New Story, "Black Angel" Now Available

This is a story that I've never shared anywhere before. It's never been available in any way. It comes from many years ago, from the second time that Rish and I did a Broken Mirror event together. The premise on this was, "A person is given a revenge crystal, only to discover that it works all too well..."

I think the story that came out of it is pretty good. I really like it, and I think you will too. Or, to put it another way, YOU NEED THIS STORY IN YOUR LIFE!!! Or at least, you'll enjoy having the story in your life. It'll entertain you for the time it takes to read it. In fact, you should head over to Amazon right now and grab it. It's available for the low, low price...I mean, it's as low as Amazon will allow, because I want y'all to give it a go...of $2.99. Check it out.

Halloween Decorations Post #2

I have a bunch of orange lights for Halloween, but I didn't bother putting them up on the shelves. They just don't seem right for Halloween. I put up lights for Christmas every year, because that is basically intrinsic to the holiday, but lights and Halloween are not so married. Companies have been trying to make it that way, but nobody's really buying.

You can get away with lights for Halloween on a smaller basis, though. I used to have a string of ghosts that lit up from inside, and I hung them up on the shelf. Those lights don't work anymore, though. I chucked them out this year, and replaced them with these lights instead.

It's little orange pumpkins with lights in them. They're not amazing. The ghosts were better, because they lit up much more, but these will do. You don't see them as well when it isn't dark, but that's fine.

You can see how hard it is to see them from afar, but in real life, rather than a photo, it works better.

They string around the room going across the same shelf line.

I'm thinking about getting a new set of ghosts too, and if I do, I'll put them along the ceiling line. That'll be cool, but I don't know if I want to spend the $12 that it would take to get them.

Frankie Berry

The other day, I made the pledge not to buy a single new thing for Ankletown Station until I had at least one building created. The only thing I was able to buy for now on was Franken Berry...if I could find it.  

Of course, I also told you the other day about how I couldn't find it anywhere, and I figured I was going to have to rely on Rish Outfield to mail me out the one that he set aside for me. I asked Rish to mail it right away, since it was already almost Halloween, and I was going to want it on my shelf as soon as possible. He discouraged that.

"What if you find it next week?" Rish said. "You're going to wish you didn't buy it from me and pay the shipping to get it out to you."

That was true. I guessed that it was best to hold off for a little bit...and it certainly was, because only a few days later, look what I found.

I'm pretty dang stoked. I'd be happy with just Franken Berry and Count Chocula, to tell you the truth. I know they made a Boo Berry as well, but I don't want it nearly as much as the other two. I pulled Franken Berry out and set him up on my dashboard.

Looks good. He comes with two choices in head. This one was the alternate, but it's definitely my preferred one. When I got him home, I made a space so that he could be up there next to Chocula.

That looks nice. I'm happy. Don't get me wrong, if I find Boo Berry, I'll buy it, but if I never do, I won't be all that upset. Halloween decorations have been so fun this year.

Lion Diet Carnivore & Alternate Day Fasting | Did I Finally Pull It Together? | Week 67 Roundup

For a couple of weeks of been spinning my wheels, unable to keep to my goals that I set for myself. But it's a new week, could I turn it around and get myself back on track? Find out on the newest exciting episode of Big Anklevich on Health!

Yoda and Artoo?

Went out to Ross, and I didn't find Franken Berry like I was hoping. Rish found Franken Berry at his Ross, but not me.

He said he would send me one if I never find it myself, so I guess I don't have to be too worried.

I did find something I hadn't seen before.

This is Yoda's Jedi fighter, from the Micro Galaxy Squadron line. I've been collecting as many of these ships as I can to use on a 1/72 scale space station I'd like to create. since I'd never seen this ship before, I figured I ought to pick it up.

Rish tells me it's from Revenge of the Sith, but I don't remember it at all. He said that Yoda flies away in it at the end of the Order 66 scene. I looked that up on YouTube, and it wasn't there. Maybe it was a little later in the show. I don't know.

Anyway, while I like the Jedi Starfighter, this particular model seems strange to me.

It's kind of bulbous and goofy looking. I'm not sure why. Yoda is smaller than other folks, he could easily fit in their ships. Why does he get one with a bigger bulb than them?

It's wings open up in an attack position, and the cockpit opens to a seat made especially for Yoda.

