Before I get to the part where I give you some free ice cream, you first must endure a carousel of self-promotion. You will sit there, and it will whirl about you, dizzying and hallucinogenic, until the end, whereupon you are successfully inculcated and now inhabit THE WENDIG CULT, which is mostly just a cult where we wear beards and look at birds. Also there’s a modicum of human sacrifice but we’ll talk about that later ha ha ha ahem.

So, let’s see.

First up, Wanderers is out in paperback on this upcoming Tuesday, May 19th. If you care to check it out, an independent bookstore is the most wonderful place to buy it (indiebound, bookshop.org, doylestown bookshop, let’s play books). If you’ve already read it, please tell others, and if you could leave a review, that’d be great. If it’s not a nice review, then please yell your review at a blue jay, who are the canonical carriers of bad reviews. The blue jay will surely pass the review along to those who require it. I mean, hey, the Washington Post said you should read it.

Second, I was on… a talk show (wait for it)… inside Animal Crossing (no it gets weirder)… run by Gary Whitta, the guy behind Book of Eli and Rogue One (hold on)… a show that recently also hosted T-Pain, Danny Trejo, and Elijah Wood? Yeah. It’s a thing. It’s called Animal Talking. It’s fucking weird. It’s awesome. Gary is good people and it’s a neat thing, so here’s the YouTube of my episode. Check out the show live, too, because what fun.

Also, guess who wrote a spot on Polygon about Calvin & Hobbes in our era of the Quarantimes, and how Lockdown makes it all the more relevant? It’s me! It’s true! Holy shit!

Anyway. I think that’s it?

ONTO THE FREE ICE CREAM

HA HA THERE IS NO FREE ICE CREAM YOU FELL FOR A CLASSIC RUSE

*sigh*

Fine, I am assured by my lawyers that if I said there’d be ice cream, then there’d be some goddamn ice cream, so uggggh whatever. Stupid law. So! The other day I was the recipient of some free ice cream myself, when Jeni’s sent me some of their new SUNSHINE ice cream, which is a luscious gray ice cream (honestly, it’s so fancy it should be grey with an e) that tastes in stark contrast to its color like you just blended up a smoothie of lime sherbet, Froot Loops, and Skittles, and then injected it with some of that vampire-killing Sunshine from Blade II. Point is, it’s fucking tasty, containing a hefty measure of one of my favorite flavors — passion fruit! — and I’m glad I got some, but I also feel like, do I deserve free ice cream? Probably not. Do you deserve free ice cream? Of course.

So, I wish I could give it to ALL OF YOU, but I can’t, because who am I, Scrooge McDuck? Swimming in Ice Cream Riches? (Certain sections of the internet will suggest to you that I am a MILLIONAIRE, full of money like some kind of money pinata, but, uhhh, haha have you met a writer before? Anyway.) At the very least, I feel a contest to give some free ‘scream is fair. I’ll send five pints of Jeni’s — one pint will be Sunshine, the other two will be dealer’s choice (but I intend for them to be fruit-tropical-adjacent). All you gotta do to win is the following:

a) be in the United States, upper 48

b) donate $25 or more to the RERF, the Guy Fieri-led Restaurant Employee Relief Fund

c) email me your receipt (screenshot or FWD or whatever) of that donation to the RERF to me at curious_spider@yahoo.com by Sunday night at 11:59PM.

I’ll randomly pick someone by Monday, will announce the winner here, I’ll get your address.

Then: ice cream for you. A tiny dollop of sunshine and sweetness.

And that’s it.

Here’s a photo of that ice cream, by the way:

Aboard a notorious criminal syndicate’s luxurious starliner, Commonwealth operative Simon Kovalic and his crew race to steal a mysterious artifact that could shift the balance of war…

Still reeling from a former teammate’s betrayal, Commonwealth operative Simon Kovalic and his band of misfit spies have no time to catch their breath before being sent on another impossible mission: to pull off the daring heist of a quasi-mythical alien artifact, right out from under the nose of the galaxy’s most ruthless crime lord.

