Category Archives: Nonfiction

Cats and cons, bathrooms and battle plans

A week ago, I drove to Greensboro for ConGregate 2026. Up until this year, the con’s been held in Winston-Salem, but they had issues with the hotel and had to relocate. This worked out well for me as Greensboro is only an hour away.

The worst thing about the hotel is that it’s on the airport, several miles from anywhere else to eat. Not for the first time, I relied on the breakfast buffet to feed me for the entire day. And the collapsible kettle TYG bought me took care of my tea needs. The best thing is that the author alley, where I set up my table above, runs right outside the meeting spaces so everyone has to pass us by.

Did that boost sales? Not massively. However attendance seemed smaller than ConGregate 2025 — I can’t swear to it — but I made roughly as much money. That’s cool. And all the panels and readings had audiences that outnnumbered the panelists. That doesn’t always happen.

The patterns in sales always fascinate me. No sales on Atoms for Peace or Sex for Dinner, Death for Breakfast (that’s usually a consistent seller), one or two of most of my other books, seven of Questionable Minds. Which as it’s the one I most want to sell right now, suited me fine. One seller bought purely because of the cover, which is cool (thanks Sam Collins!).

Finally home, where I cooked a Thank You meal for TYG for having to care for all the pets while I was gone. Happily we’ve introduced Plush Dudley to canned chicken and for the moment he’s willing to scarf down his drugs if they’re mashed up into it. Fingers crossed that lasts until after TYG does some traveling in a couple of weeks, leaving me alone.

As I’ve been saying lately, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Last week I took into account that we’d be having contractors trooping in and out to work on the master bathroom. This week we had that to deal with — finished today, at last! — plus we had to take Wisp in to have a couple of problem teeth removed.

This was a challenge. Catching and caging Wisp is always a challenge. Happily for once we got good news: when the dental vet took an X-ray look at the teeth, it doesn’t require removal. No surgery, check back in six months. We’re happy she doesn’t have to be cut on, particularly as removing bottom teeth can have bad effects on the jaw.

And on Wednesday, my physical therapist said my knee has improved enough I don’t have to book another appointment unless/until I need one. She did great, but I’m happy not to take the time. Especially as I screwed up the time and had to go, come home, go back, return.

Somewhat less happily, my glasses broke today — the right-hand screw holding the frame around that lens just snapped. I tried taping it up; didn’t work. Fortunately I have a backup pair and my eyesight hasn’t changed enough for them to be a problem. I will look for a repair place. Annoying but not catastrophiic.

Now, as to writing, my original battle plan had been to focus on Savage Adventures, like I did last week. It’s at the proofing stage and that adapts better than fiction to constant interruptions. Monday that went well. I rewrote some of the text, trimming quite a bit of it, and corrected some errors that had crept in. After Monday, though, things got nuts.

One thing I’ve started doing is taking little tasks and errands — submitting pet bills to the insurer, for instance — first thing in the morning. Gets them out of the way and I don’t have to worry about when to fit them in later in the day. However it’s very easy for them to expand and take up too much time. I’ll have to be careful going forward. This week, I was not.

Plus I had an unexpected experience with The Local Reporter. When I contact someone for an interview I don’t always get a prompt response, or any response (I suspect that’s partly because we’re not the paper of record for Chapel Hill/Carrboro the way the Destin Log was for Destin). I’m working on an article about the effect of the ongoing drought and this time everyone I contacted called me back. I spent much of Wednesday doing interviews.

Thursday I worked on proofing stories for Become the Sky, the sequel anthology to Ceaseless Way. As it’s a collaborative project we all have stories to proof. I have three: Maggie Maxwell’s “The Survivalist’s Guide to Faeryland,” Ada Milenkovic Brown’s “The Nixie of Alken Bog” and Kat Traylor’s “Surviving Dr. Bloodflask.” I got the first two finished Thursday.

So it’s actually a productive week, just not the stuff I planned to produce. Which isn’t the worst way for the battle plan to go off the rails.

