It’s been quite the ride over this past month. With everything happening around the world, both good and bad, I’ve only kept up with it loosely. My personal little world became smaller since I last wrote you.

Let’s see. Where to begin?

Consortium Book 5 Progress

I’ve made decent progress in working on Book 5 in the Consortium series. There are so many more characters, all interacting with each other. And I don’t mean the victims of the Consortium, plentiful as they always are. These are characters between the Consortium membership and the outside world.

At the end of book 4, Infiltration, the epilogue announced the crash of a cargo plane full of victims on the way to the processing facility in preparations of another massive scheduled auction and entertainment. Most of the membership only care that they will have to wait a little longer to refill their stock of victims for their amusement. To Sir and the leadership, it’s a totally different story. They are scrambling to keep their exposure to a minimum, ensuring the continuation and viability of the Consortium. The location and media coverage of the crash is making that hard to keep within their control.

Powerful people outside and unaware of the Consortium are getting involved with investigating the crash, in effect, playing the opening overture before raising the curtain of secrecy enshrouding the Consortium.

This could be my best novel yet. I’m crossing my fingers.

Quite the Ride – in Hell

Complicating life and my ability to write is that I just exited a couple of weeks of sheer hell. Fortunately, this has nothing to do with my health but that of someone I care for deeply. As some of you know, I live with a wonderful woman, sharing life with her. At the start of the month, she had to have surgery to correct a growing problem in her neck. The procedure went fine, and they released her from the hospital a day later.

That was the straightforward part, as waiting for word on how well it went dragged on for hours, driving me nuts. But that’s another story.

The hell began after she came home. I don’t know what meds they had her on at the hospital, but what they sent home with her didn’t seem to do much to ease the recovery. As she recovered, her back muscles kept spasming, releasing a screaming pain that neither one of us was prepared for. Every movement, every trip to the bathroom, every step, and every turn of the head resulted in a screeching scream bellowing into a pillow stuffed into her mouth so she could bite down on it.

I felt so bad for her, and other than rubbing her back, I could do absolutely nothing. Every time I whispered to her, offering her words of encouragement, she’d yell back, screaming, “Shut the fuck up.” I shut the fuck up and cried inside. Every so often, I’d have to get out of sight so that I could deal with my feelings of hurt and uselessness.

After ten days, she came out of it, and I saw genuine progress in her recovery. She’s ambulatory, capable of using the bathroom, showering, and feeding herself. Soon, she’ll resume driving and returning to her normal activities. Me, I’ve gone back to work, enjoying a vacation away from home. One thing I learned from this experience, I don’t have the vocation as a patient caregiver.

Quite the Ride – Corelation

As a writer who writes stories of suffering victims for the sake of extracting screams for someone else’s enjoyment, I can’t imagine myself ever doing this for real. It would tear my soul apart. But maybe, just maybe, it is why I do so well writing these stories. I put my emotions into the characters, feeling what they feel. I suffer along with my victims. Do I struggle with inflicting pain on my victims? Does Sir struggle? It is my opinion that deep down inside; he does. He puts up a good front, but he buries it deep.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from you. Tell me your opinions. Even if you think I am full of shit, I would like to know. The one thing I know, this past month has been quite the ride.