Oh Herman P. Hunter, Where Art Thou?

Jump to the YouTube video here.

So, yes, I know it's been a while since I've posted a blog post or a video. The last three months have strayed into the territory of the insane. So, I thought I'd post an update to explain where I've been and what's been going on.

Suffice to say, the last three months have been...um...challenging.

The Bionic Hedge

In the wee hours of the morning on December 17th, 2024, I went into surgery for a total hip replacement. For seven years, I had a hip that had been slowly going bad. It started with limping, and in a few years I was incapable of mowing the lawn as well as a large number of physical activities. By the time surgery rolled around, my hip had degraded to the point where I couldn't sit for long periods of time without elevating my leg. Writing had become a challenge, to say the least.

The first month post-surgery, I was pretty much out of commission, unable to do a LOT of things I normally do. No going up or down stairs. No walking on ice (heh, good luck with this during winter in Michigan). No shoveling the walk and driveway. I couldn't sit for long periods to write or work on my computer until mid-January. Apparently, the hip was pretty bad.

In addition to all of this, the incision was not healing fast. Because the area is so flexible, and I am a hefty boy, the top part took a long time to heal - like three months long. I had to have additional stitches put in to secure the wound. It was not a pleasant process.

Physical therapy started in February and has recently ended. I can now sit for long periods of time without issues. There are some minor complications to walking but it's nothing extreme. I can lift my leg again and carry on with my daily activities like normal, though from time to time, I will use a cane. I've been told it can take up to a year for the implant to be fully healed. The incision? Well, that healed on the Sunday of the Midland Comic Con, which is something I'll discuss later.

It probably didn't help that during this time, new physical challenges would make themselves known in an unpleasant way.

The Great Flood of 2025

I live on a dirt road, and our house sits sort of low on the land. It's not uncommon for water to collect and pool on the driveway. I have some drainage traps dug out to drain away the water. The lawn often absorbs this accumulation during periods when it's warmer. I also have pumps I can use in extreme situations to pump the water out to my backyard, where it gets absorbed by the lawn. In really heavy rain situations, the garage will sometimes flood, but that is a rare occurrence. Except this year. The spring melt started sometime in the last weeks of February. During a melt, the water often collects in my drive - this has been getting worse recently. Well, to further complicate things, the deterioration of the roadbed in addition to the grading of the road meant that the runoff from a couple of roads was streaming into my driveway. Ice dams prevented this water from draining into the water traps I had dug. I was pulling out the pumps, but even with both pumps going simultaneously, they were barely able to keep up with the incoming torrent. This went on for days. When it was sunny the snow continued its melt. When it rained, things were even worse. Day after day, I was out there, running the pumps, walking along icy and snowy terrain with my cane doing what I could with a fragile hip and messed-up shoulder (see below) to keep the water from flooding into my garage. I was on the phone with the county road commission - no answer. I filed a request - still no reply. I got on the phone with the city and I was nearly pleading with these people for help. Their response was the typical, "There is nothing we can do." I was literally at the end of my rope. My garage would flood because the pumps couldn't keep up. They had been running for hours. Worse yet, I feared that once the garage flooded, the basement would soon be next. I felt so defeated. So, I get up from my desk to go check on the pumps, and what do I see? There's a pickup at the end of my drive, just sitting there. One guy just watching the end of my drive. I don my sweatpants that are wet from the calf down, slide into my soaked shoes, and then put on my coat. Grabbing my cane, I head outside to move one of the pumps. The guy in the truck gets out and introduces himself to me. He was from the city road department and had been inspecting the situation with my driveway. He told me that he had called in a road grader and when it got there, he and the grader operator would fix the road and end the runoff. Three hours later, as I pulled the pumps, disconnected them, and readied them to go inside, the water had ceased pouring into my driveway. The driveway was mostly clear of water, the flow diverted and the road temporarily reworked.

I can't remember how many times I thanked Duane (that was his name) for his help. I lost count somewhere around twenty. It was clear the flurry of my petitions to the Almighty, on that day and the days preceding it, had been heard, and aid was sent. All it took was for me to not be so stubborn and ask for help. Actually, it was more like begging, but it worked. It felt like a thousand pounds had been lifted from my shoulders. Literally.

Since then, the snow has melted completely away. The temporary fixes Duane put in have held. I was told that, sometime in the spring, they'd rework the road to prevent this stuff in the future.

I still can't thank Duane enough.

And speaking of shoulders...

Oh, My Shoulder!

In past years when the snow fell, we'd manually shovel the driveway and walk. Or, we'd send the kids out to do it. Well, the kids are on their own now. Me and the wife ain't getting any younger, and the state of my hip is such that - replacement or no - I can't shovel the drive. So, this year, we bought a snowblower sometime in October 2024.

Sometime between October and early February, I pulled something in my shoulder. I was reaching for a plate in the cupboard and something in my right shoulder went, "pop!" It was soon followed by extreme pain. As a result, I babied the shoulder and decided that, sometime in the spring, I'd go and have an orthopedic guy look at the joint.