It also comes with an Artoo-Detoo, but I'm not really sure what Yoda is doing with Artoo.

I already have an Artoo that came with the X-Wing, so I could repaint this one and make him look like a different R2 unit. I wonder how hard that would be to paint a figure so small.

I guess, in the end, it's a cool little ship and it'll be fine with the space station, but I certainly don't need more of these. I probably paid too much for it as well. They wanted $5 for this thing. I pay less for a Vintage Collection figure at Ross, and I think they're much more worthwhile.

You know what? I think I've got to stop buying anything for any Ankletown Station space station until I actually get the gumption enough to actually build at least one building first. I'm going to make that pledge right now. The only thing I'll buy from Ross is Franken Berry from now on. Until I have at least one building made for the space station, I'm not spending another dime on figures or ships. I should have done this long ago.

Then next post you see with Ankletown Station in the tags will be my report of making the first building. I'll see you then. May the force be with you.

Halloween Decorations Post #1

I finished getting all the Halloween decorations up in my study the other day, and I'm kind of proud of myself for doing it. I know that sounds very Millennial of me to be proud of doing something basic or useless, but it's been several years since I managed to drum up the wherewithal to achieve the task. 

I have a huge plastic tote filled with Halloween stuff, so taking all the regular toys down and replacing them with the Halloween ones is actual pretty time consuming. I made sure to start all the way back in August so that I would get them up with enough time to actually enjoy them before I had to take them down again.

I took pictures of it all, and I figured I'd share them with y'all over the next month and a half as we build up to Halloween. It'll take that long to show all the pictures, there are so many.

I thought I'd start with the Skull Face Squad. I've been building this bunch up for years, and documenting each acquisition on the blog for you, though almost none of them have had any time on the shelf yet, due to my laziness for the last few years. Let's see what we've got. 

First is an old-timer. This is Reaper. He's been on the shelf since around 2018 or maybe even 2017. I found him at Five Below when you could still find worthwhile stuff there for five bucks, back before the dark times, before the inflation.

In case you were wondering, the pumpkin is a Halloween addition too. I don't usually have pumpkins on my shelf. The Coke thermal detonators and the bounty hunters stay up year round, however.

Now there's this group. I put them together because they all look like fantasy/sword and sorcery kind of characters. The two on the right are He-Man guys, Scare Glow and Skelegod (which is what Skeletor morphed into in the Netflix cartoon that I never watched). The ones on the left are from Fortnite and The Witcher.

This next one is a Marvel Legends figure...I forgot his name, but looking it up, it is D'Spayre. I guess he was the villain in the second season of the Cloak and Dagger TV show. I never watched season two. Season one wasn't all that good, so I never bothered to go on. The ghostly zombie sorceress next to him is called Shadow Weaver, and she is from the She-Ra show. She's not part of the Skull Face Squad, but I figured I'd introduce you to her now, rather than show the picture again in another post in the future. It's a good figure, and a pretty good design for a character. I really like the way she looks. Sexy, hot zombie sorceress Orko woman? Yes please.

This guy is from Fortnite too, but I can't remember his name either. I think it might be Voyager. Oh, almost. The internet says he is called Eternal Voyager. He's a guy in a space suit, and his normal head is just that...like a helmet or whatever. I was interested in the alternate head that is a skull floating in blue flames. That's pretty badass. I wanted him for my Skull Face Squad.

Here we have the Skullies who look like high-tech warriors, guys in space armor, but with skull-faced helmets or whatever. The first one is the Taskmaster from Marvel. He's been around since the beginning like The Reaper. The other two are Fortnite guys. The gold one is a particular favorite. He's pretty cool looking. Notice, of course, the pumpkin and the Scooby-Doo werewolf bad guy in the dividers above them. Those are Halloween things as well, as I'm sure you notice.

These are the last ones. They're the modern mercenary-looking guys. The guy in the middle is Crossbones, the Captain America villain. To the left of him is a Fortnite guy called Warpaint. He almost seems like a ripoff of Crossbones, doesn't he? Same general idea, slightly different look. The guy on the right is called Metal Mouth, I think. He's also Fortnite, though he's pretty cool, and I think he would fit in easily on the shelf with all of the Cobras in their never ending quest for world domination.

