I finally got off my rather exceptionally lazy butt and created a Goodreads page for CLICK, which you might recall is my most recent novel. If you’ve read it, and you’re inclined to add it to some bookshelves or (please? PLEASE?) review it, now you have somewhere to do that!
If we were having coffee (and I feel like I need to point out that, unlike last time, I actually am having coffee while writing this) I would spend most of the conversation being interrupted by the kitten, who has decided that my feet are the tastiest thing in the universe, regardless of whether I’m barefoot, in socks, or wearing my shoes. This started off as cute and endearing and now I’m seriously trying to think of a way to bash together some shame cones to wear over my feet whenever I’m in a room that she can get into because the assaults are constant and she’s too small to kick.
I could probably get her halfway across the house if I tried, though.
(I’m not going to of course I’m not going to Jesus but Goddammit leave my feet alone.)
Anyway.
We had Thanksgiving yesterday. There have been persistent rumors that my wife’s family is planning some sort of extravagant event in Michigan for Actual Thanksgiving, and my brother and his wife just bought a new house, so we decided to kill a couple of birds with one stone and we all went up to his place north of Chicago for Very Early Thanksgiving yesterday. We are mostly German and Polish with a smattering of English and Welsh; he married into an Italian family and brought all of them over as well, so yesterday was Teach the Polacks How to Make Ravioli Day, because why wouldn’t it be? So we spent probably three or four hours making a couple hundred raviolis. I didn’t actually make the pasta itself– my mom was handling that– but my brother and my dad and I were responsible for filling the raviolis and then covering them and, in general, finishing everything up. It went pretty well:
The darker ones are sausage and spinach, the rest are a five-cheese mix.
It went very well– I’ve actually never made fresh pasta before, and while I sort of wanted to be in the kitchen for the actual pasta-making part at least once, being the last person in the process means you get to pretend the whole thing was your doing, which is still kinda fun. Dinner was delicious and I even managed to not pass out and die on the way home, which was also a plus.
We would probably start hinting around this election thing on Tuesday at some point and I would change the subject as fast as I possibly fucking could. I have Tuesday off; part of me feels like this was a very good decision (there will be violence at polling places this week) and part of me is mourning the idea that I’m going to be home all day by myself to go crazy. I’m going to spend the whole day playing Red Dead Redemption 2 just to keep from going insane.
The other thing on my mind: the Pegasus Author Expo coming up next Sunday in Lafayette:
I am super excited about this event; I’m doing a panel on book production at 12:00 and a reading/Q&A for half an hour or so at 11:30. I’m currently killing myself trying to figure out what to read (current theory: the prologue to Skylights and something funny from one of the Benevolence Archives books) and trying to mentally prepare for anything from a big crowd (a “big crowd,” in this context, means “any number of people that I cannot accurately count in less than a couple of seconds”) to my wife and my assistant (I have an assistant!) and no one else. This is the first time this group has done something like this and nobody really knows what to expect in terms of attendance so I’m deciding to look at it mostly as a networking event with a chance to practice some public-speaking skills. If I make some money and sell some books along the way, awesome. If not? That’s a whole lot of Indiana authors to touch base with. Which is absolutely a good thing regardless.
You should come. You should bring everyone you have ever met.
Okay, coffee’s cold so I’ve yapped enough. How’re you?
So, in theory I have to have heard of Jacob Wohl before yesterday, or at least become aware of his existence, because I already had him blocked on Twitter. But … surely, surely the combination of this unbelievably fucking dumb story and the person claiming to be President insisting that we are under an existential threat because of the existence of a small band of starving refugees a thousand miles away from the US border, we’re at least going to have a brief reprieve on Republican idiocy before it gets worse again? For a couple of weeks, at least? Please? I know full well that the two rules of Republicans are They Always Get Worse and They Only Get Worse. I literally wrote those two rules. But does the slope have to be constant? Can we get a fucking break, please, just for a minute, before you idiot fuckweasels step on your dicks in public again?
I feel like I ought to be able to send these motherfuckers a bill for the brain cells I’ve lost since becoming aware of them.
At any rate. I’ve been quiet around here for the last couple of days, mostly because I’ve been trying my damnedest to spend every available second asleep, and I still feel like I have a month of sleep deprivation to catch up on. If I’m doing NaNoAnything I don’t seem to have started yet, and if it weren’t for the fact that I have an outside chance of actually passing up last year’s traffic numbers I’d seriously think about taking a hiatus at least until after the election. I’ve already voted, so I think I’m probably justified in burying my head in whatever sand might be nearby until after the horrorshow is over.
But, y’know, as usual, anytime I say “I won’t be posting for a while!” the next post is 3000 words. So.
I finally got off my rather exceptionally lazy butt and created a Goodreads page for CLICK, which you might recall is my most recent novel. If you’ve read it, and you’re inclined to add it to some bookshelves or (please? PLEASE?) review it, now you have somewhere to do that!
If we were having coffee (and I feel like I need to point out that, 
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