What I'm Thankful for on my Substack

This is filler, but it's a holiday!

I’ve had family visit over the past week, and I was debating how to entertain them while also getting a post done. Then it hit me! Do what sitcoms used to do to save money and run a clip show.

From Wikipedia: A clip show is an episode of a television series that consists primarily of excerpts from previous episodes. Most clip shows include a frame story in which cast members recall events from past installments of the show, depicted with a clip of the event presented as a flashback

But I don’t have clips of a show, I have all my entries I’ve been publishing weekly since February. So to “be thankful” this year I’m going to touch on some of my personal favorites and invite you to read them if you haven’t already! And it saves me time because I don’t have to actually write anything.

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This is my third ever Substack and the first post I wrote that made me laugh out loud while writing it. The idea came from a podcast where people who ran a long term campaign fielded questions from fans and one of them mentioned they saw a friend eating a roast chicken on the Zoom call.

It got me to thinking what other foods would be really funny to explain why you don’t have them at D&D sessions. It was a blast to take an idea and go full absurd with it. I won’t spoil it, but the latter two “foods” still make me chuckle.

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I don’t recall how I came to the idea of a raccoon getting into my home and writing a Substack. It makes sense, I think about raccoons often. They’re on my mind nearly as often as the idea of time travel and that scene in Gremlins when the mom explodes a Gremlin in the microwave.

So I wrote this over the course of a day, leaving it and coming back to adjust the tone. Not linked here is the follow up, which I realized would be a fun joke follow up. (In the next post I write as myself how to keep raccoons out of your home) The challenge with this post was editing out the correct grammar and pacing in favor of building the fiction that a barely literate raccoon got into my office, locked the door, and posted an entire article about letting them eat your trash.

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While not my first fiction piece set in the city of Plunkett, Viginia, (inspired by wherre I grew up) this is my stab at a detective character and with the genre of flash fiction.

Flash fiction is a brief fictional narrative^[1] that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story;^[2] the 280-character story (also known as "twitterature");^[3] the "dribble" (also known as the "minisaga", 50 words);^[2] the "drabble" (also known as "microfiction", 100 words);^[2] "sudden fiction" (750 words);^[4] "flash fiction" (1,000 words); and "microstory".^[5]

I got several complements on the piece, which bolstered my confidence in writing more of Sean Houston’s story. I wanted to focus on the horror aspects while still keeping some humor in the scene. After all, comedy is my forte.

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This was one of my least planned posts and the amount of times I laughed while writing it, editing it, and reading it before posting is embarrassing to admit. I’m a big fan of this piece and will keep it in my portfolio. Maybe I’ll even fine tune it one day.

The whole thing reflects the style of humor I’m going for here. The absurdity of making new zodiacs, me clearly giving up near the end, the meta joke of me pointing out to the audience that I clearly don’t know what I’m doing; it’s all the kind of stuff I love in comedy.

I love movies.

Full stop.

I haven’t always kept up with movies but I do my best to keep tabs on them. I check the trivia right after I watch them especially if that was my first viewing. Now in a world of mass ratings of films and uninformed takes on movies by the unwashed masses (not you, dear reader, I’m sure you’re very washed) I’m going to partly use this Substack to review movies with a critical eye and a sensible read.

My goal isn’t to inflate my sense of film love by throwing a bunch of fuilm school terms around. My goal is to let the average person who is curious about a film know if that movie is something they would want to watch. It’s what I look for when I read a reveiw, and I fear the world doesn’t ahve enough of that.

Also it gives me a chance to talk about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Gremlins more, which I love almost as much as fried chicken.

Happy Whenever you Read This

What I’m truly grateful for is all of my subscribers and readers and friends and family who interact with this silly little Substack. I would be doing this if I had no readers, and y’all help make it feel more fun and like a real thing.

Enjoy your holidays, no matter what you’re doing. I will be celebrating the way our forefathers intended; watching MCU movies and eating chinese food.