So, there you go. That's post number one for the Halloween decorations. I won't be back tomorrow with more, but I will be back with more eventually. A couple of times a week, probably. I don't want to overdo it on you guys and make the two people who actually look at the blog decide to stop, so I'll keep it at that level.

What Moves The Dead

I just finished T. Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead the other day.

To be honest, I only made it to the end of this book because it was so short. It was only five hours long to listen, and therefore, I doggedly insisted on finishing it even though it was boring the crap out of me. 

It was a send up of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." It was written to be a gothic-style story, and just didn't interest me in the least. I have to admit that this kind of stuff doesn't excite me. As much as Poe is a great point in literary history, I don't read him. His stuff doesn't keep me awake. So, this story, made to be similar to him, didn't do any better. 

I should have given up, but stubbornly, I pushed to the end. I can say I read it, but I don't know who else I'll say it to, because I don't really care to talk about it. There's a sequel to this book called What Feasts at Night, and I had it on hold as well, but I canceled that.

I read T. Kingfisher because Rish Outfield recommended her books on the Outcast. It was worth a shot, but I guess we don't have the same tastes when it comes to T. Kingfisher. There's nothing wrong with that. I suppose I'll move on, and see if I can find something I enjoy more to read.

I've been having bad luck with finding interesting books recently, so I hope things can get better. We'll see when I'm back with another report.

Eleventh Album?

I published a story years ago called "The Tenth Album." It was about a guy coming from an alternate universe to our universe, and coincidentally walking into our main character's record store and discovers that in our universe Van Halen didn't die in a plane crash, but in fact made another album called Balance that he'd never heard before.

The story was on The Dunesteef podcast, but somehow, it is the only story that isn't on the Dunesteef Podcast channel on YouTube. I don't even have a copy of it either. It's just straight up gone. Pretty sad.

The characters in the story were based on me and my childhood friend, Jeff. We were both very into Van Halen in high school. Interestingly enough, earlier this year, I was texting with him about Sammy Hagar's new tour. Sammy was going out with Michael Anthony, Joe Satriani, and Jason Bonham, and they were going to put a particular emphasis on playing the songs from his time in Van Halen as a sort of tribute to our dearly departed Eddie Van Halen.

My friend got all excited about it and offered to fly out to Houston to go to the show with me. I was totally stoked about that. Sadly, of all the concerts I've been to in my life, Van Halen was never one of them. I never had money when the time was right. Now Eddie's gone, and with him any chance of an actual Van Halen concert, but this Sammy Hagar show sounded like it would be the closest thing to that possible.

We got tickets, my friend flew out, and the concert was the other day. We had a great time and enjoyed the heck out of ourselves listening to all of those songs from our teenage years. I did get one video of a song from the show. Check it out:

It wasn't quite Van Halen, but Joe Satriani is about as good of a replacement for Eddie as you can get. It was nice to get the chance for once.

Now, David Lee Roth needs to get together with Steve Vai and do a Best of All Worlds concert doing all his songs from his Van Halen era. I'd go to that.

Working On The Goals

The last time I talked about how my break was over and it was time to get back to work on my goals, I mentioned that I'd written a bunch of them out, but needed to go through and plan them so that they weren't just pie-in-the-sky ideas. Most of the goals were big ones like "get all my stuff published on audio". That's the overarching goal, but to achieve it, I needed to break it down into smaller chunks. So, I sat down and started working on that.

I figured I'd share that with you here, and if you have any suggestions or comments, I'd love to hear them. Maybe I could change things according to your suggestions if they seem better than my own plan (which probably couldn't be too hard. I'm not really a planner. This whole thing is kind of new to me).

Goal 1:

Publish everything by Oct 2025:

Sep: Black Angel
Sep: Digital Wizards
Sep: Pre-owned
Oct: Angels and Wizards Collection
Oct: Sunny and Gray 1
Nov: Sunny and Gray 2
Dec: The Gauntlet
Jan: A Fire in the Center of a Million Universes
Feb: Caught Up In Christmas
Mar: Irresistible Invader
Apr: Lazerfist

From what I understand, the most important thing for an author is to have a bunch of things for people to buy. That way, if they read one of your books and like it, they can then go to your catalog and buy a second one. Then a third, and so on. So, goal one is to get all of my stuff published this year. I put Oct 2025 as the finish line, but scheduled everything to come sooner. I think I can probably hit those numbers, but I may be wildly off. I don't know. Some of the books are basically ready to go, others will need some rewriting before they are ready. So, we'll see how feasible this time line is. Getting all the formats, from eBook to paperback to hardcover might be a little much in that time frame.

