Dispatches from the Void

First blog post of 2019, and it’s in the month of April. Because of course. Apologies for not keeping the site as up to date as I’d like, but writers gonna write, you know what I’m saying? I feel bad that my own personal journal hasn’t been seeing that much love from me recently as well.

Over the holidays I took a break from The Patch and decided to write a satirical piece on the current political climate. It came out of a place of frustration, and evolved from me venting to a finely crafted faux recipe blog on how to prepare and eat the rich. I hope Jonathan Swift would have gotten a chuckle from reading it.

Currently I’m submitting it to places like TheHardTimes.net and The New Yorker, and plan on submitting it to a few other places as well (This American Life, Crooked Media). There’s not that big a market for satirical publications nowadays, so if you know of one that has open submissions please reach out. I’d love to send it to Charlie Hebdo, but it doesn’t look like they’re taking submissions. Plus I don’t read French, so it was difficult to navigate their site.

I even thought of starting my own quarterly satirical zine for a split-second, but ultimately decided against it when I realized I have no free time whatsoever to start a new project. I barely have enough time to write for myself as it is. I’ll file it away until I become a successful writer with a more open schedule (not holding my breath).

Now that I’ve gotten the satire bug out of my system, I’m back to writing The Patch in a clearer headspace. I could honestly write short stories all day, but I feel the urge to write full-length novels as well. They’re just more time-consuming, unfortunately. But I have a better idea of where I want the characters and story to head towards now, so it’s all about just getting them there and not rushing it.

Valentine’s Day weekend back in February, Amanda and I stayed at the historical Hotel del Coronado in the original main part of the hotel. Because it’s a California Historical Landmark, they can’t do any improvements on it, so the rooms in the main hotel are all original, just with updated utilities.

While we were guests at the hotel, I snuck a quick pic in front of the supposedly haunted room that Kate Morgan stayed in when she was a guest back in 1892. No chills were felt going up my spine, unfortunately. I plan on writing a ghost story featuring her after I'm eventually done writing The Patch. Lot's of research in my future! It helps I know the property intimately, having worked there for a few years after high school.

That’s all for this update. As usual, if you bought a copy of Morsels of Delight on Amazon, I’d love for you to leave a review if you have a chance. Or you can purchase an autographed copy here. I promise the next update won’t be in several months.