It’s also led to an interesting problem for me. The Christian Bible is definitely present, and a large part of the heritage of the Empire. Individuals, particularly priests, will be quoting from those writings. How can I write those in English is such a way that they are understandable, yet give the feeling that they come from centuries of change and development in Latin, modified heavily by Aramaic and other languages?

Well, if you’re J.R.R. Tolkien, you create an entire history to understand how your language evolved. As for me, I am not a linguist; nor do I have the patience (or time, at this point!) to become one. So I am left to fall back on the tools that I have: existing translations, creative interpretation, and the help of Google Translate.

In a recent passage, I found myself wanting to reference Proverbs 3:24. The King James version is thus:

“When thou liest down, thou shalt not be afraid: yea, thou shalt lie down, and thy sleep shall be sweet.”

Poetic, but I don’t want readers to see this and think of our history. I want something that conveys the idea embedded in that passage, without bringing along the weight that the language of the KJV bears.

Now, since this is coming from Kellan, it needs to reflect his idea of the passage. He was raised and educated by teachers the Empire sent to help rebuild his world after a war to deny the forces of the Accuser. So his basis is going to be the Imperial scriptures - which means something based on Latin.

Enter Google Translate.

I have access to the Latin Vulgate form of the Bible, so that’s my starting point for this particular passage. If I take it and run it back and forth through Google Translate from Latin to English a couple of times, I can get something that expresses the ideas of the verse, without sounding like it:

Vulgate: “si dormieris non timebis quiesces et suavis erit somnus tuus”

1st pass: if you sleep you will not be afraid, you will rest and your sleep will be sweet

2nd pass: if you sleep you will not be afraid, you will rest and your sleep will be pleasant

Tweak that a little and you end up with:

I slept well that night, better than I had in a week. Better even than I had since I’d first met Prospero. Was it from the effort Nissa and I put into covering the city the day before? Perhaps. Then again, didn’t the Preacher promise, “rest, and your sleep will be pleasing”?

Some of you with a religious background may notice that Kellan is presuming that the author of Proverbia and the author of Ecclesiastes are one in the same. That might be the Imperial teaching. Then again, he is from the backcountry region of a backwater world, in Imperial terms, so maybe that’s a local teaching…

Which brings us to the next point. There’s going to be multiple versions of the Bible running around the worlds. I mean, we don’t have one translation - why should they? The Regnan Thalassocracy has a rough, working-man’s translation influenced by their centuries of life at sea, and Proverbs 3:24 is rendered slightly differently:

“Fear not, fer yer slumber shall be sweeter’n the motion of a galleon at sea.”

Yes, that’s taken from “The Pirate’s Bible”. I’ve been planning this for a bit. 🙂 I don’t think I would use that as-is, honestly. If one of the Regnans were quoting this, I’d want to tweak it until it suited their freebooting nature.

Finally, there’s going to be a version of the Bible that has been influenced by translations in places where a variation of Aramaic is the common tongue. I’m not sure quite how I’ll represent that yey. I might use the translation trick with Arabic, for example. However I do it, I know that I want very distinct language that will leave you with the idea that there is a completely different political, religious, and liturgical history backing whoever quotes it in that particular way.

Who’s right? You’d think that in a universe where you can hunt down an angel and simply ask, this would be a simple problem to solve. Except the ineffable tends to be ineffable, and messengers are generally only concerned with the messages they carry, not the ones that have already been delivered… so it would seem that confusion continues, though if the Almighty approves, is it really confusion?

“Such lies we have.” The demon stretched and elongated in unnatural ways, its voice mocking; but this time, the sinking ache of dread was strangely distant, as if in—

A dream. The colors of the world were muted, washed out. I struggled to pay attention to them, but they faded, giving way to a gray nothingness. The Vohan-thing was still clearly defined, however. It continued to distort, twisting in ways that my mind told me both weren’t possible, but also were not true memories. It opened its mouth wide, hooting in anger, and in the sound I recognized the blast of the packet ship’s engine blowing off steam.

