Shutdown Chronicles, Continued
It’s been a month-plus and I’m still furloughed as the federal government’s shutdown continues. I don’t have much else to say about this, other than rumors are positively flying about how much longer this can last.
Who knows.
In the meantime, I’ve been reconnecting with my local library. I’ll just say that their new (to me, at least) practice of automatically renewing your checkouts to avoid fees has gotten me to check out several books in the last few weeks. I finished Paz Pardo’s The Shamshine Blind a few weeks back, which was - as I’d posted before - delightfully askew. Imagine that Argentina not only won what the anglophone world calls the Falkland Islands War, but launched a counterattack using weaponized pigment weapons. Imagine paintball guns, loaded with pellets engineered to be psychoactive - Deep Blue gives you the blues, nightmare edition; Slate Gray makes you uncaring, and often non-verbal; and so on. That’s the alternate history backdrop for more or less a mystery novel. The first of two mystery novels with a speculative element, which is quite refreshing.
The second novel is Cahokia Jazz, which is really scratching an itch I didn’t know I had. I’ll probably write a bit more about it in a forthcoming newsletter, but it’s another police mystery novel where the indigenous peoples of the Americas weren’t as decimated by diseases such as smallpox. As a result, the city-state of Cahokia has survived into the Jazz Age. I’ll leave it at that for now, but wanted to mention that the author, Francis Spufford, also wrote Red Plenty back in 2010, which I’m curious to check out once I finish this book.
The one I’m really looking forward to (after hearing it recommended by Jake Casella Brookins on his fantastic podcast, A Meal of Thorns) is North Sun, or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford. What can I say? I’m a sucker for Weird Sea Voyages.
I’ve also been taking advantage of the lovely autumn weather to work out in our driveway. We live in a relatively rural area - our neighbor across the street is farm. The view from our front door’s a cornfield and the woods beyond. A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of a workout, I distinctly heard the squeaky cries of an Bald Eagle coming from somewhere in those woods. A couple of days later, I noticed a couple of large birds looping around on the updrafts. Usually, it’s either Turkey Buzzards or Black Vultures, and one of them definitely was. The other had an easily identifiable white head and tail - the eagle I’d been hearing! I wondered if it was nesting nearby, and this week I got some good confirmation.
Sadly, I couldn’t get the other - equally large - bird with spotty coloring and enough tufts of white peeking out from its plumage to look piebald. It flew away before I could take this picture. However, when I checked it confirmed my theory: it was a juvenile Bald Eagle, probably being taught to scavenge by one of its parents.
Pretty cool!
Just One More Thing...
I’ll have a new story coming out Fall 2026 in The Speculative Detective Agency - an anthology of (you guessed it) speculative detective stories, with a real knockout Table of Contents. Richie Narvaez, Lincoln Michel, Amber Sparks, Megan Chee, Monique Laban. . . some real heavy hitters that I’m truly honored to be included with. So, keep an eye out for Pura Concepción Dominguez and her two sisters, as they investigate whether a local lucha star’s had the jinx put on him and why.
Oh, and while I’m certain I may be repeating myself to most of you, I self-published a tiny collection called A Series of Hauntings - Un Combo TropiWeird simply to have a little money coming in until the shutdown ends. There’s a lot of old favorites in there, but I added a couple of never-before-published pieces as well.
I should mention that it’s also award nomination season. If you wanted to recommend anything of mine for recognition, please consider A Line of Ink, Stretching Back Like a Shadow in the Short Story category.
And that’s all she wrote!