But their cold war rivals, the Illyrican Empire, want the artifact for themselves. And Kovalic’s newest recruit, Specialist Addy Sayers, is a volatile ex-con with a mean hair-trigger who might put the whole mission at risk. Can Kovalic hold it all together, or will the team tear themselves apart before they can finish the job?

Must go faster

My first two books were written on spec—which is to say, I wrote them, and then my agent pitched them to publishers. But The Aleph Extraction was the first time I wrote a book on contract, meaning the publisher paid me to deliver it on time. Which meant that if I didn’t deliver it, it wasn’t one of those “nobody will get upset at me but myself” situations. No, many many people would be upset. Least of all me.

No pressure.

Look, I’m no stranger to deadlines. I’ve been a working journalist for almost fifteen years, and in that time I would regularly punch out an 800-word piece in about an hour. But getting into the creative zone and spinning an entire world out of whole cloth? It takes a little more energy. My first book took nine years to go from being written to getting published.

When Aleph came around, I realized I had about nine months. Nine months to write it, get feedback from beta readers, incorporate that feedback, send the draft to my agent, incorporate his feedback, and then eventually send it on to my editor. Doable? Well, if a human child can develop in nine months, seems like I ought to be able to dash off a book with spaceships and pew pew pews.

Believe me, I am as flabbergasted as anybody to discover that not only can I write a book in nine months, but it’s actually pretty good. Luckily, deadlines are one of the few things in the world that can motivate me to plan ahead, so I ended up creating a schedule for when my first draft had to be done, when I needed to revise it, and when I needed to send it to various parties. Did I hit all those milestones? I mean, do I look like Idris Elba, the handsomest man alive? The answer to both of those questions is “no—but close.”

It’s worse

A lot of writers advocate torturing your characters. That is because writers are, at heart, sadists. Well, maybe just Stephen King. But we are definitely control freaks, which is why we delight in creating realms in which we have absolute, godlike authority.

Anyway, I once read some writerly advice that coincidences in stories are no-nos if they help your characters along—oh ho, here just happens to be the exact MacGuffinator that will destroy Kirkon the Unfathomable’s invulnerable Battle-o-Gon. The day is saved!

But, on the flip side, they pointed out, you can always have coincidences that make things worse for your characters. Trapped in a space station that’s slowly falling out of orbit into a planet of such crushing pressure that Dirkly Massivepecs will soon be nothing more than a cube of compressed flesh? Thank god there’s an escape hatch right here that will let him jettison to saf—OH NO, IT’S FULL OF SPACE BEES.

No one ever expects the space bees.

A point with a view

Both of my previous novels featured two narrators, but was that enough for The Aleph Extraction? Nope. I’ve added a third character, because I believe in increasing the difficult every time I start on a new ordeal. Like that guy in The Crucible. “More weight!” Never stay still. That’s when the space bees get you.

Addy Sayers, my new narrator, is very different from my previous POV characters, Simon Kovalic and Eli Brody: she’s got a chip on her shoulder the size of a small asteroid, and she’s not here to make friends. Growing up on the street, eking out a living as a petty criminal, Addy’s had a hard life and she doesn’t expect anything from anybody.

Putting Addy into the mix with Kovalic and Eli not only means an opportunity to take a different perspective on what’s going on in the Galactic Cold War, but also means I got to explore some parts of the universe that we haven’t seen before. And let me tell you, they’re not pretty: thieves, gangsters, arms dealers. A big war is a perfect time for them to thrive.

Timing is everything

Of course I worried about timelines in my previous books: time, as the only saying goes, only exists so everything doesn’t happen at once. But neither of those earlier books included an elaborately plotted super space heist. Does Tom Cruise leave anything to chance when he jumps out of a plane to land on a nightclub in Paris? I mean, I don’t know, he’s kind of crazy, maybe? But does Ethan Hunt? Heck no.

