It is April.

It is spring.

It snowed this weekend.

Which, y’know. C’mon.

*points flamethrower at sky*

It didn’t stick or anything but ye gods, really? Snow? MRGH.

But — but! — I thought, maybe this is a good opportunity to take the camera out into the hoary spitting hatemist and see if I can grab some interesting photos.

The photos below are the result. A small set of them! Behold! BEHOLD.

First, though, let’s get some administrative stuff outta the way.

Tomorrow, I’ll be at Seton Hill talking about writing and life and Star Wars and really whatever the hell you want me to talk about. I will also sign books. I will also sign babies. I will also dance seductively. It is at 7pm and you should totally go and hey look here are the details. If you’re in western PA or Ohio or West Virginia or can beam down using teleport technology, I hope to see you. BE THERE OR BE SCRUTINIZED AND SHAMED.

Then — here is a review Kira Jessup did of Blackbirds, which features the sentence: “I devoured this book in less than a day.” Which is really the best thing anyone can say about my books, that they couldn’t help but be a bookish glutton, shoving it into their imagination-holes as fast as humanly possible. People often ask what book of mine they should start with, and though the answer varies wildly depending on what kinds of books you like, really the real answer is, start with Blackbirds. I think that’ll tell you if you like my work or not.

Finally, hackers have been in the news recently, what with taking hospital data hostage and all that Panama Papers stuff. If that sort of thing interests you, I suggest peeping Zer0es, my novel about hackers going up against a sinister self-aware NSA surveillance program.

NOW, THE PHOTOSET. (Click images to view on Flickr.)

Get yourself a d20 or a random number generator.

And let’s randomize a title.

Way this works is how it always works: you have two tables below, and you randomize once for each table, and then smash those two words together and TA-DA you have a title. You can add “the” in there or pluralize or make some words possessive — feel free to make other very minor tweaks to the title that results. So, in other words, you might get Dead Orchard, which you could change to The Dead Orchard or Dead Orchards… or even The Dead’s Orchard. Hell, if you even want to flip ’em the other way — The Orchard Dead — go for it.

Then, use that new title to write a story — we’ll say under 2000 words — and post that story to your blog. Then drop a link here so we can all go dig it. Due by next Friday, April 15th, noon EST.

The two tables are:

Title Word #1

1. Arsonist’s
2. Screaming
3. Pegasus
4. Haunted
5. Eight
6. Gear-tooth
7. Cracked
8. Monster’s
9. Carnivore
10. Chef’s
11. Venomous
12. Lost
13. Robot
14. Seven Days Of
15. After
16. Copper
17. Esmerelda’s
18. Dead
19. Binary
20. City of

Title Word #2

1. Corpse
2. Daughter
3. Locket
4. Debt
5. Dungeon
6. Parade
7. Tempest
8. Coast
9. Widget
10. Warning
11. Houses
12. Scandal
13. Flywheel
14. Orchard
15. Fang
16. Intelligence
17. Eschaton
18. Riot
19. Run
20. Zero

Steven Spohn is COO of AbleGamers, a charity dedicated to helping gamers with disabilities. He’s also a hella good dude and a nice guy and a champion for a lot of people, and last week he wrote a post on his Facebook that connected with me in a really big way. Please to check it out, and if you are willing and able, consider supporting AbleGamers.

* * *

34 days ago, I lost the ability to drive my wheelchair and with it… my independence.

You see, my disease, SMA (Spinal Muscular Atrophy), is deteriorating my muscles at a very slow pace. Over time, my abilities are being torn away due to the atrophy that sets in from not using groups of muscles. The same thing would happen to you if you were to stay in bed for months or years without moving. Astronauts experience some of what SMA does to the body after being in space for long periods of time where you don’t have to fight gravity to lift your body weight.

Basically, if you don’t use your muscles, you lose them. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to skip out on leg day at the gym.

John Green captured the disturbing truth of living with a progressive disease in The Fault in Our Stars. The main protagonist, Hazel, riffs about life “There’s no way of knowing that your last good day is Your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.”

