The Lost Chisel

My eye is twitching.

My laptop broke. Shattered. All that remained of it was a dark outline on my desk.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. The hinge broke, making the entire thing pretty much useless. I took it into the shop. They said two weeks to get the part in. No problem; I was going on vacation for about that long. If I had to be without, this was the perfect time to do it.

And suddenly I had a lobotomy.

No, no, it wasn’t that bad. Mostly. I use the laptop for a lot of my braindead relaxation time. Memes. Youtube. Comic book news. Now I had to use my phone. Not my preference, but doable.

But it meant for two weeks… I had no way to write.

I could still tell stories. I actually did, in fact, for a number of the games we played with friends over vacation. If I had to, I could have used an app on my phone or good old pencil and paper. Ah, but that would be like writing left-handed… I could do it, but it would be ugly.

It was like having to write in stone, but not having a chisel to do it. You could still make a story, but you couldn’t set it down.

And so for two weeks… I’ve done nothing direct for writing. I’ve been devouring other books instead. I played so many games with friends and family. It’s been so, so relaxing.

And maddening.

Do you have any idea how many things I need to get written? How behind I am with my email? I need to check in on sales!

But then… then…!

I have my laptop back. I can write again! The shackles are off! I have my chisel, and the stone stands before me!

Time to write.

Daybreak Sentinel

Daybreak Sentinel
by Kendra Merit

Anikka has survived Daybreak. The planet’s greatest threat won’t destroy her. She’s made a good home for herself.

But thousands of colonists sleep, trapped. She has less than three months to rescue them, or she’ll be alone forever. Oh, and Daybreak isn’t done threatening her. Sure, the storms won’t destroy her, but there are bigger beasts to come.

This completes the Daybreak duology by Kendra Merritt. I reviewed book one and loved it. That didn’t surprise me. I’ve enjoyed every book I’ve read by Merritt.

Book two takes everything that was great in book one and amped it up. Survival fiction? Bigger threats! Annika learning the need to trust? Even more!

One of the odder choices in book one was the mention of Anikka being asexual. It didn’t factor into the story at all there. I do appreciate some ace representation, as romance is the default in most stories, but book one pretty much had Anikka as the lone character, so it didn’t matter! Well, her asexuality does factor into this book in some really neat ways!

The stakes amp up throughout the book. Because things never sit still for long, the novel is a fast read! You won’t be bored!

The only downside was that I didn’t remember well how book one ended; I would have appreciated a short “previously on” section – just a page, maybe two, to remind me how things concluded before.

I highly recommend this entire series. Devour it quickly!

Wut

My wife is pretty active on BookTok, checking out other authors and supporting them. She suggests books and we get them and her taste is perfect. She saw that one of the authors she followed, L. E. Harper, was having a book signing near us. Awesome! Let’s go.

And we entered the bookstore (Cincy Book Rack—if you’re in the Cincinnati area, you really need to check this place out) –so we enter the bookstore, and this person I’ve never seen before explodes. “You came!”

I figure it’s just her excited to see people to buy books. Cool!

…no. This fellow author actually recognized me. We’re on TikTok, and I post a story a week there. Well, really, I record a story a week, and my wife posts them. And she knew me from there.

I was recognized.

Wut.

Continue reading “Wut”

Writing the Darkness

Sometimes you read something, and you feel seen. The author knows you and has somehow bled your life onto the page in ink. It just happened to me.

This week I read Side Effects by Ted Anderson, Tara O’Connor, and Dave Sharpe. The tagline grabbed my attention immediately: “Hannah doesn’t want to be a hero. She just wants to be well.”

It’s Hannah’s first year of college, and she’s overwhelmed. She begins seeing a therapist, who prescribes medication to help her depression. And though the meds do help her… they also give her superpowers. Hannah really doesn’t need the complications. She doesn’t want to save anyone else. She just wants to be able to get through her day.

The first page by itself translates so well what I experience in my depression. We see Hannah seeming to be okay… and then getting to her room and utterly falling apart.

Again, I felt so incredibly seen.

Continue reading “Writing the Darkness”