Oh, and my editors at McFarland contacted me with some detailed editing questions about various passages in Watching Jekyll and Hyde. That’s pleasing — it shows they’re paying attention to the details. Not that I’d expect less, but it’s still good to see.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop I looked at Flash #209 as a harbinger of the Bronze Age. It had Cary Bates take over as Flash’s writer, a gig he’d hold all the way until the Crisis on Infinite Earths killed Barry off. It also showed that after a couple of years of avoiding super-villains, DC was bringing them back. I was delighted.

All rights to cover images remain with current holders. Southern Discomfort cover by Sam Collins, Ceaseless Way by GetCovers based on design by Arden Brooks, Flash cover by Dick Giordanoo.

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My battle plan survived, sort of

As I’ve talked about before, one of the military rules of thumb is that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. I knew this week would demolish any regular plan, so I adjusted accordingly.

(Photos are all from our yard, like this morning’s post. Here we have Mr. Squirrel acrobatically chowing down on the suet we put out for the birds)

This week, we began a renovation project. The master bathroom bathtub has enough problems we decided it was worth fixing them now rather than waiting until they become serious major problems. If you’ve ever heard that major renovations are a massive pain, it’s true. Knowing that I decided to work on Savage Adventures because it’s nonfiction and editing the manuscript doesn’t take creative thought the way resuming work on Let No Man Put Asunder would.

It was as bad as I’d figured and then some. As TYG normally works her IT gig in the master bedroom, she relocated into the spare bedroom and moved her bathroom stuff into mine. I’d almost forgotten how many things she has on her bathroom counter so mine is quite cluttered now.

A much bigger issue is that with people coming in and out, we worried the cats would freak, particularly Snowdrop, and bolt out away from the strangers. If they were spending the day sleeping upstairs we could simply lock them in. The past couple of weeks they’ve been hanging out in the living room so I had to keep constant watch they weren’t sitting too close to the door. Fortunately neither of them tried to get out, though they clearly weren’t happy.

That, coupled with dealing with the contractor if they had questions or requests (TYG did some of that, but with Zoom meetings to attend she can’t do all of it), plus the jarring noises from upstairs left me somewhat frazzled. Because I concentrated on Savage Adventures I was at least somewhat productive. I went through the book and made sure all the Doc Savage novels were attributed correctly; while Lester Dent wrote most of them, Street and Smith assigned other writers to some, and Dent occasionally used ghostwriters. I edited the first three chapters as well. The rest of the time I did some blogging, paid bills, etc. Nothing super-demanding. If not a spectacular workweek, I don’t feel I fell down on the job either.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about toxic masculinity, reposted some book reviews from this blog, and posted about Southern Discomfort coming out (same post as I put up here, more or less). And that’s about it.

The contractors will be back Monday-Wednesday next week. I’m slightly more ambitious about what I plan to do. Wish me luck living up to my plans.

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Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Personal, Time management and goals, Writing

So where did I misplace my mojo this week?

I’m honestly not sure, but whenever I sat down to work, my creative juices were not flowing.

Stuff which didn’t require creativity went fine. I finished the draft of Savage Adventures, which is not a small thing. One more draft should do it, a combined line edit with fact-checking (did I get the names of all the characters right, for instance). However I wanted to make progress on fiction as well and my mind just balked.

Short stories? No idea how to progress.

Rewrite of Let No Man Put Asunder? Ditto.

I did take the beginnings of two new untitled stories I worked on last week and share them with the writing group. The feedback satisfied me they’re worth working on and some of the suggestions were interesting (could they be part of the same novel? Probably not but if I could think of a way …). That was it, though.

I also didn’t do as well as usual with our dogs’ home PT care, or my own exercise regimen for that matter.

I did find that if I concentrate my various non-writing tasks — errands, bills, submissions to our pet insurance, Trupanion — in the first hour of work this gets them taken care of and lets me concentrate better the rest of the day. That helped with Savage Adventures at least.

Part of it may be that I’m still sleep-deprived — a couple of bad nights, no nights quite good enough to catch up. Plush Dudley being extremely restless is a big part of it. Sometimes I think he just likes to sleep on my side of the bed and he knows if he makes enough trouble, I’ll have to move and try to sleep in the spare bedroom. Wicked boy.