Your Last Good Day is a day like any other day. The limitations in your life have stayed the same for some time. There’s nothing different about that particular day. Until all of a sudden, like a dump truck crashing through your front door, everything changes in an instant.

For someone with a progressive disease like mine, you get many, many Last Good Days.

My Last Good Day of breathing, right before I was put on a ventilator, was when I was nine years old.

My Last Good Day of driving a wheelchair with a standard joystick controller was right after high school.

My Last Good Day of using a computer keyboard was a decade ago.

My Last Good Day of driving with a tiny joystick using my thumb was a Friday in late February.

The thing about this concept is that it’s not limited to people with disabilities. In fact, like many subjects, the real difference is that they’re amplified for me. But you’ve had your own set of Last Good Days. Maybe you just haven’t thought about it that way.

Your Last Good Days look entirely different than mine and entirely different than everyone else’s. Yours might be something like your Last Good Day of seeing without glasses, walking without pain, lifting without discomfort, or eating a piece of cake without it going straight to your hips.

Each of our lives are full of Last Good Days.

Truth is, you and I have an invisible clock above our heads. It began the second you were born, counting the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds you still have on this Earth. Even with a terminal illness, you don’t think about the clock. You’re busy living your life. The best life you can. The best way you know how.

But every once in a while life has a way of reminding you that the clock is still ticking.

On that random Friday, I was doing the same things I do every day before getting a harsh muscle spasm in my thumb that would take away my freedom. Eventually, I’ll figure out another way of operating my wheelchair, but it will never be the same. That portion of my life is done.

Rather than let it get me down, I’m choosing to use this as a reminder to live life. And I am officially inviting you to join me.

Since that day, I’ve started living life as an active participant, beginning to go after goals and reach milestones–things I’ve put off for far too long.

Okay. That’s a lie. For the first couple of days, I ate a ridiculous amount of pizza and ice cream because everything is made better by pizza and ice cream. EVERYTHING.

After THAT I started living life as an active participant, beginning to go after goals and reach milestones:

I reached out to 3 of my biggest idols and asked them to be a part of AbleGamers.

I entered a contest to co-write a novel with James Patterson.

I took a phone call with the White House.

I started learning Japanese, again and have continued the lessons every day for a month.

I emailed 3 celebrities sharing my story and hopefully beginning my inspirational, Tony Robbins wannabe career.

What do all of those things have in common? They were all scary and they were all things that I have wanted to do for a long time, but I either “never had the time” or would “do it tomorrow.”

And this is where you come in. I know your first reaction is going to feel sad for me and want to offer your support. While I appreciate the gesture, I have an alternate request.

We all have things that we have wanted to do for a long time but there’s always an excuse, a reason something doesn’t get done. Instead of posting sadness for my derelict thumb, I want you to do the following:

Post TWO (2) things you always wanted to do but never got around to starting, and promise me you’re going to start now.

Did you always want to learn how to be a better cook? Great. Look up and sign up for a class.

Have you always wanted to write? Fantastic. Open a word document tonight and begin.

Maybe it’s learning another language, emailing a celebrity you wish you could interact with, reaching out to an old friend to tell them you appreciate what they did for you, or whatever is in your heart. The point is to start TODAY.

Remember, although life is long, time is short– you never know how many Last Good Days you have left.

* * *

Steven Spohn is the COO of AbleGamers charity, award-winning author, and advocate for people with disabilities. Featured on CNN, NBC and other mainstream news outlets as an assistive technology and game accessibility expert, Steven brings all his knowledge and much more to championing for people with disabilities in the video game space as a means of defeating social isolation. When not writing or doing charity work, you can find him reading the latest sci-fi novels or cracking jokes on social media — @StevenSpohn or Facebook.com/StevenSpohn. He currently resides outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his two cats.