Goal 2:

Do Audio for everything by Dec 31, 2025

Sep-Oct: Three Vampire Weekend
Nov-Dec: Angels and Wizards
Jan-Feb: Sunny and Gray 1
Mar-Apr: Sunny and Gray 2
May-Jun: The Gauntlet
Jul-Aug: A Fire in the Center of a Million Universes
Sep-Oct: Caught Up In Christmas
Nov-Dec: Irresistible Invader
Jan-Feb: Lazerfist

This is a sort of extension of the last goal. I want to publish everything. Doing the print versions is one thing, but doing the audio is very much another thing. It involves a whole different work pattern, so I made it it's own goal. Not only that, but it's probably going to take longer than just creating the eBooks and paperbacks, etc.

I suspect that I'm going to have to make a calendar with the hours of the day assigned out to what task I will be working on. Every Tuesday at 8:30 AM, I'll record for an hour, and then at 9:30 AM I'll work on the print book, then at 10:30 AM I'll write or something like that. That's the next step in my planning. Once I've got these goals completely hammered out, I have to take my free time and piece meal it out toward achieving the goals.

Goal 3:

Write Daily

This is kind of a two part thing. First of all, I'm going to switch over from measuring my year in birthday to birthday years to regular calendar years. No more of the October to October reckoning. It's goofy and confusing. I'm the only one who can follow along. I'll stop that now and switch to regular calendar years. So, my writing goal for this birthday to birthday year was 304,475. I hit that back in June. I'm beyond that now. I'm up to 326,447 on year now. And, as we continue through to my birthday, that will continue to increase. If I get about 30,000 words per month, then it will be somewhere around 380,000 in the end.

My word count for 2024 so far is 261,488. I want to outdo my birthday to birthday year's word count with my 2024 word count. I can't make a concrete goal, though, because the birthday to birthday year isn't over yet. I've got four months left in the year in 2024 instead of just two in the birthday to birthday year...but two of the months are the same months as the birthday to birthday year gets, so the only real difference is November and December.

So, as I said, I suspect that my birthday to birthday year will be 380,000 words. Meaning that I have to eclipse that with my calendar year goal. I'm going to shoot for around 40,000 words per month in November and December. If I mange that, I should be right around 400,000 words for 2024.

Then my next goal is to beat that total in 2025.

So, let me list them out:

Birthday to birthday year goal of 380,000
2024 goal of 400,000
2025 goal of 400,000+

I'll come back and make more specific numbers for the goal once I find out how October finishes out.

How do I accomplish these lofty goals? Well, I made a little word per day chart of what I will be shooting for over the next year and change. Here's what I've got:

Oct: Write 1,000 daily
Nov: Write 1,000 daily
Dec: Write 1,250 daily
Jan: Write 1,250 daily
Feb: Write 1,500 daily
Mar: Write 1,500 daily
Apr: Write 1,750 daily
May: Write 1,750 daily
Jun: Write 2,000 daily
Jul: Write 2,000 daily
Aug: Write 2,000 daily
Sep: Write 2,000 daily
Oct: Write 2,000 daily
Nov: Write 2,000 daily
Dec: Write 2,000 daily

That's a pretty intense thing to be shooting for, really. I've almost never written 2,000 words in a day. I've done it maybe five times ever. I want to get to that level, however, and it seems like the best way is to build up with a slow increase every month until I'm there. Hopefully, it'll be kind of like weight lifting. You lift ten pounds every day, and in a while, that seems easy, so you take it up to fifteen...and so on and so on until you're lifting more than a hundred pounds.

Those are all of the very specific goals, I think. The rest are more one time things. Here are a few of those:

Construct a website for BD Anklevich with a store to buy eBooks, signed paper books, etc.
Get an email list going on the website and start a monthly newsletter.
Do some advertising with the money that I make from the podcast and the sales of books.
Get a group of first readers.
Plug myself on the podcast monthly, and ask for reviews as well.
Get the podcast on all the big podcast platforms to increase the audience
Republish the old Dunesteef episodes with my stories on the Anklecast

And maybe there should be others. I was thinking of trying to hit up Abbie Hilton and ask her what she thought I ought to work on as I continue trying to build this stuff up. What should a beginning writer be putting his effort into? What will be worth my time and what is a waste of time?

