This morning I wrote the proverbial “The End” to a novel. The novel is provisionally titled, Not A Man to Back Down, and it is the second book in my Speaker for the Dead series.

My notes say I started it on March 19th, so this was a long slog. To be fair, I stopped work on it to tend to a few short pieces, and even a rewrite of the first chapter of Speaker for the Dead, which is the start of the series. I was sending out packages to agents on SFTD as I started book 2, so there was a lot of cross pollination. Plus I wrote a lot of supporting copy at that time that needed to be done to find an agent, like query letters, synopsis, etc. It’s all writing. Some of it is just not very sexy writing.

Not a Man, (or NAMTBD) is far from being finished. There is still much work to be done. What I did was finish the first pass. My alpha. Next will be a read of the alpha on my kindle, which will probably happen some time in December, so it’s a little less fresh. Already I forgot how much of the novel starts, which is good. The less I know in advance, the more I can find wrong with it. The alpha read will largely be for continuation and to get a feel for what I am missing. Right now I have a sense that there are parts in the front that will need to be rewritten to align better with the back side, but I don’t know for sure. Have to read the thing in one go, like I do every other book, to see how it’s working.

I do this with everything I write, it’s just with a novel it’s much harder. I can keep around 25k words in my head in terms of plotting and such, but even that is tricky. This is why I wrote notes and roughly outline the major plot points on large stories so I write to those points and not necessarily what I remember.

As I read through it, I’ll make edits on my phone, and based on those I will cut and paste the novel into something that is more cohesive. Sometimes this means moving chapters around or writing entirely new ones. Sometimes this means just rewriting a few key sentences to get everything aligned. This novel also has something new, a few very short stories told from the POV of someone who bumps into Lissa Carter Jones, the proverbial Speaker for the Dead. I thought it would be a fun way to show what she is up to, but not in her voice, or the voices of the main characters. They will be dropped in the middle of the novel as a way to break things up and give a better sense of how overwhelmed Lissa is in helping the dead.

Eventually all of this work this will result in a Beta version. It’s at that point, when I am happy the book stands well on its own, that I will send it out to my beta readers.

Drop a line if you want to be in on that hot Beta fun.

In other news, I signed my first professional literary contract this week. Super exciting. My little story C’mon Boys is all gown up and it about to move out to Issue 7 at Baubles From Bones. Snif, sniff. I’ll be posting as soon as I have a link. It should be out early December.

This morning I got up after sleeping in until 9:00, and started on the dishes. The kitchen is always a mess after Halloween. For some reason cleaning the kitchen is one of those chores that I find relaxing. I can do it without much thinking, and the things I do have to actually think about are of such low consequence, that the decisions feel safe.

We take Halloween seriously at Chez Tolladay. Yesterday I put in over 14k steps setting up all the things we hadn’t gotten to yet in our front yard. In many ways it was our best Halloween yet, in terms of how the house looked. We had very few trick-or-treaters, but that’s a on-going trend. The neighborhood has been slowing changing over the years. There are less middle class families with kids, and more rich older people, or (because we live in an orthodox neighbor) more orthodox jews who do not participate in secular holidays. Still we had fun and the house looked cool. We added a new bubble fogger, and a new witch to the ensemble, which was nice. Mostly we made ourselves happy, which frankly is the goal.

Halloween for us is very much like a theater production. The fun is not in doing the same thing over and over, but in the rush to try to make things new and fresh with that same blank canvas. The fun is not in pleasing the audience, but in building something that meets our ever expanding and harshly critical standards. There was still a lot we didn’t get to, but there’s always next year.

Every year our son had gotten more and more into pumpkin carving. This year we bought out new tools as he experimented with shaving off parts of the outer skin. This lead to a healthy discussion afterwards about carving so the light can come through in some places better than others. In essence, using the thickness of the pumpkin rind as an element to one’s design. We realized more experimentation was in order, then he pointed to the three un-carved pumpkins we have in the yard that I use as props for a singing pumpkins projection. Looks like we’ll be experimenting with them before the end of the week. Looking forward to that.