Dear Tiny House Hunters:

Boy howdy, those tiny houses sure do look cool. I’m with you on this. They’re like dollhouses that you get to live in. Everything is so neat, so compact, so pragmatic. Looking at your existing home or apartment, you start to think, LOOK AT ALL THIS WASTEFULNESS. Do I really need all that floor near my bed? What am I doing with it except walking on it in order to get into bed? Do I really need that much counter space? Yes, I have a bowl of fruit on the counter, but surely that’s an improper and extravagant misapplication of three-dimensional space. What if I could just store my fruit under the sink, or in a secret ceiling cubby hole, or in a quaintly hollow tree stump outside? Are hallways anything but just the middleman of architecture? Do I truly require this much oxygen? My own house suddenly feels bloated, like a gassy belly. It’s cluttered and chaotic and — I mean, is this a house, or is it the airless infinity of outer space? Right? Am I right?

The tiny house is like a diet.

You look at it, and you think: I can do that. I can get healthy. I will juice cleanse and then eat asparagus and chia seeds for the rest of my life, and sweet hot fuck, I’ll be healthy as a horse. A robot horse. A robot horse who will live forever and be the handsomest robot horse ever. I’ll lose this weight. People will admire my lean frame and my culinary judiciousness. I’ll eat like a rabbit. I will defy gluten and cast sugar into the sea and JUST SAY NO to pizzas and ice creams and tacos and all I will eat are these rods of asparagus and these spoonfuls of chia seeds and once a week for dessert I will treat myself with these delicious crackers made from ancient grains (amaranth, motherfuckers!). For sweetness, I will mist them with agave syrup the way the lady at the fragrance counter mists you with perfume as you walk past.

I will diet, and I will be good.

I will tiny house, and I will be good.

* * *

I started watching your show at my wife’s behest.

We used to watch House Hunters until we learned the whole thing was a crass, reality show lie, and then we watched House Hunters International because even if it was a lie you got to see how they took showers in Iceland or what atrocity they called a “kitchen” in Hungarian apartments and of course we’d occasionally wiggle our toes in other shows, like that horrible one where people who are way too rich actually try to buy entire fucking islands because sure, why not, buy a whole fucking island, assholes, but if you’re not turning it into a villainous fortress then I just don’t understand you.

One day my wife said, “You need to watch this new show.”

And I said, what is it, and does it star Guy Fieri, and will he milk the donkey sauce from his pubic beard into a chicken stock in order to make the soup that takes us all down to the FLAVORPOCALYPSE. And she said, no, no, “It’s a new House Hunters show,” and I thought, well, where else can they go? Maybe House Hunters New York Apartments where we follow a broke single person trying to fight rat-swarms in order to find a rent-controlled outhouse-sized apartment for less than the cost of a mansion in Minnesota.

“It’s not that,” she said. But it was close. It was very close.

Enter you people. Hunters of tiny houses. Cave-humans once stalked lions on the veldt, but you intrepid hunters track itty-bitty homes — houses compressed down like coal until they become the shining diamonds of Spartan living.

You are the tiny house hunters. Er, not that you yourselves are tiny — far from it, as some of you are quite large-sized, like many of us humans! No, no, the tininess is embodied in the houses you seek. These homes are magnificently small. Many are 200, 300 square feet — 400 max. You get a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, maybe a living room or sitting area, but all those rooms are smooshed together, stacked on top of one another, or are merged into mutant aberrations (“WELCOME TO THE KITCHEN WHERE THE SINK IS YOUR SHOWER AND THE OVEN IS YOUR CLOTHES DRYER.”) It’s not an apartment. It’s like a regular house hit with a shrink ray.

The normal house made Lilliputian.

Some look like little cabins! Others like chic trailers! Others still are shipping containers, or hobbit houses, or weird Transformers that expand and contract like a breathing lung.

I find that there exist two overall categories of tiny house hunters.

One group of you is the lone individual. You’re maybe young, an artist, with lots of student loan debt, and you tell us all the lie that you’re going to buy the tiny home and buy some property with it, except the truth is, your tiny home will forever haunt the yard of one of your siblings because that’s where you plant it. Or maybe you’re older — a musician gone to pasture or an aging hipster or a yarn lady — and you’re divorced or your spouse has perished in the usual way and now you just want to pare down your life. I understand that.

Another group of you are the couples.

Oh, the couples.