My nightmare recollection followed the same pattern as previous nights. The sickness. The cold earth clutching my foot, sapping my energies. Once more, I pulled out my pistol, fumbling it into place before I pulled the trigger with no effect.

My trembling lips were tempted to curse. Instead, in that moment, I found myself repeating words my father had taught me: a child’s vespers, litany against the evil of the world. I am sure they would not have come to me if they hadn’t been so ingrained that reciting them was as much muscle memory as conscious thought.

“Sayet es vo ishoa, hakim melek; esoka, sheth, ey adruhk, alaha melek.”

Save me from evil, wise Lord; body, soul, and spirit, let me walk with God.

In my dream, I muttered that prayer continually. The incubus shrieked, a hellish noise that mimicked the blast of the ship’s steam engine. My pistol grew hot in my hand with each utterance, and instead of firing it to free my foot, I found the strength to turn it around and hammer it against the icy earth congealed around my foot. With each blow, the web of icy mud cracked, until at last the earth shattered and I pulled myself free, twisting to try and catch a glimpse of my face in the swirling blackness of the mirror.

“Esoka, sheth, ey adruhk, alaha melek!” I gasped, fighting free of—

A wool blanket.

I was sitting up on the cot on the packet ship, tangled in the blanket I had pulled over me before I fell asleep. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck, making me shiver in the light breeze that came through the open windows of the cabin.

I untangled myself and sat forward on the bunk, hands on my knees, breathing heavily. After a minute, my heartbeat slowed enough and I gulped down a deep, shuddering breath.

“Not as bad as it could have been,” I croaked, voice was barely more than a whisper. I stood and wobbled over to the washbasin. Slivers of moonlight wormed their way into the cabin, distorting my face into something grotesque, yet familiar.

I stared in paralyzed horror, unmoving, as my reflection in the mirror titled its head. Two yellow eyes, slitted like a cat, met mine. A third winked at me from my transfigured forehead. The apparition in the reflection grinned, showing a wet, red tongue and rotten brown teeth.

“Such lies!” The nightmare voice was barely a whisper, but did not stay there. In a trice, it rose to a shriek that startled me backward. Freed from the dread pinning me in place, I fell back onto the bunk. I struggled, trying to scream; but unable to find my voice.

Somehow, I was tangled up in my blanket again. Once more, I sat up and disentangled myself. This time, though, I did not wait for my heart to calm. I lunged for the wash basin, grasping it until my hands ached, twisting and turning my head to examine the face that the mirror showed me.

In the moonlight, I saw nothing more than my own reflection.

At the end of it all, I took the blanket from my bunk and covered the mirror. I sat up on the bunk across from it, staring at it as if it were a trapped animal, until exhaustion and the rhythmic thump of the packet boat’s engine lured me back to a dreamless sleep.

Read more about Kellan and his struggles—spiritual, mental, and physical—with his own very personal demon in A Sense of Murder, coming soon from Selene Press!

Pre-order A SENSE OF MURDER from Amazon!

My nobledark fantasy mystery, A Sense of Murder, is available for preorder! Come enter worlds that are the battleground for good and evil. Places where magic is law; guns and steel are justice; and evil is patient, persuasive, and genuinely terrifying…

In a far-flung corner of the worlds-spanning Empire, Ser Kellan tor Iaestus is a Highwayman, sworn to keep the peace in the rugged Outlands. Armed with a revolver from a forgotten war and a hidden Talent to see truth, he is an agent of justice and peace in a wild land... so long as he keeps his talent hidden, lest he be pressed into the service of the Empire.

When Prospero, an Imperial Magus, arrives in the Outlands hunting for a magical truth-teller, Kellan is assigned as his guide. Certain he can keep his Talent concealed and maintain his freedom, Kellan escorts the magus on his journey. All goes well until a string of seemingly unrelated murders exposes demons, dark powers, and a warlock weaving cruel designs in the shadows. As Kellan and Prospero investigate, they follow a thread that leads from the Outlands to the city of Victar de Reya, links whores and politicians, and takes them from fine restaurants to piratical celebrations.

