehydration due to weeping. So far I've only actually cried twice and managed to still get stuff done. Still, this ain't fun. Breaking up sucks.

Well, life goes on. It'll take me time to recover emotionally, and knowing my luck, another decade before any young lady returns my affections and have another shot at eternal bliss. In the meantime I'm going to try and get more writing done, edit crap out, read more pulp and Weird West, etc.
Wish me luck on my search folks. I suspect it will be my greatest challenge.

That moment when you want to swear

Since I became an adult I haven't sworn on purpose once. I'm one of those goody two shoes who tries to not jay walk and hold the door open for people. But there are times when something so stressful and just world-endingly bad that take place in the blink of an eye that it's pretty hard not to let something slip. I had one of those moments today.

It'd been a pretty good day for me considering how most go. I was tired, sure, but I was hanging out with friends, one of them a lovely young lady who just happened to take a shine to me, and we'd had a fun time swimming in an indoor pool. We'd worked up a good appetite and went to the nearby grocery store. We needed snacks, but for some reason I have the bladder the size of a annorexic peanut and had to hit the bathroom.

It is important to note that I didn't switch my swim shorts out for my usual attire, as I wanted to save on space, and had my pocket knife clipped on the brim. I wouldn't be caught dead outside the house without at least one knife, and the pool was no exception. However, it's more used to being clipped in a pocket, and not the elastic band of a slippery and still moist swimsuit.

So I finally manage to find the bathroom after searching high and low, and discovered that it was cunningly tucked away near the front without any signs to attract attention and stuff obscuring the entrance rather effectively. It wasn't enough to escape my gaze however and I soon found myself on the path to bladder relief.

I selected a stall and went about my business of getting in the proper position when I heard an unusual sound. Cla-tunk! I looked down. Yeah, you know where this is going.

To my absolute horror I found that my beloved pocket knife had felt left out of the earlier festivities and decided to take a dive into the porcelain altar. It was at that point that I struggled to keep an absolute typhoon of foul vocabulary that I'd accumulated over a period of years of scanning the internet and endured the haunts of high school. I consider it a credit to myself that not one actual swearword passed my lips, but it was only with the kind of self control that one uses to lift a car off of a baby or sawing off your arm to free yourself from the entrapment of a boulder pinning your arm.

Could it have been somewhere convenient like the floor? Nope! It had to be a public toilet, one of the most foul places in existence this side of Chernobyl. Thank Odin whoever had used it last had the courtesy to actually flush, and didn't have to watch a speared turd cloud the water. Yuck.

I still had a problem though. I had no rubber gloves, a full bladder, and one of my most prized possessions laying in what intimidated me more than a nest of rattlesnakes. For a moment I considered leaving the thing, but I couldn't do that. We'd spent too much blood and tears together, and I couldn't leave it just sitting there. It'd also have been a nasty surprise to whatever employee drew the short straw and had to clean out the stalls.

I bit my lip, preferring I had a rawhide stick, got some toilet paper wrapped around my hand as if it might actually help, and plunged my arm wrist deep into the cold water. I tried not to think too much as I rested my prize on the paper dispenser and relieved myself, pulled up my short, and hustled over to the sink. Thankfully no one else was there to question what the heck I was doing. I proceeded to wash the almighty crap out of my hand and knife with a generous application of soap until I felt that my presence wouldn't spread some sort of disease.

I sheepishly walked over to my friends and asked hopefully if any of them had any hand sanatizer. They gave me a worried look and asked why. I declined to answer specifically and said I'd explain in the car. Thank Shiva, the lady behind the register had some sanatizer on hand and I again rubbed it all over my infected hand. And yet it still felt retched.

The way I was acting had my pals thoroughly worried and wondered if I should even be allowed in the car. Through clenched teeth I told them all would be revealed once no one else was listening. I can only imagine what horrors passed through their heads as we walked back to the car, all the while I had some wipes soaked in the wonderful purging substance known as alcohol, vigorously rubbing my hand. Thankfully the object of my affections had seen pretty weird stuff and wasn't about to leave me stranded.

I had to learn how to eat later with only my left hand, and by the time I got home I soaked my hand and knife in bleach, hoping that it would be an unstoppable scourge on the forces of bacterial colonies. I'm a bit worried about rust forming considering the bathing I gave it, but I'd rather deal with rust than some sort of toilet-born mutation struggling to gain sentience. Only time will tell.

Weird West Review: How the West Went to Hell

Finally got my lazy arse around to doing some more reviewing, and thankfully my insatiable thirst for Weird West writing led me to this dandy piece out on Amazon. Well, rather it's a bundle of pieces. It's an anthology of Western Horror with all sorts of interesting ideas and very well executed.

I haven't yet read through the entire thing, but overall I'm very pleased with my purchase. Eric S. Brown knows his craft and does an excellent job at each piece he writes at.
So far his first story in line is the biggest, dealing with demons, holy warriors and Satanic politics. And not the usual politics, I mean ones where Satan is actually involved.
Erm, okay, one's not involving DC or the UN. There, ought to clean that part up anyway.
Basically a demon has a plan to make Earth suck so bad that it will usher forth Judgement Day, and has chosen a backwoods town in the West to start it up in, and a handful of folks are band together to try and stop him.

