Under a Black Rainbow

JANUARY  (7 books | 2,036 pgs) 01.) The Game Master's Book of Villains, Minions, and Their Tactics (Game Manual, 256 pgs) | 4/5 02.)  The Game Master's Book of Traps, Puzzles and Dungeons (Game Manual, 256 pgs) | 4/5 03.) Loteria by Cynthia Pelayo (Stories & Poetry, 344 pgs) | 3/5 04.) The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins (Novel, 528 pgs) | 2/5 05.) Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (Graphic Novel, 384 pgs) | 3/5 06.) Root Rot by Saskia Nislow (Novella, 140 pgs) | 3/5 07.) The Undead by Johan Egerkrans (Art, 128 pgs) | 4/5 *     *     * I am late in posting my monthly reading list and personal updates. The new job is full of wonderful people and challenging work, but I often feel like my productivity is being used inefficiently. There are ways to mitigate this, and I'm working on it.  But this struggle makes for a crowded headspace. After being in the office all day most of the week, I yearn for the silence of...

I've had a strangely large number of conversations in the last two weeks about the nature of authenticity, itself a comment on truth as a whole.  Because so much of what life has thrown at us in recent years is composed of digital falsehoods pushing nonsense, linguistic labyrinths meant to confound, and a wholesale weaponization of language forcing ideologies to clash against each other...it can be hard to find the authenticity in life sometimes.  The internet was lauded early on as some great bastion of learning. It was also touted as a way to further connect people of differing backgrounds and ideas. Though presented as a kind of great technological, cosmopolitan symposium like those held in ancient Greece among statesmen and politicians and philosophers, it has become simply another great example of our idealism outshining the reality of what would actually happen. Rather than being a pure way of spreading truth and knowledge, we've basically polluted the digital ocean in t...

  Small Portrait (1950) Kay Sage * Probably gonna start calling these posts something else since I'm definitely reading a lot less this year than I did last year. I'm also not updating nearly as often.  April was significantly better than March, but no less eye-opening in some respects.  * I read one book for all of April and it was a novella by Netflix and movie screen horror wunderkind Mike Flanagan. "Rare, Fine & Limited" was an immediate purchase for me when I saw that it would be a Mike Flanagan novella attached to a bottle of tequila. That bottle then became a spectacularly delicious sotal spirit, which was a delicious smokiness that I'd never had before, but which was enjoyed alongside this reading.  Flanagan's movies and shows have been exceptionally done, so I expected nothing less in a novella. And the first 72 pages were magnificent. SO GOOD. The pacing was stunning, the story evolved into something I really, really became enamored by once it h...

  Another trip to Ypsilanti, MI; another week of debauchery and horror gaming with some of the best to do it.  My first two years, I volunteered so that I could meet new people. Now I've met a ton of the regulars and show up a few days early so we can find ourselves congregated in the hotel bar, regaling each other with stories of prior gaming sessions or other Chaosium Con shenanigans from prior years.  The hotel bar provides a perfect nexus of a meeting point: you can see people enter the hotel from the front entrance, you can see them exiting the hotel side of things while heading out the entrance or to the convention center, or you can see people leaving the convention center to head back to the hotel. It's a perfect place to catch literally anyone at the con if you haven't seen them yet.  The first few days before gaming, vending, or panels begin is a good time to stock up on supplies from the HoD or Kroger's, and snag some grub from other local restaurants that...

AUGUST  (0 books | 0 pgs) Obviously, I was unable to read as much as I have in prior months. September, however, is looking nice and ripe for some catching up on the books I meant to complete this month. If nothing else, I've already read 93 books and had planned on reading 80 for the entire year, so...not a bad time to take a break for a minute while life has its way with me.  August found me busy with two of the remaining four stops on the 2024 "Book Tour" I've tried to complete, with one event in Blue Springs netting me 16 book sales and my reading/signing event in St. Louis netting me 8 more book sales. I had the pleasure of meeting a ton of great people at the local event and can't wait to meet more at the Phantom Pages Festival on Saturday, October 5th .  I was inspired by several of the authors seen at the Blue Springs event, and decided to up my own self-promo game by buying a collapsible vinyl banner and creating some excerpted bookmarks.  I began helping...

Because of the next book, I released this current one. Despite releasing Under a Black Rainbow five days ago, I've been deeply involved in the creation of the next book, which feels more immediate and has, like other projects worth completing, become its own maelstrom of things to contend with.  Though dense in topicality, I've found a way to have a little fun with it (as I usually tend to do). Fictional locales of Latin-ized stages of grief, emotional landmarks on the map, incomplete fictions, potential GPS coordinates for signifcant places in significant moments, playlists that consumed my brain during particular stints... Excited is the wrong word for this book, but there is a thrumming pulling me along and telling me it's worth telling.  So I've been busy doing what it is that I tend to do best, which is make shit for other people to consume. Enjoy these fruits from your favorite dancing monkey. Works totally in progress. May your 2024 be better than you expect, an...