Ten Years Ago From Now

Today is May 12, 2025. What shall my life be like ten years from now? I shall be sixty-four years old. Shall I still be working two jobs, fast food and a grocery store? What friends and family shall still be with me? I write books and illustrate the covers. What more shall I have finished by then? Shall any of it be famous by then?

Ten years from now shall occur. Ten years ago was horrible. I was unemployed and my house was no longer my home. My life today was unknown on May 12, 2015.

If I open a novel I can read later chapters first and earlier chapters later. The story is what it is regardless. I wonder if time is the same way. Alas, I am but a character in the story that is reality. My moment is the one being read and not by me.

Ten years from now is already today. It is already yesterday. The moment is what it is already.

I hear the claim that the future is not written. It is what we make of it. Oh? Who chose when they were born... or where they come from? Did you write your own genetic code? Your free will is entirely on someone else’s terms, to be clear.

Shall I remember to read this ten years from now? Shall I smile wondering why I worried? Shall I miss what are better days? Time will tell. It always does.

Really My Fiction

I write books and illustrate the covers. I have always used my real name… until I released my novels The Wayward School for Girls and Sorcerer of the Realm. I used the pseudonym “Mister Nobody” for those two and the related books that followed.

The first book is about a dreamlike world where most everyone is either a child or elderly. The same characters can be either depending on their moments in life. The villain is the principal of an elementary school and uses his own students as child soldiers.

The second novel is about a Nazi sorcerer and his apprentice, his teenage daughter. Together they commit mass murder using magic and technology. The girl’s mother is the hero of the story.

The themes of both books are controversial. No one who has read either has a problem, but many people are outraged by premise alone. Cancel Culture could cancel me regardless of what I actually wrote.

GOOD NEWS!

The thought police are losing their power. People are tired of them. We are becoming free to think for ourselves again.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Shawn-OToole/author/B07C28S75Z?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Weirdly Normal

My Weird World universe began as a short story that became a novel. It expanded with a collection of short stories and another novel. The second collection is pending. The cover for the fifth book has already been illustrated.

The universe is entirely dreamlike. Our world does not exist in theirs. The weirdness of their reality is normal in context.

The genre is horror. Even the adventure stories are survival horror. The dreamlike is typically nightmarish. Most people are children or elderly… thus weak and witless.

The villains of Weird World are the rulers of the world. They have a right to be villainous. Whatever they take is theirs already, since they own everything… and everyone. They can rape and kill with impunity. The heroes cannot turn to the law for deliverance. It is instead used against them.

My thematic specialty as a writer of fiction is the foot soldier of villainy archetype. Weird World is no different. Children are the cannon-fodder baddies. They are the ordinary sons and daughters of normal people used as goons by the forces of evil.

My Weird World is weird… but its weirdest aspects are the most realistic… and that is why the genre is horror.

True to Life

Humanity is individuals as male or female. It is families as races and a species divided into cultures, factions and nations.

Most individuals are insignificant. The nameless many instead identify as male or female by family, race, culture, faction or nation.

I write fiction. I populate imaginary worlds with imaginary people. Like in reality, most of these people are insignificant. They are nameless accordingly, instead recognized by their sex, race, culture, faction and nationality. They have no other identity.

Unlike everyone else, main characters are significant as individuals. Their sex, family, race and nation are incidental. Their personality is more important than their culture and decides their role in a faction.

I realized fiction is true to life in the simplest of terms. The heroes and villains are important. No one else really is, except as nonentities to save or slaughter.

Bad for Now

My circle of friends is broken. I live alone. My finances are dependent on my unskilled labor as a middle-aged man with injuries. My creative endeavors languish in obscurity.

Optimism is wishful thinking. There are no signs of things getting better.

I am blamed for my troubles. I am told I should do this or could have done that, blah, blah, blah. Never mind that I never rob or exploit. I work for my living. I work hard. I literally broke my back acting above and beyond for the very capitalists who fired me for it.

Humanity is a prolific species of lonely creatures. My friends drift away, sooner or later, and usually with little or no warning. I am loved when convenient and disliked at a whim. I am told this is not a problem since it happens with everyone. It is especially a problem because it happens with everyone!

I take care of myself as best I can. I am thrifty and mind my health.

I never sacrifice other people. On the contrary: I am mindful to never gain at their expense. My good deeds are secrets.

I would be blessed to reap what I sow. I am instead cursed by the endless grind of a world going nowhere. I am crushed by the grinding.

Artistic Vanity

I am a nobody who writes books and illustrates the covers. My work languishes in obscurity. It shall most likely fade away, unnoticed into oblivion.

I am frustrated by my inability to achieve fame and fortune. I am disheartened by the disinterest in my work. I do feel as if I am striving in vain.

Do you draw or paint or sculpt? Do you write poems or novels? Do you sing or dance? Do you write music? In other words: ARE YOU AN ARTIST?

I turn my daydreams into words and pictures. It is my art to do so. My thoughts and feelings are clarified by the effort. By bothering to articulate what I imagine, I refine it. By turning it into product, I can share it. I have inspired people, though very few.

Is there a point to my pointless toil? Am I achieving anything by my relentless failure? Do I have anything to show for what remains unnoticed?

I am an artist for better or worse. That I even bother must count for something... otherwise it is best to be feckless.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Shawn-OToole/author/B07C28S75Z?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Surprisingly Sexy

Young women and manly men are sexy by default. This is why they are the usual sexiness of art and fiction. This is why an adventure story was typically about a warrior rescuing a fair damsel.

Other things are sexy too, and some of them universally. Uniforms are such: Men and women are especially attractive wearing them. People love women cringing and screaming in fear: Such was the damsel in distress at her sexiest. It is her superiority over the “Mary Sue” that was supposed to replace her… and failed to do so.

I write and illustrate fiction. The sexiness of my work is the most important aspect. It energizes everything else.

The sexiest thing to me of all art and fiction is a hairy monster effortlessly breaking the neck of a clueless guard. It was three panels in a comic book I happened upon in 1983.

I have incorporated what is sexiest to me into my own art and fiction. It shall never be as sexy to others as it is to me, however. It is not even sexual, actually. The erotica is exclusive to my imagination.

I write and illustrate what I imagine. People shall read and see from their own perspective. What is sexy to me may be nothing of the sort to them… but they may be aroused by something I did not even consider sexual. Someone may be inspired by a scene or illustration beyond what it was meant to be… and that is a good thing.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CG279LYG?ref_=ast_author_dp