Wicked Fortune has had Her way with us since we crash landed in this garden of bad ideas.
This tramp, as our Webmaster has informed me I am properly identified, has benefited from your support of many kinds: books gifted in the mail, messages and calls by phone and skype when i was low and worse, encouraging emails, old style snail mails, meetings at bars, vitamins in the mail, protein powder on your guest desk, beatings with stick, fist and waster, rides to the hospital, even holding me up so i could piss in a urinal when I was crippled, and help lifting the 27 pound life strapped to my deteriorated back...
You readers, who i am recently relived to discover number only in the hundreds, not the thousands, have sustained this geriatric revolt against the postmodern overworld. You have taught me that the boon of being cursed—as i do think a Haitian voodoo man did me down on June 7th, 2023 at Harford and Hamilton for the crime of urban generosity—that this gift of ire from the evil-workers among us on this stage and behind the curtain, is that it brings us to the attention of good-givers, of angels sent to mend the rent. Some of you few readers are such.
Currently the following projects are the focus of this tiny and adjoining spaces:
-1. Plantation America efforts center on a massive three volume work: In This New Isrаel: Sowers, Reapers & Inheritors, projected to be about 2100 pages or a half million words, hopefully complete in 2026. Sections are posting on patreon and include the lives of John Harrower, Isrаel Potter, and Moses Roper and the relations of Mort, Smith and Lane.
-2. The Son of God, Arrian's Alexander, is under way and posting on Substack. Achilleas of Thessolonika has been proofing this and providing name corrections. This is looking to run to more than one volume. Part 1 I am committed to complete by November 2025.
-3. Enemy of All Mankind, my inquiry into an apparent and ancient conspiracy against humanity, is already around 300 pages and should be complete by November 2025. Much of this will post on this site and, for more sensitive subjects, on substack.
-4. A Gaslight Knight, is my current fiction project, all but the last chapter to run here.
-5. Jeth Randolph, of Casting Darts Publications and I are working on Vunak of Antares, a planetary romance, using skype calls and a crude hammer and wrench game system to work out gladiatorial combats between bad asses pulled from history to battle before alien gods. The resulting book will be gifted to Mister Vunak, who we have virtually abducted as a protagonist. The novel will run here and on Jeth's substack.
-6. Adam Smith of Myth of the 20th Century and Coach Finstock of Full Haus have reached out about possible January podcasts.
-7. My writing goal is to complete 8 novels, 2 biographies and 2 histories in 2025. Travel writing will be limited to appendices relevant to these other three categories.
-8. Travel plans for February and April include Colorado and the Southwest.
-9. Time in the Mid-Atlantic will be limited to 6 weeks in spring and 5 weeks in early Autumn.
-10. A reader and one time crackpot podcast cohost may be hosting a recorded discussion in April.
-11. Lynn Lockhart is working on Gallows Born, a hardback trilogy.
-12. I am arranging the print publication of some 70 extant titles with Casting Darts Publishing and three other parties.
Thank you all.
I can only repay you by improving as a writer, and so aim to make it so.
-JL, Portland, Oregon, 12/31/24