Telling a heist from multiple viewpoints means that I had to make sure that everything lines up correctly, otherwise one character might de-ionize the neural explainotron before their partner remembers to invert the retro field’s dynamic quotient, and we wouldn’t want that, would we? Ha ha, we would not, let me tell you!

For me, that meant going through and isolating every place in that chunk of the story where one of the characters makes any reference to time, and then making sure that all of those times agreed. Not only so that things happened in the right order, but—much more importantly—so that eagle-eyed readers won’t write in to point out that it doesn’t align. Because it sure would be embarrassing to have a basic math error make it to print in one of your books, not that I’d ever know. Ha ha ha.

Unexpect the expected

I wrote the book. I turned it on time. I lined up some publicity. I even planned for the space bees.

But the crystal ball neglected to tell me that there was a pandemic waiting in the wings. LOUSY PIECE OF GLASS. Point is: no matter how well you think you’ve planned your latest endeavor, life invariably finds a way to mess with you. Release dates get moved, copies don’t get shipped on time, audiobook production gets held up. That, as my father would say, is the way the cookie crumbles, which also explains why I eat all my cookies in one bite now.

What to do? Well, the only thing to do. Roll with those punches. Paper copies get shipped before the official release date? Encourage those folks to write reviews or share pictures on social media! Book launch gets canceled? Consider a virtual reading instead. Can’t handle the crippling doubt of whether or not this book will succeed and you’ll get the opportunity to write another one? Spend hours building a utopic island paradise in Animal Crossing. I mean. What?

The things that are in your control, you do your best to be flexible and to adapt to the new normal. The things that are out of your control? Well, in the words of the ice queen herself, let them go.

Just remember: in space, no one can hear the bees.

* * *

DAN MOREN is a novelist, freelance writer, and prolific podcaster. A former senior editor at Macworld, his work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Macworld, Popular Science, Yahoo Tech, and many others.

Dan Moren: Website | Twitter

Aleph Extraction: Indiebound | Bookshop | Elsewhere

Instead of one delicious cookie, here you get a stepped-on cookie, fractured into many crumbly bits! What a special gift! Anyway. Here, again, are my SLAPDASH DISORGANIZED THOUGHTS during what I think is Week 349 of the Quarantimes. You’re doing great, sweetie.

I’ve started to finally work again with some effect. I’m not like, hard-charging at 100% or anything, but I have a measure of focus I didn’t have weeks ago. And when I say “measure,” it’s exactly that — it doesn’t last as long as it used to (before ALL THIS BULLSHIT began), but it also lasts a whole lot longer than it did, say, the week prior. Helps too that I have the story I’m working on more or less figured out. But “figuring it out” took me longer, too, than it normally would. Again, I just try to remember, we’re all walking on broken legs. Doesn’t mean we can’t get from Point A to Point B, but we’re gonna do a lot of hobbling about and crutch-walking, and that means it’s gonna be slower. Still gotta move. But gotta take it easier, too because you shouldn’t try to run on a broken leg.

Paul Vasquez, the Double Rainboy guy, died from COVID. And that’s a helluva thing to write. He had what I consider an outsized impact on how we view beauty and nature and honestly I think he gave people permission to feel that way about what they see out in the world and to express that feeling in a big way. To see the disease take him away from this beautiful world is a decidedly not-beautiful thing. But he left beauty — and recognition of beauty — for us.

My baking situation has become a real problem. I’ve baked so much fucking bread I’m pretty sure I’m just a big sack of carbs. I baked so much bread I had too much and it went stale and then I took that bread and turned it into bread pudding, which I’ve also never made before, and it was delicious, and now my heart is just a crusty loaf of bread. I am bread. Hard on the outside, soft on the inside, sour throughout. I still haven’t cracked the “sandwich bread” thing, though — each time it’s come out like a brick. It’s still good, just not… sandwich bread. I’ve also been sourcing flour from small mills around the country, like a fucking weirdo. What is the deal with bread? Is it an emblem of being able to do a kind of Frontier Survival Act? Is it the fear of not being able to get bread? Or is it merely the comfort of smelling fresh baking bread? Have we all been colonized by sourdough starters? Maybe we have.

