When I was a kid, my grandfather would watch me while my parents were busy. Most of the time I wound up doing chores, but occasionally, he'd get really melancholy. It was usually when someone he knew died. He'd talk about it like it was some sort of family curse. The men live forever while all the women in our lives die.
You'll linger. He said. You'll linger long past when everyone you care about has died. You'll outlive them all, just like me.
Heavy shit to lay on a nine-year-old.
Except I get it now. There was another funeral last week and it has just... taken everything out of me. I'm lingering. I'm fifty. I shouldn't be putting so many friends in the ground. Why the fuck is someone dropping dead from heart problems at thirty-five?
I guess I know why. We're not allowed to talk about it, unfortunately.
I'm posting this because I need a break. I can't think happy thoughts anymore. Everything is dark and depressing and I need to regroup. I've been writing for 15 months straight now, clocked in at just about 600k words in 15 months now. that works out to about 10k words a week. Not bad, not bad.
Thing is, I know If I stop writing, inertia will set in, so I can't stop writing. what I need is to stop posting. Keep writing and build up a nice buffer again. However, I need to write it out ahead of time because I just threw out a week's worth of writing because I knew it was shit. I can't focus.
I'm lingering.
So I'm not stopping the writing, but I am stopping the posting. I need...
I need the world to be unfair in my favor. I need some unearned good luck. I need to have faith rewarded. I need to find some hope because I don't have any right now.
So, posting this on all three books. I will not abandon this, but I need to... Find something. I don't have ... this thing right now. I've been lingering like this for far too long and I need to refocus.
I want someone, somewhere, to feel very bad about how the world is being run. This isn't how it's supposed to be. The young die while the old linger on, with eyes of sorrow staring into the twilight. The old man is supposed to help the young hero...
Not bury him.
So. I dunno. A month, maybe two. I'll post something occasionally at irregular intervals to prove I haven't given up. I need to rest. This wound is deep and it isn't healing.
-T.E.G.
PS. When I return in earnest, I will delete this chapter.
Unless you need to, leave the chapter. It serves a function, even when you have returned and it is no longer entirely valid it will serve a function.
You have my condolences on encountering such difficulties, as well as my sympathies. I am only nearing fourty, and have burried too many myself.
Half of my family was gone before I was out of my teens, so I do understand.
I also linger, I find solace in helping others that cannot help themselves, I hope you too find the thing that you are missing. Some purpose perhaps.
I won't delete it. I haven't deleted any of them. I will, however, do what I have done with the other is move it to an end date several years in the future. When the series is done, I'll bring it current to just after the end, or it'll naturally reappear if something happens to me.
In case anyone is curious, I am resolving to finish my books, in order. Right now, HKN, book one, is done. I just have to find the time to run the editor, and Hotrod will be done. Then FTS, Then this.
Ironically, I keep working on book 2 of IWS. I dunno why. Like, when I need to relax, it's fun to work on book 2.
Just so you know, this book has the goal of addressing time travel in the eldritchverse. Both to give an example, and show why it can't just be used to fix everything.
You might ask, why include it at all?
Because I must.
This massive crossover of interlinking books is a total and complete way to look at EVERY type of manga story. So, since timetrsvel is a thing in many Mangas, I need to explain how time travel works.
After this, as I explained in the story, the past will get so tangled up, there won't be enough "time" to keep altering the past. Just my way of putting limits on the setting¹.
There are no infinities in the eldritchverse.
Everything ends eventually.
AAAAAAH! I caught up! Crap, what a cliff hanger!
Hello most beloved Author. I hope you continue this story one day. I've enjoyed it immensely. But of course, take your time, and do what you can when you can.
PEACE!
I will. it's just at the moment I'm trying to finish FTS, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm finally finding free time. The plan is to just get sh*t done and then start in earnest on Feb 1st.
My condolences.
hope you're doing better, friend.
