Club High Castle Pre-Pandemic

We are in the second half of December, where the new year is glimmering just beyond the horizon. Christmas is almost here, and so is the season of setting new goals and striving to reach new heights--I realize I just sounded like a commercial for a gym membership, but hey, ‘tis the season! I like to look back at my previous goals and see if I remembered what I wrote and if I accomplished what I had set out to do. Let’s take a look at December 2017. My goal for 2018 is to finally—once and for all—to crack out of my shy Internet-self shell! I’m not a Marvel character with a quick, witty quip for every occasion. I’m not the most hyper active conversationalist, especially on the fast-paced platform that is Twitter (home of High Castle happenings). Well…I definitely forgot I wrote that, ha ha! My how things have changed! Mission accomplished? I feel like this is an ancient fear I had back in the Beforetimes or something. The key to this endeavor was not giving a fuck. That’s it. I s...

In this era of lightning fast doom and gloom news and social media tirades, the beautiful side of humanity is often drowned out and shoved to the back. We forget to pause and remember the little things, the tiny gestures that restore our faith in humanity.  Kindness matters. If I ever ran for president, this would be my platform. “Teacher, I have the wrong coins.”  Let’s rewind this a bit…okay, a lot. Let’s go all the way back to grade school. I was 5 or 6 years old, and my family was extremely poor. I remember the powdered milk that came in boxes and getting hand-me-downs from some of the other children in Sunday school. We even qualified for discounted school lunches at 40 cents. Young me knew what three coins I had to bring: a big one, a small one, and a tiny one (a quarter, nickel, and dime). One morning, I only had the tiny and small one. I put them in my pocket and worried all morning about not having the big one. The teacher had us line up for lunch, aft...

As Thanksgiving approaches (with lightning speed, I might add), I’ve been walking down memory lane and revisiting past holidays. As the years go by, fewer and fewer stick out in my mind (what can I say? It’s a side effect of getting older ;) ), but there will always be a select few that I’ll always remember and treasure forever. One of the few I can still picture in vivid detail was my first Thanksgiving away from home. It was 1999, and I was fresh out of Basic Training. That September, I was sent to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi for tech school . I volunteered for the drill team  right out of the gate. I loved the marches, formations, my teammates, and the comradery; hell, I loved everything about Keesler. To this day, I look fondly on the time I spent there. Let's fast forward to November of that same year because this will end up being a novel if I don’t! The powers that be did what they could to let us go home for the holiday, but this isn’t an ideal world, and ...

It’s that time of year again, folks! NaNoWriMo is back! Last year I jumped in with vague impressions of a story and sank, but this year, I’ve got myself an outline, a plot, and an ending. Sisters: Behind the Iron Eagle , take two! I don’t know if the political climate is right for the original Sisters . I started it before a certain election. And despite the fact that I have disclaimers plastered everywhere, I am still wary about publishing it. I don’t want to give up entirely because I put a lot of research into it, and let me tell you, researching Evil in WWII will make your gut churn. I understand why Philip K. Dick couldn’t bring himself to dive deep into the horrors and atrocities of the Third Reich for his unfinished sequel to The Man in the High Castle . From Wikipedia, The Man in the High Castle [book] : Dick said that he had "started several times to write a sequel", but progressed little, because he was too disturbed by his original research for The Man...