He’s so stinking cute, though.

Part of the problem may be that I haven’t had much break from our various pets the past month and a half, except when I’m out running errands. Over time it erodes my personal space and that does get draining.

I did get to attend my Genre Book Club, as I discussed over at Atomic Junk Shop. That was fun. And I had lunch with one of my writing friends, the first time I’ve managed that in a while.

Tune in next week for (hopefully) a better result! Cover by James Bama, all rights to image remain with current holder.

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Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Personal, Short Stories, Southern Discomfort, Story Problems, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals, Writing

Sleep, stiffness and a stupid mistake: my week in review

For several months now I’ve been enjoying a respite from my chronic insomnia. As I know from experience, sooner or later my body resets and the start of summer is often when it happens. Sure enough I began waking up stupid early this week. Not disastrous, as I can write in the middle of the night as well as in the daylight, then catch up with a nap. Or two. I’d prefer solid sleep but I can deal with working while the city sleeps.

The stiffness is harder to explain, hitting my shoulders/back of the neck and my hips but nothing in between. I suspect it’s a mix of lifting the portable air conditioners we used last week when the HVAC went down with sitting in some bad positions while working and not getting up to stretch enough. When the work is going well, that’s an easy mistake to make (“Just fifteen more minutes, I’ll have this draft done …”). However I’m back on my regular stretching routines after feeling two hot to do them last week so that should help over time. I can already feel a difference in my posture and sense of balance.

The stupid mistake? This morning when I was giving Trixie her post-walk treat I meant to give Plush Dudley a lower fat one; he’s older and his pancreatitis is much more reactive to fat than hers. Oops — I handed it to him without thinking. Hopefully after several weeks of low fat food it won’t have a significant effect. Then again, I may be up early shoving beshitted sheets in the washing machine. Send positive thoughts, please!

Most of my work involved writing about local hurricane preparedness for The Local Reporter. It’s a good article, though not up on the website yet. I also worked on an update about the Chapel Hill Library budget (ditto). That took up a couple of days. I also redrafted Honey on the Grave based on the feedback I got from the writing group. I started the next draft of Die and Let Live but it didn’t get far. I did some work on Savage Adventures and more work on prepping Southern Discomfort for release. I got a proof copy from Amazon’s print-on-demand service but haven’t had a chance to judge how the cover looks yet.

And that’s it. Not spectacular, but a vast improvement after the previous couple of sweltering weeks.

All rights to poster image remain with current holders.

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Well, this week could have gone better

Tuesday, the HVAC repair crew showed up with the part to fix our air conditioning. After nine days with no a/c we were excited, though half fearful something else would go wrong.

Something else did. Turns out the compressor broke because something called a TVX broke so they had to order a TVX replacement. That left us broken and miserable the rest of the day. I wound up missing writing group and a Con-Tinual panel.

Next day, TYG got a second portable air-conditioning unit which we set up in the spare bedroom. That helped a lot, even lowering the temperature downstairs. I checked with the vet who assured me the cats would not die at 85 degrees in the house, provided they had water and a cool place to stretch out (they had both). Then Thursday, the part came in, they fixed it up and the heat is now back to normal.

This did not do my writing any good, of course. I made progress on Savage Adventures (Doc Savage cover here by Bob Larkin), rewriting up through the start of 1943. Only about 15,000 words to go this draft. But everything else … no. Nor exercise. It would have been easier if we’d been able to open windows or doors, but the cats might have gotten out, so we gritted our teeth. I did work up in the bedroom with TYG and the pups for a couple of days — we have one of the portable units there — but it’s always distracting when we’re working at close quarters.

Oh, and I got my first turn-down of the year, for All Happily Families, from Bourbon Penn. Does not dismay me at all, I’m happy to be submitting shorts again after a long time without.

I really, really, really hope for a smooth June. Fingers crossed.

