The second entry in Brian Clopper’s meta fantasy series finds Irving and zombie-turned-vampire Roon reaching Revision Ravine and learning more about Dean Harmstrike and the Questing Academy.
Let me start by saying I had low expectations going into this book as the first book failed to tie up many loose ends, but I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I shouldn’t have.
All the issues from the first book are present here and turned up to eleven. Irving and the other characters are never in any danger, as either Irving’s wish jacket or his author save the day.
Moreover, this book, like the first, failed to tell a self-contained story. Instead, what you get is an incomplete story and you come away feeling like you only got the second act of a book. The books don’t make sense narratively when separated as they are.
My other issue is with Irving himself; he’s the definition of mediocre and lacks any distinct personality and is little more than a plot device to experience the world. The other characters don’t fare much better. While Roon is slightly more developed than Irving, she’s still very generic. Knarl and his axe wife were so one note they were completely forgettable, and I felt the same about the denizens of Revision Ravine.
I could have forgiven all this had Clopper answered more questions than he raised in this book. Unfortunately, that is not the case. While we get a few more tidbits about Dean Harmstrike and the world of the Questing Academy, we’re left with far too many loose threads to justify slogging through the rest of the series.
I won’t bother with the other books in the series and will just look up the ending online. I give Irving Wishbutton and the Revision Ravine 2.0 out of 5.0 stars and don’t recommend it. Either look up the ending online or skip it altogether.
Irving Wishbutton and the Questing Academy is the first book in Brian Clopper’s meta fantasy series about the eponymous boy-hero and the anonymous writer drafting his book. The story alternates between the everyday life of the writer and his family, and Irving’s time at the Questing Academy.
I liked the concept of this book a lot and thought how Clopper depicted the often-mundane life of writers was spot on. I also loved the mystery about Dean Harmstrike and the other characters Irving encountered, especially cyborg Val and fairy Sarya. I equally loathed Gared, the arrogant pompous knight, and windbag villain Raggleswamp.
However, my major criticism of the book was how Irving was never in any danger as all his problems were fixed by the actions of his author. For example, Irving’s writer drafts a chapter where he gains a wish, that he then uses later in the Questing Academy plotline.
This happened repeatedly to the point I could predict how Irving would get out of tights spots and thus never feared for him. Not only did this rob the story of all narrative tension, but it made for boring reading, and I’d go as far as saying it bordered on Deus ex machina territory, in the sense the almighty hand of the author was always there to pull Irving out of danger.
I also didn’t like how the book ended on a massive cliff hanger, but that should have been expected given how often the “writer” in the story ended his chapters on cliffhangers.
I will say there were a lot of redundancies and clunky sentences throughout the book, and it could have stood a few more rounds of editing.
Overall, the book lacked polish and could have been executed better. I give Irving Wishbutton and the Questing Academy 3.0 out of 5.0 stars. I bought the next in the series, but I’m in no rush to read it.
I recommend you either rent this from your library or snag it when it’s on sale.
Set between the events of Cute Mutants Vol. 4 & 5, Weapon UwU Vol. 1 follows Lou, Maddy, Gladdy, Ye Shou, Katie, and Skye as they set out to kill Heart of a Flower, then his children. However, it did not live up to the hype of its subtitle: God Killers.
Lou and company killed Heart of a Flower with ease and then persuaded his children to either stand down or join their side. And at no point did I fear for the characters’ safety, as they were never in any real danger.
While it was nice to see the other Cute Mutants interacting with each other, sans Dylan and their inner circle, Whitby dedicated so much of this book to the middle-school-level soap opera of who liked who, complete with the obligatory love triangle.
This wouldn’t have been such an issue had the characters in question not been in their late teens/early twenties and the extermination of mutantkind weren’t looming over everything. It just felt to me like everyone was acting so immature given the grave situation they were facing.
I also thought this book was very repetitive: Weapon UwU would learn about strange events somewhere in the world, go investigate, meet one of Heart’s offspring, fight minor enemies, then turn said offspring to their side or find some nonlethal way to neutralize them.
Overall, this was just an okay book. It was nothing special, and I suggest you either rent it or buy it when it’s on sale. I give Weapon UwU Vol. 1 3.0 out of 5.0 stars.
With primary season 2022 in full swing here in America, I thought it’d be a good idea to analyze political ads and what lessons they can teach us about storytelling. For those out of the loop, Americans vote for candidates in Congress every six years and the House of representatives every two years.
However, unlike in other countries where campaign spending is capped, in America candidates can spend unlimited funds on ads thanks to Citizens United, in which the Supreme court ruled corporations are people, money is free speech, and thus corporations can donate unlimited money to campaigns, political action committees (PAC) and superPACS. The former of which can donate directly to candidates and coordinate with them, while the latter can’t (but often do anyway).
As a result, in every election cycle, candidates flood Americans with emails asking for donations and bombard us with political ads.
Know Your Audience
But these campaigns don’t throw crap at the wall and see what sticks; they do their research and tailor each ad to a specific demo with a singular message that often boils down to their opponent is bad for X reasons but I’m good for Y reasons. And in recent years with the advent of social media, campaigns have been able to target their ads with laser precision to reach their intended audience, as seen in the 2016 when the Trump campaign used Facebook data harvested from Cambridge Analytica to target democratic voters disillusioned with Hillary Clinton and get them to vote third party.
