Well, a golden opportunity to get an old favorite short story of mine reprinted in a collection called At the Stroke of Thirteen was enough to muster enough scarce resources for getting the laptop fixed. "The Vampire Hunter's Requiem," a story about private investigator/vampire hunter Jack Petrov's last case on Halloween 1975 in New Orleans, will be reprinted for the second time in that horror anthology edited by comic book writer Nick Cuti and promoted at next time's ComicCon (or so I've been told by a fellow writer who informed me of the opportunity). The story was accepted and contracted for worldwide publication rights, and even with no story payment, the exposure of anything I write at something like ComicCon was too good to pass up. I'm again working to reconstruct lost story files or continue unfinished projects. Last month I finished the rough draft (left incomplete for about a year) for the second Jack Petrov novel entitled A Dark Mirrored Land (set mostly in the fantasy realm of WycheRealms and the Balkan-like region called Varlochia, but partly in 1928 Gotham, NJ). I wish I could get the lost data off the computer's old hard drive, apparently damaged when I shut it down abruptly one time too many in late June and early July, but the repair shop tried and failed to retrieve any data and informed me other data retrieval services out there that might get any lost files if they still exist on that magnetic storage cost hundreds of dollars (money I don't have at present to even look into getting such help).
So, I'm back at the keyboard in my spare time, getting stuff done, but still with no Internet apart from brief periods at my local library (where I am typing this currently). My dead end job feels like more of a dead end than ever, and I cannot prove my possible Asperger's Syndrome disability is sufficient to get any sort of help in a desperate situation where I've accumulated non-repayable medical debts and other expenses building up. People say count your blessings, but I just don't see continued survival and living every day as blessings. My life and its mistakes have been a never-ending curse from which death would be the only release. I see everything through a dark glass, despite being saved by Jesus Christ. I remain a pessimist and an unfulfilled perfectionist. If those two conditions are not proof of insanity, then what is?
So, I'm back at the keyboard in my spare time, getting stuff done, but still with no Internet apart from brief periods at my local library (where I am typing this currently). My dead end job feels like more of a dead end than ever, and I cannot prove my possible Asperger's Syndrome disability is sufficient to get any sort of help in a desperate situation where I've accumulated non-repayable medical debts and other expenses building up. People say count your blessings, but I just don't see continued survival and living every day as blessings. My life and its mistakes have been a never-ending curse from which death would be the only release. I see everything through a dark glass, despite being saved by Jesus Christ. I remain a pessimist and an unfulfilled perfectionist. If those two conditions are not proof of insanity, then what is?