Life of Pol

  Yesterday was the Fourth of July, a day of celebration. Yet, this current America has nothing to celebrate as yet ANOTHER mass shooting happened. A 22-year-old on top of a building shot people in a crowd who were attending a parade! I already felt discouraged yesterday as I saw no pride in celebrating America since it has become such a cesspool of violence and hate. After the news broke of the shooting, I only felt worse about where I live. There have been more than 300 mass shootings this year alone! It's only July! Yet the Republicans and all the back woods morons are still fighting to have their AR-15s at the ready, no matter how many people die. I'm ashamed of this country. Truely disgusted.

  Well, I finally started wood burning again. I had stopped for a while, but after watching several videos on YouTube, I realized how much I missed it. I wanted to challenge myself and do something different than an animal, which is my go-to subject, and try a portrait.  This is Arthur Morgan, the main character from the game Red Dead Redemption 2, and the most lovable bad guy you'll ever meet. After a couple more tries, I realized that portraits just aren't for me. Trying to get the skin to appear smooth takes a lot of very light layers repeated time and time again.  Pyrography takes patience, and I have only a limited amount to spare. In the end, trying to create realistic portraits just took too much time, with too many failures. It zapped the fun out of burning. But I have a brand-new burner, so I am definitely doing more. I have my eye on a really cute baby raccoon. 💓

  Prologue   Well, it looks like it’s my turn. My father told his story. My mother told her story . . . I guess it was inevitable. I’m nineteen years old now. I didn’t think I would make it that far. I feel so much older. Perhaps I do age in dog years. That would make me 133. That pretty much matches up to the way I feel right now. Worn and broken, that’s me. I am dictating this portion of my family’s strange tale into a recorder, because I no longer have the use of my right arm. Dane or my mother will write it down later for all to see. So much has happened. I don’t know where to begin. It’s been eight years since The Rise of the Son came out, and my mother, Sephina, tried to explain what happened to us. Tried to explain what happened to the detective. What happened to me . It seems like a lifetime ago. Twelve years. Oh, my God, it’s been twelve fucking years. That’s too much time. Too many lives wasted. Lost. Taken. I look up at the moon and smile. Ironically...

  2021 didn't start out very well after terrorists stormed out nation's capital. But after the inauguration, and now that we have a great new President and Vice President in office, I'm feeling hopeful for the first time in a long time. I'm sure there are going to be more trying times ahead. God knows we haven't yet seen the worst part of the pandemic. But even with that threat looming overhead, I still have the warm feeling of hope inside me that has been missing for so long. I don't know what the future will hold, but I do know that Steve and I will go through it together. I know we'll get back up on our mountain soon, and finally begin to feel settled again (the boys will be happy about that, too). There is a positive energy in the air that hasn't been felt in a while. I pray that energy only grows. Feeling hopeful today. I hope you are, too. Stay safe. Mask up. Protect others. 💓

  The werewolves are coming. Well, I guess they've been here for a while. Since 2000, actually. That was when I first got my book Blue Moon published. It is a story of a man who is a werewolf, and is able to take his life on the night of a blue moon. The book is a suicide note and a confession. It was accepted and published through an online print on demand publisher, which at the time was very exciting for me. But after a few years, the book pretty much sat there. Fast-forward five years. I wrote the screenplay for Blue Moon and shopped it around. I've spoken about this experience in a previous post. I had a production company love the book and option the screenplay. Long story short, they dragged me along for a couple of years, and eventually everything fell through. On the plus side, during the time they had me under contract, they suggested they would want to make the stand-alone story of Blue Moon into a series of movies. They asked if I had ideas of furthering the stor...

  Blue Moon is the first book I ever had published. It was originally published through a POD publisher, iUniverse, back in 2000. It was the only one of my books that I hadn't self-published. Because of that, over the last few years, it has become somewhat forgotten. But not anymore. I have gotten my rights back, and have self-published this title finally! With a whole new rewrite and new cover design. Blue Moon  is the book I had mentioned in an earlier post, that almost got made into a movie. It is the story of a doctor at a mental institution who is turned into a werewolf.  This story is actually a suicide note written on the night of a blue moon; the only night a werewolf can take its own life. I came up with this story roughly thirty years ago. I wanted to write something through the eyes of a person that was a werewolf, who could just describe the agony of it, and the sorrow he felt for the lives he had taken. When I originally wrote the book, it was a stand-alone ...