He also spoke to the feelings of disenfranchisement among older and working-class white people by harkening back to a simpler better time with his slogan, Make America Great Again, often shortened to MAGA.
We also saw this in both Obama’s campaigns where he levied social media to connect with younger voters. In both cases, their ads spoke to their audience, admittedly in vastly different ways.
But how?
By speaking to their base, the hard-core fans who will go beyond voting for them to canvassing, calling, and taking people to the polls to vote.
How does this apply to writing?
First, if you don’t find your base, your tribe, you may sell a few copies, but that’s where it stops. There will be little word of mouth, and few if any reviews. But by finding your base, you’ll have a crew of readers who will ride or die for you and your work and who won’t stop talking about you.
Second, if you don’t identify your base, any marketing and ads you do will fizzle out.
As I mentioned above, political campaigns may seem like they want everyone to vote for them, but they actually want higher voter turnout among their base than their opponents.’ This is because historically voter turnout has been low, especially in non-presidential elections, so while there may be more of them than you, it all boils down to getting out your base.
But how do you find your writing base?
You go where they go, frequent the websites they frequent, and connect with them. You find their likes and dislikes, their hobbies, their personalities, and their problems.
And you give them what they want/need.
Give Them What They Want
Political ads often prey upon people’s emotions, e.g. fear, anger, or uncertainty about the future. Again, going back to the Trump campaign’s 2016 run, they played on the fears and anger that white Americans and their values were being ignored and becoming irrelevant.
Likewise, in Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous daisy ad, which featured a little girl on a swing holding a daisy before it cuts to a picture of a mushroom cloud, only aired once. But the message was obvious: vote for Barry Goldwater and it’ll end with nuclear war with Russia.
In the infamous Willie Horton ad, which spawned a genre of attack ads based on racial fears, the 1984 George H. W. Bush campaign painted Dukakis as soft on crime by implying he would allow criminals like Horton on the loose to commit more crimes.
Horton, a Black man serving a life sentence for murder without prole, while on release on Massachusetts’ weekend furlong program, failed to return, and physically and sexually assaulted a white woman before a civilian later shot him.
And more recently, Hillary Clinton’s 3AM ad with a red ringing phone, implied, then candidate Obama was ill prepared to handle the rigors of being president.
These quintessential attack ads did one thing: made people vote for the target’s opponent because they will stop the nightmare scenario from happening. They also created a us vs. them mentality, and if people are one thing, it’s tribal.
But how does this apply to writing?
Easy.
We all Want to matter
People want to be entertained. But more than that, they want stories that speak to them as a person. They want to be seen, to know they and their struggles matter, that they too can save the day and get a happily ever after.
The secret to giving readers what they want is to not try to please everyone.
Instead, focus on one person, be that you or someone else, and write for them. Be specific and write from your experience. Write what scares you, what hurts, because if it resonates with you, it’ll resonate with others. Tell your truth, regardless of how ugly it may be or who may take offense, because your story demands to be told. Do this and you’ll find your audience and please them. But that’s not enough.
You must hook them and keep them hooked.
Hook The Audience Early
Because we live in a capitalist society, everything costs money, and political ads are no different. They, in fact, cost so much that they only have 30 seconds to hook audiences, keep them engaged, and tell their story.
Likewise, you only have a brief window to hook readers before they put your book down to do one of a hundred other things vying for their attention.
One of the best ways to hook readers is by starting with a bang. While literal or metaphorical, you want your protagonists to be doing something when your readers meet them. One good way to insure this is by starting right in the middle of the action, aka in medias res.
Another way to hook readers early is by starting as close to inciting incident as possible, so they don’t have to slog through world building or character development that can come later.
Additionally, you could start at the end, then jump to the beginning, as masterfully done by Tarantino in Pulp Fiction.
You could also start by posing a question to the audience, such as in mysteries, and the quest to answer this question drives readers forward.
A similar technique is to add subplots with their own questions and move from one to another, answering one question as another arises to keep readers engaged and guessing what happens next.
But perhaps the best way to keep readers hooked is by making them care for your characters. They don’t have to like them, but they must feel something for them, and you do this by making your characters true to life.
We all have that one friend who reminds us of pretentious Holden Caulfield, bookish Hermione, or egotistical Victor Frankenstein; pull from your knowledge base and give your characters quirks and ticks of those you know. Make them act and sound like real people, complete with flaws and questionable morals.
And once you’ve made readers care about your characters, send them on a journey that matters. Have them grow and change as the plot demands, not vice versa, and make them earn their endings.
But once the story ends, the actual work of getting reviews and further sales begins.
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
One reason political ads are often highly effective is a combination of superb storytelling and repetitions. During campaign season, you can’t escape ads; they flood the airwaves, internet, your email, phone (robocalls and texts), even video games are no longer safe as candidates have taken to appearing in games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons, MLB Live 08, and Burn Out Paradise.
The point being, repetition is key to building and growing your reader base. Research has shown it can take seeing an ad 3 times or more before people buy a product, which means you must be your own hype man for marketing your book. Of course, don’t engage in spam or dishonesty to get sales, but plug your book and talk about your writing often sopeople know it’s out there.
Yes, this means marketing yourself and your book (I know. It sucks.).