It's early February 2025, and a snowstorm just dropped six inches of snow on the driveway. Unable to start the snowblower, my wife decides she's going to shovel the drive by hand. I can't do it because of my hip and the concern over falling. Undaunted, I decide I'm going to figure out how to start the snowblower. I ask where the instructions are. She doesn't know. So, I look at some instructions on the engine and set up the thing to start, but I couldn't find any way to start the engine electrically. So, being a manly man with a bad shoulder, I decide to manually start it by using the pull cord. And if my shoulder wasn't bad off before that great idea, I was in absolute misery after 15 attempts to get the snowblower working. Sitting there in the still cold of the garage, I curse myself for being so stupid as to buy a manual start snowblower. And, as I'm standing there, I notice these three prongs below a shielded enclosure mounted to the engine. It's the prongs used to plug the machine into an electrical outlet to start the engine. To make a long story short, I got the snowblower running. The price was a shoulder so bad off that I could barely sleep for days on end.

I paid to have an X-Ray done of the shoulder independent of the specialist, just to get a heads-up on what was wrong. The results were...not good. I was pretty sure I was looking at surgery to rectify the problem. So, here I go again with pain, stitches, and wounds. Well, the specialist was a little more encouraging. After taking new X-Rays and doing some tests, we decided on a cortisone shot and some physical therapy as a first round. So, as soon as my hip therapy ended, the shoulder work would begin.

The shoulder is a little better now, though it currently hurts with all the typing I'm doing. We'll see what the future holds.

Flop-A-Mania

The Revenant and the Cult, Book Two premiered on March 3rd, 2025 to virtually no fanfare. No ads. Little in the way of a release effort. Sales were bad last year, despite con sales. The funds I had on hand were spent buying books for the Midland Comic Con coming up on March 5th. The book was released with barely a peep and few, if any, preorders.

Add to this the fact that Audible still hadn't made the book available on their site. In fact, as I write this post, it's STILL not available on their site. Spotify has it available as does Barnes & Noble. Kobo. Chirp Audiobooks. Audiobooks.com. Google Play. EVERYONE has it available for preorders or sale, but not Audible. It's still tied up in quality control. A week later, a 6-hour book STILL hasn't passed the quality control assurance process. Even though my publisher and the narrator both used the same tool Audible uses to check quality.

I'm still fuming.

Audiobooks are among my biggest selling formats and THE BIGGEST audiobook outlet is slow-walking my book.

All I can say is, if you have a Spotify premium membership, you get access to all of my audiobooks as part of the plan. Oh, and I think they PAY me more than Audible as well.

Luckily, my physical sales have made up for this idiotic loss of revenue. And speaking of physical sales...

A Mess in Midland

After selling out of stock at the Midland Mall Comic Con in 2024, it wasn't a hard sell to get me to sign up for 2025 - which is what I did in August of of last year.

So, it's near the end of February 2025, and I'm getting ready to attend the Midland Comic Con. It was the last week in February - when the mess with my driveway was beginning to ebb - that I managed to talk to another participant in last year's con. What should I discover? The original organizer of the convention was out, and the venue took over control.

Oh, and my past reservation? Well, that didn't transfer over to the new convention.

I stewed and fumed for a day. The driveway, my flaccid release, and now this. In the end, I decided to see if I could salvage this situation. I called the original organizer of the event and then called the new one. Luckily, the new organizers understood my predicament and worked with me. Given that I wasn't the only person who had this problem, they had opened up an overflow space - an empty storefront off of the main drag - for just this circumstance.

Last year, I was right across from Barnes & Noble; a prime spot, I figured. Now? I was in a place called The Bat Cave, and a cave it was. Off the main track. Walls with the spackle still showing. It looked like a half-wired warehouse. Part of me was dreading this event, thinking it was going to be another utter failure.

By 2:30 PM, Sunday we were packed up and leaving. No, I didn't leave all demoralized and disgusted. We had completely sold out of stock...again. I brought nearly DOUBLE the stock I brought last time because I didn't want the drive home this year to be another hour of me kicking myself that I didn't bring more books to sell.

That's a sellout at the same venue, two years in a row. I'm surprised I could walk out the front door with my ego as big as it was at that moment in time.

My dour attitude up to that point vanished like a fart in a hurricane. And, at that moment in time, it felt like my fortunes had suddenly changed for the better. Because they had. All of the crap that was raining down on me had ended, and things were suddenly looking up.

Coupled with some online book sales, March 2025 is looking to be the best month in sales that I've had since I started publishing.

The Takeaway

The greatest casualty in all of this has been working on the next book. Stress, pain, and lack of time have hampered my progress. I fear my release may be delayed until late 2026, though I'll work hard to make sure that doesn't happen. But, the work continues nonetheless. I'm about 10 to 15 chapters in already, though much of what I've written needs to be heavily revised.

The fact is, the end of February and the beginning of March was a challenging period of time in my life. Then, it was like the storm had passed, the clouds parted, and the sun shone in a clear sky once again. In fact, this was almost literally the case. And while God threw a lot of challenges my way, he also bestowed upon me a few blessings as well.

So I really can't complain.

Anyhow, now you know.