October was also the first time I went through edits for a story. Gotta say, I found it pretty exciting. Almost everything to do with my story “C’mon Boys” is going to be exiting to me because it’s my first professional sale. Everything is new and fun when seen through that narrow lens. But I’ve also been enjoying the process because the editor I am working with, Joel Troutman, is so very kind. By way of comparison, the notes I get for edits to the art that I work on in my day job are so much more blunt that it is almost comical. It’s like talking to a therapist, and then immediacy afterwards talking to that neighbor from Brooklyn who is one of those types that needs to project their “New Yorker” attitude at everyone.

The story should be out mid December. I will be posting links when I have them.

As to writing, this month was pretty productive. Except for the first week that I missed from illness, I really cranked on the second novel in the Speaker for the Dead series. Yesterday I outlined the last 3 chapters that need writing. Roughly 10k words to go, or about two weeks if I’m being productive. Hopefully, by Mid November I will finally set that beast aside, and turn to some other things.

I also cranked out a very short story (slightly over 1000 words) about visitors from the future coming to Los Angeles. Not sure what I’m going to do with it yet. It will need to go through a month of sitting, and another pass of edits, before being sent to my favorite beta reader (hello Val). After that, we’ll see. Hopefully it will find a good home.

All that to say it’s been a big month for me, writing wise. I have other news, one of my stories is in contention at another small magazine, but I don’t want to say more until I know for sure they will publish it. It looks as if they have more stories than they have space, so they need to do a second round of cuts. Obviously, I hope they pick mine, but they have decisions to make that I am not aware of, and I trust they know what the hell they are doing. Yo, small businesses are hard to manage. I know from experience having started 4 or 5. Regards if they pick me or not, I wish them well.

This week came just after Mabon, which is the pagan holiday at the equinox that marks the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn. When I was younger I used to loathe the fall as it brought with it the beginning of school, and the end of summer’s innocence. Now that I am much older, and find the heat of summer to be tiresome, Fall comes as a blessed relief. A time (at least here in LA) when one can open their windows again for large parts of the day. Indeed, this morning when I woke it was 60 degrees outside, the house a cool 74. The house has not seen that temperature but once or twice in three months. This, then, is a great relief.

Plus, Halloween is just around the corner, a holiday I did not learn to appreciate until I became a parent, but I digress….

As it happens, something else of import came to me this week. Joel Troutman, the Editor of Baubles from Bones informed me this past Tuesday he would like to publish my story C’mon Boys. This is a first for me. My first professional sale in fiction. After 14 years of attempting to write sellable fiction––part time, and keeping this weird addiction of mine on a shoe-string budget––it has finally paid off. 

This welcome news came in the middle of an otherwise difficult week. I’d been sick since Monday with a head cold that left me achy and dull-headed. I threw myself into work as a respite. It’s funny how when you are tightly focused upon a difficult task, you take little notice of yourself. I took advantage of this trait all week to both make money and to not dwell too much upon my miserable personal experience. Win/Win.

Many of you might know this, but I get up early to write. For years this has been my habit. Every weekday I get up at 7:00, regardless of when I went to bed, and for the first 2.5 hours of the day I work on my craft. I also feed the cats, put away any dishes from the night before, and do other sundry chores, but most of that time I spend tightly focused on the work. This week, because I was ill, I slept in until 9:30 or 10. It was the first time in many years (perhaps 10 years or more) that I went a full week without writing anything. 

This then, is the irony. The news of my first sale came at my least productive point in many years. 

I have no news so far on the sale except that Joel wishes to purchase my story. Once I know the actual date it will be published you can be sure I will post it here. Obviously there will be links to how to purchase it from Baubles from Bones, when that information is given to me. I’m very proud of this accomplishment, obviously, but also very thankful. In a week full of dull and miserable thoughts, when just getting through was about all I could focus on, this news was a blessing.

It is easy to forget, but I wish to point out that all of my hard work would mean nothing if it wasn’t for other creatives out there, like Joel Troutman and the other fine people at Baubles from Bones who are working hard on their own worlds, trying to make magic happen. Success is never singular, no matter how much we might like to think differently. All of it comes from the hands of others, exactly like the food you eat, the wine you drink, and the smiles you give away. 