Go All In
If you don’t believe in yourself and your book, no one else will. Put everything you have into it and promoting it. Engage in hash tag games and Facebook groups, reach out to bloggers and your local media, run ads, do what you must to get the word out.
Because no one will care as much about your book as you.
One thing we can learn from political ads is how to be evangelists for our books.
Don’t back be shy about saying how much you love your characters and their story, how excited you are for people to meet them, and how much you hope readers get what you’re trying to do.
This too, means having an elevator pitch on lock and ready to go when asked what your book’s about, and what your next project(s) are. It also means having some way to connect with readers, be it on social media or via a newsletter, and keeping them posted on your work and yourself.
You could have the best book in the world, but if no one knows about it, then what?
This goes triple if you’re a self-published/indie author. If need be, take a public speaking course if you’re not naturally extroverted, read a few books or watch a few videos on Amazon ads, social media marketing, and growing your followers.
Do whatever it takes to let people know how outstanding your book is.
Conclusion
If you’re American,whomever you vote for in the midterms, do it because you’ve investigated them and their platform. None of the above matters if there’s no substance behind the candidate and the book.
Write stories only you can and fuck the haters.
In closing, I want to leave you with this quote from Marianne Williamson I think is apropos:
“Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small does not serve the world. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
Thank you for reading and let me know your thoughts in the comments. Also, share this post if it spoke to you, and you can sign up to my newsletter for updates on me and my work here.
However, it lacked in both the horror and queerness. Most of the stories only had a fantasy/paranormal element, and the queerness was rarely more than subtext. Also, many of the stories ended just as they were getting interesting, leaving you feeling cheated.
While there were a few stories I enjoyed, such as Attachments, by Justin F. Robinette, in which a ghost haunts his former lover who spurned him; and HUSAVGUD, by Bernardo Villella, in which a gay man must face his past to move ahead; most of the stories were forgettable.
Overall, I felt this anthology failed to deliver on both the horror and queer aspects and pulled a bait and switch. I give Queer As Hell 2.0 out of five stars and don’t recommend you read it.
After graduating high school, I didn’t really plan to go on to college, and spent a year bumming around, eventually getting in trouble for shoplifting and my dad gave me an ultimatum: either go to college or he’d kick me out. So, I started at Henry Ford Community College before transferring to Oakland University.
My freshman year, I tried joining a fraternity, and failing that, I joined the Gay Straight Alliance, where I met other IRL queer people for the first time and didn’t feel so alone. After that first year, I mustered up the courage to come out as gay to my mother and, eventually, my father. This was largely because I felt like I “had to pick a side” even though I liked girls too.
Like most college kids, I went out clubbing on the weekends and wound up losing my virginity to a girl one week, a guy the next, and hooked up with a prostitute a few weeks later.
Looking back, I needed my ass smacked, but yolo.
So, I spent the first half of my twenties hooking up with guys and trying to find a boyfriend. But the whole time, part of me was curious about relationships with women. However, due to internalized biphobia, I didn’t think bisexuality was real, especially not for guys, so I suppressed those feelings until me and my first boyfriend broke up.
I’m Coming Out Part Deux
Things ended between us badly. The relationship was toxic and emotionally abusive as fuck, and I should have broken up with him a lot sooner than I did. Anyway, after we broke up, I got depressed and ate my feelings for like three or four months, then I like snapped out of it and hit the gym, admittedly to extremes (6-7 days a week, 4-6 hours a day).
As I shed the pounds, my confidence rose, and I caught myself checking out the women at the gym and them checking me out.
I’m not proud of this next part, but here it is.
I got the asinine idea to make myself straight, so I got rid of all my gay porn, stopped visiting online gay erotica sites and went out to straight clubs intending to hook up with women.
Because I’m so shy I’d have a few drinks to loosened me up, but as time wore on, I had to drink more to get the same affect, which eventually led to me getting alcohol poisoning twice in six months, at which point I stopped drinking cold turkey.
I’m not gonna lie, I was an asshole to the women I interacted with and apologize for my fuckboy ways.
I wound up dating a few women and hooking up with them.
But at the end of this idiotic quest, I realized I was still into guys, but liked girls, too. So, I came out again as bisexual and have been openly bi ever since. I also try to advocate for more bisexual visibility by writing stories featuring bi and pan characters of color like me.
It’s my goal to fill the world with all the stories I wished were around when I was coming up, so other LGBTQ+ Black and brown kids know they aren’t alone, and they matter.
As for my love life?
I’ve been single for the last thirteen years and if Mr. or Ms. Right comes along, cool. But I’m fine being alone.
Conclusion
That’s my tale more or less. I have omitted some events for the sake of brevity and to protect the innocent/stupid.
Today’s post will explore my coming of age and sexual awakening. Unlike today where being LGBTQ+ is mostly accepted, back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, being gay was the worst thing imaginable, especially if you were Black. So much so it was the go-to insult on the schoolyard.
Growing up, all I heard was how awful and gross being LGBTQ+ was and what few depictions of them in the media weren’t flattering. So, as a young Black queer boy it was rough, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Confessions of a Pervy Kid
To put it lightly, I’ve had a complicated relationship with sex and sexuality.
I was a toddler when I saw my first porno. The way my parents tell the story, they’d rented Pinocchio from the video store, but instead of the Disney classic, the store gave them the X-rated version, and it wasn’t until they came to check on me and the other kids because we were suspiciously quiet that they discovered the mistake.
