Have you ever taken a long car ride with children? Or a cranky spouse? If so, then you understand how you have to bribe them with ice cream, or a visit to a candy store—something, for Pete’s sake—to keep the screaming and fighting to a minimum. Hell, my parents used the promise of a glass of ice water at Wall Drug to get me and my brothers from Illinois to South Dakota.
If your first stop on the trip is to the ice cream stand, you’ve surrendered all your leverage.
So I have a beef with the CDC’s announcement that fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear a mask (under certain circumstances). Did none of the CDC leaders ever take a road trip with kids?
Also, why trust anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers to do the right thing now, when they have perfect cover to cheat? I appreciate that the CDC used a scientific approach to the decision, but they squandered an opportunity to convince more people to get vaccinated. The CDC is silly trusting them to get the vaccine, just like I trusted my son to do his homework and clean his room.
By the way, I hope you all are getting vaccinated. Yes?
It’s gorgeous weather here in Michigan, and we’re planning a bit of driving to see some things. If you have the opportunity to travel or just go to a restaurant, I hope everyone on your journey is vaccinated and healthy.
Meanwhile, at My Writing Desk…
I’m involved with an independent production of a retelling of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Together with a writing partner, we modernized The Little Peasant. The project is moving along, and it should be available to read mid-summer. As of this writing, there are 22 such fairy tales in the anthology.
But that’s not all…
A much bigger project for me has been a collection of short essays based on Stoic philosophy. I started a daily practice in 2020 to write an essay each day. The pandemic and the intense election contest colored those essays during the year (as you can imagine). Now I have 366 of them, and I’m refining the words. I plan on releasing both a book and a smartphone app as a way to read them.
After this project, I’ll be so burned out, I’ll look like this guy (Seneca, a Stoic philosopher):
The smartphone app is a real hoot for me because it combines several technical skills I’ve developed over the past three decades. Along with writing the essays, I’m:
- Using a scripting editor to manipulate the words so they can be used as web content
- Using Excel to combine the edited essays with computer commands and create a script for a web server
- Populating a WordPress site on a server with the essays via a script
- Customized the WordPress site to provide a convenient navigation of the 366 essays
- Built a smartphone app to retrieve content from the WordPress site
All of this has to be put to the test. Crafting essays and making a book are tricky enough, but this is way more complicated than I thought it would be. I wrote my first novel on a Commodore 64, and that was trickier than I anticipated, but I figured it out.
Speaking of Books and Stuff
I’ve republished my novel, Fugue, as The Forgettable Marriage of Lina and Joe. Same story, new title and cover. Next month, I’m teaming up with other novelists to promote these books, so check back in the next Picayune for the chance to get advance review copies of my novel, along with several others, if you’re willing to leave a review (even a negative review, if that’s how you feel about it).
Along those lines, I may have my (long) short story about a murder in the suburbs of Detroit ready to share next month, as well. It’s the launch of my detective series, and this first story is called Welcome to Willieville.
Recommended Reading
I’ve started to read the biography of Irene Nemirovsky, who wrote two novellas about the fall of France in World War II. She was one of the most talented novelists of last century and died in Auschwitz. I’m writing an essay about her because those stories, published as Suite Francaise, are haunting. I may have recommended that book last year, but it’s worth another recommendation. Go read Suite Francaise:
Next Month
Look for that promotion for advance copies of several novels in the next Picayune, and maybe Welcome to Willieville, as well.
Thanks for reading the Mickey Picayune