This is a picture of me with my two brothers (left), my step-siblings (right), my mom, and stepdad somewhere around 1978. It was a taken in one of those booths at the Renaissance Fair where they make it look old-timey.
Old-timiness aside, it’s a pretty accurate depiction of our lives, which I've been writing about this week.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The month is half over. How are you doing on your creative goals? I’m here as your certified Accountability Buddy, and you’re here as mine.
Here’s what I got done:
This is my third (I think) week in a row breaking Substack with too much material to fit in one email. I got some advice about this ongoing issue from a Substack superuser, God, an esteemed subscriber to No Dikkering Around who you should subscribe to.
Part of being accountable is showing your work, so when I don’t have room to show it, that’s a problem. God’s advice: spread out longer posts over multiple days, otherwise no one will see them. In tomorrow’s post I’ll post the additional work that didn’t fit today. If there’s more, I’ll post that the next day.
As always, this work will be behind a paywall because I can’t go around publishing all my work online for free for the world to find. I gotta eat.
I’m in the home stretch of The Onion Story, due October 1 to the publisher. I got more early chapters edited, filled out, and finished. I was in the zone a lot and need to stay there for the next two weeks, so I’ll be clearing my calendar best I can.
There are a couple of sections in the story about my early life, with tales of child abuse and brushes with death. I didn’t want to violate anyone’s privacy, so I called my dad and asked for his consent to write about his personal struggles, which affected me greatly. He said, “I’m an open book.”
I’m grateful to him. Now I’m free to write what I need to write.
The other person I need to write about, my former stepdad, died some years ago, which was a universal positive.
I wrote 15 more pages of the Action Cop audio drama. If all goes as planned, my writing partner and I will have all eight episodes crappy-rough drafted by mid-October. Then we can get to work making it good.
Let me know what you got done in the comments! Partial receipts below…
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