Two people who think they can co-habitate in a space roughly the size of the Keebler Elf Tree. Some of you are also older: you’re retiring and you are embracing austerity in your later years. One of you is perhaps way more on board than the other with living in this adorable little tomb, and that’s fine. Maybe you’re a younger couple instead, and if that’s the case, you probably have like, four kids and two dogs and you think ha ha ha that this is going to be good for your family, don’t you? Because sure, kids and animals like nothing more than being crammed together in a piano crate, forced to share their limited oxygen while Mommy and Daddy make clumsy, grunting love in the casket-sized open-air loft above everybody’s heads, and the dogs are barking, and the kids are fighting, and Mommy and Daddy are rutting like wild boars and yay, family.

I watch this show, though, and no matter who you are, I’m always a little amazed at your reactions. As if you don’t actually know what a tiny house is? You start out by saying, “We want to simplify and downsize,” or “We want our family to be closer,” and then you get into these tiny houses and start changing your tune. You say things like, “This is cramped,” or “Where’s the shower?” or “What is a composting toilet?” You then say, “This is cute,” but you say it in the way someone says it when they’re looking at someone wearing a homemade sweater. You don’t mean it. You look terrified, like an otter trapped in a cardboard tube.

So, I’ve seen a number of these episodes now, and I’d like to walk you through some of the realities you are likely to face upon procuring and dwelling within one of these tiny houses.

First, the toilet. We just need to get this out of the way right now. It’s very possibly a composting toilet. Now, if you’re a hipster like me, you think, HEY COMPOSTING IS GOOD, but I do want you to understand, you’re basically keeping your poop. I mean, we all keep our poop somewhere. Mine is underneath my backyard. But yours will be closer. More intimate. It will be mixed with sawdust or coconut hulls or, I dunno, the ashes of your parents, but you’ll keep it close and it will turn into dirt that conceivably you can use to grow flowers. That’s very nice. But make no mistake, whereas right now you poop into a bowl and pull a lever and the poop is whisked away by forces unknown, in a composting toilet you mostly just poop and then kinda… get up and walk away. I say this only because many of you seem quite surprised. As long as you don’t mind pooping like you’re living at a Lilith Fair, you should be fine.

Second, the toilet. Nobody has brought this up on the show, but I’m going to now: if you live with other humans, eventually one of you is going to take the kind of deuce-evacuation that could conceivably destroy a marriage. Normally you’d be fine, because normally you’d be living in a normal-sized human house where you have a door to close and a fan and several rooms or even floors of separation. But now you dwell in an elf-house and now you and all the other elves are going to share in that dump you just took. You’re going to live with it for a while. Everyone is going to become intimately familiar with one another’s bathroom peccadilloes, okay?

Third, okay, actually, it’s also possible that the toilet is an outhouse. Which is great and fine but please be aware that spiders love outhouses. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Fourth, your bed is going to be a claustrophobic morgue-drawer nightmare. The ceiling will be three feet above your head and that’s only if the mattress is of the same material they make diapers out of. If it is a proper mattress, your nose is probably going to be pressed against the top margins of your tiny house. Beds, actual human beds, are fucking huge. Perhaps extravagantly so, I dunno, but we have left the era where we could comfortably sleep on a pile of reeds on the hard rocky earth and now we sleep on giant mattress configurations that are basically as big as half of a tiny house. If you want to practice what it’s like sleeping in a tiny house, sleep in one of your drawers, or in the crawlspace under your existing normal-sized home.

Fifth, many bathrooms do not have sinks. So, what this means is, if you want to shave, you will shave in the kitchen sink. That’s face and legs and pits and crotch or whatever you shave, if you shave it. Also, that means if you take one of those aforementioned Herculean/Sisyphean dumps, to wash your hands will require leaving that room. Also sometimes the toilet is in the shower. And sometimes there isn’t a shower. Other times there is a bathtub outside because sure why the fuck not, go bathe with the raccoons and scrub your body with dry leaves, cave-person.

Sixth, yes, that is a tiny closet, and it will hold no more than the suit or dress in which they will bury you. Did you believe that a tiny house would give you a huge closet? The only way your tiny house has a huge closet is if you use your tiny house as a closet. Which I’m sure some people do.