Because I wasn’t writing this week, I had a lot of time to my thoughts. I came up with at least one story idea based upon Lissa Carter Jones, the protagonist of my novel Speaker for the Dead. It will likely be a short story separate from the novels. I have one such short set aside already, with the idea that if SftD ever gets published I can use it for readings, or some other way to help market the book.

This past summer I wrote something like 2/3rds of Lissa’s next novel, with the rest mostly outlined and ready to fill in. I was hoping to finish the first draft by Halloween, but after this week that seems unlikely. There are still some 15-20k words or more to go. Even on good days I rarely put out more than 1000 words, and some of the final chapters are going to go more slowly as I try to catch every stray point and set it down. 

Also this week I came up with something to fit into the next “near future” SF story I write. I keep a lot of ideas like this stuffed into a series of text files, which I occasionally mine for ideas. It’s not a story itself, just a little bit of world building that seems both humorous and on point. One of those ideas that when you hear your first thought should be, I wish I’d bought stock in that when it first came out. 

But also…. my thoughts this week––especially after watching our current administration become increasingly lawless in its actions, AND seeing how little effect this seems to have upon the population in general––I started to wonder if the stories that we tell each other have suited us well for our current crisis.

I had this thought especially after reading the second story in that wonderful old read from 1989 Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Like the first story, The Soldier’s Tale is full of intense extremes. Fedmahn Kassad experiences battles in many places, some of which are real, some of which are computer generated. The scope is large, this is Space Opera here and Simmons is happy to give the reader every bit of that depth. The writing is wonderfully crafted, and very muscular. Simmons rightly earned his Hugo award for this work. When viewed against other SF novels you can see how it came about, a more literate way to attempt a SF novel, but one with a deep knowledge of the past SF masterworks. It strikes me as both being unique, and yet also clearly canonical (in as much as any work can be considered canon). It is big, smart, fast-paced, and extreme in scope. The hero of every adventure not only faces great odds, but insurmountable, totally impossible, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me, odds––and yet they still succeed. This is a nice trick to pull off, leaving the reader smarter for having gone down the path with the protagonist. In every way it’s a very satisfying read.

Except, except, at the end of the day it leaves the protagonist alone, and isolated. They exist on a pinnacle of fantastical achievement, but it is a pinnacle that cannot be shared. There are no others in their world. There is only them. It is only their agency that matters, not of the others. Very much a Hero/NPC mindset, in which every “other” the protagonist faces only exists to further his or her story, and have no real story of their own. 

Mind you, this is pretty much the basis for story, at least story from the western (or more specifically, American) lens. My problem is I think there is a flaw to this way of framing the world. Not only in the extremes in which we place our characters (in order to drum up sufficient excitement or interest) but also the way we frame their place in society. 

Heroes are also real people. They exist in the real world. At least the heroes that read these stories do. Remember stories do not exist on their own. They exist in the minds of an audience. A story on its own is not a story, it is nothing. Stories do not exist without readers, without listeners, without an audience. So when we as the audience experience a story of a protagonist facing a living hell, completely alone, are we not taken to that place ourselves? Of course we are. We live their experience. This is why we enjoy being a part of the audience. We get to experience their struggle, without facing any of the risks. And certainly the larger the struggle the greater the payoff. That is the underpinning of much of western story, at least the popular ones. Big powerful, emotive experiences that are also safe. 

But are they helpful?

I ask this because right now our country is going through a clearly transformative time. Much of what we know and believe–in terms of how and why a government should act–is being questioned, and at times upended. We are living in a time that is going to be talked about for years afterwards. It is a time of great change, a change that is transformative as well as extremely damaging. Sadly we have no idea how it’s going to end. We don’t even really know the theme yet for this time. That will come to later historians. All we can say for sure is that living in the middle of a time of great movement is fucking terrifying and bewildering. And the thing I keep seeing is that we are drastically unprepared for it. I mean most of us knew that Hitler was bad, and yet a healthy portion of the population seems to have happily embraced our very American version of that leader. This is not a good thing, by any measure––postwar Germany was a literal hellscape, talk to someone who lived it––and yet I cannot help but worry that we are now heading down that path. 

