Election Day Sale

This election is almost over!  In a matter of days we’ll know if America will remain a land of democracy, or if it wall fall into fascism.  That’s assuming in the months after the election the fascists don’t burn the country down in their attempts to steal the election.  But that’s Big Challenge Number 2.  Big Challenge Number 1 is getting out and voting to show that the majority of Americans don’t want Orange Hitler back in the White House. 

Therefore, as with every election for the last decade plus, I’m having an Election Day Sale on several of my ebooks.  From Friday November 1st, through Election Day Tuesday November 5th, the following five ebooks will be free to download.  All I ask is that you vote.  If you need it, this site will help you find your polling place.  (Also, apparently, it’s technically illegal for me to give you something to get you to vote, but if a free ebook from an unknown author was the deciding factor on whether or not you voted, then the case could be made that anything could have been the deciding factor, like choosing not to vote because you didn’t want to stand in line after stubbing your toe that morning.  And it’s not like I’m dumb enough to just give people a million dollars.  Anyway, there’s no way for me to know if you vote or not, so you can take a book and not vote.  Which is fine, except in the sense that this election will determine the very fate of the United States.)

If you’ve already voted, then reward yourself with some free books.  If you haven’t voted yet, then grab something to read while you wait in line.  And if you’re not an American citizen, grab an ebook anyway and participate in your government however you can, because if nothing else, this election has shown that the forces of authoritarianism are everywhere, and they unfortunately don’t sleep.

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Political Pies

Everybody complains about politics, but does anyone do anything about it? My attempt to do something about it is to collect forty of my short stories with a political element into my Political Pies anthology. The stories are either politically neutral or equally condemning of the national parties. Instead of trying to sway you to one ideology or another, my goal is to just get people thinking about politics in the hopes a rose might grow out of all the political manure.

 

The All-You-Can-Read Buffet

The All-You-Can-Read Buffet is a collection of forty stories covering various genres and themes ranging from six to over 4,200 words in length. Some of these stories I wrote a decade ago, while others were written especially for this collection. All together, they are a buffet of my writing. As such, I encourage you to read as much as you want. Go back for seconds, thirds, fourths even. I won’t even mind if you skip over the stuff you don’t like, but, to quote your mother, “How do you know you don’t like it? Have you tried it?”

 

Relics

This work contains some profanity and sexual situations. It is intended for mature audiences only.

A plague that kills men has devastated the world’s population. Only a few thousand boys and men were able to be quarantined. But Mike Shay is the only man known to have a natural immunity to the plague. Therefore, he is practically the only man in a world of women. He spends his days reading, playing video games, and making the occasional sperm donation. Then Dr. Veronica Barrett shows up, disrupting what passes for his life. She says she’s there to investigate his “mental wellbeing,” but is there more to her visit?

Instead of the normal, adolescent, heterosexual male fantasy of being the only guy on a planet of women, “Relics” tries to give a more realistic view of Mike’s life.

 

The Future is Coming

As a science fiction writer, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how technology will change the way we live. I’ve come up with these ten short essays about science fictional elements that will – almost certainly – one day become science fact as a way for people to start coming to terms with them. Because I’ve spent time thinking about clones and AIs, I feel I’ll be okay when they do finally show up whereas most people will probably freak out. I hope these essays will get people to start thinking about the future because, no matter what we do, the future is coming.

 

Lonely Phoenix

Partway to a new colony world, board member Geoffrey Ames is woken from hibernation by the caretaking crew of the Lucian. They require him to look into the matter of their fellow crewman Morgan Heller. Morgan’s claims – such as being over 1500 years old – would normally land him in the psychiatric ward, except he can back up some of his other claims.

Political Karens

The idea for this post has been kicking around for … I don’t know how many months.  It started when I saw a post about how some Democrats weren’t planning on voting for Biden because of how he’s handled the whole issue of Gaza.  On one hand, I fully understand the dream of only voting for politicians that fully support the same causes you do.  But on the other hand, I doubt Trump could even find Gaza on a map. 

I know some people get really put off being told they have to support the lesser evil, but where the fuck have they been living the past forty years?  Yes, the system is broken.  Yes, the only thing more antidemocratic than only having two choices is only having one.  And yes, Harris isn’t perfect.  But you know what, NOBODY IS FUCKING PERFECT!  If a politician agreed with me 100% on every one of the 8,000 issues we have in the country/world right now, I’d figure they were just lying to get my vote. 

If you took the 100 issues I care most about, and looked at, not what Harris promises to do but what she can probably actually deliver, maybe 10 of those issues will see marked improvement, 5 might actually get noticeably worse, and the other 85 will have little if any change.  Whereas with Trump, 95 will get noticeably worse, while the other 5 will have little if any change.  Will Harris bring about a new golden age of America and the world?  No.  But she will make things slightly better.  Trump will dose the country in gasoline and light a match.  The choice is between slightly better and utter destruction, and somehow people can’t decide? 

