Jan 8
At the writing desk five days in a row, woo! The last three days, I put in more time on my Rollover scenelet, then yesterday I read some news, and welp, no more Facebook for me. Had to spend too much time setting up a pinned post to that effect. And then the fires in LA hit the news. So I’m cleaning up my blog & continuing the disentanglement from FB.
I will hate missing updates from friends who are on no other platforms, but the scroll is already 50% page ads/follow suggestions/paid content/reels, and wading through that to get whatever else Meta may deign to show me is a fool’s game.
I’m not up to dealing with that plus fake profiles & mob action moderation. I’m not even sure it’s worth my time to cross-post book ads & blog links there anymore. Not going to stop doing that yet, shameless self-promoter that I am, but I don’t expect them to be seen, given the accretion of malicious, energy-sucking, brainwashing components on the platform.
ANYway. The Fediverse aka Mastodon feels weirdly like FB circa 2008, so I get my parasocial community needs met there. I can get news there too, along with Heather Cox Richardson, the 1440, & other journalist newsletters.
And I’m still blogging. 20+ years now. I just opened up my Livejournal to check.
Fun fact. The things I post now are remarkably similar to what I posted back when I started. The verses change, but the tune remains the same.
I love finding notes from my past self that obviously made sense at the time but are gibberish to me now. For example, I found a note on my phone that reads, “WRITE ABOUT SHOELACES.” Yes, in shoutycaps. I have faith I’ll eventually remember why I wrote it. But right now? Big shrug of I dunno.
Scary times ahead. I had most of a post yesterday, but I waited until today to publish it because I’m just not up to writing about Jan 6, 2021. Or politics in general. I need to be angry to do that, and I am so far past angry at the many self-righteous Fellow Muricans who voted for the Monster In Charge that I need to mentally back up a bit before I can make it coherent.
Anyway. Moving on.
Insurance: welp, my PCP and the good colonoscopy surgeon are both on the new insurance, so…whew. Confetti, streamers, and all that.
I know worrying about insurance coverage and doctor choice is a higher-level problem to have, I am grateful for having health insurance of any kind…but still. I wish the government had adopted Medicare for all back in the 60’s and 70’s or whenever all the European countries and Canada did. Not that “times were simpler” or any nostalgic bullshit like that, but health insurance was undeniably a smaller, simpler industry then.
The bigger an organization becomes, the harder it is for it to change course without crashing and collateral damage.
Okay, one little politics adjacent rant. I follow a fair number of socialists and so-called anarchists (I’ll get to the reason for the so-called qualifier in some other post)
Anyway, I end up tuning out a lot of their “CAPITALISM BAD,” rhetoric because they immediately follow up that truth with examples have not one fucking thing to do with capitalism. They go on and on about prices and wages and the inherent evil of wages for goods, and, um.
Exchange of goods or services by means of currency isn’t capitalism.
It’s commerce. Socialists can (and do) engage in commerce too, with or without a medium of exchange, aka currency. Even communists can. Swapping & trading items for a mutual increase in satisfaction is a thing even some animals do.
There’s are are few faster ways to lose my support than using bad examples to support a good premise. Eradicating commerce from human experience…I don’t see it happening. Anyway. Just me pondering things as usual.
And now, a cat!
Pippin enjoying his fleecy blue blanket on the big beanbag in front of the fireplace. So cozy.
What’s on your bookshelf?
This is the part where I talk about my books.
Relics From A Traveling Show
The newest of the new! A collection of all my short fictions in one handy volume, available now from your favorite booksite or local shop.
Or! OR! if you like your local library, you could request a purchase. Free for you, sale for me, everyone wins.
Most libraries need the following info for ordering print books:
Title: Relics From A Traveling Show
Author: K. M. Herkes
ISBN: 9781945745201 (paperback)
Every library system does things a little differently, but most want their collections to serve their communities, so most of them are very responsive to patron requests.
If you like novels more than short stories, I recommend my series The Rollover Files for hopepunk tales of about an alternate world where moms with midlife crisis superpowers have been saving the world and making the military nervous since 1943.
I also have a completed, quirky slow-burn science fiction thriller duology with a romance chaser: The Stories Of The Restoration.
All my titles are available from Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Hoopla, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Overdrive and many other fine booksellers.
Support your favorite independent bookseller! Find a local shop via Indiebound
Be a potato.
" Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground."
Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)