Fast forward a bit and I was now two going on three and my parents had left me home alone, as they often did in those days.
I was a curious kid prone to exploring, and while searching in the closest I found a videotape. Thinking it was one of my cartoon tapes, I popped it into our VCR and on came a porno.
I still remember it to this day; the premise was a busty blonde didn’t know how to deep throat, so she employed a hung Black guy to teacher her how. There I was enthralled, lying on my stomach, feet kicked up in the air, watching them go at it, when my dad came home from work. He saw what I was watching and tore my ass up.
Thus began my perennial mission to seek out all things sex related.
You Show Me Yours I’ll Show You Mine
When I was a bit older, me and another boy from our apartment played you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. Recalling the event, it wasn’t sexually so much as out of curiosity.
Jumping forward a bit, I was now five, and we’d moved to Detroit.
One day, a girl from up the street took me behind some bushes and flashed me her privates; I did the same, and that was the end of that.
TW: Child Sexual Abuse
Following this, my Uncle Pat’s girlfriend’s son, who was a few months younger than me, began molesting me and my brother.
It started with I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. Then he taught us how to masturbate by rubbing ourselves against stuffed animals. Next, it progressed to oral sex and sitting on his penis. I didn’t know what to do because the only thing I’d been told regarding child sex abuse was the abuser was an adult stranger, not family.
I now know this type of abuse is common in the Black community, though rarely spoken of.
However, back then, I didn’t know how to process it. And as often happens, I abused others, namely a boy visiting one of our neighbors. I’ll spare you the details and just say it involved penetration.
Rightly so, his parents were livid and banded me from being around him, and I got the requisite ass whooping from my parents.
Jumping forward a bit, my family and I were now living with my dad’s mother in the house next to her old one while we waited for the land lady to transfer things over to my parents. I was snooping in my parents’ room when I found my mom’s playgirl magazine.
I was oblivious to everything as I thumbed through the pages and didn’t hear the door opening. Betty, my father’s mother, saw what I was reading and beat my ass with a wooden paddle so hard it broke. My dad being a huge mama’s boy, said nothing about this and I went on my way to explore the empty house next door.
I found my Uncle Pat’s massive collection of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. I spent a couple of hours perusing them, and when I came how my mom asked if I’d enjoyed looking at those porn mags. I acted like I didn’t know what she was talking about, as I didn’t want another whooping.
In hindsight, the clues I was bisexual were all over the place, but more on that later.
Shortly thereafter, I had my first case of Steven’s-Johnson syndrome, which you can read about here, and all thoughts of anything not hospital related left my mind until I hit puberty.
Cumming of Age
Over the years, it became a habit of mine to sus out my dad’s porn collection, only for him to discover this and beat my ass. My brother and Uncle pat’s girlfriend’s son got in the act too; at one point when I’d discovered a porno tape, one of them would stand guard for my mom while two of us watched the tape.
But in between that, I came of age.
Due to all the steroids given to me to reduce the swelling in my airway from the allergic reaction I mentioned above, by eleven I could ejaculate and had tons of pubic hair, and it was around this time that I had my first inklings I wasn’t straight.
There was a teenage boy in our neighborhood who would play with us younger kids, and I remember being infatuated with him to the point I got hella jealous when he played with anyone but me.
Looking back, I was totally crushing on him.
It was also around this time I had my first serious crush on a girl. I was about twelve and she was in the grade below me, so we only got to see each other in the few classes we shared. I was super shy and never worked up the courage to confess my feelings to her. But the worst part was everyone knew how I felt and teased me about it. I think is partially why I have approach anxiety with asking people out.
A Whole New World
The summer I turned thirteen, a whole new world opened to me when I got a PC and internet access.
It was 1997, the days of dial up, AIM, and 56k modems. Like any horny teen, I promptly found my way to porn sites, but given the limitation of the technology at the time, I found it faster to read my porn than watch it.
It never crossed my mind that I was mainly reading gay erotica, or that there was anything wrong with that, until the guys in my age group all started talking about hooking up with girls.
Now like then, I’m more attracted to men than women, but because of bi erasure and biphobia I thought I had to hide my attraction to guys.
But over the years, those stories I found online became a lifeline to me, and eventually inspired me to become a writer.
Time passed and I and one of my friends started messing around. Truthfully, it was purely sexual as had been all my attractions to guys up to then.
I’d only experienced romantic attractions to girls until the summer I turned fourteen.
The Day the World Changed
The summer between eighth and ninth grade marked many changes.
I had my first major depressive episode and lost interest in everything save my computer, video games, and Dragon Ball Z, all things D liked too. He was my brother’s friend originally, then we became friends over games of Rival Schools, Tekken, and other such PlayStation games. Because my brother had chosen that summer to start running the street, D would be at our house waiting for him.
This was before cell phone were ubiquitous, so it wasn’t like he could call or text him to see where he was at. With D being two grades below me, I was reluctant to give him the time of day, as I was about to be a high school guy.
But it turned out we had a lot of the same interests and the same pervy sense of humor. Over episodes of Dragon Ball Z we bonded, and without me even realizing it, I fell for him hard.
This hit me for a loop as one day we were just chilling and the next I’m wanting to kiss the dude. I hid my feelings and tried to act normal around, but it was torture. I crushed on him all throughout high school, but I never acted on my feelings.
