The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Ah, the joys of photographing books on a black bookshelf in my dark-ass bedroom.
I did not buy many books in August. I, uh, fixed that problem in September. Also notable is that three of the books on the shelf are ARCs, sent to me for free for a review, which is always fun. That second Thom Hartmann book will be getting a read real soon and a review in the next few days, for example.
I’m Luther Siler. I’m an author. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.
I’ve written several books you might be interested in, ranging from short story collections to near-future science fiction to fantasy space opera to nonfiction, all available as ebooks or in print from Amazon. Autographed books can be ordered straight from me as well.
I can be found in several different places on the Internet. Here are the important ones:
Thanks for reading!
The headline for this piece is a lie– which would have been a clever reference to the events of The Outside, had I meant to do it when I started writing the sentence rather than realizing it halfway through. I actually have no intention of writing a full review of this book, which is really good and which I started reading last night and finished today. I’m tired and my thinkmeats are all askew and I’d rather just give you the basic genre of the book and then if you aren’t reaching for a credit card with one hand and navigating the interwebs to Amazon with the other we probably can’t be friends.
The genre, according to author Ada Hoffman, is “queer autistic cosmic horror space opera.” It may also be relevant to your interests to know that Hoffman is both queer and autistic.
That’s all. You may go now; I know you have more important things to do.
And I went to work today! And I haven’t had a nap, and my wife said I was being normal! Hooray!
Seriously though everybody who told me that there weren’t going to be bad side effects from Effexor? I’m gonna need y’all to get in a line and then I’m going to get into a whole bunch of fights, because that was every bit as bad as getting used to Lexapro. The good news is that I appear to be over the hump, and while I’m not certain that the drug is making me better yet it certainly seems to be done making things worse.
But hey. Whatever. I survived. I’ll take it.
Also, there’s an update on Patreon, if you’re into that.
I have reached the stage of adapting to brain meds where I have been asleep for maybe 38 of the 48 hours since Monday night. I haven’t been to work in two days; I’m going to burn half of my sick days for the year in September and that’s if I manage to make it in tomorrow. I love being completely unreliable, I really do.
When I’ve been awake I’ve mostly been staring at my phone in abject, slack-jawed horror at the news. I feel like it should be elation, as it really does feel like the walls are finally starting to close in on this evil cancer-beast currently shitting up my White House, but it’s not. It’s definitely horror.
Part of me would not be surprised if the motherfucker was out of office by this time next week, honestly. It’s not a big part but it’s there.
Off to bed, then. I have to be up in twelve hours if I want to make it to work and I’m going to need at least that much sleep to be ready for it.
Day … three? of the brain meds, and I am a fucking mess and have been all day. I made it through a day at work but only through a combination of pure stubbornness and fear. Because I have no idea what will happen to me if I run out of sick days during the first semester.
At any rate, I told most of my classes that I felt like shit and that they ought to be nice, and if they pressed I told them it was a medication thing. One class asked specifically what was wrong, and I said that I was dizzy and tired and nauseous and sweaty, all of which was 100% true. (I got up this morning, took a piss, and had to go back to bed and breathe for ten minutes because my blood pressure just decided to flatline for a while.)
One of my kids looks at me and says “Are you on ADHD meds?”
Well, no, as it turns out, but … nice guess, kid.
Forgive me if you’re seeing this twice, but given how FB’s stupid algorithm makes sure that no one sees everything it seemed best to put it in more than one place: I accepted a FR from a guy named John Johnson yesterday or the day before because I generally accept them from anybody on Luther’s account– if I don’t recognize the person, I assume they’ve read a book or met me at a con, where I hand out bookmarks with my FB page on them.
Well, one way or another this dude appears to have gone through my entire friends list and sent friend requests to everyone. Initially I thought it was just the women but that appears to not be the case. I looked at his account and he literally had no friends who were not connected to me. I have unfriended and blocked his account, and am currently playing the but why? game.
God, I hate Facebook.
Every so often I use either my blog or my Patreon as a bulwark against my own shitty memory, and this is going to be one of those times: I started on the Effexor last night, so today is Day One, and so far I have been dizzy all day and I have been sleepy, although not as bad as my recollection of the Lexapro early times were. The dizziness is manageable and the small supply of Meclizine I happen to have on hand cut it but didn’t kill it; I’m going to avoid driving any time I don’t absolutely have to for the next couple of days, but this isn’t close to bad enough to keep me home from work.
Yet, of course. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.
An utterly random observation: we watched the two-part season finale of Season 10 of Masterchef last night, and I continue to have the most useless mutant power of all time: we watch every one of Gordon Ramsay’s stupid competition programs and I have only been wrong about the winner once in all that time, either on Masterchef, Masterchef Junior or Hell’s Kitchen. Most of the time I’ve been able to pick the winner out several episodes before the end but I’m pretty sure I’m well into statistically impossible by now in terms of how often I’m right on the final episode.
Also, I’m not going to do a full review, but if you happen to be the type of person for whom a combination history of antisepsis and biography of Joseph Lister (the guy whose name was eventually appropriated for Listerine) sounds appealing, you could do an awful lot worse than reading Lindsey Fitzharris’ The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. It’s not for the squeamish, and I nearly didn’t make it through the book’s description of a surgery to remove a bladder stone in the prologue, but it’s good stuff.
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