Many of those goals there involve me figuring out just what the best way to do things is. How do I make my website? What email service to I use for my mailing list? How do I get my podcast listed on Spotify? How do I get it on Google Podcasts...or whatever they're called now? Things I've got to investigate and work out. That will be the process to achieving those goals. I don't even know what they are yet, so I can't make itemized to-do lists with those goals. But I will set aside time to work toward them as well this year.

So, there you have it. That's what I'm working toward by the end of 2025. What do you think? Is there something I missed? Should I add something to the list? Is something that I'm trying to do a complete waste of time? Let me know what you think.

A Monster Miracle

It was only a week or so ago that I talked about finding the Monster Cereals out for sale again at Walmart. In that post, I mentioned how Jada Toys made action figures of the monster characters, and how I would love to buy them. Well, today, my wish finally came true. I walked into Ross and gasped when I saw this on the shelf:

I couldn't believe it. I texted Rish the picture immediately, and as soon as I bought Count Chocula, I headed immediately to the other Ross in hopes that they might have Frankenberry or Boo Berry. Well, of course, they didn't. Someday I'll learn.

I did my traditional picture on the dashboard.

It was amazing that I was able to get him to stand there. The figures are a great sculpt, but I'm going to actually complain about how poseable they are. I think they're too posable. It's really hard to get this guy to stand. Maybe his joints are too wobbly, and that's the reason, not because there are too many of them.

Count Chocula came with an extra head.

I think I like that head better too. I'll probably put it on when I put it on the shelf.

I also saved the box...I don't know if I'll keep that or not, but I think it looks so much like the cereal box that it might be cool to put it on the shelf with the box in the background behind it. What do you think?

I don't know. Maybe it's too much. I mean he's also holding a box of Count Chocula in his hand as well. It's like a hall of mirrors of Count Chocula, boxes going off into infinity. Also, without the box, it will fit in a much smaller space. So, we'll see.

I'll be hitting up all the Rosses I can over the next while. Hopefully, I'll get the other two monsters. I can dream, can't I?

Lion Diet Carnivore & Alternate Day Fasting | Spinning Wheels, But Not Failing | Week 66 Roundup

I'm doing lion diet right now, but how is that going? Well, do lions eat cheese? If so, then I'm fine. Otherwise, I might be struggling a little bit. Does it completely derail me? Or do I get there anyway?

R2-SHW

I got a new droid the other day.

I saw it on Amazon for a much lower price than they've been asking recently. It used to be $25 if you wanted this droid. I guess nobody was buying, though. When I looked the other day, it was at $11.70. That's not an amazing price, and for most Star Wars guys, I'd still pass, but I want more and more droids. As many droids as I can get. So, I jumped at the chance to get this new different droid for what amounts to a reasonable price.

He's a little unusual. I think he needs a black wash to bring out the details, especially in the red parts. I like the different look, though.

He also comes with the camera thing on the top of his head that he can use to look around with in case he gets dumped into a Dagobah swamp or something. That pops out if you push in the center third leg.

You can spin it around to make it look in different directions, but I don't think I like it much, because it's not attached. It will fall out if he turns upside down, or just tips over or something. I suspect that I will lose the thing sooner or later. I think I'll leave the third leg out permanently to try to make sure that doesn't happen.

I gotta stop buying Star Wars guys if they're more than Ross prices. I think I will make an official pledge right now that from here on out, unless there's some very special circumstances, I will not buy Star Wars Vintage Collection figures anywhere other than Ross.

Over Yond3r

They had a couple things at Ross the last time I went. I was a little surprised. They had another Weequay, and I went ahead and grabbed that. They also had this Fortnite figure.

I wanna say that I already have a Yond3r, but I can't find a post about him nor do I want to look through the drawer full of figures that I have for Ankletown Station in search of him. If I do have him, I'm pretty sure it's the gold version.

Now that I look at it, though, I don't think I did get it, so this is probably my only Yond3r. I guess Yond3r is supposed to be DJ, like Marshmello or Daft Punk.

Hence the donkey helmet look on a guy wearing a Michael Jackson looking suitcoat with epaulets and everything.