This is the next post in my ongoing series of autobiographical stories. TW: this post deals with the physical abuse of minors and descriptions of medical trauma. Reader discretion is advised.
Readers Are Leaders
Growing up, my dad read to me often and even made up his own stories. As a result, I’m a lifelong reader and bibliophile. However, today I’m going to talk about a time when the library became a source of pain and horror for me. I’d just turned six years old, and my class went to our school’s library for the first time.
For legal reasons, I’ll refer to the librarian involved in this story as Mr. M.
I’d taken my seat when the boy next to me kicked me. I kicked him back and Mr. M told us to knock it off. A few minutes passed when the boy kicked me again. I kicked him back and the next thing I knew, Mr. M pulled me out of my seat and threw me headfirst into a bookshelf. I remember him pulling me from my seat and throwing me, then being pulled backward, but the impact is a blank.
Then he made me stand with my arms out like Jesus on the cross for the rest of the hour. In the days after he assaulted me, I didn’t remember anything of it, but luckily a neighbor girl who lived up the street from us saw the whole thing and told my parents.
The school started an investigation but allowed Mr. M to continue working.
The next week, while my class went to the library, I stayed behind and had my first seizure. My parents took me to the hospital and after running tests, they diagnosed me with epilepsy and after an MRI they found a cystic mass above my right temporal lobe at the site of the impact.
They started me on antiseizure meds and scheduled surgery to remove the mass, but a week before surgery I caught strep throat and the doctors prescribed me penicillin, even though my parents told them penicillin allergies ran on both sides of the family.
This was back in the early ‘90s when the only insurance we had was Medicaid, so they forced us to go to the doctors they assigned us. Said doctors told my parents not to worry, and they listened to them.
They shouldn’t have.
A Year-And-A-Half of Hell
The combination of antiseizure meds and penicillin triggered the first and most severe allergic reaction of my life: Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis (TEN, NSFW pictures in link). Initially, I developed a red blotchy rash and flu-like symptoms. My parents took me back to the doctors, who said there was nothing wrong with me.
But I only got worse as the days passed.
Week after week, my dad kept taking me to them, only to be told I was fine while I got weaker, and my fever soared.
Two months into this, I ran a fever of 103-104F and not even an ice bath could break it, so at my Uncle Stanley’s suggestion, my parents took me to Children’s Hospital in Detroit.
Within five minutes, they’d diagnosed me with Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS, a less severe form of TEN). The next thing the ER docs did was cover me in icepacks to break my fever. It worked, but the sudden change in body temperature caused me to go into shock and I flatlined.
What I remember most from the time I was clinically dead is the absolute silence and darkness I found myself in, the utter nothingness. I later learned it took them over forty-five minutes to get a stable pulse, but to me, it seemed like only seconds had passed.
When you get defibrillated, it feels like being slammed in the chest with a sledgehammer. And when your heart doesn’t restart, you gain momentary consciousness until the charge dissipates.
Then it’s back to nothingness.
Once they stabilized me and took me to the ICU, they started me on a new antiseizure med that made me hallucinate a giant spider was trying to eat me. I tore my bedding to shreds trying to get away from it and that sparked a lifelong aversion to spiders.
False Hope
I spent the next three months in the ICU and appeared to get better, so they moved me to a regular room, then released me the week before Christmas.
Everyone at my dad’s job pitched in to buy me presents, including the brand-new Game Boy, all of which my roommate stole while I was at a magic show the hospital put on.
A week after being released, I started having breathing problems and my parents rushed me back to the ER.
Over the coming weeks my breathing got worse and my skin began to peal, until I’d eventually lost over eighty percent of my epidermis and had damage to my lungs and windpipe. I had to be put on a vent and slipped into a coma for six months.
Rude Awakenings
I came to a few days before my seventh birthday, which we celebrated in the ICU with an Oreo ice cream cake. But the vent tube was the only thing holding things in place, so when they removed it, my air way collapsed, and they had to do an emergency tracheotomy.
When I regained consciousness three weeks later, I now had a breathing tube and I couldn’t talk well, as my vocal cords had accidentally been severed, rendering me effectively mute.
Because of the length of my coma, I had to relearn how to walk and how to communicate. I spent months in rehab and months more waiting for my parents to complete training how to take care of me.
Those first months were the hardest as I was full of displaced anger and lashed out at everyone, blaming them for what happened to me. Then I turned that anger inward, viewing what happened to me as divine retribution for my deviant sexuality (a tale for another time).
A New Beginning
When I finally went home for good, they homeschooled me for a while; a private tutor came to our house once a week and spent most of her time grading my work and didn’t teach me much of anything.
After a few months of this, I started third grade at a school for kids with disabilities like mine. Being the new kid and not being able to talk well made school a living hell. I kept to myself as the other kids didn’t want to work with me, and they would glare daggers at me whenever our teacher made them work with me.
And so my life settled into a pattern: I’d get sick and go into the hospital for a few months at a time, come out, have surgeries on my airway only for them to fail, rinse, repeat. I had anger issues for years and acted out by destroying things and getting into fights with my younger siblings.
Again, it being the ‘90s, my parents didn’t put me into therapy and instead beat my ass with a thick brown leather belt. And when that ceased to make me behave, they’d threatened to relinquish to the state, which gave me abandonment and intimacy issues that I’m still working through today.
