Some Thoughts On Being Sick

 The other day I sneezed my head off, and I'd like to thank my wife, Emily, for not only retrieving it but helping me get my head on straight.

It was a challenge. I sneezed so hard my head bounced from the living room into the kitchen, where our dog got his hands--um, mouth--on it, thinking it was a new toy. Emily ran after him and got it back, but now I have tooth marks on my forehead and a chewed up ear. The staples I won't complain about--we didn't have thread.

She had to tackle him. It wasn't pretty.

Okay, it's possible I'm exaggerating. Slightly. Certainly my sneezes did startle Beowulf several times, and he'd come running to make sure I was okay. Or possibly he came running to see if I'd overturned a plate of food. It was all because we made a foolish mask error, and two days after we did Emily came down with a bad head cold. When I got it a few days later it was worse, of course, because I'm a man.

You may have heard the term "man flu", but it really was only a cold, and since it wasn't the coronavirus I don't have much room to complain. Just the same, Emily and I agreed that this was "just" a cold the way the Federal government does a "little" overspending. We were down for a week, much of which I don't remember because NyQuil is wonderful.

They way I measure my illnesses: I know it's bad when I take a sick day from work. In my job, if I call in sick somebody else has to work the shift, and I don't need any new enemies. At the same time, I've often lectured coworkers that if they might be contagious they should stay the heck home, and either I was contagious or my wife and I take this sharing thing way too far.

A rare photo of me pre-sneeze. The camera was recovered days later, but the photographer remains missing.

 

The next levels of illness involve what I do if I stay home. If I can get some writing done, I'm in fairly good shape. If I don't feel up to writing, then that's quality reading time. If all I can do is sit in a lump and catch up on TV, call the coroner.

If I lose my appetite, I'm on death's doorstep. I did lose a few pounds over that period, but it's not a diet I'd recommend.

Meanwhile I really did have some impressive sneezes, although the only damage they did was crack windows and shatter nerves. The US Geological Survey says the worst of them only registered as a 4.7 in Chicago, which is barely higher than the sound of cell doors slamming on indicted Illinois governors.

Anyway, we got by with the help of chicken noodle soup, vitamin C, and modern pharmaceuticals. Wait. Pharma ... p ... h ... a ...

Um, drugs.

NyQuil is coma-inducing manna from Heaven. Did I mention that? On one day I slept for ten hours straight. But I have the same question about it that I have about Benadryl: Does it really do anything about my symptoms? Or does it make me sleep so deeply I just don't notice them? I don't remember.

Oh, I almost forgot one other indispensable thing: Kleenex.

The guy who invented Kleenex deserved a Noble Prize in Awesome.

The trick is to position so many boxes around the house that you could step from one to another. We had 2.4 boxes of Kleenex per room on average, with fewer in the basement and one by every chair in the living room. Fourteen trees died for our noses, in just one week. Always have plenty of Kleenex.

And NyQuil. Did I mention it's awesome?

A recent photo of my upper respiratory system.

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Sing Along With This Month's Newsletter

 I've been mostly offline due to being deathly ill for the last several days. (It was only a nasty head cold: Emily and I just felt like we were on the edge of death.) Luckily I'd scheduled our monthly newsletter just before that, and you can find it here:

https://mailchi.mp/a7d0d4972714/spring-has-sprung?e=2b1e842057

Of course, you can just subscribe to it, no questions asked. Once a month or so you get a cute picture of the dog, some writing stuff, and news or lack thereof about my attempts to get published again. Most people show up for the dog photo, I think.

But this particular newsletter has something different: a little song I wrote. Very little. Join us, and you probably won't be sorry! (Just so you know, we did not have a computer virus.)

You've seen this photo before, but in the newsletter it's usually a new one.

 

 

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Why We Love Trouble is a mystery

See that little play on words I did with the title? No? Never mind.

 

 I finished the final polishing of We Love Trouble. It tops out at 81,000 words--still the longest novel I've written yet. Boy, is writing a mystery tough: characters, suspects, clues, red herrings, ghosts, horses, Bigfoot ... 