I like the look of the outfit, but not the head so much. I'll probably dump the head and maybe swap in an alien head like Weequay's or a Nikto or something...or I could just put the alternate head that the figure comes with. I guess Yond3r isn't as enigmatic and mysterious as Daft Punk. You can see him without the headwear.

If nothing else, it's a new head to use on something. I put it on the Weequay and it looked pretty good...although the Fortnite head is more simplisticly detailed than the Star Wars Vintage Collection figures are...so I could do that too.

The Terrorists Have Won

Rish likes to use that phrase as his joking response when someone talks about a problem in society...and there's a lot of problems in society today. This is a problem that happens only among toy collectors particularly, but a symptom of a more widespread problem in society at large. Check this out:

The Vintage Collection came out with a new stormtrooper figure recently. It's a new version that looks amazing and is more poseable than things we've had before. Except, the figure on this card that I found at Walmart recently ain't it.

That's what's supposed to be in that package. What you saw above, therefore, was what we call a swap. Somebody came in, bought the stormtrooper, went home and removed the new one from the package, swapped it out for an old crappy, worthless stormtrooper, sealed the package back up, and returned it to get their full money back. So, in essence, they stole the figure.

What's sad is that these people are obviously collectors of toys. They know what happens to toy lines that don't have good enough sales. They get cancelled and go away. Yet, they'd rather screw everyone and get their collection for free. It's not like there's any need behind this. These are friggin adult toy collectors carrying this crap out, not a father stealing a loaf of bread to feed his children. It's big time dishonesty and lack of respect for the rest of society, and it really makes me sad, but even more so it makes me fear for the future.

I find something like this at a store all the time. It's incredibly common. How much longer can our society maintain cohesion when this is what it is? Get ready for real life stormtroopers to come our way someday soon folks. The terrorists have won.

Yakity Yak

 I found another Yak Face at the Ross.

I talked about putting together Hugh Yakman in the last post. I was eager to do the same thing again. So, I removed the head off another Halo guy, and replaced it with the new Yak Face figure. Now I have two Yak Face soldiers.

So, we have Hugh Yakman and Samuel L. Yakson.

I hope I can find some more Yak Faces. I could put a bunch more of these soldiers together. Sadly, I passed up at least two or three Yak Face figures that I've seen in Ross over the last few months. I could have had Yakov Smirnoff. Michael Yakson. Weird Al Yakovich, and so on.

I'd love to collect enough to make my own boy band. They could be the Yakson Five...wait, wait, wait, I got one more...they could be the Yak Street Boys!

Okay, thanks for putting up with me. Tip your waitresses. You've been a beautiful audience.

Anklecast 70 - Undo (Part One) Available For All

The new episode of the Anklecast is up and available for all.

Ronnie was just looking for some antique that his father might enjoy for his birthday, but instead, he stumbled upon an item that gave him astonishing power over time. What would he do with this power? Find out in the first half of Undo. Beware, this story is dark and rough.

Afterward, Rish and I talk a little about how Big was afraid to release the story because of things that take place within.

As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.

You can find the show on the usual feed, or you can right click HERE to download the story yourself. Then again, you could just click the play button below and get it that way. It's all up to you, I guess. We're all about choice here on The Anklecast.

Okay, Break's Over

Hey, folks. I bet that the two of you who follow this blog regularly are wondering what happened to my writing over the last while. Back in June, I reached my goal of 304,475 words for the year. Then on July 3rd, I posted my last this month in the books post talking about how the writing had gone in June. Since then, I haven't made a peep about writing. Not only that, but I've barely talked about publishing or making covers or doing audiobooks or any of the other things I was going on about so frequently this past year.

Yeah, I pretty much took an extended vacation. I said I was going to keep going on things. In fact, here's my exact words from that post:

Now, what am I going to do next month? Well, if it’s going to be my vacation month from writing with no specific goals, then I guess I’ll do the same for audio. Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to do nothing. I’m already 30% of the way into Three Vampire Weekend, so I will do my best to get as much of that done as I can. I think I can probably get all of the book minus the big novella done this month. The novella, “The Elephant in the Room,” is going to take a month to finish all on its own, so that will likely be my goal for August, when it comes rolling around.