As for Mr. M? My parents sued him, and it came to light he’d abused two other students, breaking one’s arm and the other’s leg. They fired him from his job and he lost his limo business.
And the doctors responsible for my allergic reaction? When I was 12 my parents settled a malpractice lawsuit with them out of court for an undisclosed amount.
I’ve led quite the life for one not even forty. I still have my breathing tube, and while there have been talks of trying to reverse it, right now I’m content with the status quo. Medical technology has advanced a lot since my initial reaction. Who knows?
Maybe I’ll get rid of it yet.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading and let me know if you want more of these stories.
What early childhood events have shaped you? How did you react?
This is the second post in an ongoing series of autobiographical stories about my coming of age in the metro Detroit area.
Let me set the stage.
The year was 1989, and I’d just left the only home and friends I’d known back in West Germany. Because of the chaos caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall, my father’s discharge from the military got jammed up, so for the first six months of our stay in the US, it was just me, my mom, brother, and sister.
Having spent most of my life oversea in a tiny mountain town, coming to Michigan was a huge cultural shock. Back in Bindlach, no one cared that I and my siblings were biracial, but upon coming to Detroit I got racist comments like oreo, zebra, and worse, hurled at me. But the worst of it came from my father’s mother (whom to this day I refuse to call my grandmother) and my uncles.
The House that Betty Anne Built
When we arrived in the US, we stayed with my father’s mother in Northwest Detroit (Six Mile and Grand River). Her house was a two-bedroom affair that we squeezed ten people in (eleven when my dad joined us). With so many people in such a small house, we were all over each other, and it was hell.
My father was the only one with a steady job, so money and food were in short supply, so much so, you had to guard your food when you ate to stop others from taking it right off your plate. To make matter worse, my three uncles (all in their 30s) would spend what money they had on the daily lotto and weed.
We were on welfare during this time and while this helped us greatly, my uncles would eat up all the food in the house when they got the munches, so there were days we only had slices of bread or nothing at all to eat.
Betty Anne was a self-proclaimed Baptist preacher and from the moment we moved in with her, she spewed all this bullshit about how white people were the devil and us being half white made us unclean and less than fully Black people like her. My Uncle Stan got in the act too, constantly spouting off about how the (white) man kept Black people down and how they needed to separate themselves from whites.
If that wasn’t bad enough, her house was infested with roaches and my Uncle Patrick’s on-again off-again girlfriend Penny would steal my brother’s and mine clothes for her son, which prompted my mom to label our clothes with permanent markers. But this did little to stop Penny from taking them.
I never understood why Betty treated us like shit while she doted on Penny’s son and his half-siblings, all of whom were biracial too.
But c’est la vie.
My dad was the oldest of Betty’s kids but was and still is a complete momma’s boy and let her walk all over us and I resented him for the longest time for this.
A Silver Lining
School was an escape for me, and it was there I met my first friend since coming to Detroit. My teacher Ms. Mally was awesome, and I still remember the clean up song she made us sing when we put away our toys.
One day at recess, I got into a fight with another kid and bit him. They called my mom up to the school and had a meeting about it, and that was how I met Wenderryl McKenzie. As young kids are wont to do, we squashed our beef and became fast friends, which made things at home less sucky.
Then things turned for the better. The people in the house next to Betty’s moved and she and my uncles moved into it, leaving my family to live in her old house. The process took a few weeks, but by the end I had my own room and wasn’t crowded anymore. With only five mouths to feed instead of eleven, food wasn’t as scarce and I didn’t have to worry about guarding my plate while I ate, but it took me years to break that habit.
Even though we no longer lived with her, Betty still had a hold over my dad and whenever they were short on money for rent or other bills, she hit him up. This caused friction between my parents, so much so that they separated, and my mom took us to live with her friend Kay up north in Otter Lake, Michigan.
Otter Lake
Kay’s house was a ranch style two-bedroom, and we lived with her and her teenage son for several months. She had diabetes, and a highlight of the day was when she drank a juice because she’d let one of us finish it.
As with any change, it took time to adjust, and one of the biggest changes was going from being surrounded by a ton of other Black kids to being the only one in my class. The kids and my teacher were nice enough, but I missed Wenderryl and Ms. Mally, and my dad.
To help ease the transition, my mom would take us to the gas station near Kay’s house and let me play on their Super Mario Bros. arcade machine. I remember getting so frustrating at not being able to beat it, that I’d give myself nose bleeds.
I also recall that she had satellite TV and how I’d stay up late watching soft-core porn, among other things.
As for Kay’s son Jeremy(?), he tolerated me, even though I followed him around like a lost puppy. At the time I thought he was a jerk for ignoring me, but in hindsight, who could blame him for blowing me off? What teenager in their right mind wants to hang with a five-year-old?
Eventually my parents reconciled, we moved back to Detroit, and I started first grade with my all-time favorite teacher, Mrs. K.
For a while, things were good, then my class took their first trip to our school’s library, setting off a chain reaction of events that forever changed my life.
But that’s a story for another time.
Conclusion
Let me know if you like these stories as I have more to tell.
His full name is Jason Jordan Miller. He’s 16, 5’7, 185 lb, with light brown hair and green eyes. He has buck teeth and constantly wears a beat-up Tigers’ cap.