My sourdough starter is named Steve, by the way. He’s still bubbling and making hooch. The key, and thanks to Seamus Blackley for letting me in on this, the “your starter should double in size” is basically some Instagram bullshit. Mine never doubled in size. Never even grew that much. But it’s vigorous and makes great bread. Good job, Steve. Good goddamn job.

Our dog has cancer. Or had. She grew what would best be called a “sinister barnacle” upon her neck, under her collar — vet at first thought, well, maybe it’s an infected ingrown hair or something, but it got kinda thumb-sized and angry, but then stablized. So they had us watch and wait. It was good for a couple months but then grew, as sinister barnacles tend to. So, we scheduled the surgery and it was last Monday. It went well, though now her neck looks like some real Frankenstein shit. And hard to protect that area because it’s where a collar would go — so we have a towel swaddled around her like it’s a scarf, and she traipses around the yard as if it’s the French Riviera. Got a report back, and it was cancer — soft cell sarcoma or something? Slow-growing, and they got it out with clean margins. So, in theory, as long as she heals well, she should be good, and he said she should live out her normal lifespan. So, bad news turned to good news? Or something?

The vet was all no-contact. An impressive operation. Here in PA, it seems people are taking this more seriously than in other places… buuuuut also not as seriously as they should. I had a building inspector just roll up on me in my shed while I was working. No mask. Tried to just walk the fuck in through the door. We had a propane guy try to pet our dogs while they were in the yard — which is fraught even in non-pandemic times because, uhh, they’re dogs, and dogs can bite off your fingerbits, buddy. Had to get a battery replaced on our old Forester (we’d been running it, but it still died on us) and AAA was like, “It’s non-contact, don’t worry,” but then the guy showed up and it was of course not that at all — he refused to do it all himself, needed someone in the car while he replaced the battery. He was masked and everything was socially distant, so it was fine, but eennnhh. So stressful.

Hell is other people, now. Officially. Sartre knew what was up.

Local politicians of the G-O-P variety are showing their colors. They want our country to reopen all the way and they want the “numbers” for the disease to stop including nursing home and other care facilities, as if those are hermetically-sealed chambers where the disease gets in but never gets out. And it further suggests that the elderly who die from this… aren’t really people, anyway, which is fucking gross. The altar of Mammon is wide and hungry for blood, and they’re happy to throw us on it in order for it to disgorge a few golden coins into their pockets.

You see photos and you increasingly realize there are Two Americas. And we are drifting further and farther apart. It’s not exactly that it’s new — there was the Anti-Mask Brigade or whatever in 1918, and we had full-on Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden in the 30s. But social media and the internet have afforded people the luxury of choosing their own consensus reality (if you ever played Mage: The Ascension, boy will that fuck with your head). They get to pick a world where on some spectrum the virus isn’t that bad, or it doesn’t exist, or it was pumped into our blood due to evil flu shots and now we’re being thought-controlled via 5G by twin gay Satanic puppetmasters, Bill Gates and Tom Hanks, who want to make a new vaccine that will presumably be filled with… I dunno, robots or something. We’ve corroded access to education and eroded people’s critical thinking skills so now they’re happy to swill whatever Flavor-Aid will get them to the Promised Lands. The cult-like thinking is spreading like aerosolized syphilis. We’ve got these concentric circles starting to drift together — Q weenies, and anti-vaxxers on both the left and the right, and Trumpies, and militia-nuts and… is there any way to get the Flat Earthers in there? Probably.

Murder hornets are just a thing they’re using to get clicks and try to scare you, by the way, evidenced by the fact that no entomologist is gonna call them “murder hornets.” That’s not science. And they’re not even widespread. This is like the killer bee phenomenon from when I was a kid. THE KILLER BEES ARE COMING FROM AFRICA AND well, you remember the rest. Also a lot of wasps and such are useful to the world in a variety of ways, often eating or parasitizing worse critters. Unless they’re up in your grill, don’t try to wipe them out, please, because they’re almost certainly not the Asian Hornets you’re afraid of. If they are, call a professional to assess. But also, HOT BEE BALLS.

