2021: A WTF ODYSSEY

And suddenly, 2021 is coming to an end. What? Already? Didn’t it just start?

It’s been another year, and as the pandemic goes on I’m vaccinated and boosted, and the City of Phoenix has given me money for it. Who knows how long it will go on? How many variants are coming?

I’m having trouble keeping track of it all. I had to scroll through this blog to jog my overloaded memory, forgetting a few passwords in the process.

We did a lot of traveling again. Things just happened that way, the gods of the road guiding us. It may not be the same next year, with Emily working again, and things being different. The Angel of Death is no longer perched on our roof. And Maggie, Em’s mom is traveling through time and space.

Meanwhile, my writing career is alive and well and interrupting my plans. I’m getting interviewed on Zoom, learning to be more of a pro at it. A new world is forming in the chaos.

Starfaring, Ken St. Andre’s space opera role-playing game that I illustrated with cartoons was republished, with the cartoons. The past never dies. Especially in the age of the internet.

Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology, finally came out, with my story “Those Rumors of Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” It was a long, hard slog, but things do happen if you don’t give up.

“Love Nwatta-Nwatta-Nwatta Style” that was inspired by the Starfaring cartoons was reprinted in Metastellar: Speculative Fiction and Beyond. Who knows? Maybe I’ll someday find a market for the novel that it’s excerpted from.

Within the week, the Kickstarter for El Provenir, ¡Ya! Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl, A Chicano Science Fiction Anthology failed. My feeling is that this was probably the exactly wrong time to be tin-cupping it. The world is in turmoil, everyone is begging for alms. The book will be coming out, though, thanks to some alternative resources. It will have a new story by me, “Incident in the Global Barrio.”

Meanwhile, I still haven’t finished Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of Victor Theremin, but I am hurtling toward a bizarre, complicated climax. I have a lot of days off next week that I plan to spend working on it, while America, and the world, continue the process of transmogrification.

As for 2022, all I see is a big, fat question mark.