RL kicking my ass, but funny thing. I think I might be allergic to gluten. Which is weird because I've eaten bread for years, but the truth is, when I eat wheat, I feel like death warmed over, and when I don't, I feel better. So, gonna try the gluten free thing and maybe I won't be sick so much and I'll be able to write more. I've been slowly grinding stuff out, but a paultry 500 a day.
I actually managed to slam out 3k today for the first time in forever. I hate to admit it, but it seems wheat is off the menu.
I hate getting old.
@TheEldritchGod maybe it's just the processed wheat, and you might be able to eat rye bread or similar?
the notion of not being able to eat bread is scary to me xD i know I'm a cliché but i like proper bread xD
but tbh, that's less problematic than other illnesses of age.
Alzheimers would scare the sh*t out of me for example.
at least you still get to write and think. and now you have a reason to try different foods xD
positivity yay xD
I think we are all surprised when we find out that our loved ones can and will die.
Good luck brother.
Yeah... but they should be MY age. Or about my age. Not... fifteen years younger. I am so glad I didn't take the Jab. When you work in the medical field, You hear all the stories I figured it'd end about a year, but it just keeps going and going...
my condolences. it's hard to keep going.
if you want someone you can unload onto without worry feel free to dm me. doesn't have to be via text either if you'd rather not write something down.
talking about who he was and the good times you've had helped me with sudden and early loss, and maybe it does for you too.
the lingering is the slow start of what may end up in a depression, which having lived through one myself, I'd never wish on anybody.
take care friend and know that we're here if you need us.
I'll be able to survive without your chapters.
probably.
they're really good though, so I might get withdrawals
The problem is, I am not the type to share things. I could explain, but it would involve sharing. ;)
My grandfather was a grand chess champion when he was a kid. He figured out that things were bad in Germany and would go wrong for Poland so he fled with his wife and my mom ahead of WW2 while urging the rest of the family to follow. They didn't. Apparently, we were... royalty or something. I never understood how it worked. The family head was equivalent to a count, I believe. Grandpa was not a count. He was a... nothing really. Just related. We had an entire town that shared our last name.
So everyone thought he was nuts. Well, Poland got rolled over. At the time my father's family got wiped out. He was an orphan and somehow wound up in America to get adopted. Grandpa got citizenship in America, and signed up to join the army. He spoke four different eastern European languages, so in their infinite wisdom they sent him to the pacific theater, where he took an exploded shell to the face. A fragment slid around the inside of his eye and went down the center of his brain, between both halves, and out the back.
He survived, was in a coma for three days, up and walking in a week, and back on the front line in a month. Saw the scar of the exit wound myself. The man was the determinator. The only part of his brain it got was the part that tells you to shut the hell up. The man had no filter.
And this man was my babysitter for most of my childhood.
This man smuggled people out of communist Poland and guns in. He was hellbent on freeing Poland from Soviet occupation and he had this crazy idea that the next generation was going to have to do it. That was going to be me. One of my earliest memories was about going to the Moose Lodge (don't ask) and sitting around with some of the other kids to talk to this guy who was recently out of Poland talk though a translator. I asked what happened to your hand. They proceeded to tell me in detail how they ripped out his fingernails.
I'm a little f*cked up.
I don't want to get into the details, but when your crazy grandfather is training you to be a child soldier because you are the last surviving male of your bloodline, ehh... yeah. Beating into me the whole "how to be a real man" thing goes way back. The whole "A man has only three feelings and they all begin with H" comes from him. I just... need some time to process all this.
The whole, Next generation thing is important to me and... this hits hard. Not my kid, but... sorry.
I can't even type it out. I'm dancing around this but, I can't.
Might come back to answer everyone later. Need a break.
