October 2021 – Kirk Writes

An Excerpt

I’ve not talked a lot about what I’m currently working on. I suppose this isn’t surprising, as it is still about halfway done.

It’s a fantasy novel. The original germ that led to this was something I based some short stories on years ago in another life.

Oom – the largest, oldest, and most corrupt city in ten thousand dimensions.

That was it, that was the germ that started it. What sort of characters would live in such a city? I asked myself. What would they have to be like to survive in such a place? I came up with an unlikely pair. Once I did that, the stories I could write about them opened up.

I stopped writing for many years. This was due to life pressures – or at least that’s what I told myself at the time. Children and grueling work schedules are unforgiving.

When I returned to writing, two years ago, I started with characters I knew. I wrote a weird western, which I will polish and publish shortly before I am ready to publish the current work in progress. I wrote the first book in this fantasy trilogy, and I am partway through the second. It is taking shape nicely, I think. I have discovered some new and interesting characters scratching in the filth of city of Oom.

She loves money above all. The only reason she wants to bind the Company of this Lasko Hool right now is that, in her mind, she is binding them with my money, and keeping twice the binding-fee for herself. But I have the power now, Kooro Ko. I know what you want, and I know why you came to me. I am the only one who could possibly accomplish your end. Ozmooz does not trust you, and he will not be unguarded around you. But I, on the other hand… Kooro Ko, you are a master manipulator. But you need me. You need me, and that gives me power in my hand. The power of death.
Ilith leaned forward until her mouth was a finger’s breadth from Kooro Ko’s perfect lips, and the soft warmth of her breath was on Ilith’s face. To her left, the struggling lantern flame finally gave up, and the room subsided into close darkness.
“I will think on it,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I will think on it. What you suggest is possible, when the time is right.”

Creaking

Life Itself / Kirk

I’ve reached a stage in my life where I have to work to keep my health. I’ve got various complaints and minor problems. Some of them I have sought medical advice and treatment for, and some of them I have just lived with.

About three years ago, I was diagnosed with a heart palpitation. Because of my age – in Canada, about 2100 men my age died of heart disease in 2019 – my GP sent me off to a cardiologist. I went through a battery of tests, which disclosed that the palpitation was annoying but harmless, but I had high blood pressure and some calcium deposits on my arteries. The advice was to lose weight, exercise, and take an array of drugs, including a statin to prevent further plaque. So since that time I have lost weight, exercised, and taken the drugs as prescribed. At my last appointment with the cardiologist, he pronounced my results excellent, and told me he didn’t need to see me any more.

I have an acquaintance. He is five years younger than I am, and about five years ago he was diagnosed with serious arteriosclerosis. He had a triple bypass, and was at that point merely obese. Declaring the problem fixed, he immediately returned to his old ways, drinking heavily, smoking, and eating gigantic large-calorie meals. I just saw him a little while ago. He is now over a hundred pounds overweight, with an umbilical hernia that can’t be operated on because he is so obese. He has to walk with a cane because his legs are so bad.

I just lost my ex-sister in law to advanced diabetes. She was warned repeatedly, and strongly, over twenty years, that she needed to eat more vegetables, stop smoking, exercise, and lose weight. She had been in and out of the hospital over the last year with complications of progressive organ failure due to diabetes. A couple of weeks ago, she fell in her home where her 91 year old mother was taking care of her. They took her to hospital, and she died overnight. She was fifty-five.

I am determineded to stave off the ravages of time as long as I can. I see friends my age who can’t turn their heads, or who can’t climb a flight of stairs without stopping for a breather. As you age, it gets harder and harder to keep things in decent condition. I do pushups most mornings, and it just hurts – in the shoulder, in the elbow, in the wrist – they’re not disabling pains, but it hurts. I work my neck to maintain cervical mobility as much as I can, and it hurts.

The alternative is not to do it. Just avoid that pain. But that doesn’t avoid it – that just moves it along into the future, and makes it worse.

Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young.

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