Even if every American agreed on what America should be, there’s no way to get there within a Presidential term.  And too many adult Americans don’t understand that.  They’re apparently still at the stage where if they want candy, but if their parent says no, they immediately start crying and screaming.  We can only try to make things better tomorrow than they are today, which means we are often just left with baby steps.  But they can be baby steps in the right direction.

This brings us to my concept of a Political Karen.  We all know the image of a hyper-Karen, someone who would demand the complete destruction of a pizza place as acceptable compensation for not putting enough green peppers on their pizza, even though they never mentioned extra green peppers when they ordered the pizza.  I hope most of us would not only not agree with that, but would see it as going too far.  Now a Political Karen, is someone who – watching the country be destroyed by a fascist Trump – would think that if only Harris had stated support for Policy Y, they might have voted for her, thus avoiding this whole situation.  And I would hope, that most people would see that as going too far as well.

Short story – “Spooky Story”

“Spooky Story”

Closing the front door, Karl called out, “We’re back.” He unhooked Buster’s leash and the Basset Hound plodded into the kitchen to get a drink of water.

Karl took his shoes off and walked into the living room.  His wife Susan was where he had left her: in her “office” corner staring at her laptop.  He walked up behind her and kissed the top of her head.  “What are you stuck on?”

Susan sighed.  “It’s spooky season, and we’re going into an important election, so I wanted to do my part and write a spooky election story.”

“What did you come up with?”

“I wrote, ‘President Trump,’ and I didn’t want to go on.”

Karl snorted.  He then pretended to scream.  “Agggh.  The horror.” Kissing her forehead he said, “That hack Stephen King has nothing on you.”

Susan smiled.  “It just feels like I need to do more.”

Rubbing her shoulder, Karl said, “Come on.  We all know we’ll have President Clinton 2.0.  I doubt he even wants to be President.  It would mean he’d have to work for once in his life.  And he can make so much more money giving speeches bitching about how terrible she is.  If we’re lucky, in a year or so he’ll fade into obscurity.”

Register to vote, or check your registration

To me, it seems the only hope Trump has to “win” is if his supporters throw so many wrenches into the voting process that there will be “questions” as to who actually won.  And then his Supreme Court stooges will go, “Since there’s no way to really know who won, we’ll just say that Trump won.” And that will be the end of this experiment with democracy.

One of the wrenches being thrown, is purging people from the voter rolls.  Yes, voter rolls need to be kept up to date as people move, or become eligible to vote, or when they die.  And then there are those who purge thousands of voters from the rolls weeks before an election for … reasons? 

So if you feel that America should remain a democracy and that the voters – not corrupt election officials – should determine who wins an election, then you need to do your part.  Right now, doing your part is to register to vote – if you’ll be 18 by Election Day – or checking your registration.  You should be able to check your registration on your state’s website, although some of them apparently don’t make it obvious.  So another site you might want to use is Vote.gov.  The reason to do it now, is in some states there is a deadline as to when you can register, and it may only be days away from when this is posted.  But if you are registered, you should still check your registration because if there are problems – from the normal glitches that happen in databases of millions of people or from politically motivated purges – you can get it all sorted out well before the election.  And the smoother things flow on Election Day, the smaller the wrench the forces of tyranny will have to destroy the process. 

Ideas for Election Stories

Several months ago, I wondered what I could do to help defeat Trump.  Without going crazy, like donating money or talking to people.  What things were there that I felt comfortable enough doing?  I figured I could write some stories, as sort of a cautionary tale of what a Trump Dictatorship could look like.  That was a great idea, but it turns out I don’t have the time, energy, patience, skill, etc., to write all these stories.  But I don’t want these story ideas to just fade away after November.  Especially if there is someone out there who could make something of these ideas to further the cause of making Trump’s defeat even greater.  So here are some story ideas I won’t get around to writing before the election.  If you can make something of them, then go for it.

Story #1

This is a simple story of some news reporter giving a glowing speech about how grand and vibrant Trump is as he begins his third term and how the Chosen People cheer him on while the Anti-Trumpers are trying to destroy the world, or some such BS.  During all of this, in the background there is video of Trump, who is just this drooling blob in a wheelchair. 

Story #2

There has been a lot of weird shit during this election.  Like, didn’t Vance once say something about only people with kids, biological kids, that is, should vote because only they have a stake in the future, or some shit?  I know it was only like a month ago, but a thousand weirder things have happened since.  Anyway, this story is a news report about how a Republican Congress passed some bill, which Trump signed, that restricted voting to only people with biological children.  The bill was named after some Senator who, thanks to the genetic testing now required to vote, learns that his kids aren’t biologically his.