Personality
Jason is a carefree, practical joker and a major fuck boy. An underachiever, he’s more concerned with socializing with friends than doing his work at school and has the habit of putting off assignments until the last minute. He can also be an asshole and take things too far. Jason is also obsessed with money, power, and fame and always has a plan going to get all three.
Likes
He loves video games, hooking up with anything that moves, sleeping in, and pulling pranks on people and posting them on social media. He loves being the center of attention and can be egotistical, high jacking conversations to talk about himself. He’s also big into weed and drinking. He also enjoys working out with David, Lance, and Matt; and loves crypto, NFTs, and day trading.
Dislikes
Jason hates responsibilities, doing boring assignments and homework, and not getting his way. He also hates having his authority challenged and anyone calling him on his BS.
Goals
His number one goal is to have as much fun as possible and sleep with as many people as he can. Second, he wants to become a journalist and report on celebrities and sports.
Desires
Jason desires sex, fun, and living life to its fullest, and screw the consequences.
Fears
He fears intimacy, being “trapped” and having to become a responsible adult and being poor.
Morality/Religious Beliefs
Jason is Catholic but doesn’t take his faith too seriously. Morally, he’s hedonistic and libertine, caring only for his pleasure and freedom.
Political Alignment
Politically, he’s a libertarian.
Thanks for reading. Next week’s post will be the second in my series of autobiographical tales about growing a QPOC in the Midwest.
Content Warning: depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, alcohol abuse, and references to child physical abuse.
Welcome!
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so apropos of that, today’s post will be about my mental health journey.
Suffering in Silence
I was six years old when I had my first hallucination. I was in the hospital for an unrelated allergic reaction to Penicillin and Dilantin and the doctors switched me to another antiseizure that caused me to think a giant spider had captured me in its web and was trying to kill me.
In my frenzy to get away, I shredded my bedding.
Afterward, they prescribed me carbamazepine, which I’ve been on for 30-plus years. However, from then on, I saw things that weren’t there, off to my left. These hallucinations would come and go, playing like channels flipping on a TV. I told no one about them because I had enough issues going, such as being bullied at school and my parents constantly beating me every time I acted out, without being crazy.
Kid me wasn’t the brightest and all this added to the displaced anger I had over the life-changing side effects of the allergic reaction I mentioned above (namely, being rendered effectively mute and having a breathing tube that made me the target of kids’ teasing).
So, I bottled everything up inside until it got too much for me.
I was 9 years old the first time I thought of killing myself. I was in the hospital, as I always was in those days, and had to have my blood drawn again. Taking the crude metal blank they used to stab your fingers in those days, I planned to silt my wrists.
However, the tech took it from me when she realized I had it and that was the end of that.
As I progressed to middle school, the bullying intensified, and I thought of killing myself often. Then the summer I turned 13, I had my first major depressive episode and lost interest in everything. My parents thought this was hilarious and laughed about it, so I stopped telling them anything about my problems.
It was also around this time I was struggling with my sexuality, which compounded things. I internalized everything and only allowed myself to express anger, often breaking things or getting into fights with my siblings, all of which earned me a beating from my parents’ thick brown leather belt.
It Gets Better . . .Kind of
At 19, I went off to college, started dating and hooking up with guys and the occasional girl, experimented with weed and alcohol, but my anger issues and other problems were still there. At one point, my depression got so bad I rarely left my dorm and failed most of my classes. Then at 20, I moved on my own and started using sex and alcohol to self-medicate myself and started cutting myself. I made a half-assed attempt to get help from one of my university’s therapists, but I wasn’t ready. So, I spent the first half of my twenties getting white girl wasted every weekend and hooking up to feel like I was normal and loved.
Psych Ward, Ho
Then the year I turned 26, I had a psychotic break.
It began with a personality change; I went from shy and quiet to a literal frat boy. And the hallucinations I once ignored, became all-encompassing. I believed I was the Antichrist and that all the conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, the 13 bloodlines and 500 families who ruled the world, were true and I was one of these higher dimensional demons.
I wound up in one facility for a week before being released and then wound up in another for several months after the police found me in only my underwear walking along Woodward Ave. After tasering me, they took me to St. Joseph Mercy Oakland hospital near my house.
The doctors diagnosed me with paranoid schizophrenia and prescribed me antipsychotics, which helped with my hallucinations and delusions of grandeur to the point I could function.
At the end of my stay, they sent me to outpatient therapy, but because I had aged out of my father’s insurance plan and exhausted COBRA insurance, I couldn’t afford either my meds or therapy (Note this wass pre-ACA).
The Lost Five Years
I spent the next five years in a daze, not knowing what was real and could barely function. I’d go weeks without bathing, stopped caring for myself in general, and became a shut in, rarely going out or socializing in person or online. It was so bad at one point I stopped paying my bills and my heat was shut off during winter and my pipes burst because it was so cold.
I would have continued living like this had I not sought help.
A Light at The End of the Tunnel
As I approached 30, I realized I hadn’t accomplished anything I’d set out to do, and this triggered a quarter life. Slowly, I cleaned up my life, sought therapy and help from a psychiatrist, got on and stayed on meds for depression and schizophrenia, and pieced my life back together.
I haven’t had another psychotic break in the 8 years since I started seeing my psychiatrist. But I have had several episodes of depression over the years, and there were a few times I thought of killing myself, but a few adjustments of my meds helped sort me out.
