Autopilot

I started the next chapter in The Harbinger just a few moments ago. Without really knowing where I was going, I began writing and what I wrote has absolutely no place in the book. I don't know what the hell I was talking about so, here. You can have it.

It's funny how feelings are said to wash over a person. The elation washes over a woman as she holds her firstborn child for the very first time. Sadness can wash over a man as he watches his mother, bound to hospital machinery, succumbs to her battle with lung cancer. Fear has been known to wash over a group of patrons when a gunman begins taking hostages and the red-blue strobes begin to pour through the glass doors of a small town bank. Love? Love does not typically wash over anyone. There are distinct points in time where someone may feel a heightened sense of intimacy, connectedness, or lust, but love is more of a feeling that permeates a being and waxes or wanes with the turns of the moon. It tends to hit hard at perhaps any given moment and will change over time without agitating or rekindling it.

Pain is a lot like love if one were so inclined to think about it. It's all about one instance, that one occurrence. That initial blinding shot through the heart. At first, you don't know what just happened. Your mind can't catch up with what your body is feeling and you panic. You wince. You turn to try to avoid it, but you've already been hit. The numbness recedes and you look around and try to regain your senses. What did I do to deserve this? and How did this happen? are common thoughts. You try to relax. Tell yourself you're going to make it through this. You want to tell your friends, your family about how it happened. After a while you learn to accept it. The feeling dulls. Time passes. You know it's still there without looking at it, but you look anyway. You might be able to fix it if you do something about it, but you grow weaker by the minute. The pressure increases and it's harder to breathe. The fight or flight response takes hold.

You can make it. You can do it. You're going to live through this.

Or you bleed out.

10,000 Strong and Growing

Over the past two years, I've barely chronicled the little intricacies of my thoughts as they related to my reading and writing. Since my meager beginnings, I've grown by what I like to think are leaps and bounds. I've written and published a book, written half of a short story collection, and explored the realm of poetry on whatever amateurish level is below amateur.

Now nearly ten thousand people have visited and viewed my site and I don't know whether to be terrified at the prospect that people out there are reading my stuff or to be honored and humbled that people would give me a fraction of their day to be curious enough in what I have to say.

In any case, I'd like to plan a small thank you for your support. Rest assured that I am dedicating a large portion of my time in the near future to finally wrap up my second book. Life certainly has a way of pulling at one's attention and subverting goals at hand.

My first thank you will be in the form of a story that I really enjoyed writing entitled Clyde King. This was previously published as a bonus to the first printing of The Seventh Horn. If you didn't get the chance to grab my first book in paperback or have yet to read anything of mine so far, I hope you'll swing back when the counter reaches the titular 10,000 visits and give it a shot.

And the easiest way to go about increasing the counter? Tell someone else to swing by too. As I've said, "The biggest compliment you can give an artist, musician, or author is to simply tell someone else about their work." I'm not here to be popular or to earn enough to make a mansion made up of smaller mansions; I'm just here to enjoy what I'm doing while I can.