Quick Update [4/8/2024]

Hey peeps!

Fun news: The short story (and rights to the series) for Six Words has been sold to Aethon. Rhett, the owner, liked it, and thought it could work as a cool story once we hashed out an outline. It's not going to be released until 2025, but just in case you were all curious, there it is. Still considering just forcing the issue and writing a female protag, since my gut instinct was to tell it from her POV. BUT, I don't have to worry about that until later.

Currently: I just got back from the airport to pick up John.

The good news: His father is okay and will make a full recovery! At first, it seemed like he wouldn't. His kidneys were failing, his lungs were infected, and he had pneumonia. He also had sepsis, and anemia, and needed several blood transfusions.

HOWEVER, despite that grocery list of ailments, he pulled through, and is going home Wednesday.

Here is the tribute John wrote for his father, because I thought it was beautiful:

Just a post about my father.

My father, whose name I bear, is an exemplar of what every boy should aspire to become.

He was born poor--one of eight children in a family with an electrician father, who died when my dad was still a child. Afterward, he was desperately poor, like for a bit his bed was the top of the shelves in a mobile home type poor.

But he didn't let this defeat him. He worked his ass off, starting in a meat packing plant when he was fourteen to help provide for his family and improve his own life. He still bears the scars to this day from the heavy meat-freezer doors crushing his fingers more than once.

But he didn't let that defeat him. He joined the military as an enlisted man, and worked his ass off for 2 years. At that point, someone recognized his talent and drive, and recommended him to officer school.

He served his country in Vietnam as a lieutenant, through two tours. He was lucky, and his was an easier service. But he put himself in harms way to defend what he loved, even if he got lucky, which is what matters. And he didn't escape entirely unscathed. He lost friends and classmates and suffered the occasional derision of his countrymen, although more gave him their praise.

But he didn't let that be his end. He met my mother, and they got married, and then he went to law school. My mother was several social strata above where he had started, had a masters degree, was beautiful, and put him through law school--but all that was possible because he worked every day to make himself worthy of someone like her.

And when he was done in law school, he worked an internship so hard he was offered an associate position, and worked that so hard that they made him a partner. Then he spent the next fifteen years working 80 hours a week to provide a life vastly better than the one he had to his own children--including me. He didn;t work for himself. He sent my mother and his three children on many vacations he didn't go on, because he had to work. He bought us all the cool toys and bought himself almost nothing. He did everything to make sure we were provided for and never suffered as he had.

And he succeeded. I knew almost nothing of pain, or suffering, or loss for the vast majority of my childhood. I knew happiness, toys, and attention. A giant room, tutors, and trips. Of Dungeons and Dragons and Videogames and trips to artsy-fartsy cities. I was a spoiled child, and my childhood was almost entirely joyful.

My father was also so honorable that I once, as a ten year old, caught someone stealing my skateboard and offered to trade them some toys for it. I was shocked and dismayed, like just now learned for the first time ever that people didn't always do what they said dismayed, when I came back and those people were gone. Because my father never, ever failed to carry through on a promise, not once that I can remember. The idea was foreign to me.

He worked himself so hard that when he was sixty-five, he was hospitalized for nearly bleeding to death internally because the stress of always being the one to shoulder the burdens had caused multiple ulcers to open up and in his stomach and he was eating away his own blood. He spent over a week in the hospital recovering.

He was good to those he worked with. His staff loved him so much that over a week into his hospital stay, when I visited him, I found two of the secretaries bringing him food and newspapers, and on the way out I caught one of his partners sneaking a girly magazine to him.

My father was not perfect. But on the rare occasion he did make a mistake, he had the honor, and the courage, to admit it.

I am not the man my father was. But I'm a hell of a lot closer for having seen him model what a man should be, non stop, for all of my life.

And he did it with no model at all.