Seventh, no, of course you’re not going to get full-size appliances. That’s an EZ-Bake oven you’re looking at. The sink accommodates a single coffee mug. The washing machine washes Barbie clothes. You need to stop asking about full-size appliances. Actually, if someone ever makes a bingo card for Tiny House Hunters, that’ll be one of the things that goes on it.

Eighth, okay, listen, people with kids and dogs. You want “family bonding time,” but what your kids see is “hostage-taking time.” This is like, “cult bunker time.” Your kids do not want to live that close to you. Or to each other. Your dogs want to run and jump and — I mean, they’re not hamsters, you understand that, right? They’re not hamsters, and you’re not diminutive little fairy creatures, and tiny houses are not houses, they’re GI Joe playsets, they’re hipster sepulchers, they’re absurdist shoebox dioramas. I admire your desire to lean into austerity and trim the fat from your life, but unless you have a huge property, shoving a family of 6 into one of these turtle terrariums is something some people have to do, but they wouldn’t choose to do it, y’know? I lived with my mother and father and a dog and imagining growing up in one of those things is giving me retroactive trauma — my bowels are clenching, turning my innards to ice water.

Ninth, a lot of those tiny houses are pretty dang expensive for what you get. You think they’re cheap but seriously you could probably rent a hella nice apartment or even buy a couple of cool wizard vans to live in for that price. Just an FYI!

* * *

What I’m saying is —

I worry about you, tiny house hunter people.

I worry that this is all some kind of pyramid scheme, that it’s like Amway or alpacas, that there’s some unseen Ponzi scheme at play here.

I worry that after a year living in one of those tiny houses, you’ll need to buy another tiny house, and then another, and another, until you’re just stacking tiny house atop tiny house in a teetering Jenga tower of hobbit homes and shipping containers and then one day it falls and crushes your whole hipster family.

I worry that in two years HGTV will air a follow-up WHERE ARE THEY NOW special and 75% of you will have died in murder-suicide schemes, having gone mad not in the labyrinthine expanse of The Shining hotel but rather gone cuckoo bananapants inside the claustrophobic MRI machine you decided to call home.

Like I said, buying a tiny house is like a diet.

Or, rather, it’s like going on a fad diet.

Austerity sounds virtuous. And for some people, it is the thing that motivates them, it is a part of who they are. For the rest of us, not so much. Fad diets often ask you to sacrifice things to which you’ve grown accustomed — and often things your body actually needs — under the auspices of getting healthy. I WILL CLEANSE MY BODY WITH JUICE AND SPROUTED GRAIN you think, and then someone walks by you eating a hamburger and some precious thing inside you snaps and next thing you know you’re on the city bus killing and eating people.

Tiny house living will be like this. It’s good for some. Single people in particular — I mean, hey, they do it in New York (usually because they have to, though, not because they want to). But for the rest of us, while we may find some value in paring down and cutting the wheat from the chaff, a tiny house may be a bridge too far. No, we don’t need to live in 3,000 square feet, but we also don’t need to live in an airless, soul-crushing box. Many of us will find joy in having a little leg room when we’re sitting on a toilet, or having a place to put our stuff, or having a table at which we dine instead of standing around holding plates and staring at each other. Many of us like having separate rooms instead of BATHROOM-KITCHENS. It isn’t that romantic having a refrigerator that’s also a toilet, or a bed that’s also a bathtub.

Maybe a tiny house is for you.

But watching this show and hearing your comments and looking at the terrified countenances plastered to your skulls, I’m thinking — nnnyeah, maybe not so much.

Be well, tiny house hunters.

And remember: you don’t actually have to live in a tiny house.

Love,

Me

P.S. most people are trying to move into bigger houses what the fuck is wrong with you most people only live in tiny houses because they have to, you privileged turd-necks

P.P.S. but I mean hey you do you

Today will feature not just one image, but several.