 Well, it's that kind of story.

I already have Beowulf: In Harm's Way, Fire On Mist Creek, and Summer Jobs Are Murder at various points in the submission process, and I think I'll send this one out on the literary agent hunt. I really like it ... which doesn't mean it's good, of course, but if readers have half as much fun reading it as I did writing it, it should do pretty well.

I've described We Love Trouble as "The Thin Man meets Scooby Doo". For those of you who don't remember "The Thin Man", I could also describe it as "Hart to Hart Meets Scooby Doo". For those who don't remember "Hart to Hart", I'm at something of a loss. I assume everyone has heard of Scooby Doo.

I finished a submission cover letter, and here's one of the blurbs I came up with:

A near collision with a riderless horse leads travel bloggers Travis and Victoria Noble to an unconscious teenager—then to a dead man. A quiet Indiana camping trip for the Suzuki twins and their steeds has become a conspiracy involving horse racing, blackmail, and … morel mushrooms.

It's another fun mystery for the always helpful Nobles, who are so used to being suspects they have bail money on speed dial. Not so for their dog Wulfgar, whose unusual talents include seeing dead people. He struggles to protect his humans and pass on what the ghosts tell him: Something's unusual about the twins' horses, and the threat to the Suzuki family—and the Nobles—is far more than supernatural.

 

Yeah, I'd read that. Well, I already have, about a dozen times.

 

"Did you say dog?"

 

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Ford ... Falcon?

I have a feeling you wouldn't want to be in this car when the driver's dodging potholes.

Guess I should have waited to post this until May Fourth ... but I've been holding on to it since last summer, and with the recent weather I'm getting a new hope that summer might actually get here again.

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The Writing Process: Literary Agent Queries

Recently I spent two days sending queries to literary agents. Several hours of researching the agents and their agencies, composing query letters, enclosing requested materials, and sending out twenty-two e-mails. Most agents accept simultaneous submissions, but they also appreciate a personal touch, so researching whether we'd be right together was pretty time consuming.

By the end of the first day I'd already received two rejections.

Many authors do just fine without agents, these days. You don't need one if you self-publish, or if you submit to publishers that permit direct submissions, like most small and medium sized publishers. Harlequin, the Big Shot in the romance novel business, doesn't require agented submissions. In fact, one of the Harlequin lines is currently looking at my romantic comedy novel, Fire On Mist Creek.

They've had it for two years. I'm not confident.

Many authors get published without agents, after all. I should know.

Many publishers, especially the big ones, won't look at a submission unless it's received through an agent. Also, good agents act as full partners with the author, assisting in many areas besides the submission process, and also provide a shoulder to cry on. As slow as the publishing industry can be, that shoulder can be important.

But is an agent worth the process of finding one?

I tweak my submissions to make them more personal. In addition, each agent has different requirements: Some want a synopsis, some a separate author bio; some want the first five pages, or the first three chapters, or the first twenty-five or thirty or fifty pages.

So  I took the time to target each. Some gave me a quick rejection; some I might never hear back from; some might send an encouraging note that they liked my writing, but didn't get excited enough about it. (And an agent must like your work, because they're going to dive into it with both feet.)

Maybe they'll like the query and ask for a partial; maybe they'll like the partial and ask for the whole manuscript; maybe they'll like the whole manuscript but, as with one agent, have a meeting with their staff in which it's ultimately rejected. (They loved my young adult novel but thought it wasn't dark enough, and felt "dark" was the way the YA industry was headed. No wonder young people today are depressed.)

Even if you ultimately land one, it might not be a good fit. I did have an agent, years ago, but eventually he decided to get out of the publishing industry, and I started again from square one. It wasn't my fault. I think.

There's ultimately no guarantee that the agent can make the sale, but you can be sure they'll try ... because a legitimate agency won't make any money from your efforts unless they do.

So there's the process: similar to the process of submitting directly to a publisher, and with a similar rate of success. Many authors are successful and perfectly happy with independent publishing, and others do very well submitting directly to publishers. Is the extra step worth it? Well, so far it's only cost me time ... on the other hand, time is a precious commodity.