Saddled with a suspicious young seer and facing demons clawing at them from the Unreal, the two must work together to unravel the warlock's conspiracy before he kills again. But can Kellan locate the killer without exposing his own power, and surrendering the independence he's fought so hard to protect?

Duty demands truth. Survival demands secrecy. Kellan can't have it both ways... and time is running out.

Pre-order from Amazon today!

Thank you for your patience. And now, what you have all been waiting for: MEMES!

In his latest article, Ian2 branched out to talk about women’s self-defense:

The Bugscuffle Gazette

Women's Self Defence

I don’t offer training…

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14 days ago · 48 likes · 21 comments · Ian

I’ve also been following Mrs. Emma Walz on Facebook recently, where she has been doing a series of videos on “Crap My Cop Dad Taught Me To Keep Me From Getting Trafficked”3 (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six). As she says there at the start of it all, “Some of you have the self-preservation instincts of a golden retriever.”4

Having some experience with this subject for a couple of reasons, I’ll say that neither of them are saying anything shocking or new. At least, not to me.

My wife & I assist a friend who does a hapkido-based women’s self-defense class. It’s 3-4 hours, and the actual techniques are (IMHO) secondary. The primary takeaways we try to leave them with are:

• Situational awareness5, and

• Yes please use your voice, and

• Situational awareness, and

• The idea that you can fight back (and must fight back) instead of being dragged off wherever6, and

• Situational awareness

You may notice a theme there.

No, we are not teaching waif-fu. I mention that because of the startling number of people who think “women’s self defense” means “teaching women to fight and defeat men.” Nope. If that’s what you are looking for, if that is what you think you might need, learn a formal martial art (hapkido or judo).7

Our technique is rooted in some of the base concepts use in hapkido, but that’s where the similarity ends. I say “technique”, singular, because while there’s a number of holds we talk about, the breaks we teach are based on two simple movements. They are about using surprise and leverage to break common holds. The focus is teaching the women that they can break those holds and get away from an attacker.

Note: not fight an attacker. We do cover strikes (punch, heel-palm, scoop kicks) but those are for familiarization and to instill confidence. We always emphasize that if everything has gone to hell in a hand basket, the goal is to break a hold and get to safety.

More to the point, though (and I think Ian and Mrs. Walz would both agree with me here): we repeatedly emphasize that what we are teaching the ladies are intended to be measures of last resort, because the absolutely best way to win a struggle8 is to never be in one. And that best way to ensure that you’re never in that situation?

Situational awareness.

Go. Read. Learn.

And make us all happy by putting your dang phone away in the parking lot, okay?

I spun around. Someone catching you unawares in the Stacks was not a good thing.

The being who’d hailed me was standing back behind the cab, holding a couple of credit slips in his hand. I looked him up and down as I walked over to him slowly. His fox-like face was long and narrow, covered with fur, with lighter circles around his eyes. High leather boots and faded jeans with a broad belt were topped by a long, open leather vest. That showed off a narrow chest covered in reddish-brown hair streaked with white. A broad-brimmed hat with two notches cut to accommodate a pair of pointed ears sat atop his head.

That caught my attention. It had been over a year since I’d seen anyone wearing a cattleman and cowboy boots. I thought I was long past it, but a quick flash of homesickness washed over me, gone as soon as it came.

“Sorry if I startled you,” he drawled. His voice was high, with a lilt to it that reminded me of slow summer days back home. He was a good half meter shorter than me and skinny enough that I wondered if he had been missing some meals.

I shook my head. “Bit distracted, that’s all.”

Closer now, I could see that his eyes were black. A single tooth poked up over his upper lip, giving him a snaggletooth appearance. A streak of white rose up from the corner of his mouth to cross the bridge of his nose and up over his forehead, off-center.