Boy was that a load of BS. I didn't do a single thing. I stopped writing for a little while, but along with that went everything else. The only thing I managed to do was get Undo published, and that was just because I had to work my way through that to edit Rish's reading for The Anklecast. 

What I claimed that I was going to do while not writing was to work on the preproduction outline of my next book, The Skeleton Crew, but I certainly didn't. I don't think I spent more than ten minutes even  thinking about it at all.

In doing this stuff, I discovered a little something about myself. It looks like writing every day is the base line that I have to stick to. If I let that slip away, then all the rest of my productivity goes with it. I don't know if it will always be that way, but for now, at least, I see that it is

After being a layabout for a while, it started to feel wrong to me. September was growing closer, and the opportunity to get going with the start of a new month kept calling to me. I pulled up a fresh document on Google Docs, and started listing off things that could be my goals for the next while, and with each addition, I felt more energized and inspired.

The line from the Sting song called "St. Augustine in Hell" kept coming to mind. I found a version of it on YouTube that you can play here:

That's right, break's over. Time to get back to it. I don't think that I ever felt better about myself than I have for the last year. The only time that comes close was the last time when I did pretty much the same thing in 2019-20. Only that time, I wasn't quite as productive as I was this year. I need to get back to doing the stuff so that I can feel good about myself again.

So, starting on September 1st, I began writing every day again. What is my goal for month? 500 words? 1,000 words? 1,250 words? 1,333 words? I'm not going to make a word count for now. This is going to be another first month of the year like I had in November last year. The real goal is just to make sure that I write every day. That's what I'm shooting for. I suspect that I'll get at least 500 words a day, but if I don't, I'm not going to beat myself up.

Next month, I'll give myself a big word count goal, and then we'll go onward and upward from there.

So, I guess the point of this is that I'm back. For the last three days, I've been writing on my story for Marshal Latham's contest over at the Journey Into... Podcast. I believe the contest was called the Journey Into Journey 2 or something like that. Oh, wait, Journey Into Journey: Illustrated Edition. While I work on that, I'll see if I can't get The Skeleton Crew planned out, so that I can jump into it once I finish Marshal's story.

I'll be back on here soon enough with a post about the goals that I started setting out. I think I need to ponder them a little bit, and also plan them out step by step to see if I can't manage to achieve them all. That's a pretty important thing. You can hit big goals as long as you break them up into smaller goals that you can keep up with day after day and week after week.

So, I'll see you with more of that stuff then.

Lion Diet & Alternate Day Fasting | Fighting A Temptation | Week 65 Roundup

 I was doing really well this week, when I noticed a specific temptation in my fridge. It called to me. How could I fight it? Did I win? Watch and see what happened as I battled it out with a carton of creme.

It Begins!

This picture is from August. I had to take it, because they're back again, folks.

Of course, I don't eat that shit anymore. Not only that, but I never got these as a kid either. I think the only time I've ever eaten them was the time that Rish and I bought some to try on the show. I think that was an episode of Thirteen Nights of Halloween on That Gets My Goat...hold on, let me do a quick search...Ah, found it. Check it out if you'd like.

Anyway, despite the fact that I wouldn't eat them, I still love to see them come around again each year. Jada Toys did some action figures of the characters from the cereals, and I would totally buy those. In fact, I ran around to Rosses for a few weeks just because Rish told me that someone on Facebook had claimed to find the Boo-Berry figure there. Sooner or later, I may just pay full price for those guys. I love decorating for holidays.

Hallow's Eve

It's kind of funny, I think, that my enjoyment of decorating with toys for Halloween and other holidays has led me to buy action figures for characters that I've never once heard of. Today's figure is one of those.

This figure came out in the same wave as the Jack O' Lantern that I wrote about a little while ago. That was only a month ago, yet Walmart has decided to put them on clearance. Interestingly, right as they are pulling out all of their Halloween decorations for sale as well.

I considered buying this when I bought Jack O' Lantern, but since I didn't know her at all, I decided against it. For half price, however, I have no qualms.

I like the character's look, and the masks she comes with. Apparently, the character has superpowered masks that give you different powers when you put them on. That's a pretty neat idea. I like it. I don't need that, though. Just a character in black and orange is probably enough.

Anyway, the only thing I have to figure out is where to put her for Halloween. Should I put her next to Jack O'Lantern? Or give her her own shelf? I guess when I do my post about my decorations, you'll see.