March 2020 – Sam Stark

I’m Trash Because I Love Hunky, Man-Chest Book Covers

I published a book.

I mean, yes, it’s a book but it’s more a novella. It’s a fun little story I wrote for shits and giggles about two dirty-mouthed pirates that fall in love with each other over food. A reader of mine was kind enough to offer their editing services and the niece of one of my writing group pals is a artist/designer. Long story short: I received free editing and free cover art for the book and I am beyond grateful. I don’t know what I would have done without them. (Actually I do: I would have had a stock image cover and a bunch of typos. The end.)

It’s doing fairly well. I didn’t expect much from it, but it’s been steadily making money and the little line graph thing in the sales section of Kindle Publishing is headed in an upward slant, not a downward, so I guess that’s not bad for my first try.

All that is making me excited for the book I’m writing now. It’s a mashup of romance, super heroes, and a little body horror because I’m weird.

But hey, back to the first book. I had a time trying to figure out what I wanted on the cover. I searched the top 100 Gay Romance novels on Amazon, but that was kind of boring, so I searched “gay romance covers” on Google and that got some pretty amazing results. This one is my favorite:

It’s just fantastic. I’m going to read the shit out of this book when it arrives (yes I bought it).

There’s also this one.

Please go to the Goodreads page and check out the synopsis. If you’re not dying to read this book after that, friendship with me is off the table.

Besides the book–sorry, novella–publishing stuff, things have been kind of weird. If you haven’t heard, there’s this virus going around. It’s in the news and stuff, you probably heard about it, I don’t know. I live about 15 minutes north of Seattle, so I’m a stone’s throw from one of the two American hot spots. I haven’t actually seen any of the stuff they’ve been reporting on the news, like hospitals overcrowding or riots in grocery stores, but I can tell you that traffic is really, really good. In Seattle. In the middle of the day. It’s insane.

Oh, update on my last post: My daughter is doing well, back to using her keyboard so she’s playing lots of video games during this pandemic. The skin is red and strange-looking but healing, which is the most important thing. Jokes about alien skin or attacks from acid dragons are in the near future, I’m sure.

I hope everyone is safe and healthy and getting all the things they need and are not hoarding toilet paper or sanitizer like assholes because that’s selfish and stupid. Just saying.

Pet your pets and take care of yourselves! Have a good one!

“I Became Insane, With Long Intervals of Horrible Sanity.”

life

My dear friends, it has been a rough couple of weeks.

Some of you may know I have a twelve (almost thirteen) year-old daughter. She is wonderful and hilarious and loves horror movies and is basically everything one could want in a daughter.

On February 17th, we had a small kitchen fire that blackened our walls/ceiling, and melted a lot of plastic stuff. It started when a bit of oil splashed out of a pan, caught on the element, and built from there. My daughter was burned pretty badly trying to put it out. She had oil burns from fingertips to elbows on both arms, and second degree patches on her right thumb, wrist, and ring finger. I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced second degree burns, so let me tell you: they are terrible. They are very painful, and take forever to heal. My daughter has been a trooper the past few weeks through pain, open blisters, excruciating anxiety attacks, and a bunch of skin shedding. I’m not exaggerating when I say that her right arm looks like the fiji mermaid from The X-Files.

It’s been a long, slow, agonizing few weeks.

We are very thankful that her injuries are only second degree. They could have been a lot worse. She doesn’t need any kind of surgery, or skin graphs or anything like that, and none of the bad burns are deep enough to worry about movement or motor function. So let me say again, we are very lucky, all things considered, and we are very thankful.

That doesn’t make it any fucking easier to deal with though.

Understandably, this whole event has left my daughter with a little PTSD. It took a little while to manifest but it’s there, and it’s hard to communicate with her sometimes because I have no frame of reference. I’m just doing the best I can by cleaning and dressing the wounds, staying up with her when she needs it, comforting her when she breaks down–just being there.

There’s a lot of anxiety and underlying tension in the house right now. The baby (okay she’s not really a “baby” she’s a toddler) can feel it too so she’s turned into a tantrum monster. No seriously she screams at everything including routine diaper changes.

So, long story short: I am tired. I don’t like to complain about all this because I wasn’t the one that was injured, I’m not the one that’s in pain, but I really am ready to just crawl in a hole and sleep forever.

Hopefully you all are doing better than me and mine. I’m going to go home today and finish the second season of Altered Carbon (Omg Anthony Mackie is fucking great, but you know who’s better? Chris Conner. Seriously, just watch season 2 for Poe).