“These would be yours, yes? Saw that there Iggy toss ‘em your way, at least, before he vamoosed.” He held out the slips, a pair of tens. His three fingers were long, covered in the same thin red hair and showing dark skin underneath.

“Ha!” I took the slips. “Thanks. He still stiffed me, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought.”

He shrugged, rolling his shoulders in an odd way. “Sorry to hear that. Glad I could be of help.”

“I do appreciate it, mister…”

“Roy, to my Human friends.” He held out a hand. “Pleased to be making your acquaintance.”

First off, a cover reveal for A Sense of Murder, coming this spring from Selene Press! This story has everything: Murder. Mystery. Demons. Angels. Secrets. Faith. Sacrifice. More murder. Prayer. Magic. Blind seers. Crime! Diplomacy! ROMANS! ZOMBIES! PIRATES! Come for the murder, stay for the mayhem.

Next up, I get to announce that my story, “Expendable”, will be part of the Annals of the Auran Empire anthology from Autarch, the publisher of the “Adventurer, Conqueror, Kings” (ACKS) RPG system. I’ll be appearing there alongside the likes of John C. Wright, , Ruth Clara, , , and B.K. Gibson.

“Expendable” tale takes place in the epic game setting for ACKS, and is about a scholar named Ptolemaios who guides a band of brutal mercenaries to an undead city on behalf of a cruel and mysterious dark captain.

Arbiter of Worlds

Annals of the Auran Empire Authors Announced

Friends, Aurans, Countrymen …

Read more

a month ago · 26 likes · Alexander Macris

Finally, I got news that the Brave Knights and Heroic Courage anthology is entering into copy-editing, so my story “Paladins for Hire” should be showing up soon. Which makes me really happy, because I love Thorn and Rose. I need to write something about them again.

Oh, and I got my taxes done and I’m about a third of the way through revising my second draft on the sequel to my novel Sigils, so I’ve got that going for me.

Enough about me, though. On to the memes!

+++ QUERY: PROGENITOR, WHAT IS THAT DARK PLACE? +++

+++ RESPONSE: RANDAL’S HARDWARE. WE DO NOT GO THERE. +++

tl;dr? Don’t bother.2

Wall of text answer? Buckle up, this is going to be a ride!

First of all, Unicode injection is a threat. Like, a real, honest-to-goodness security hole caused by blindly trusting text. Even before the advent of LLMs, people were working hard to figure out how to identify and mitigate stuff like this. When you’re working hard to keep Unicode prompt injection from subverting your LLM, figuring out how to clean scraped content is right up there in terms of mitigation.

Worse, detecting and identifying the Unicode poisoning is trivial. It’s an novel idea for watermarking documents, maybe, but no way to kill LLMs. This is up there with hidden prompt text displayed as white-on-white to poison copy-paste usage: clever, but easily defeated. Training will eventually result in LLMs learning that sometimes this character looks like “P” and sometimes it looks like “Ρ”, but trust me: they will hiccup and chug on.

Plus it’ll tank your search engine optimization and ranking in search engines, because SEO is (and has been for a long while) AI optimization. LLMs and machine learning in general have been a staple in the search world since shortly after the WWW was invented.3 So, you know, don’t do that. You don’t want to mess with your data the same way you don’t want to nail the doors in your house shut while leaving the windows open. It doesn’t make sense and doesn’t do what you want.

Okay? Okay. That’s an answer to that specific question. Now, let’s step back and look at the situation as a whole. I shall start by telling you A Truth:

We have been here before.4

Re: my statement above, “shortly after the WWW was invented”. There’s a reason Neil Clarke is able to talk about using robots.txt to keep the AI bots from scraping your content. That file, that protocol, was the result of the first rounds of “YOU CAN ONLY ACCESS MY FREE DATA THE WAY I WANT!”