Hey, look. I got a box of books! Wanderers paperback, out 5/19. Please to buy from your local favorite indie bookstore? If you don’t have one, Doylestown Books will deliver.

Mother’s Day was tougher this year than I expected. And a hard balance because, my son is celebrating his mother (and I am too), and I can’t be all morose, but this is the first Mother’s Day without mine aaaaand. Well. It’s hard.

Oof, this shit is getting depressing. I don’t mean for it to be. Uhh. I’m seeing a lot of new birds recently! Blue-headed vireo. Magnolia warbler. Orchard oriole. (Those sound like launch codes.) Also there are brown thrashers nesting in the hedge by my shed and they are fucking brutal against blue jays. I just saw a BIRB WAR between a thrasher, a jay, and a catbird. Noisily mosh-pitting in the sky. Here’s the thrasher, and then I’m out, byeeeee:

Laura Lam is a damn fine writer whose work has only grown better over time — and her newest, Goldilocks, is evidence of that. It’s sharply relevant and has that feeling of a screw turning and digging in as you read it, and I cannot recommend it enough — and here she talks about some of the same stuff I’ve grappled with, re: Wanderers, meaning, oops, I predicted the future. Sci-fi writers aren’t out here trying to predict the future, really; we’re usually trying to talk about the present and the past. But sometimes, we hit the mark just the same. Here’s Laura!

* * *

I thought Terrible Minds would be the place to talk about the strange, horrible feeling of accidentally predicting the future, since Chuck did it too with Wanderers.

It happens to pretty much any science fiction writer who writes in the near future. Worldbuilding is basically extrapolating cause and effect in different ways. You see a news article somewhere like Futurism and you give a little chuckle—it’s something happening that you predicted in a book, and it’s a strange sense of déjà vu. I used to even share some of the articles with the hashtag #FalseHeartsIRL when I released some cyberpunks a few years ago. I can’t do that with Goldilocks, really, because the stuff I predicted isn’t some interesting bit of tech or a cool way to combat climate change through architecture or urban planning.

Because this time it’s people wearing masks outside. It’s abortion bans. It’s months of isolation. It’s a pandemic.

In real life, it’ll rarely play out exactly as you plan in a book. Some things twist or distort or are more unrealistic than you’d be allowed to put into fiction (e.g. murder wasps or anything that the orange man in the white house utters). In Goldilocks, I have people wearing masks due to climate change being a health risk, which was inspired by how disconcerted I felt seeing a photo of my mother wearing a mask due to the wildfires in California while I live in Scotland.

The rising tide of misogyny and other forms of bigotry has been on my mind the last few years, so I created a dystopian future, my take on a Handmaid’s Tale scenario—how would that shake down if climate change meant thirty years of habitability at most? I took a slow, insidious approach, though I deliberately didn’t go into a detailed step-by-step breakdown from how exactly we go from here to there. This was because it would date itself immediately (it already has, I suppose, as there’s no mention of coronavirus in the book), and I also thought it’d be more interesting for readers to fill in those blanks and each find a subtly different route.

I figured you’d still try to use reproductive health as a way to control power over the narrative, and the Heartbeat Bills that cropped up while I was drafting last year and the way states are using COVID-19 as a way to ban abortions is fairly telling. I also thought about how people offer something that seems good for those who just gave birth but has a sting in the tail—a birth bonus to make the first few years of raising a child easier, but it’s also a way to sneakily encourage people with uteruses to stay home and look after the kid for a few years. If you want any additional kids? You have to pay a very hefty child-tax to get that state-mandated IUD removed, so only the rich are able to have more than one.

Five women steal a spaceship to journey to Cavendish, a planet 10 light years away and humanity’s hope for survival and for a better future. A planet they hopefully won’t spoil like the old one. It’ll take the Atalanta 5 a few months to journey to Mars to use the test warp ring to jump to Epsilon Eridani (the real star for my fake planet), and then a few more months’ travel on the other side. It’s a long time to be with the same people. I did not expect those elements of how the women cope with isolation to be a how-to for 2020. I read a lot of astronaut memoirs, and that has probably helped me cope with lockdown a bit better than I might have (my top rec is Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth).

