Gauthic Times #108 News & Other Stuff from Bill Gauthier, or When the Hell Am I?

Hello, friends.

Sometimes I’m all over the place. Today has been like that. I’ve done some running around because a snowstorm is coming and I needed to move my Dad’s minivan because of a parking ban where he lives. Then I had to get some gas and get some lunch. My Crohn’s Disease has been acting up because I’m closing to needing a new dose of my medication and I think I’m fighting off a cold.

How’re you?

Let’s get into this week’s update!

Welcome to the 108th installment of Gauthic Times, the newsletter about my writing, my life, and my wife.

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You can also get my collection Catalysts or my novellas Alice on the Shelf and Shadowed.

Anyway, let’s go!

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Editing brought me to page 592 of Project: Amusement Park, leaving me with 90 pages left to edit. The chapter I’m at is 33 manuscript pages long, a little more than a third of what’s left. All the characters are moving toward each other on the game board, or all the strings are beginning to wind together, or whatever other metaphor you’d like to use. I’m hoping to finish the editing by next week. If I can bang out 10 pages a day, that’ll be nine days, or February 17^th as I write this on Saturday afternoon. That’s the first day of February vacation, which means I’ll spend most of that week entering the edits into the book, thereby revising it for an official 2^nd draft. I will hit up beta readers at that point.

I sent another query to another agent for Project: Monster. I’d found this agent last week and saw she was opening her queries up on Friday. I set a reminder and when I got home from work, I sent it. That’s four agents and one publisher that has it, going back to February 2023. Let’s all cross fingers that someone sees the genius that is this novel that like Stephen King’s It meets Monsters, Inc.

I also recorded two videos and edited one.

The video I edited today is a video trying to get people to become Patrons. I’ve had some friends watch it for feedback and one suggests I pare it down further. I’ll see what the other friend says and then go from there.

I also recorded a video thanking people for signing up to become Patrons. I haven’t edited that one yet.

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Paid-subscribers on Patreon get an art/comic book update here. Become a Patron and see what’s in the works!

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One of the unhappy truths about me is that I suck at celebrating things. I will remember you have a birthday but forget to get you a card. Christmas? Same. When I see something that inspires me to get it for someone, I’m great. Unfortunately, I’m usually moved to be inspired by things that I like. As such, I wish to shower love upon my beautiful, intelligent, funny, kick-ass wife Pamela. So here is:

An Ode To My Loving Wife Since This Is Valentine’s Day Week and I Have Not Yet Gotten Her a Card

I was pacing through the apartment saying that I wasn’t sure what to write about this week when Pamela said, “Write about your loving wife.”

It was a joke because, unlike me, she has a normal ego. But that got me thinking that maybe I should write about her. I have said many times that she puts up with my shit but doesn’t take it, and that’s the truth. And with me, there’s always shit.

Pamela and I met in January 2007. I heard her boots coming toward me around the corner of a CVS in Jamaica Plain in Boston. We were on Centre Street and South Huntington Ave outside a restaurant called the Alchemist. I like boots. I don’t wear boots as much as I used to but I like them. And a woman in boots…be still my heart. And Pamela can wear boots.

They came clicking around the corner and I followed the boots up the black coat, fancy scarf, and there she was, the woman I was going to meet. The woman I would eventually marry.

How does such a lowly cretin as myself get the attention and ardor of one so magnificent? Was it my sex appeal? No, for I have none. Was it my charm? Probably not since most of my charm was stolen from either Han Solo or Lando Calrissian. Was it my boyish good looks?

It was, she says, my sense of humor. And how sweet I was.

(An aside. She disputes everything I wrote about myself. She calls me handsome and cute and wiggles her eyebrows at me. Maybe she’s right and I’m wrong. But this is my newsletter/blog/Patreon update, so I’m going with what I wrote).

Seriously, though, something clicked and has clicked ever since. I’ve nearly screwed it up several times over the 18 years with all sorts of stupidity–and I’m not unconvinced that I will still screw it up at some point in the next 18–but somehow it still works.

Pamela is my biggest cheerleader, and I hers. She doesn’t realize how amazing she is and how her mind is. Things haven’t been easy in our lives for a long time now, since 2019, but we’ve maintained. She’s been a terrific stepmother to my older daughter and an amazing mother to our younger daughter.

Thanks to her, I’m still here and I’m writing these words. Not just these words, but all my words since 2008.

So this one’s for her.

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And here we are at the end of another update. It was a little all over the place, but so am I these days. Thank you so much for subscribing, reading, and for your support!

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