We'll see what happens.

Any way you go, you still have to put the after-sale work in.

 

Find all of our (unagented) books at:

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book review: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Rikk Deckard is a bounty hunter in a futuristic city, who flies his hover car around while on the hunt for escaped androids who need to be "retired".

Gosh, that sounds an awfully lot like the plot of the movie "Blade Runner", doesn't it?

"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", by Philip K. Dick, was first published in 1968, and was indeed the inspiration for the 1982 film of the different name. The setting was moved for the movie from the post-nuclear war San Francisco of 1992 (later changed to the really far future: 2021) to an almost as dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, and where the hell is my flying car?!

Ahem. I can just imagine police having to investigate those accidents.

Deckard is given the task of hunting down six androids of a new model, practically indistinguishable from humans, and he has a very good reason for finding them: Each is worth a bounty of a thousand dollars, and with that kind of money he and his wife can trade in their electric sheep for a real, living, expensive animal--maybe even a goat.

Yeah, you heard that right. In the aftermath of a nuclear war most humans have migrated offworld (and each migrant is given their own android), while those who remain behind find animals so scarce that they're sold like some kind of gold plated work of art. The problem is, some androids rebel, kill their owners, and smuggle their way back to Earth, where police employ bounty hunters to find them.

Meanwhile, a secondary plot covers John Isidore, a man whose low IQ kept him from migrating, who finds himself helping the escaped androids. As Deckard goes through his list and gets closer to a final showdown, he's increasingly exhausted, and also begins to question the morality of his job. Deckard also discovers the six androids he's after may be only the tip of the electronic iceberg.

There's also a subplot involving Mercerism, a technology based religion that's, frankly, weird. But Mercerism becomes a factor when Deckard closes in on the last three androids and the hapless Isidore.

For those of you who watched the movie, yes, Rachael Rosen is there. Otherwise there aren't enough similarities between the book and the movie for me to really say one is better than the other--but they're both sufficiently bleak and downbeat to make a person want to drown in a bottle of Jack Daniels. Just the same, the author Philip K. Dick (no relation to Philip J. Fry) was great at characterization, and at setting the stage for his fictional worlds. It's a fascinating read and worth trying, although the final conflict and the ending both seem abrupt.




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Firefighters Never Grow Old ... Wait, Yes They Do

 At the Albion Fire Department's annual appreciation dinner last weekend I received a hand tool from people who should have known better than to give me a hand tool:

No, those aren't wings growing out of my head, but I appreciate you thinking I could earn some.

 It was an award for being a volunteer firefighter for forty years, although my actual 40th anniversary was July 14 of last year. Here's the blog I wrote about it then:

https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2020/07/40-years-as-firefighter.html

 The dinner is when awards are given out for the previous year, you see. I've already gotten a cool statue and an even cooler watch, just for sticking around. (You older people, explain "watch" to the younger ones.) You might remember that Phil Jacob was honored not long ago for hitting his 50th anniversary with the AFD; for his 60th, they have to give him a fire truck.

I know what you're thinking: "They gave you a tool?" But in all fairness, it's the power tools that usually get me in trouble. I've hardly ever hurt myself with a hand tool, this year.

Now, Mitch Fiandt got the 35 year statue, despite the fact that he's been fighting fires longer than I have:

The young punks just can't pull off the firefighting mustache like we old farts can.

I'm just that good. Or more likely it's because he put in 35 years on the AFD, but previous to that he served on the neighboring Orange Township Fire Department for eleven years.He's the only member of the AFD who remembers how to operate a steam engine.

 Other service awards that night went to Brad Rollins for 30 years, and Shane Coney for 25 years. Between the four of us, we have something like a century and a half in firefighting experience, plus sometimes we have contests to see whose joints pop the most when we get on a truck.

That's Brad Rollins lower left and Shane Coney top left, but really they're all old ... more or less.

 So if you ever see the four of us hopping off a fire engine at the scene of a blaze, you'd better get out of the way ... because we have to take a running start to get the fire hose inside.

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