the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
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NEWS AND VIEWS - JUNE 2020
WRITING NEWS I was hoping to release the latest Signalverse novel -- Sneak and the Shadow of Darkplanet -- in June, but I had to push it back a few weeks, unfortunately; I'm now hoping to get it out later this summer. I haven't been doing a lot of writing lately, but I have been working on the outline for The Brassfire Fleet, the second book in The Chemical Empires series. I already had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen in this book, but the story takes place in the Els, a huge island chain south of Partizzia, and I needed to know more about the background of this place, and the political situation there, before I got started actually writing the book. I mentioned last month that I had entered The Demon in the Metal into Mark Lawrence's SPFBO contest. The book still doesn't have any reviews or ratings anywhere, but since it entered the contest a few people have placed it on their "to-read" lists on Goodreads and I've even gotten a couple of emails from people interested in reviewing it, so it does seem to be getting a little extra attention now, which is nice. * * * * * * * * DIRTY WORK This is something I wrote a few years ago, for an old blog I used to have. Since I wrote it I've been in several houses that were even worse than the ones described here. Had to install a water heater in a really junky place this past week (this is basically what I do for a living: I fix and install water heaters for our local rural electrical cooperative). It wasn't the worst place I've ever been in, but it was probably in the top twenty — dirty, messy, and moldy, and the unspeakable bathroom had a toilet full (and I mean full, to the brim) of unflushed urine. So that was a fun job. But no, it definitely wasn't the worst place I've ever seen. Here's a rundown of the top three worst houses I've ever had to work in. 1) The House of Filth. The absolute worst place I've ever been in. The House of Filth was a single-story house out in the middle of a cornfield, and from a distance it looked like it might have been in pretty good shape -- the siding was okay, the lawn around the place was mowed, and there wasn't any serious junk in the yard (which is usually a tip-off -- people with cluttered-up yards tend to have cluttered-up houses). It wasn't until I got out of the truck and approached the house that I began to realize that the place was a dump -- the garage door was open, and all kinds of animals were roaming around inside: chickens, cats, rats, etc. There was chicken shit everywhere. The garage was also full of old, dirty appliances, soiled sofas, and piles of leaves and sticks -- obviously the garage door had been open for a long, long time, and it had never been cleaned or swept out. As bad as the garage was, though, the house itself was a thousand times worse. The first thing we saw, upon stepping into the house, was a pair of litter boxes overflowing with cat shit. Empty bags of chicken feed were all over the kitchen floor. The linoleum was dirty, rotten, and peeling. The kitchen counter was stacked about two feet high with dirty dishes -- pots, pans, and plates -- which obviously hadn't been cleaned in weeks, possibly months, possibly years. The living room looked like something out of Hoarders; there was so much clutter (most of it just random garbage, like empty bottles of Tide and boxes of cereal) that I couldn't see the floor. Everything was covered in a layer of filthy grime -- a powdery mix of dirt, dust, cat hair, human hair, and cobwebs. There were random plastic bags, full of God knows what, scattered all over the place. 
But this was the upstairs. I was there to fix the water heaters, which meant I had to go into the basement. The stairway leading down into the basement was a mildewy, cobwebbed mess. There was garbage on every step, which I had to kick out of the way in order to proceed downward. The basement itself was pretty much what I figured it would be: a drippy, damp nightmare of rusty appliances, rotten plumbing, Shelob-sized spiderwebs, and general nastiness. My dad and I (we work together) managed to fix the problematic water heater, but a few weeks later it quit again (it had rusted away to almost nothing by this point) so the homeowners asked us to drop by and remove it. It took my dad and I about an hour just to muscle the ancient old thing up the stairs and through the garbage-ridden house; by the end of it we were tired, wet (from the leaking water heater), and covered in the house's disgusting powdery grime. Stay in school, kids. 2) The Farmhouse from Hell. This was the home of a kid I used to go to school with -- a nice enough guy, I guess, but not very bright and not very hygienic. The guy was a farmer, and he lived alone in a ratty old farmhouse that was probably built sometime around 1900. It was a dirty, decrepit mess, and probably the saddest, most uninviting place I've ever visited. Most people who live like slobs (the Hoarders types) usually have at least one room that they keep relatively livable, typically the living room or a bedroom (or wherever the TV is). This becomes their nest, the room where they spend 95% of their time. They'll have a sofa in there, and pillows, and a rug or a carpet remnant or something, and usually a couple of dirty dishes or empty soda bottles scattered around. This place had no such room. The entire house was scarily spartan, with almost no personal effects to be seen at all. There was almost no furniture. There was nothing on the walls (except for a single calendar, pinned up with a tack), maybe because the plaster was coming off so badly. No rugs, no carpet — just creaky century-old floorboards. There was no warmth to the place at all, no sense that a human being actually lived there. Creepily spartan though it may have been, the upstairs was nothing compared to the basement. It took us fifteen minutes (I timed it) just to get down the basement steps -- the entire passageway was covered in cobwebs, which were covered, in turn, with black soot from a malfunctioning fuel-oil furnace. We had to brush away the cobwebs with a broom handle as we descended down into the murky depths. The basement was nasty, of course, full of all the usual things nasty basements are full of. This one was particularly bad, though, because the water heater we were there to fix had been leaking for months, and the floor was a slippery, muddy bog of discarded toilet seats and assorted garbage. Yay! 3) The Hillbilly Hovel. This was the first really disgusting place I ever had to work in, so it sticks out in my mind a bit more than the others. This monstrosity, a decaying shack inhabited by a grubby gang of snaggle-toothed hillbilly dairy farmers, was another house out of Hoarders, except dirtier. Their dairy operation was so filthy, with such a high bacteria count, that they couldn’t get their milk to qualify as Grade A; they had to sell it as Grade B. (Which, if you know anything about dairy farming, suggests an almost insane level of uncleanliness. I've seen dozens of ancient, rotting, moldy dairy parlors in my day, with flies buzzing around all over and cow shit covering pretty much every square inch of the milk room, and none of those places ever had to resort to selling Grade B milk.) Anyway, my dad and I had to install a water heater at this place. The easiest way down into the basement was through the garage, which was full, almost to the ceiling, with piles and piles of garbage, most of it old food packaging. Carrying the water heater into the house was incredibly treacherous; it was like trying to carry the thing across a landfill. I'll never forget the look on my dad’s face after he almost slipped and fell into the trash: he was obviously grossed out, but was also so amazed by the over-the-top mess that he looked like he was about to burst out laughing. We eventually descended into the basement, which was almost, but not quite, as bad as the garage. To our horror, we discovered a woman living in this grotesque cellar: she was sleeping on a dirty mattress in the middle of the cement floor, her pillow not six inches away from a puddle of wet garbage (old toothpaste tubes, shampoo bottles, Doritos bags...things like that). She explained that she was living in the basement because her elderly father-in-law kept it too hot upstairs. And indeed he did: the old guy liked it hot. It was probably about a hundred degrees upstairs -- he was running his furnace full-blast, and I think this was in June. (I didn't ask her why she couldn't just ask her father-in-law to turn down the heat -- I wasn't in a chatty mood at that point. I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could.) * * * * * * * * POETRY I admit it's kind of weird, but I like to memorize things. Kings and queens of England, the whole roster of heavyweight champions, the notorious Frozen Peas scene, a few poems and speeches, etc. I just like having these things as part of my mental furniture. Of all the poems I've committed to memory, this one is my favorite. It's not the most original choice, I know, and the intellectuals hate it (as they hate Longfellow generally) but I've always found it comforting. When it comes to poetry, my tastes are pretty bourgeois.
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