I am a fan of the blood orange. I like its aesthetics — it’s a bruise-dark fruit that does indeed bleed into the glass — and I love its taste, sour and sweet and mmm. And so I quite enjoy using it in recipes when I can get them, and lately I got a whole bag of blood oranges (and then later, some Aliseo blood orange juice) and I used it to make two different cocktails and a taco. The taco recipe will be forthcoming, likely this week, but I’ll give you the two cocktail recipes here:

Blood Orange Negroni, aka the Miriam Black: Make a fucking Negroni, then put blood orange juice into it. … … mm, okay, that’s simplifying it too much, maybe? Whatever. Seriously, in a shaker, make your Negroni as you would: ounce of gin, ounce of Campari, ounce of sweet Vermouth, then squeeze 2-3 blood oranges into the mix. Shake that motherfucker like a pair of dice and then guzzle it with your booze-mouth. For those of you unsophisticated monsters that cannot abide gin, I say: sub out the gin and use bourbon.

The Mimosa, Reloaded: Yesterday I decided that the bottle of Champagne that my wife and I have had in the fridge since the Cretaceous needed to stop taking up space, and I thought, HEY FUCK YEAH LET’S DRINK MIMOSAS. What were we celebrating? Our ability to make mimosas and drink them whenever we want because damnit, we are adults. Then someone on Twitter — @mattaccount — said, “You should put amaretto in that,” and I thought, ew, no, why would you do that. The taste profile seemed odd to me — but that’s because I’m dumb. Almond cookie plus sour plus Champagne actually sounds great when you think about it. (I have admittedly only recently come around to amaretto, which as it turns out is fucking amazing, especially Lazzaroni.) So I changed my tune and decided, you know, okay, maybe. Maybe. And I did what this person said and it was amazing. Then I thought: let’s go bigger. LET’S GUY FIERI UP THIS SONOFABASTARD AND DRIVE THIS DRUNK BUS THROUGH THE WAL-MART IN FLAVORTOWN, and then I bleached my pube-beard and put on sunglasses and surfed on a tide of — wait, no, none of that happened. But I did add something to the third iteration of the drink, and here’s what I did — ounce of Amaretto, ounce of blood orange juice, ounce of pineapple juice, top off with Champagne. I did not put this in a fancy flute glass because I am not a fancy flute glass kind of guy. You can drink this out of a proper wine glass, or a bike helmet, or a shoe, I don’t care. It’s good. Have it. And it’s breakfast. Totally nutritious because fruit juice.

THERE YOU GO.

Before the images, I will remind you of some things:

AN EVENING WITH CHUCK WENDIG is next week, so if you’re in the PA/OH/WV environs, come say hi, listen to me jabber, get a book signed, take a picture, get in the van, fight a wizard.

Also, now there’s a whole different EVENING WITH CHUCK WENDIG (seriously, I’m pretty sure I’m going on a date with the whole audience), and this one is more Star Warsy in nature — on May the 4th I’ll be at the Cherry Hill public library at 7PM, but you can also buy tickets to a catered reception at 6pm (see? a date!), and so if you’re closer to PA/NJ/NY/DE, come say hi.

I’ll remind you folks that the second Atlanta Burns book, THE HUNT, is now out. If you want a kind of… noir-ish grim-dark Veronica Mars, well, I got your book, so go check it out. In it, Atlanta’s ex-BFF Bee needs her help untangling a nasty knot to find out who got her pregnant. That means Atlanta’s got to go around once again kicking over logs, and as always, what she finds underneath is a squirming, teeming mass of corruption.

NOW, ON WITH THE BLOOD ORANGES.

These images all belong together — though, given that they are macro photos, some may hide their true nature. But I promise, this is all part of a series, all taken together. Enjoy.

Today’s challenge is deceptively simple.

Your story must include a dragon.

OKAY THERE YOU GO BYE

wait hold on don’t leave.

There’s more.

You might be saying, “But I don’t want to write fantasy.”

Okay, so what does a dragon in science-fiction look like?

And I’d encourage you to think outside the scaled, fire-charred box. Who said the dragon has to be a literal dragon? What about a serial killer called the Dragon? An MMA fighter or wrestler? The name of a boat or spacecraft? The name of a disease? In fact, I’d encourage you to think beyond the literal here as much as you can. Get creative.

How do you include a dragon that isn’t really a dragon?

You have, mmm, let’s say 2000 words.

Due by Friday, April 8th, noon EST.

Post at your online space.

Link back here.

Behold the dragon.