And the thing that really sat in my craw this week, while I was pushing pixels like a diseased madman, or laying in bed at 4 am, unable to sleep, yet too tired to get up, was how massively we seem unprepared for the times we are in. All these stories about heroes, and today with Marvel movies the heroes are truly muscular, and yet we as individual citizens seem too weak to act. 

What I began to wonder in my fevered state was if we told better stories would we have better outcomes? I suspect we need less individual heroes, and more stories of distributed heroism, where heroes are people who work with others in concert towards a greater goal. Stories of community, not isolation. Stories of communal strength, not individual strength. Stories of compassion and care, versus single-minded conquest. 

The truth is we cannot outsmart our villains, not in the real world, and no matter what the actual odds, but perhaps if we work together we can overcome them. For good citizens to be ready for that experience we need to have been bathed in stories that teach us how to be part of a working team, not how to be a stronger individual. 

So where are these stories? Why aren’t they selling? Who is writing them? 

That’s what I want to know. That’s what I want to write. 

This week the Trump administration passed a very large and possibly the only legislation they will accomplish this year. There are a lot of articles about what it means and what it will do to and for America, but I’m going to set those aside. If you’re reading this long after July 4th 2025, Google will no doubt lead you to everything you need to know.

I wanted to save this space to talk about two things: Predictions about what will happen in the future because of this bill, and specifics about how it will affect our finances.

The Future

There has been a lot and hand wringing from the left over this bill. Some of it for what I think is good reason, and some of it for more incendiary reasons. I’m going to try and steer away from the more hyperbolic ideas, but I don’t know if this will be helpful or not. Predicting the future is hard, yo.

On the whole I don’t think the Big Beautiful Bill will change much. I suspect it will effect us less than most of my friend on the left might think. In part because the cuts to SNAP will not start until October 2027, and many of the changes to medicare (like work requirements) will not start until December 2026. That is to say the bill that the American people will have to pay for it will not come due for a few years yet. I don’t know that this will help Democrats in the mid-term elections as the voters they are appealing to may not have noticed the looming bill by November 2026.

And the more positive side, the tax cuts sold in this bill are not really tax cuts. They are merely keeping the existing ones passed by Trump in 2017, which would otherwise have expired next year. They are not current taxes that will be saved, they are future taxes that were averted. So except for small areas like in Social security (see below) there is not going to be a huge influx of cash to regular voters.

Financially, It would be reasonable to suggest that the BBB will move past and not leave much of a wake. Oh politicians are gonna talk about it endlessly. If nothing else the Republicans have put their names to a piece of legislation that gives the largest cut in public assistance in American history, while also running up the deficit. For those that pay attention to such things, it will leave a mark. But I don’t know that the average American is going to notice or care.

The thing I think will have the largest impact is going to be where much of the money in the BBB is directed. Trump wants to deport as many undocumented workers as he can, and with this bill ICE is suddenly going to find itself with a massive inflow of cash. The budgets for everything from prisons to detainee transportation went up 10 times or more. If you couple this with the tactics that ICE has been using the past 5 months, it starts to look like a recipe for disaster. Even prior to this bill, we’ve been seeing that many undocumented workers are either self-deporting, or lying low. This directly affects agricultural production, meat processing, and the construction industry, just to name a few areas. What it will mean for the future is hard to guess, but nothing good. I predict we will see an increase in the price of food, and home repair. Because every undocumented worker is already plugged into our economy, having them leave or working less is also going to depress the economy for everyone. I predict we will see either slow or sluggish growth for the next 2-3 years. If Trump carries through with his planned deportation of 3000 immigrants a day (and he will have the manpower from this bill) we will fall into a recession.

That’s just the financial effects. What that will do for us as a country is a whole other thing. There’s another implication to ICE and its huge budget that is lost on many. The way Trump has been using ICE it is as much his own private police force as it is a national one. It is very possible that citizens will start to get taken off the streets for reasons other than being undocumented. I would not be surprised if the number of political prisoners we’re seeing (which are right now mostly pro-Palestinian protesters) were to substantially increase. Regular citizens could be rounded up by unmarked agents and sent out of state or out of the country with no trial or notification. I know this sounds totally crazy pants, but I predict this is exactly what is going to happen. We’re going to slowly become more and more a police state with any opposition becoming political prisoners, while Congress looks on and does nothing, with little in the way of legal protections.