Though it’s a mild spoiler, in light of current events I have been warning people that there is a pandemic in the book. It’s not a huge focus of the plot and it never gets graphic, but I forwarded an article about coronavirus to my editor on January 22^nd with basically a slightly more professional version of ‘shit.’ The illness within the book is not quite as clear of an echo as White Mask, it’s still strange. The last thing I expected when I wrote a book with a pandemic was to have its launch interrupted by an actual pandemic.

You don’t feel clever, or proud, when you predict these sorts of things. You feel guilty when you see the nightmares about the future come true instead of the dreams. You wanted it to remain something cautionary. I’m nervous about how to talk about the book—I don’t want to be seen as profiteering off of something so terrible, yet I know some people have also found reading about fictitious versions of current events calming. Because books have a narrative shape, an ending that’s often hopeful. This is comforting when we don’t know when or how this liminal in between phase will end or what our new normal will be.

I worked hard on the book, and it’s had the most pre-pub buzz I’ve had so far (this is my 6^th book). I wanted—I want—it to do well. It’s a particularly painful wistfulness to wonder how it would have done if the supply chain was normal. Instead I see the hardback out of stock at certain retailers and I wonder when it’ll be re-stocked and if potential readers will go to alternate retailers like Bookshop or just shrug and move onto one of the other many books out there in the world instead. When my phone pings a reminder for a planned in person event that isn’t happening now, I daydream about that parallel present where none of this happened. My mom is still halfway around the world instead of visiting me like she was meant to be just now, again wearing a mask outside the house, but for a different reason. She and my parents-in-law are in their 60s and 70s, and my mother-in-law is being treated for cancer. I worry about them every day, about everyone who is at risk.

It’s a gut punch. I didn’t want this future. None of us did.

I hope we move towards a better future.

* * *

Laura Lam: Website | Twitter

Goldilocks: Doylestown Books | Indiebound | Amazon | Powells | B&N

Once again, here we go with less a full-course blog meal, and more a series of vaguely unsatisfying bloglet nibblins, like some grotesque shareable you’d order at Applebee’s that would give you vicious 3AM diarrhea. Also, my favorite Lord of the Rings character was Bloglet Nibblins, half-hobbit, half-orc, all sex machine.

I figured out some business with my middle grade book. In case you didn’t see, ahem ahem, Little Brown bought my MG novel, Dust & Grim, and I’m in the midst of edits on that book, and I rewrote the first act and wasn’t feeling it — but I figured out how to move forward on it in a way that’s satisfying. It’s weird because my BRAINTHINK comes slower at this moment in time — it’s like, the thought I need to find is in the back of the cabinet, but instead of just reaching in and plucking it off the shelf, I have to first push through a wall of pudding. The wall of pudding is gloppy and forbidding in that I cannot see what’s beyond it, so I gotta do a lotta fumbling around.

This mind pudding effect is not kept to just fiction. I get it all the time now. I sat down after lunch today, plonking myself in front of the computer, and I had a list of things I needed to do, and then the moment I sat, that list was gone. Simply inaccessible. I just sat there, slack-jawed, like, I have shit to do, I’m sure of it, buuuuuuuut. (I talk more about this phenomenon with Jared Rizzi on his new podcast, if you care to listen.) So instead I went outside and stood underneath a snow of crabapple blossoms. Oddly, it helped, and I figured out several things I needed to do.

One of the things is about rewilding our property. Found a good native plants place not far away that will deliver, and I’m picking some nice natives to start to go in around the front and back yards, either to replace junk that’s there now or to simply slot in alongside stuff to start competing. The goal is to get more birds and butterflies and buggables and such. Maybe summon a hobo or two, enticed by fragrant flowers, and then we can butcher the ol’ hobos and — I’ve said too much. I don’t want to share my hobo recipes, because then you’ll all start hoarding hobos, and I won’t be able to get any.