My life isn’t perfect by any means, but I’m doing much better now compared to back in my twenties.
My hope is that by hearing my story it helps you.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health issues, know help is available. If you’re in the USA contact, the national suicide prevent lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or TEXT GO to 741741 to reach a trained Crisis Counselor through Crisis Text Line, a global not-for-profit organization. Free, 24/7, confidential. Help is also available at afsp.org or TEXT TALK to 741714.
IF you’re LGBTQ+ and in crisis, contact thetrevorproject.org for more resources geared toward you.
This is the first in what I plan to be a recurring series of autobiographical stories.
From the time I was born until age five, I was a military brat; my father worked vice for the military police, and I spent the first years of my life at the Christensen Barracks in Bindlach, West Germany, AKA The Rock. It was called so because it was a tiny town in the Bavarian mountains with only one main road that wound around the side of the mountain.
‘80s baby
Like many kids in the ‘80s, I was left to my own devices for much of the time as both my parents worked, and as kids are wont to do, I found ways to entertain myself. I’d explore our apartment and the surrounding environs, hang out with other kids in the neighborhood, and do typical kids’ stuff like have sleepovers and go to Sunday school.
One vivid memory I have of The Rock is the Christmas I found a snail outside and one of our neighbors gave me a glass container shaped like a Christmas tree to put it in and I proceeded to show it off to all my friends. One of my guy friends whose name I can’t recall had some red food coloring and put it on himself pretending it was blood.
While running up and down the stairs, I slipped, the glass container shattered, and a chunk of it pierced my left side just above my hip. My parents rushed me to the hospital, but on the way there the engine of my dad’s Nissan caught fire and he had to extinguish it with my mom’s can of Pepsi. Afterward it wouldn’t start, so he carried me the rest of the way to the hospital, all the while blood was running down my side.
Once at the hospital, the doctor jammed his fingers into the wound to fish out glass fragments and sutured me up.
Birds and the Bees
A fonder memory I have is when my sister was born.
I was three when my mother had my sister Sherrie (my brother Jamarr having been born thirteen months previously, six months premature and in the NICU all the while). My father took me to see them right after my mom gave birth and I remember being struck by how light-skinned my sister was (is still is) as she could pass for white. I also recall that my mom had fried chicken with vanilla ice cream and a Pepsi for dinner that night.
While my parents had told me I was getting a new sibling, and showed me an animated vhs tape about the birds and the bees with anatomically correct names of genitalia, it came as quite the shock to me when my parents brought home two babies instead of the one I saw.
I wasn’t happy going from an only child to the oldest.
But that’s life, lol.
There was also the time the twin girls in the apartment upstairs from us got chicken pox and my mom made me and Jamarr go play with them so we could get it too. Our case was severe, and I still have scars from where I scratched myself raw in places.
Then there was the year on my dad’s birthday when all the adults ganged up on him and striped him naked as a joke.
But the best memory from The Rock I have is of my next-door neighbor and BFF.
You Got a Friend in Me
My best friend at that time was a boy named Marcus, and he, I, and his older sisters would play house together. And he and I would play games on his computer (a commodore 64 if I recall correctly). His family and mine would also go on trips together to the beach and PX.
We and a few of the other kids in the neighborhood would hang out at the playground together and regale each other with the curse words we’d learned since our last meetup.
Being such a small town and me being so young, I thought everyone was like my family: a Black dad and a white mom. It wasn’t until we came stateside in ’89, shortly before my fifth birthday and the fall of the Berlin Wall, that I learned differently.
But that’s a story for another time.
We moved to Detroit to live with my father’s mother, and I came down with rubella. Marcus’s family moved stateside too (to Minnesota if I recall correctly), but with it being the era before social media or the internet we lost contact and I’ve never spoken to or seen him or any of the other kids from The Rock since.
Truthfully, I never had any friends later in life like the ones I did back then.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading this piece. Let me know if you want more of these stories as I have tons more to share.
The Random Affair (Urban Knights #1) is the first entry in James H Roby’s detective thriller series and resolves around ex-Navy intelligence operative turned PI Jordan Noble as he tries to track down Cody Random, a genius chemist whose brother Jordan killed years prior. Random is out for revenge as he tries to complete the creation of Crush, a new super addictive drug with cocaine as its base.
Over the course of trying to find and stop Random, Jordan reconnects with Robin Summers, his first love, who’s now involved with a small-time drug dealer.
Let me start by saying this isn’t the type of book I usually read, but I’m glad I picked it up. The action scenes were crisp and vivid, and the plot moved along at a good clip. Though as mysteries goes this was light on actual sleuthing and relied more on hacking/wire taps to advance the plot.
I found Jordan and the other characters surprisingly complex for an action/thriller novel, and while I didn’t agree with all their actions, I understood why they did certain things like not involving the police or CIA.
My main issue with the book is its formatting; apparently the author sent the printers the eBook file because there were no page numbers, and it had a little black box at the end of each chapter, which I take was supposed to be a chapter break.
Also, there many instances of head hopping, but not to the point it made the book unreadable. All around, this book could have used another round of editing and had it been more polished it would be a solid 5.0.
I’m definitely going to read the next book in the series and recommend you read this one if you like action thrillers like Jason Bourne and XXX.
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