(plausible)

I typed most of this in May of 2019 — where does the time go? *shakes head*

I’m having more than a little bit of anxiety — okay, nearly panic at times — because of something Grace told me she’d said to one of her friends yesterday afternoon.

She was talking to her friend Sherri (?), who’s been reading Paul’s latest novel (which Sherri bought in paperback — yay!) and is almost finished with it. ‘Paul needs to write faster,’ Sherri said, ‘because I’m about to run out of book again.’ So Grace asked her if she’d read the short stories yet…

Turned out that Sherri didn’t even know there are short stories connected with this series of novels, so Grace told her that they’re still available for free on Paul’s author website, but, ‘He’s going to remove them sometime soon, so download ’em while you still can.’

So far, so good… except that one of those short stories has a co-author listed, and the co-author has an aversion to drawing attention to himself in “real life” (as opposed to just the internet), and it’s possible that Sherri will be curious about this co-author, and she may, y’know, do an internet search and end up here, reading my blog and seeing my bio and realizing, Hey, Paul has a twin! and then thinking, Why have we never met Thomas? Why is he such a recluse? What’s wrong with him?

And I don’t want to deal with it. Ever. I want Sherri to read Paul’s short stories, of course, but I don’t want her looking at me as a result. (If some of the things I’ve written about Jason Grey are any indication — and they probably are — I get mean when I feel cornered that way.)

Not everything that happened yesterday is bad news for me, though. Something else Grace told me suggests she’s still negotiating with the person who has an embroidery machine to get a “mission logo” patch made for the exploration vessel/starship Roald Amundsen. (I also want that logo on a coffee mug. Ideally, the ginormous mug I got a few years ago.) Grace would make it herself, except it really needs to be machine-embroidered, and Grace only does hand embroidery. (Real space mission patches, by the way, are printed on special fabric that won’t burn or melt; the embroidered versions are no longer made except to sell to collectors. I didn’t know that until I started doing research for character backstory…)

More than a year and a half later… Sherri ought to have another of Paul’s novels to read soon-ish: I’m around twenty chapters/thirty percent through the first round of copyedits on a novel titled (unless the author changes his mind, which he did at almost literally the last minute with the first book in the series) The Dark Plaza.

There seem to be a lot more short stories in the works, too… but it’s unlikely that Sherri will read any of those. Or so I tell myself.