See, there was a veritable panic as companies tried to figure out how to give away content on the web, but not let just anybody access it.5 It felt like lawsuits were threatened daily.6 Bogus patents were filed—one such claimed the rights to every copy made of a document across a network. There were accusations that image links were straight-up piracy. Other companies tried to flex and suggest that you didn’t even need a hyperlink on a web page, and that sharing the text of a link was tantamount to copyright violations and theft.

Dogs and cats, living together, total chaos. All of this played out over the popular tech blogs of the day. Ask some of your GenX or elder millennial tech buddies about it.

To be clear, I am not at all addressing any implied moral weight to any of this. You can give away something for free that’s morally bad (“First one’s free.”) You can also sell something in a way that is morally bad.7

What I am saying is that in a purely technical sense, we have already hashed out the case of “I am giving something digital away for free to anybody who asks for it! How can I keep them from using that in a way that I don’t like?” which is just a special case of “I sold someone a copy of something! How can I keep them from using that in a way that I don’t like?”

… and unfortunately8, the answer is, you can’t.

Which is why, if you look very closely, you will see why Amazon and other companies license you digital content instead of selling a digital copy. That gives them more extensive control than copyright. It also very much explains why companies like Google and Anthropic bought and scanned books: once you have a physical copy of something, it is yours to do with as you please.

Including feeding it to your LLM.

Back to the web. If you put something up on a website, the way the web works is not that someone comes and takes it. It’s that someone comes and asks the server, “Hey, will you give me a copy of this?”

It’s up to the publisher, via the server, to determine if they want to give out that copy. You can’t say, “Oh hey, I am delivering you a copy of this, but I’m setting restrictions on how you can use it!”

… kinda. Sorta. This is where things like memberships and paywalls and licensing and user agreements and whatnot comes in; to let you say, like Amazon, “I am giving you a license to access this content, and that license comes with restrictions: one of which is that you may not use it to train LLMs.”

Exactly what people want, but it’s hard, and legally finicky, and it means that nobody can find you now. Remember what I said about how search engines lean heavily on machine learning? You’ve basically told them, “You can’t see what I’m publishing on the web!”

You may say, “Sam, that kinda sucks. I mean, I want to give my stuff away, but only to the right people, and only for the right reasons, and I want search engines to index it, but not in a way that I don’t want! Is that too much to ask?”

Ta-da! That is, in fact, the whole reason behind the robots.txt file.

Yes, it’s not really a technical solution. More of a gentleman’s agreement between publishers and bots on the web. It’s a social solution to the problem, masquerading as a technical solution. Here’s the essence of what that file represents:

“I have data sets that I will share with you, bot; but other data sets that are for humans only. So long as you, the bot, respect those boundaries, I will refrain from locking everything up behind a digital wall.”

There are technical (IP bans, server-side filtering, intentional slowdowns, CDN bans, crawler honeypots), legal (fraud and abuse statutes), and social (“Bad company is bad!”) consequences to violating this agreement. Do some companies still do it? Yeah. All in all, though, it’s worked pretty well over the last thirty years.

Which brings up the last point.

There is a pretty long history - social, technical, and legal - for why things exist the way they do. You don’t want to monkey with copyright, because that has a long-established legal history, and trying to change how it works causes SO. MANY. PROBLEMS. Especially since licensing is right there, and it also has a long-established legal history. And if you’re in the middle, there’s robots.txt and similar accepted practices that can kinda let you have some cake and eat it, too.

Well. Nibble on it a bit, at least.

Long story short, there’s no simple technical solution to what some people see as a moral issue: restricting who may use information that is otherwise freely shared. Unfortunately, there’s no easy legal solution, either.

Give it a decade, and maybe we’ll start to see advances on both those fronts. In the meantime, absent a complete collapse of civilization9, LLMs are here to stay.

In other news, I’ve been noodling about with trying to come up with a useable definition of what “AI Assisted” means for writing. As a fellow in my writing group pointed out, that’s a very author-centric concern. But it’s something that’s significant to my particular corner of the world right now. Maybe I can come up with something to help in that regard. Maybe not. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, have some human-farmed memes. Enjoy!

