The third and final book of my Scar of the Downer Series will soon be released! I have finished with all major edits and the manuscript is off to the copy editor. In preparation of its release, I have been working on a trailer for the series. 

(On a side note, HookSounds has some great music that you can use for projects that are quite reasonable. They are very helpful as well!)

I wanted the trailer to encapsulate the feeling of the series while not giving any of the plot away. Feel free to share the video (you'd be doing me a favor)! It was quite time consuming, but fun to make. I do like to edit video in my spare time. So, please enjoy the trailer and keep a look out for my upcoming book that will be released by WiDo Publishing.
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​What a year! The past seven months have been a nightmare. I wish I could look at it in a different light, but I still can’t wake up. Now, before I begin, I truly don’t want this blog post to come across as a whining, complaining diatribe. That’s not its intent. Everyone everywhere faces seemingly insurmountable odds every day. It is the one thing humans should be able to understand about one another. Nothing in life is easy. What we all have in common is hardship of varying degrees.
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​As many of you know, my wife has been fighting cancer since September of 2018. It has been a long road with many twists and turns. She had a lymph node biopsy, which detected cancer in it after all, and facial reconstruction. I’m glad to say that part of her is healing quite well. In January of this year, she started Opdivo, an immunotherapy drug that is designed specifically to fight melanoma cells. We thought that this would be the easy part of the journey, but it has turned into a trail of endless doctor appointments and strange maladies (dead thyroid, double vision to name two).
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I wish I could say that the health events only affected Liz. My oldest daughter has been on antibiotics three times since January (2 strep infections & 1 ear infection). My second oldest has been on antibiotics twice (2 strep infections). My third daughter has had 1 strep infection and an earring back surgically removed from the back of her ear (long story). My youngest has also had 1 strep infection. This doesn’t even count the hospitalization my wife endured for several days at the end of March. Several doctor appointments are still on the horizon, including a liver biopsy for an undiagnosed autoimmune disease, a visit to the neuro-ophthalmologist and rheumatologist, as well as a trip back to Philadelphia to visit the dermatologist/oncologist. She also has the routine CT scans and lymph node ultrasounds with her oncologist and skin checks with her dermatologist. It is a road that we will be on for quite some time.
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​When will it end? That is the question that floats around in the back of my mind whenever I am reminded of all these things. The answer that echoes is this: “I suppose never.”
 
This is the plight of humanity; it is the struggle we all must endure. 

​The car repairs, dirty dishes, clean house, work trouble – these are the small stresses that no longer seem small. These are the stresses that begin to feel overwhelming when coupled with everything else.
 
What can one do? You must keep on going! Our four daughters depend on it. 

​All of this brings me to the strange point of this blog post.
 
The Turkey!

​“What turkey?” you may ask.

Well, on Friday night, while we were out at a friend’s house, a turkey crashed through our double-paned window and roosted in our house for several hours. While there, it destroyed part of our kitchen, scratched our floor, smeared blood and feces on our walls, beds, floors, doors, and ceilings. (Yes, even the ceiling.) Of course, insurance only covered $282 dollars.

​Good ol’ insurance. They think of everything.
 
So, in the end, what does all of it mean? How does our family carry on? One step at a time. Though, if I’m being honest, at this point it feels as if I’m more or less being dragged behind the wheel of a truck.

What else do we do? We will wait. There is nothing else we can do. We will wait, and wait, and wait. 

​I’ll be upfront and honest with you. I love fantasy stories, and stories told in other worlds. When I read, I like to be taken away from the world in which I live. I like a story to take me away from the problems I am dealing with in this life. My mind is constantly churning over the difficulties of this life, so when I read a book or watch a movie I like to escape, to force my mind to rest for a moment. That doesn’t mean I don’t read “real world” books or watch “real world” movies. It’s just that I prefer stories with an element of the fantastic, which brings me to “superhero” movies. 

​I also believe it taps into something we, as humans, know to be true. As a Christian, I believe the Bible to be the inspired word of God. While the source of the super-human strength stems from a different source than what we are typically used to in comic books, we can find superheroes interwoven throughout the Bible. I will focus on one that stands out above the rest: Samson.

​He was an ordinary man who was given extraordinary strength. He even had a “kryptonite.” No, I’m not talking about Delilah. It was scissors to his hair. While the strength came from God, and ultimately his loss of it came through disobedience, it was “held” in his uncut hair.

​I recently read an obnoxious article that lambasted superhero movies and those that watch them. Don’t get me wrong. If someone doesn’t like that genre, I don’t really care. But when someone demeans those who do and labels them childish for liking them, that irritates me.
 
The article, however, got me thinking. What makes a story a childish story versus an adult story? While I like Liam Neeson movies, are they any less fake than superhero movies? I would say, “No!” They are just as fictional as Lord of the Rings.
 
I’m not exactly sure what motivates someone to label fans of superhero movies as childish, but it reminds me of teenagers who have decided that they are going to start acting like an “adult.” They are still living at home with Mom and Dad, but they must separate themselves from their younger siblings, and inevitably, they overcompensate. They start calling the behavior of their brothers and sisters immature. They make fun of the cartoons their siblings still watch and say things like, “I don’t watch little kid shows anymore.” In a sense, they are insecure of their own growing up. To appear more mature, they feel as though they must diminish things that they may have previously enjoyed when they were younger.
 
I think I can end this post with a quote by C.S. Lewis:

​Just a thought.

These past few months have been difficult, to say the least. It's hard to move on, to think about the future, the road ahead, when the daily struggles of life feel so burdensome. I tell myself that I have to homeschool the children, I have to edit the third book, I have to clean the house, balance the checkbook, decorate for Christmas, fix the snowblower, etc... while another part of me says, "Who cares about it all? Does any of this matter?"

While my head says, "No," my bones, my heart, and my God say, "Yes!"

When you find yourself standing at the foot of cliff, staring up at the mountain before you, reaching the summit seems impossible. How do you overcome such an obstacle? How were we going to make all these trips to Philadelphia? How would we navigate a huge city in which we've never been? How would we navigate such a life-changing event?

​Fear tells me that I may lose my grip and fall. Fear tells me that every horrible situation is lurking around the corner. It all seems too much to bear. Many times, I had wished I could find a place to run to escape these problems, but no place exists. You just have to stand up and face them.

It was at this time that I didn't care about a book deal! I didn't care about a high-paying, impressive job. I didn't care about a great house or any other temporal thing. What I wanted was good news, that's it. I didn't care about birthday presents, birthday cake, or anything like that. I cared for one thing - the health of my family, more specifically, my wife.

She is one of the meanings behind my writing. I've realized that my love for writing is bound together in my love for Liz. It is one of the reasons why I do it, and why I can't let this become a roadblock for tomorrow. 

It is easy for me to obsess over the dark thoughts that something like this conjures. My mind can become like a black hole that sucks me in away from my wife and family. While the pull is the strongest during these times, it is also during these times that I must resist.