Audiobooks Coming, Preparing For The 90s & The Joys Of Social Media

 

Key West, April 2021

After a pleasant time in Fort Lauderdale and Key West, I returned home to Atlanta. For those that remember what a VCR is, I am using a borrowed one to go through my archive or personal videos recorded in the 1990s. I have not seen their contents in over a decade as my last VCR died that long ago and new ones are no longer manufactured. I should have learned earlier to not rely on technology to preserve memories as it becomes obsolete too quickly.

Me in 1995 taken
from one of the VHS tapes.

This archive of tapes will be vital to what I am writing for my first novel set during the 1990s. I have my handwritten journals from the period, but watching and listening to tapes from that time is much more immersive. There are hours of VHS tape to digitize. This project is like doing research on myself.

Otherwise, I am tending to my flowers and taking regular walks. I had the first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and am waiting on the second. I am glad to see the rollout of the vaccines across the country. Life is slowly returning to what it was prior to the pandemic. All of the predictions that the world never would be the same were hogwash like most predictions from talking heads in the media. I am grateful that they remain consistently wrong.

Life is busy as I am preparing to narrate the audiobook versions of Dweller On The Boundary and Terminal Wake. Those years of experience in broadcasting will be put to use again and I do miss being behind a microphone some days. I will be recording the audiobooks beginning this month.

Fort Lauderdale 2021

One final word regarding my social media accounts, especially Facebook. I treat my social media like my front door. Who I allow through that front door is for me to decide. After two incidents in the last year on my Facebook with people that I went to school with in Paulding County and their acting inappropriately with me, I will state unequivocally that I do not tolerate disrespectful behavior from anyone. That policy includes people that I may have known in the past. These incidents are a good reminder of some of what I left behind and they diminish my already limited supply of sentimentality. If you come through my front door and act like an asshole, you will be treated as such and removed. The only Facebook I have is my personal one and I restrict who I allow there on a case by case basis, which is my right. I may have written two very revealing books about my life between the years of 1979 to 1991, but that does not mean that just anybody can access my current life and treat me as they wish. If you have read my first two books and learned anything about me, I hope it is that I have little reason to miss much of what I left behind. I am also cautious in how I interact with people from that same past.

Over the last several years we have cultivated an online society that behaves as though there is no real life consequence to how we treat others in this digital sphere. In this realm people lose their humanity and treat others as nonhuman entities. We forget that real people are behind these digital manifestations of humans and that is deeply wrong. I understand that some people are assholes in real life and act the same online, assholes are unavoidable, but I believe and I retain some hope that most people are not assholes in person. I know that good, decent and genuine people do exist. I have spoken with them and I have met them.

Consider this, the next time you want to act like an asshole online take a few seconds and think about whether you would say this to another person's face. Also, consider what the consequences of that action might be too.

I do enjoy interacting with readers and I welcome questions through my email address listed under the Contact section of this website. However, I do not respond to abusive or rude people. I treat people with respect, manners and kindness offline and online - I see no difference between the two realms.