Legendary actor and cultural icon William Shatner is diving headfirst into heavy metal with a new, star-powered album that promises massive guitars, cinematic scope, and his signature spoken-word intensity. So all the weirdness you’d expect combined with what sounds like a good chunk of sincerity.

Look, this could go either way, really…

The forthcoming album will feature covers of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden, alongside new original material written with his team.

No, no, I didn’t say I’m going to buy it. I said, “Shut up and take my money.”

Yes, I am 100% going to buy this along with Christopher Lee’s symphonic metal albums—yes, that’s a plural, there, please try to keep up—and put it all on repeat until the combination generates the plot of a science-fantasy novel so strange that it makes Dune look like the imaginings of a Benedictine nun.

I wonder if he’ll do a metal version of “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins”? One can only hope…

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One of the things that came up was a post I saw recently about how ‘orrible it was that some Romance writers were using LLMs. In the comments on that post, there was a strong consensus that LLMs are nothing but theft engines, and that while using LLMs to enhance your writing is PURE EBIL… you know, it is useful for other things like marketing and advertising.

And using it for that is understandable because that’s not art, after all.

In other words, everyone seems to think AI is this awful scourge upon man if it’s used for what they do—but you know, it’s kind of useful for doing the stuff they don’t particularly like doing.

And that, right there, is why AI is here to stay.

Because the number of things I DO NOT know how to do is much, MUCH larger than the list of things I’m good at.

I suck at art, and music, and market analysis, and research, and… look, do I have to list them all? I am unfamiliar and bad at those and a bunch of other things.

I am kind of decent at directing someone else how to make the kind of things that I want, though. I can absolutely act as a producer and tell someone else what I want a song to sound like, or tell an idiot intern what kind of research I want done. With the development of LLMs, I now have two options in that “someone else” category:

• Pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for limited time access to a highly-trained, experienced, and skilled organic AI2. The output there is phenomenal, but you pay out the nose for that quality.

• Spend a few cents to have a clanker3 turn out something that’s not nearly as good, but which is definitely good enough for my purposes.

So if your choices are “You can’t have something because you can’t afford it, peasant” and “Here’s something that’s kind of mediocre, but at least it exists,” well, I know which one most people are going for. No matter how much someone yells about that second option? Absent Butlerian Jihad or civilizational collapse, it’s not going away. Historically speaking, telling people “You’ll have nothing and like it” hasn’t been a winning strategy/

Anyways. Just my 2¢. Gnaw on that for a while. Maybe next week I’ll talk about the relationship between LLMs, 5Ks, and penguins. Meanwhile, feel free to tell me I’m an idiot in the comments (because engagement is the coin of the realm here) and enjoy a few memes.

I have ended up listening to podcasts on the way to and from work quite a bit. Mostly writing podcasts, weird stories like The Haunted Cosmos and The Dusty Tome, things like that.

Yesterday I gave “The Confident Fiction Author” by a try. I first heard her on the Novel Marketing podcast, talking about story dictation techniques, and thought I’d give her a go. I didn’t have anything other new shows on the docket yesterday, so I queued up her latest episode:

FictionCourses.com - Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer

Episode 49: Managing Your Energy: A New Year Habit for Authors

FictionCourses.com - Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

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3 months ago · 3 likes · Sarah Elisabeth Sawyer

Rating? Two thumbs up. Which takes them off the keyboard; but hey, I need to practice my dictation, so I guess that’s okay. Definitely a good enough first (well, second) experience with her that I’m going to add Saywer into my usual podcast rotation.

In fact—I’m going to recommend you check this episode out, whether you’re a writer or not. The whole thing is short; at less than 30 minutes, it’s perfect for your morning commute or (bleah) workout. If you’re a reader, not a listener, she also has the complete transcript up on her Substack. So, you know, +1 Internet Quatloo for showing us GenX types some love.

What’s in the episode that makes it so useful? Sawyer talks about how we often complain about not having time to get things done, when the reality is that we often don’t have the energy to get things done.

