It’s been a long time since I’ve put fingers to keyboard here, so the three or four of you (and that is being incredibly generous) still here might be wondering ” Where have you been? What’s with all the silence?” The short answer: a lot. The longer one’s gonna require a paragraph, may be two. I promise to keep things less on the loquacious side and more “brevity is wit”-ish.

Let’s start off with terminal illness,shall we? Not mine, but close enough to home. Our family made the move to new accommodations at the end of December – bigger, more rooms and a kick-ass basement custom made for reclusive writer time –  to help my wife’s mother with her ongoing treatment for two different types of cancer. Both rare, both found in single-digit percentiles of the population. Then the cancer got ballsy, made its way into the marrow, bumped things up from “concerning” to “this is going to kill you”. There were weeks left, if we were lucky. After a debilitating first round of chemo, we started to see improvements. Vast, “holy shit” honest-to-goodness miracle kind of improvements. And that trend continued for months, till we got the good news a couple of weeks ago. Zero traces. The marrow is clean. It’s over, and we couldn’t be happier at this outcome. We’re a tight little unit, this family. And every day, I’m glad to be surrounded by such strong and beautiful people.

As a result of the above, though, some things had to be placed on the back-burner while we waged this little war. With the fires put out, and a new “normal” slowly becoming commonplace, it’s time to get back to business. To quote Abraham Van Helsing, ” There is work – wild work – to be done.” First, and certainly not least – I’m plying my trade under a new umbrella. The folks at Blumhouse.com (specifically Editor-In-Chief, Rebekah McKendry) have been kind enough (and trusting -the fools…) to allow me to spew words on their website. Before the above-mentioned crisis shook up the status quo, I managed to post a couple of articles.

Should you feel the need to read assorted verbiage on genre-related fooferaw,  take a gander at the menu:

A Kind of (Black) Magic: Another Look at Clive Barker’s LORD OF ILLUSIONS

DC’s ANIMAL MAN Volume II: The Best Horror Comic You May Have Missed

Marvel Movies Phase IV — Bring on the MONSTERS!

What Lies Beneath: Toronto and The Tunnel Monster of Cabbagetown

They’re a good gang to hook up with – fans with a love of the genre who aren’t afraid to fly the flag for their personal favourites – and they trust me enough to let me occupy space on their real estate. I’m still not convinced that my style of writing could be labelled “journalism”. But it’s fun. I get to talk about things I like, and share it among like-minded individuals. So I’m going to keep at that for a while.

I also quit smoking. 25 years on the hook, now ten months nicotine-free. And I don’t miss it. Not a bit. It’s hard, but not impossible. So maybe I’ll write about it here.

And we got a dog. Her name is Maggie. And she’s awesome.

Aside from that? Who knows. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past year, it’s that life is short and no one is going to hand anything to you. So there will be more writing, here and elsewhere. I could get all wordy about my intentions, or just get down to the work.

In the end, the work is the only thing that matters. So time to get back to it.
It feels good to be back.