Anywho, it has quite a few characters, and yet Brown does a good job of making them all stand out and not seem like stereotypes of Western stock stories, which is really hard to do. And this is coming from a guy who is terrible at remembering characters. The villain is undeniably evil and you really come to hate him, but he actually does have a tiny bit of charm. Mostly the guy is a complete troll and can't help but screw around with people. Imagine Edmund Blackadder crossed with an anarchist serial killer.

Fair warning though, don't get attached to any of the characters in any of these stories. These stories are dark and don't end happily. No, really. Some of these are downright dirty. Not something I like personally, but if you like Stephen King style unpleasantness then you'll really get into these. That's not to say they are distasteful or poorly executed, they are by intention supposed to be pretty grim. Just giving a heads up, since I personally like stories with happier endings, but that's purely a matter of taste.

There are of course lots of cowboys and zombies. The zombie craze of the last decade hasn't quite petered out yet, and of course everyone and their grandma wanted to put cowboys and zombies together in the same basket. We get a few of those in here, and they aren't bad either. It's just hard to take that sort of thing and make it seem new and fresh, y'know? Kind of like zombie video games. Cripes, there's been an undead horde of zombie games!
It'd be delicious irony if the zombie virus were spread through such games. It'd explain why in every zombie story it spreads so fast, eh?

I really want to call out one story in particular though, since it stuck out and really hit a good note. In the story Weeds we get a truly awesome short story involving a pair of Union soldiers tumbling into a town that had once been bustling with human life, but now seems vacant and unusually overgrown with plant life! Of course they go in and what should they find? Botanical monstrosities!

Folks, plant monsters in fiction are criminally underused. I don't know, maybe I just haven't seen them that much outside of Day of the Triffids or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but wow I'm amazed they aren't used more, and Weeds really made me happy. :)

I'll get around to the remainder of the stories inside, but for now take my word for it and give it a look if you're interested in Horror or Western stories, and Weird West especially.
http://www.amazon.com/How-The-West-Went-Hell-ebook/dp/B00I4SJY20

And just to note for my own amusement, I checked out the author's page to see what else he'd written, and stumbled upon the largest cache of Bigfoot fiction I've ever seen in my life. Seriously, the guy has written a bagillion Sasquatch books. I'd bet my next paycheck he's written more stories on Bigfoot than the Syfy Channel has made Bigfoot movies, and they've done a lot! And somehow they dragged Lance Henriksen into almost each and every one of them. It's uncanny. The guy was in Terminator and Aliens, and somehow sank to doing Syfy Originals with a kid's lunch money for a budget. I dunno, maybe he just plain likes doing Bigfoot movies.

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy! Take care and keep reading! :)

Don't have a Kindle? Worry not!

Early on I recognized a small problem of marketing my book exclusively on the Kindle system. Namely that not everyone has a Kindle, and many of the people I've spoken with who wish to read my stories don't have such things. I've pondered this over but after doing a little research with the wondrous tool known as Google, I've found that there is indeed hope for those who have no Kindles and wish to read what they have!

Behold, the Kindle Reading App!
https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/kcp-landing-page?ie=UTF8&ref_=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd

Basically if you have a computer, tablet, Ipad, or other fancy do-dad that runs on electricity, congradulations! You are now capable of accessing not only my writing, but millions of other works as well!

And thanks to my fellow associate from Dinosaur Cowboys, I've been made aware of the Kindle Cloud reader which works like a charm as well. Thanks for the heads up pard! https://www.amazon.com/ap/signin?openid.assoc_handle=amzn_kweb&openid.return_to=https%3A%2F%2Fread.amazon.com%2Fref%3Dkcr_app_surl_cloudreader&openid.mode=checkid_setup&openid.ns=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0&openid.identity=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&openid.claimed_id=http%3A%2F%2Fspecs.openid.net%2Fauth%2F2.0%2Fidentifier_select&pageId=amzn_kcr

So what are you waiting for? If you have a computer and are able to read this, then you can hop on and begin reading stuff. Hop to it! :D

Blog update

I know I've been rather quiet on here lately, sorry about that folks! Been busy busy on my end. Trying to edit other stories I have in the works, read through the virtual ton of stuff I've downloaded on my Kindle, play through Bioshock Infinite on all difficulties, help my family through the quagmire of weird hoops and trails, and spending time with a wonderful person of the female persuasion who seems to have taken a fancy to me.

For that last one I feel no regret whatsoever, and I hope you all kind find it in your hearts to forgive me. ;)

Anyway, hopefully before this month is out I'll have a new story up on Amazon, Stalkers in the Storm, and a few quick Weird West reviews, since I have chewed through a handful of them. Yay!

Wish me luck on all fronts lads! I've not forgotten this place and I'll keep churning stuff out when I can. :)