What’s Happening
Just as a warning, I won’t always just talk about writing here. The world is a mess. This year has been strange in so many ways. Today I’m going to talk about health care. I have a good job. I have health care through that job. I also have Medicare because I had to have it to keep my Trinet for life from my military retirement. These are some baseline facts.
We rarely use the benefits, but recently Trish had a surgery scheduled, and a lot of aspects of health care were right there on display. Start with a primary physician who charges $85 for a visit if you just pay, and hundreds of dollars more if you have insurance. Follow with all of the pre-approvals necessary, and the health-care professionals who seem to brush past this and then look confused when charges come in.
The big downside of capitalism is that once anything is privatized it no longer serves anything but profit. Period. Medicine is priced ridiculously. Health care is priced ridiculously. Insurance is expensive and only in business to deny as many claims as possible… not because any sort of medical professional made an informed decision, but by AI and a list of points intended to find a way out of paying that is handled by a group of (not medical professional) people on a committee or board. Everyone knows all of this. It’s critical.
My point is, I knew all of this, but until we spent a couple of days in the hospital the totality of it didn’t sink in. