The Sparrow's Nest

For the short story collection, I have finally choses which stories will go into it. There is one rare one published back in 2013 and three new stories that  have never been seen before. All together, there will be ten stories in the collection. What's fun is that they're all in the same universe, so I've left little Easter Eggs in some of the stories. Also, the official title is now "Haunted Mountains: Chilling Tales of Apache Land."

The other day, I put on a shirt I've had for a few years. As always, it was short and I couldn't lift my arms without it rising up. My pants have no respectable pockets and they like to slide off my hindquarters, as if they think I want to flash the public. The pants also think I want my shoes hanging out of skinny jeans for all to see, much like the butt crack it keeps trying to promote. When I'm in search of a dress, they're too short and immodest. I am so sick of this. Well, I have found the solution to my problems. I shall buy a bunch of short dresses and use them as shirts. E-shakti will provide me with the long dresses I want because they're customizable, and Duluth Trading Company will give me pants that don't slide off my butt and has a lot of pockets. AND they have pants that aren't those skinny jeans that make people look like apes. Their shirts are also nice and long. Both pants and shirts are made strong. HOORAY!

February 10, 2021 On the evening of February 9, 2021, a gray laptop computer was found dead in its room. Apparently it had been dead for several days. When authorities attempted to revive it, the power button would not respond, although the battery was at full power. The cause of death has been speculated to be a cup of water which fell on the keyboard last Saturday. It was working well afterward and its friends and family didn't see that anything was wrong. When the computer was dried out and put to sleep, it never woke up. The green button was glowing to indicate that there was still some brain activity, but after some serious reflection on the part of the family, they decided to pull the plug and let the computer go. The gray computer was a rebuilt dell laptop born on e-bay. It spent the last few years as a trusty assistant to horror author Julia Benally. It has produced a number of short stories, some of which are not yet published, and two books. The first book, the gray compu...

Making a ToC, or Table of Contents, WITH NUMBERS: First and foremost, you need to do your chapter headings. So after you have them all named and just right, with correct pagination, meaning chapter one starts on an odd number on the right hand side page, you need to go to HEADING ONE at the top of the page. HEADING ONE refers to this in the HOME tab: Right click "Heading 1" and click on "modify." It will open a window like this: This is the place where you design what you want your chapter heading to look like. Centered, colors, fonts, and everything. Now go down to "format" and click on "paragraph." Here you can mess with the spacing. Click "Okay." You can rename heading one so you can find it. Click "Okay." Now we apply the "heading one" which I have renamed "hello." This is how it looks before we apply the heading:  Make sure your cursor is on the line with the chapter heading, and then go up to your new...

June is coming and "Renzhies" will be ready to drop! It's so exciting! Zhin Zhin is the main character for this one. We get to see his backstory told in epistolary form, introducing new characters, hobnobbing with the old, and we shall be hating the new villain with the passion of a thousand supernovas.

I'd made a very long checklist about the road to the publication of "Renzhies." I finally made all the chapter headings and formatted them to look nice and neat. I ran into a few problems. When you're making chapter breaks, you're not supposed to use page breaks, but section breaks. After that, you go into your header and click a button that will unlink the headers from the previous section so you can type in the new chapter heading without changing the previous chapter heading. Well this suddenly stopped working and I was at my wit's end, until I finally realized that when I clicked into the chapter heading, it would jump back to the previous section, or even more. So I had to scroll all the way back down to the place I wanted to be, and then it worked. I think my computer is doing its preliminaries to its death throes. Just great. It's the toughest computer I've ever owned, but I guess every computer has to die of something. Anyway, I got it all figu...

Several weeks ago, my brother and I were asked to pick a woman up from Gallup, New Mexico and bring her to Pinetop, AZ. She was going to be nursing another woman back to health who had to get a major stomach surgery. I'd never been to Gallup in my life. I passed it on the freeway once going to Albuquerque. Times are hard and I was going to make money with this, so I was like, okay! Let's go to this totally unknown place. We had instructions, me and my brother had figured out who was driving first and second, we had our snacks, we cleaned out the car, and then Sunday night the tribe went on lockdown. We were being essentials, though, so we cut out the next morning for New Mexico. I should have seen the signs when we stopped at Speedway for gas. Speedway has the slowest gas pumps on the planet. 19 bucks and I was standing there for 15 minutes. Getting to Holbrook and then jumping on the freeway was easy. I drove all the way to Gallup and got off at the exit that the instructions ...