That is the thing I fear the most, and yet seems the most likely. Hopefully, I will be wrong, but I very much doubt it. Time will tell.

One last point. Our standing in the world is not so great right now. As I type this millions of people around the world will likely die thanks to Trump stopping the USAID program. How this administration treats other countries is also noticed. Our treatment of Ukraine is especially troublesome. Other countries are going to look at Trump’s actions and realize that if this is how American treats its allies, then maybe they need to not engage with us. This had implications well above the business level, and none of them are good. We’ll have to see how it all plays out.

Finances

On Thursday, July 3, the Social Security Administration sent us an email. I assume it was sent to everyone who is registered with SS or about to retire. This is highly unusual. I don’t know that the agency has ever used its resources and private information in such a way before. It is blatant advertising, and also misleading.

This is what it looked like. This link takes you to a similar page on the SSA site.

I started digging around and found some sources that were a lot more accurate.

GovFacts.org This is long, but in-depth, also covered similar bills.
AARP This is shorter and a little broader in scope.

The TL/DR is the new bill doesn’t cut taxes, it instead offers a larger “bonus” deduction of $6k per individual. This deduction is available to everyone who is 65 and over, and makes less than $200k/year ($175k/year for those filling single). It is also only going to last until 2029. After that it will be gone.

What this means is complicated, because our tax system is complicated. If you’re living on SS and make enough money to file taxes, then unless you are rich this will be an absolute benefit. If you don’t make enough money to file taxes, this will not help you at all. So it’s a very precise and targeted relief but only for the middle class retired or soon to be retied set, and only for a limited time. Which is not really what the email suggests.

Since I am 62, I will get only this benefit only in the last year it is offered. Because my wife is slightly older, Teri will get the benefit more than me. We file jointly, so technically we will both benefit from this at some point.

Is this good for us? Yes, without question. It might carve as much as $3k off of our tax bill, depending on a lot of factors. My income is not set because I am self-employed, and because my clients pay me in a variety of ways (some pay W-2 income and some pay 1099 income), so it makes if very hard to guess how much it will effect us.

What will affect us, without question, is the cuts to the advanced tax credits for the ACA, which is how we are insured. I haven’t looked at the numbers recently, but I would not be surprised if the monthly premiums on our already rock bottom insurance (bronze level) will double. We’re looking at something like an additional $400-$600/month. Yikes. Mind you, before the ACA on the open market we paid even more than that, so we’re not exactly surprised. Just sad.

The irony is, once we turn 65 we’ll be eligible for Medicaid, so we will no longer be on the ACA. So right at the time that our medical insurance will stop (not entirely, because you still have monthly premiums for medicaid) we’ll get an additional tax break. The net effect is we are going to loose money up until we each turn 65, and then we will loose less money. And that doesn’t count how the economy as a whole will affect us. Who knows what that will be.

As far as I know, these are the only two areas that will directly affect our finances. Time will tell. But in the main it looks like a net loss of something like $6k/year, dropping down to maybe $3k/year in four years.

Joy.

Last month I posted something long on the nature of story and how it seemed to be intrinsic to every human endeavor; foundational to our language processing as it were. So a few weeks back I started actually researching this. Turns out my assumptions were largely correct. My local library had several of the books I had run across in my searching, and as I type this they are all collected near my reading chair. Slowly I am making my way through them.

I am taking notes, scribbling furiously in their electronic margins. This is big. I have a feeling this is going to end up being a book. Let me tell you, it’s a lot.

Just one of the things I discovered was this: Humans are such a social species that we cannot measure ourselves except by using others as a kind of calibration or reflection. That is, we measure ourselves through the same lens that we use to measure others. Your understanding of how well you are doing (or not doing) is directly tied to how you perceive the others around you doing. Essentially we keep a group of people in our heads; friends, family, co-workers, etc, that we use as our core group. How our group collectively functions we take in as a measure of ourselves.