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Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Personal, Short Stories, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals, Writing

No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. And this is like fourth contact or something

As I’ve mentioned previously, when I set my goals for 2026, I factored in that I’d be working on proofing and indexing Watching Jekyll and Hyde. And taking some time off. And allowing a couple of weeks for whatever problems might crop up and derail me.

You may also recall that our dogs’ gross digestive upsets already used up the emergency time I’d set aside. Life, alas, continued throwing emergencies our way. Last Sunday, TYG pointed out the thermostat showed the house was a higher temperature than she’d set. I’d noticed this over the previous couple of days but thought she’d just set it higher than usual. Nope. So we called our HVAC people, they sent someone out … compressor is dead. Covered by warranty so it won’t cost us to replace it, other than the diagnostic visit. But it has to be ordered from the factory which meant we had to spend this week sans A/C. And wouldn’t you know, the temperatures got up into the 90s?

Fortunately TYG acquired a portable A/C unit a while back; it’s big and bulky but we can plug it anywhere. It made the bedroom upstairs livable. The rest of the house, not so much? Nobody passed out from heat exhaustion (including the pets) but day after day it got increasingly, cumulatively exhausting. It didn’t help that I couldn’t sleep. Partly the heat, partly that TYG was restless and I’m too light a sleeper not to wake if she gets up.

So heat, plus exhaustion, plus umpty-zillion extra chores that turned up. Researching window air conditioners (we decided not to get one) and pet hotels (not practical — the cats would freak). Spending what seemed like two hours helping TYG fix a problem with the app controlling our thermostat. Various other odds and ends that popped up out of nowhere. Trying to tie some of our pet insurance reimbursements. As my title says, my battle plan did not survive.

I did get more work done on Savage Adventures and a Local Reporter story about a proposed cut to the Chapel Hill Library budget (not online yet). At Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about the importance of good cover art even for reprint book.

And that’s pretty much it. Though several older Con-Tinual panels are now online on Facebook: on favorite nonfiction history books, C and D list comics characters and Swamp Thing.

Fortunately the weather turned cooler this morning. The house is cooling off though it’s a slow process. The cool weather should last until Tuesday when the HVAC is up and running again.

Still, every week of lost time is, well, lost. And I hate that.

Cover art by James Bama. All rights to image remain with current holders.

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Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Personal, Southern Discomfort, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals

Sing hosannas and release the doves!

This week came the day we dreaded — Wisp going to the vet! She gets warier every year, plus we can’t feed her after midnight. Which means Snowdrop can’t get any food either as they eat together.

Fortunately it was mostly smooth sailing. The cats sat by where their bowls go, but didn’t complain too much. TYG was able to grab Wisp and throw her in the big cage; after about half an hour of plaintive meowing, I took her in.

The good news: she’s in great shape. Some tartar on a back tooth, only .25 pounds heavier than last year (we’d thought she’d put on a lot more weight). And she forgave us fairly quickly.

It was a week with a lot of appointments like that, all of them turning out well. I had a dental appointment Wednesday (checkup and cleaning), then Plushie had his eye checkup later that afternoon (still in great shape). Good news, but a lot of time taken up. Plus I had to submit a bunch of invoices to our various insurers for online purchases.

The downside, of course, was that all those appointments ate up time. Plus, of course, time after each to recover and refocus my thoughts. On top of which I had a late night Tuesday and Wednesday which left me zonked on Thursday. Despite which, I got some good work done. The best thing is that I successfully formatted Southern Discomfort for Draft2Digital and Amazon. Draft2Digital is invaluable but their ebook formatting sometimes makes my Word formatting look wonky. That’s now fixed. And D2D will provide me with a PDF I can upload to Amazon.

I did some work on Savage Adventures. I really need to get to work on a cover artist ASAP. Not that I’m close to done, but once I am, I’d like to move much faster than I did with Southern Discomfort. Speaking of which, the cover is done for the digital version (Amazon needs some technical tweaks); I’ll announce a release date next week.

