Hi y’all! Sorry posts have been sparse lately. Those of you who have been with me for awhile know I’ve been living with severe health problems for a long time and these have really been worsening in many ways over the past year and a half, made complicated by injuries and emergency surgeries. I’ve also found myself really slowing down over the past year, making it really challenging for me to write much of anything, anytime. This has been frustrating because I always used to be a low sleep, high output person and you may recall some years ago my posting screenshots of some of my different email inboxes showing 7,000 unread email messages in one, 31,000 in another, 78,000 in a third, etc. At the time I received about 2,000 emails per day, which finally dropped to about 1,000 per day maybe three years ago to now probably less than 500 per day, and at this point, I don’t consider most too important, but many still are. I used to be able to stay up all night and churn out 40-80+ emails per night, but it’s gotten so bad now that if I can answer more than one per day, it’s a damn miracle. Recent examples now look like taking 2-4 hours to write a “simple” two-paragraph email. So if you haven’t heard from me and are expecting/hoping to, this is the main reason and it’s not meant to be personal and hopefully I may actually get to you — I’m trying. This has also impacted my personal/professional writing and I haven’t been able to write in the volume I used to at all, so that while I can still get many poems written, fiction and nonfiction are very different and magazines that have been publishing 2-5 short stories of mine per year haven’t even received any new ones from me to review this year in many cases, and that has been massively frustrating.
That said, despite all I just said, my 2025 publishing efforts have been pretty good so far, just with a different focus. The past couple of years I averaged about 25 stories, 10-15 poems and a couple of articles published each year. However, without the time and energy to write even short stories much this year, I’ve been pumping out some poems and experimenting in some surrealism and dada movements so that in half a year so far, as of today I’ve had about 45 poems published, 1 article, 1 essay, a couple of short memoir pieces and as of this morning, my 11th short story of the year, a 100-word microfiction story I titled Pete’s Pocket (The One True God) that the kind editor of Friday Flash Fiction was cool enough to publish this morning. (Check it out!)
Additionally, I wanted to mention 2025’s challenges haven’t all been about me (nor am I talking about national and global insanities that seem to have infected much of the world this year). While I’ve been having to deal with a right torn rotator cuff and torn bicep and other damage to that arm and shoulder for which I was to have finally had surgery last month, my wife had a hard fall in February that resulted in virtually the same hellish injuries, but to her other (left side)! She’s had to be the sole bread winner, driver, essentially my caretaker if you will, for many years now and with no one to help out, I found myself having to try to take on that role as best I could. Between her emergencies and some others of my own, I found myself having to emergency drive for the first time in nine (9!!!) YEARS this spring, which may not sound that daunting but though we’ve lived here for a few years, since I don’t drive, I don’t know my way around, don’t know where things are, and when I found myself having to drive to a nearby hospital to get my wife at 2 AM, and worse than not knowing where I was or where to go was the fact that in that darkness I literarily couldn’t make out any street signs and if it weren’t so serious-seeming, it’d have instead looked or felt like an idiot’s circus.
Moreover, our last remaining pet, Ace, my wife’s kitty (baby) whom she loves more than anything in the universe has been very sick the past few years with what will likely be a terminal illness, requiring constant travel to other states for tests and treatment and to continually empty our meager bank account. Like both of us, he took a turn for the worse this year and it’s been fucking brutal. That doesn’t take into account my late mother’s estate remains open, for which I remain executor nearly 1,000 miles away, and we’re considering another big move when I don’t know if this one will actually be realistically doable at this point. The move here — roughly my 40th — nearly broke us in every imaginable way.
Not everything is necessarily grim, mind you. I’m just trying to provide some reasons why my reading and writing have slowed, why you don’t see many book reviews this year here (I don’t have the time and energy to write almost any), etc. But I appreciate those of you who come check this site out, and those who let me know with some likes, comments, follows or whatnot. I want, and would like, to visit all of you more than I do — which is admittedly infrequent — but my windows of opportunity each day to get crap done — bills, calls, medical appointments, an occasional writing attempt, etc. — have really taken a hit and the ample time I’ve apparently taken for granted most of my life with little need for sleep has gone in a different direction, so if any of you visit here and wonder WTH I don’t come comment on your site, it might seem, I do notice, I do try to go visit other sites, but it’s so time and energy consuming to do that or much more, I know it may look like I don’t notice, care, appreciate, visit other sites, etc., but I do, simply without most any interaction, for which I’m sorry. But I’m glad to see all of you, am glad to see what you’re up to when I can get to your sites and am grateful for the support you extend me here — for what little that may be worth…
And now I need to wrap this up because I’ve been working on this for several hours now and I’m tired as shit, need to take some meds, drink some fluids and maybe try to post at least one recent publication announcement here after so it’s not just this one lone post. I don’t post an announcement for each of my new publications, but I’ve been trying to post about more of them than I used to and I’m behind, of course, so hopefully I’ll get a few new ones posted here in the next couple of days for those of you trying to measure just how depraved my writing has become. LOL! (My sad attempt at black humor rears its ugly head too often these days but WTH, eh?) Thanks all. I wish all of you a good week/end, safe life and passage in these rough days and cheers to all.
Best,
hankrules2011 