But our understanding doesn’t just stop there. All of these relationships are skewed through the lens of narration. If a friend or family member is facing cancer, they are not just sick, they are a hero battling like against an implacable foe. This is because our brains keep them in story format, complete with heroes and villains. Mind you, we’re not putting little capes on them in our minds, the process is usually not quite that obvious, but the basic structure of our thoughts mirror story structure.

There’s a lot in the books about why we do this. I am working my way through all that, but for me the most important part is the process. Not Why we do, but What we do. What is this narrative thing? How does it work? What does it mean, and How can we use it?

A tale of two stories.

I remember–back after almost a year of covid and vaccines were suddenly available–being gobsmacked at how so many Americans not only didn’t want a vaccine, but rallied against it. Why would someone think playing Russian Roulette (albeit on a gun with a lot of chambers) was such a great idea? Why was there all this needless division over something that struck me as obviously beneficial? The answer is, they were hearing another story, one that people in my immediate group couldn’t hear. And in their story, the vaccine (or someone who represented the vaccine, like Dr. Fauci) was the villain. In our story the vaccine was the hero.

What?

Imagine you and your best friend are both reading a book for a class. The books have the same tittle and the same author, but between the covers the stories are vastly different. Imagine how confusing it would be when you’re talking about your favorite part of the novel to your friend and they suddenly start asking, “Wait, in your book Frodo is the good guy?” And you nod your head, like of course. And then your friend asks, “And that Sauron guy isn’t trying to save the ring?” And you’re like “WTF?!?! Save the ring, from whom?” And they say, “From the hobbits who stole it, of course.” And right at that moment you really start to believe your best friend is stone cold crazy. How could they even get such an idea?

The thing is, it’s right there in their book. It’s just their book is different from yours, because their circle of friends is slightly different, so they see and measure the world slightly differently.

The irony is both you and your friend will feel terribly hurt and confused. Neither will understand why the other is acting so crazy. And worse, the more one of you tries to convince the other of their error, the more thy will believe in it. After all, in their book Sauron is the hero, it’s plain as day. Everyone can see it. Why can’t you? You are the crazy one. They are perfectly fine. Everyone in their circle (but you) agrees with them. Their story is the true one.

This is what I think was happening during covid. We had two sides fighting not over a vaccine, but over the roll in the story that the vaccine played. We had a hero camp and a villain camp, and the two sides could not be further apart, over something a year before they would have 100% agreed upon.

So how do you fix this? What do you do when your friend or your family members are reading from a slightly different book? I don’t know the answer yet. I’m still working on it, but I think it comes down to making up a third story that you both can believe in. And if I am right, it might be even easy to do.

We’ll see.

I didn’t post much last year. This is not me apologizing, it’s just a fact. I was busy writing, just not blogging, but since this blog is a perfect place to drop historical markers, here is something from last year.

In 2024 I wrote:

Two Novels. Mind the Slice Book 1 and Speaker For the Dead. *

Nine stories from scratch, including one that weighs in at slightly over 20k words

Three incomplete stories from years past got dusted off, and finished.

In total, that’s well over 200k words, and probably closer to 250k. All writing a few hours every weekday morning.

Also in 2024 I earned 22 rejections for my short stories. I’m not trying to suggest this number is meaningful, except that is it evidence I am still swinging.

And that’s it. It was by far my most productive year. I expect to get even more productive as I go. We’ll see.

* Technically, Mind the Slice Book 1 is a revision of a much longer novel that was broken into three novels, and Speaker For the Dead is a novel I started and stepped away from in 2014. In both cases, much of the writing was new material, with occasional older chapters folded back in. For instance, the original Speaker had a mid 20s male as the protagonist, and he was boring as fuck. I’m sure that was why the novel originally stalled. Last year I was looking over the parts, and the chapters I had written for a side character (Lissa, a 47 year old black woman) just leapt off the page. I did a quick outline with her as the protagonist, dumping most of the original boring material, and three months later the book was finished.

Made a few minor changes to make sure things are up and running correctly. It’s mostly stuff you won’t see, like links to ebooks, etc.