Hey so I found a new bird. Er, I didn’t discover a brand new bird, but rather, one that is new to me — one who roamed idly into view as I was standing there. So here I present, the yellow-rumped warbler. SONGBIRD OF THE GILDED BUTT. I’m really quite fond of that photo.

I have a bread problem. I real damn bread problem. So you remember how I did the obvious thing and cultivated a sourdough starter? Yeah, I’ve baked with it every day since. I’ve made two loaves with just starter, then another “noir” loaf with chocolate and walnuts, and with the discard I made rolls, and I made waffles. The rolls were sublime, truly some of the greatest I have ever eatenthe waffles I usually make. The waffles were… fine, not great, totally edible but inferior to , which are murderiferously good. Then I bought two 10-lb bags of flour (soft wheat and hard bolted wheat) from a local mill and seriously, I have a problem. That problem is bread. And probably diabetes, soon? Can you grow meat from a sourdough starter? Or Impossible Burgers? (Oh, these are the rolls, btw.)

I guess a meat shortage might be a thing? We get most of our meat from local providers, which is nice in that a) I’m supporting people near me and b) they’re not big factory farms subject to the problems those have. Not to say “small farmers” are automagically better people or better places, but on a whole I find they are, if only because you can go there, and see the operation, and talk to the farmers. We did try when this all started to buy a freezer and hahahaha that was fucking stupid. In mid-March, the earliest we could get one delivered was April 28th, and you’ll note that April 28th has come and gone. Our new delivery date is June 15th, so, yeah. Somewhere there’s like, one guy with a thousand freezers he’s using to keep all his toilet paper cold. The fucker.

Also, Pepcid? So someone said that famotidine cures The Cove, The Rona, The Vid, and now people are hoarding that even though the off-chance of it working means you’d need to have it delivered to you via IV, which is not what you buy from Target, you dicks. I could use my heartburn meds just for heartburn. Anxiety heightens heartburn. And heartburn heightens anxiety! Fun.

My anxiety is quieter, though, these days. That feels weird, but I think it’s smug. Self-righteous. “See, I told you this shit would happen,” it says, rocking back on its heels like a too-proud child. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back later. For now, just pickle in the world I told you would arrive.”

Some injuries are funny. I’m sorry, it’s just true. For instance, this thread where I asked last night, hey, what’s your weirdest or most embarrassing injury? It’s got 3,000 responses and hooooooly shit.

Wanderers in paperback. Boom, you just got suckered into reading a sales pitch. You fools. Ahem. No, seriously, Wanderers? It’s coming out in paperback this month. Aaaaand I don’t know if that’s gonna work or not, because print is weird right now? But if you’re so inclined to grab a copy, your local indie store would surely welcome that business. So would Doylestown Books, where you can pre-order it. Comes out May 19th. Tell your friends! And your vague acquaintances!

We’re okay here. Again, lucky and privileged and mostly fine. A lot of floating. Distance learning is hard — everything feels like homework for the kid, because now, everything is homework, and his bedroom is his classroom, and that just sucks. It’s nobody’s fault. Everybody’s doing their best. But it’s definitely an act of jogging on a fractured leg, and everyone pretending that, nope, you’re just supposed to run like that, it’s fine, the herky-jerky gait is normal, keep running, it won’t hurt, ow, ow, ow. We got toilet paper. We went from none to a lot in short order? We have food, though what’s available week to week is erratic and odd. I’m trying to cook healthy meals, but veggies have been the real hard one to get — we’re trying Misfits Market for the next month until the CSA we subscribed to kicks into gear. These are all very privileged problems, I know. Just the same, things are weird, and the industry in which I work is going through some paroxysms, and as the country’s economy wavers, so too do theoretically luxury items like books and… well, just grabbing onto the cliff’s edge as tight as I can, is all. As I imagine most of us are doing. I think that’s it. I’m out. Here are dogs.