Hearing Renewed

The big news is that I got new hearing aids this past week. Wow! I had no idea y’all were so noisy!

I guess that goes for me, too. I always considered myself a rather quiet person. Now, I can hear every breath I take and sometimes I think I hear my heart beating. Imagine being trapped inside an old time radio show where sound effects are the major clue to what is going on. The author sits at his typewriter and you hear every click of the keys as he frantically types out the climactic scene. He pours a cup of coffee and you hear the liquid gurgling into the cup. He walks across the floor, pacing up and down—clump, clump, clump. The neighbor’s chihuahua at the end of the block barks and half a mile away, someone starts a leaf blower.

Get the idea? It’s like having all those miscellaneous sounds pumped into my head through amplifiers in my ears. Would you people be quiet?!!

Nonetheless, I’ve been able to have an intelligent conversation with friends and attended a live comedy show in which I was forced to understand all the jokes. This comedian was so old he’s still making Covid jokes. I’ve turned down the volume on my television, my computer, my phone, and my stereo. I’m getting my music from Pandora piped directly to my hearing aids and I had forgotten what I was missing when I listened. Phone calls? I can hear the person on the other end without putting it on speaker phone and holding it against my head. The conversation is pumped directly to my hearing aids. No, Medicare Advisor, I still don’t want to talk to you.

I won’t say it is a whole new world, but it is certainly a world I hadn’t experienced for some time. I’ll take it.

But seriously, shh!!!

I released the third book in the Team Manager series this week. Team Manager COACH! is selling well and will go into serialization at StoriesOnline.net on Tuesday. It’s not at quite the pace of the previous two releases, but still selling well. I’m working on a final volume, which will disappoint some readers that I’m not taking the story further, but the longer a series goes, the fewer readers it has. Team Manager SPRINT! ended on Saturday with about 7,000 active readers on SOL. That’s down from 9,000 for Team Manager SWISH!

In the meantime, I’ve nearly finished the rewrite of my 2021 NaNoWriMo effort, Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. Unlike most of my rewrites, this one is growing instead of shrinking. I wrote 150,000 words in November and now it’s closing in on 200,000 and well over fifty chapters. And my alpha reader, Les, keeps telling me I can’t end it there. It needs to be longer. Bob can’t just ride off into the sunset never to be heard from again.

Well, 4,000 years of history certainly gives me plenty of opportunities for more stories from Bob’s experiences. Maybe there is another volume coming. So far, Bob has had encounters with the Olympian gods, the Sumerian gods, Jesus, a goddess in Indonesia, a couple of feuding Maori gods, and a few gods of the Caribbean and the Mayans. He’s met Hammurabi, Nebuchadnezzar, Xerxes, Alexander, Caesar, and Kublai Khan. He’s built palaces and temples in Crete, Mesopotamia, India, Japan, China, Mali, Italy, Chicago, and I probably missed some. He’s fought against slavery and trafficking for 4,000 years and has still only made a small dent. And he joined the space program. He’s had sex with Helen of Troy, Aphrodite, and Cleopatra. He’s been on every continent except Antarctica. I’m sure I can come up with a few more adventures for him.

I expect to start pre-releasing Bob’s Memoir to my patrons in a couple of weeks with public release in about mid-March.

That’s the highlights for this month! Stay tuned.