I read “Honey on the Grave” to the writing group. They really liked it, which was great; it’s only about my fourth draft and it usually takes many more before a story is any good. They also gave me some suggestions for polishing it, which I will look at later this month. The meeting was the reason I was up late Tuesday; we discovered Zoom was automatically recording our readings with AI and because they guy who officially hosted it is no longer with the group, we can’t do anything to turn it off. We set up a new Zoom link with myself and one of the other writers as co-hosts; however some people had bookmarked the old link rather than clicking on it from the group’s webpage so we had to go find them and tip them off. A learning experience.

Over at Atomic Junk Shop I reviewed some books about African-American films and reposted my old review about Brother From Another Planet.

On the downside, waking up late led to me missing much of my usual morning exercise and stretching sessions. Next week should be better, though — zero appointments.

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Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Short Stories, Southern Discomfort, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals, Writing

A Charleston fountain plus a week in review

I still haven’t uploaded all the Charleston vacation photos so today you get to see the Pineapple Fountain we visited in a waterfront park. When it was built, being able to import and serve pineapples was a mark of wealth and Charleston was both a hub of trade and a wealthy city.

The fountain, with my sister wading in it. Birds did that too.

After a frustrating April, this week went well, despite taking time off Monday to visit Costco. With god knows what about to happen to our economy due to the Toddler’s stupid Iran war, TYG and I figured picking up some bulk supplies now might be wise.

I wrote 6,000 words on the current draft of Let No Man Put Asunder, despite the fact I’m having to change a lot more of the book. As I realized last month, Mandy’s character arc isn’t strong enough. I’ve added a couple of scenes this section that will help with that; hopefully more will come to mind as I move forward. However I also realized I cut out some scenes where she realizes whatever magical transformation she’s undergone is compelling her to quit smoking, something she’s not happy about. It simply looks like halfway through the book she stopped lighting up. I’ll have to go back and fix that.

I rewrote the short story Honey on the Grave and it looks good. I’m reading for the writing group next week; we’ll see what they make of it. If it’s got problems I can’t see, they’ll spot them. I also reread Die and Let Live and started restructuring it so that it’s less of a talk and exposition fest. I haven’t actually written the changes — there’s places where I’ve no idea what to replace the exposition with — but diagnosing what needs to change is the first step. I also reread my short story Inherit the Howling Night (title very much a placeholder) and I want to work on that one next. It has substantial problems — no good ending, no idea of the lead character’s arc, protagonist is a writer and “struggling writer” is a character type that rarely works for me — however I’m starting to see fixes (character may become an actor instead).

I got some work done on The Savage Years and my cover is almost ready to go for Southern Discomfort. It’s just technical stuff like formatting to make it work on the Amazon paperback. I should have a release date soon and hopefully will have some copies in hand at ConGregate this summer. Details soon.

I also got my first article in at The Local Reporter in the new monthly format, a longish one on why Chapel Hill/Carrboro is looking at school closures.

From some time back, here are Con-Tinuals panel with me discussing humor comic books, another where I talk Swamp Thing and one about Britain in 1940.

May the rest of the month flow as smoothly. Don’t bet money on it though. I certainly don’t.

Cover by Bernie Wrightson, all rights to image remain with current owners.

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Filed under Nonfiction, Personal, Short Stories, Southern Discomfort, Story Problems, Time management and goals, Writing

Rhiannon Giddens took me down

TYG has been a huge fan of folk musician Rhiannon Giddens since catching Giddens when she was just starting out. We went to her local concert last year and Monday, she was performing in Durham again, so …

As you can tell we were waaaay close to the stage. We got to see Giddens up close, and she was clearly over the moon about performing. As with her last concert, she had a roster of talent performing too: Mavis Staples, Blind Boys of Alabama, Rissi Palmer, Toshi Reagon. I don’t know any of those names (music is not one of my fields of expertise) but damn, they can sing.

Trouble was, rather than wrapping up around 9:30, the concert ran until well after 10. Then we had to get an Uber home. Then we had to dose the dogs. We crawled into bed around 12:30 AM which is late for us (particularly me). That left me off my game Tuesday (which I’d anticipated) but the rest of the week as well. I think maybe I had some sort of mild bug or my pollen allergy kicked in — I shouldn’t have felt as wiped as I did. Though the concert was still worth it.