It’s an interesting concept. While time and energy are interrelated, the two are obviously not interchangeable. Her point was that you need to manage both to get things done. While people seem to get the idea of managing their time—hence the complaints about not having enough—they often miss the idea that they need to manage their energy just as much as their time.

As soon as she started giving examples, I recognized some of my own patterns of behavior. How my energy ebbs and flows through the day, and through the week. Some of the example she gave on how to deal with low-energy situations were useful. In one of those fits of synchronicity, was chatting with about that same sort of thing last night (“hacking your brain”, is what I think she called it).

Rob’s Substack

The Amazing Kacey Ezell

Listen now

3 months ago · 1 like · Rob Howell and Kacey Ezell

So there you have it. Two podcasts to listen to from the “not a podcast” guy. I swear, I can quit any time I want. Now, while you’re waiting for those to load so you can listen to them later, why don’t you enjoy some memes?

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I mean, Holi knows she isn’t, really, but she keeps that understanding locked away For Reasons and doesn’t look at it too closely unless she absolutely has to. So she is all silly sunshine and fluff with certain exceptions where she becomes a very serious, intensely murderous little buzzsaw.

Her familiar, Squeakers, is an undead possum. She has recently come into possession of a Grave Cloak, an item that enhances her necromantic capabilities and allows her to converse with the dead and move unseen among low-level undead.

She’s also picked up the Phantom Steed spell. Did you realize that you can flavor the appearance of your illusionary steed? YOU CAN! So I give to you… MISS BINKY RAINBOW.

Between the steed, the cloak, and her general attitude, she’s starting to look like what you get if you order a Nazgul off of Temu. I absolutely meant for her to become a pint-size dread spirit of vengeance, and I am 100% delighted to see how my itty-bitty widdle engine of destruction is taking shape.

While I sit off in the corner and cackle with excitement, please peruse these fine memes, sourced from only the most reputable of dealers on the vast Interwebs!

Still with me? Okay!

My wife’s been feeling sick. Really run down the past few days. So yesterday, we decided to stay home from church. I figured that if she were sick and staying home, I probably should, too. One, I didn’t want to take what she had out and spread it around; and two, I didn’t want to bring anything back home to her.

So there we were, sitting on the couch and watching live stream from our church. At one point I looked over, I picked up my phone, and took a picture of her.

Of course, she got all embarrassed. She was sitting there in her robe, hair undone, with her little electric blanket wrapped around her.

“Why are you taking a picture? Look at me.”

“I am looking at you. That’s why I took the picture. I love you, and I love this. I love all of this.”

Don’t get me wrong. She’s an absolute knockout. A drop-dead gorgeous woman. I love it when she does herself up and is—gestures vaguely—all that and a bag of chips. Absolutely kills it. When she’s all made up, it’s a treat for me to get to hang on her arm and go out with her. Make no mistake, in those situations, I am NOT the one people are paying attention to.

But right there on the couch with the robe? Her just getting up in the morning and flopping down there to be next to me? That is what I want. The woman I married, the woman I fell in love with. And I fell in love with a human being, not a dress and makeup. I love being with her and doing life with her, no matter what she looks like.

Ladies, word of wisdom for you: we’re guys. Yeah, sure, we like it when you purty yourself up’ but deep down, that’s the wrapping on an amazing present. It looks pretty, but what we love the gift infinitely more than the wrapping. We love you, not your clothes or your makeup or your perfume.

Anyways, enough with being sugar-sweet. On to the memes!

That’s what Cassie does:

I hadn’t planned to end the evening dancing with a ghost.

That was before I rounded the corner of Fifth and Magee and nearly ran through Joseph Dawson. One semi-awkward almost collision and a turned ankle later, I had a handsome older ghost helping me to my feet, while asking me if I was all right.

Do you want more? You can have more! I wrote “Callipygous Waltz” a few years ago, inspired by an image from . You can find it and thirty other shorts in my collection of flash fiction, One October Night.