@TheEldritchGod that war f*cked up a lot of grandfathers. I hope you can work through what's worth keeping, and what should be left to time.
mine was drafted with 17 and stationed in France never talked about anything he'd seen.
one time - I was 5 i think - he choked me after i startled him awake until he realized i was his grandkid instead of whatever he'd thought before.
the only thing he was willing to talk about was the time as POW and the friends he'd made on that French farm and still visited until his dying day.
it's hard to know how to frame what happened internally, so one is okay enough to keep moving forward.
take the time you need for it. (as much as you can in the US)
good luck friend.
@Mortuos - Here's the thing, He was a goddamn genius. Chess grand master. When we would walk to the drug store he'd talk to me about theoretical physics. It was one of our talks when I was 14 that brought about the concept of the pixilation of empty space, why infinity does not exist, and the implications of non-smooth space-time.
The man build computers (at the time a TRS-80 Model was cutting edge home computing) and used to drill me on coding... in basic. I mean, he was nuts, but he was also brilliant. I used to have to go get his mail for him once a month from a PO BOX that I would later find out was a drop box and he used me so nobody would track me back to him. I was there the day I delivered the news that all his remaining relatives had be rounded up and shot back in Poland.
I never saw a man... shatter before. I mean just... break. I kept asking him what as wrong until he explained part of it then he just... shut it out. Just turned a switch and pulled himself together. I wouldn't understand what happened until his funeral many years later. There were a bunch of people he had helped who showed up and they all told me stories about him. The man had a goddamn walk in vault in his basement with so many guns. Imagine the gun stash scene for Terminator 2, except no guns later than 1978.
Apparently the letter was that they couldn't get to him, so they went after anyone related to him, that was it. He shutdown after that. The smuggling, himself. Everything. He just kinda... died inside. Didn't help that his wife died the year before.
I think if he had been a younger man, back in his prime, I actually believe he could have organized and planned a revolution in Communist Poland. When I write about Ryan, quite a bit of Joseph is in him. Joe was... he was a determinator. Took a fragment through his brain and finished out the WAR. Crushed anyone who played him in Chess. I mean the guy would buy Chess Computers and have like multiple of the things all over his house set on maximum difficulty and he'd just go from game to game to game to game. He self taught himself quantum physics because I talked about it once and he thought it'd be a cool thing to talk with me about.
He also worked me like a horse. Had me manually mow basically an acre of land with a giant solid steel industrial lawnmower. The damn thing outweighed me. I can still walk 30 miles without taking a break because of that madman. I dunno.
Lately I've been stuck on these 32 hour shifts without sleep because some idiot on the overnight fell asleep after locking a client in a bathtub. So they did a blitz sweep of the entire area and I heard they caught like 10 people sleeping on the job. Took all 11 off nights, along with any co-workers because, HEY, you LET your co-worker fall asleep. You take 20 people out of work, that's about 600 man-hour you need filled.
EVERYONE is calling in because they are sick of the mandates. I got mandated from my worksite to another, then BACK at the end of the shift to my house again. This weekend, I started at 10p on friday, I got about four hours off, then I had to come back and I'll be working until 6a monday morning. With a few breaks here and there, come tomorrow morning, I'll have worked 51 billable hours in the past 56. I think this pay week is going to be about 90+ hours.
Now, I don't sleep, so it's actually not that hard, but I can't focus when I'm this mentally drained. I guess I'm just kinda babbling here. Really want things to slow down so I can get back to writing on the overnight, but I can't really focus. My mind keeps wandering. I dunno. I don't know what my point is. I'm just... feeling old.
@TheEldritchGod that sounds like your grandpa needs his memoirs written, and probably a Hollywood movie as well.
and a 90h work week is about 50 too large.
my German sensibilities tell me to tell you to cut that out, but i guess you probably know that you can't work efficiently on a drained battery.
then again i know about the abysmal state of worker's rights in the US. (yay red scare)
i sure hope you get the necessary sleep before you get into an accident.
humans sleep for a reason.
take care of yourself please.
and it says a lot about me being young when I was really confused about why someone would round up people in Poland for a moment. xD