I got in an article for The Local Reporter, though in our new format, it won’t be out for a week or so. Over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about Marvel’s execrable War Is Hell series and the appeal of Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk (a repost from this blog). I got some work done on Savage Adventures because proofing nonfiction doesn’t require the kind of creative thought that writing fiction does. And following the two shorts I sent off last week, I submitted a third short story, “Champions of Darkness,” this week. It’s a no-pay market but there aren’t that many places to submit a 6,000 word reprint so I’m cool with it.

At this point, 2026 is one third over (you may have noticed). It’s tricky to assess my performance so far, given that a lot of it is long-term stuff (e.g., two drafts of Let No Man Put Asunder). I’m doing well on short stories, not just submitting but writing them: “Oh the Places You’ll Go” is finally done, for instance, though I haven’t found a market yet. “Honey on the Grave” and “Die and Let Live” are both looking closer to finished than they have before.

However I’m way behind on writing Impossible Takes a Little Longer or Let No Man Put Asunder. I think I can still get in two drafts of each but it’s looking tougher. Part of that’s because I used up the vacation time and “time off for disaster” that I’d budgeted in this year. Which, of course, doesn’t guarantee I won’t have to take more time off for more disasters … fingers crossed.

Financially, things are still dismal. Dog drug expenses are up, other expenses have been up and with Local Reporter dropping back to monthly coverage, income has been down. I’ve been looking around for more freelance work, no luck so far (while we are a two income family, I do take some satisfaction in covering my designated share of the bills).

Health, last time I had it checked, is good. Weight down a little, blood pressure back down. Exercise was off with everything else this week, but hopefully not enough to reverse the improvement.

And now May. Let’s hope for reasonably smooth sailing.

Cover by Gil Kane. All rights to images remain with current holders.

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March was a month that happened …

Despite Plushie’s fortnight of diarrhea, it was fairly productive. Of course, as I’ve mentioned before, that’s partly because of The Local Reporter switching to monthly so I didn’t have actual paying gigs distracting me. I’ll be back to work on it next week, prepping for the April issue.

I got close to 34,000 words rewritten on Let No Man Put Asunder, redrafted “Mage’s Masquerade” and “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” and proofed the first chunk of Savage Adventures. I applied for a couple of writing jobs (remote) and started checking various short fiction markets — no luck so far. And we made it through diarrhea and out the other side er, so to speak. And the multiple trips to tire places or our VW dealer.

Yes, it’s mostly Snowdrop photos today. I think he’s worth it.

This week was choppy, with enough errands Wednesday it was a struggle to get anything done. Still, overall satisfactory. I got another 3,500 words finished on Asunder (that was what I struggled to complete Wednesday). I reread “Oh the Places You’ll Go” and I think I’ve finally finished it. I’ll proof it later this month but I’m satisfied I’ve fixed everything I didn’t like (or my beta readers didn’t like). First story finished in a long while. I read “Mage’s Masquerade” to the writing group; the overall reaction was way favorable though with several slight changes. For example it comes off as if Sinclair is waaaay older than Cecily; while that’s not out of line for a Regency plot, it’s a sensitive enough subject I’m going to make it clear he’s maybe a decade her senior, nothing more.

Finding markets for two 7,000 word short stories will be a challenge. But I can always publish them in another collection of my work.

I got several thousand words of Savage Adventures proofed and polished and I started looking for a cover artist. No luck so far.

I also began editing my Hellboy Chronology. At first I was only going to update it to add one of the new Hellboy-verse TPBs. However I wound up converting it to blocks which threw the spacing and the whole look of the page out of whack. I’ve begun correcting for that, though I’m only up through the 1960s. Please be patient as I keep working. All the information is still good.

Over at Con-Tinual I talked about The Worlds of Andre Norton, Favorite Superhero Moments, the return of Superboy, now all available on FB at the links.

Week is almost over, as I’m stopping work early to cook something for TYG. Have a great weekend, y’all.

Cover by James Bama, all rights remain with current holder.

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Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Short Stories, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals, Writing