Story #3

This is more of a “fun” story, in that some Republican asshole tries to impeach President Harris on Day 1.  The fun comes when someone, possibly even President Harris, rips them and the entire Republican party to shreds over it.  I think the greatest problem with this one is that there is so much material to shred the Republican party on, that you run the risk of dragging on for too long.

Story #4

This is a story I actually started writing, with the title “A Rose by Any Other Name.” The story was about some Republican asshole in Congress proposing a bill that if passed would certainly be signed by Trump, that outlawed giving gender neutral names to babies.  Like, the parents couldn’t just name their kid Sam, it would either have to be Samuel or Samantha. 

This idea began when I wondered if parents would start doing that so that the kid could decide if they were a Samuel or a Samantha or just a Sam.  I don’t know if that is even a thing parents are doing, but I realized that even if it isn’t a thing that’s happening, there are those who would spend a great deal of time and effort to make sure it couldn’t happen.  I mean, it’s not like they could spend that time and effort to try to solve an actual problem that’s harming people. 

I started writing this, and one point I wanted to bring up is there are a couple countries that have some sort of naming board.  Some of these are for cultural reasons, while others are for more grammatical reasons.  I sort of fell into a rabbit hole on this, which just confused me so I set the story aside and now I don’t have time to hammer something out of it. 

This election is far from over

With all the buzz over Harris and the multiplying dumpster fires that is the Trump campaign, I was starting to feel relieved.  And then I remembered that’s how I felt in 2016.  We had one competent candidate with years of service who, while not being able to solve all of America’s problems, would at least take steps to put dents in the problems, and then there was this dumpster fire named Trump.  And while I still believe that come next January we’ll have President Harris, here are my election predictions and why I won’t really relax for another six months or so.

First off, I predict that Harris will easily win the popular vote getting the most votes of any candidate ever.  I also predict that she’ll win the Electoral College roughly the same as Biden did in 2020.  She might pick up two or three states, but she might also lose a state or two. 

Immediately after the election, there will probably be two hundred or so lawsuits filed about the election.  I predict that 50ish percent of them will be dismissed almost immediately because they are clearly batshit insane.  Another 40ish percent will be dismissed rather quickly because, while not obviously insane, there won’t be any evidence of whatever criminal act they claim happened.  The remaining lawsuits, while actually falling into the previous two categories, will unfortunately be seen by judges who will take them as an opportunity to audition for the next Supreme Court seat Republicans get to fill.  And while no actual wrongdoing will ever be proven from all these lawsuits, their true purpose will just be so countless assholes can talk about the “concerning questions” these lawsuits bring to the “faith” in the outcome of the 2024 Election.

When Congress certifies the election, I doubt there will be another attack on the Capital, if for no other reason that this time we’ll have a President who won’t just sit there and watch it happen for hours without doing anything.  I’m sure there will be protests, but they will be kept clear of the Capital.

And while I’m 99% certain that Harris will be sworn in as President next January, and all the MAGA trickery will amount to … nothing, I can’t shake the feeling that the truly diabolical members of the right have some secret plan to throw a wrench into Harris’s Presidency.  But I bet such a plan would come out before or just after she’s sworn in.  Which is why I won’t fully be relaxed about this election until sometime next spring.

Random Story – Payphone stories

These are just odd little stories from my life.

Back in ’92 or ’93, I went on a school trip to Toronto.  It was one of these where we left at midnight, did something in Toronto, and were home again at like 4 AM the next day.  What we did on that trip, I don’t remember.  But at one point, a group of us were someplace and we figured it was a good time to use the restroom.  I remember we went down a set of stairs, and ended up in this lounge area with the restrooms on the ends.

A friend of mine and I had finished, and we were waiting out in this lounge for another one of our friends.  In this lounge, there were four or five payphones, and I was standing next to them.  I don’t know why, but I stuck my finger in the change return of the nearest one.  My friend started to say something about if I was that desperate for money or something, when I pulled out a quarter.  He then got angry alternating between claiming I was trying to prank him and what was the luck that I’d check some random payphone in another country and find a quarter.  Well, it was a Canadian quarter from a Canadian phone.  If it had been a US quarter, that would have been another level.

The other payphone story I have, happened like ten years later.  When I lived in towns, I enjoyed taking walks late at night to let my mind wander and plot stories.  Which is something I can only really do in a place with sidewalks and streetlights, and where I live now has neither.  But I get to see a lot more stars.  Anyway, one of my walking routes took me by the courthouse in this town, and outside it there were two or three payphones.  One night, I was walking by them and just randomly checked for coins, but didn’t find any.  I kept going, until I heard a woman call out to me.  She walked over and tried to give my like $10.  I was confused, until I realized she thought I was homeless.  She figured only homeless people would check for coins.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a payphone.  But if I ever see one again, I’ll probably check for change, just for memories.  Plus, a quarter doesn’t buy as much as used to, but it’s still money.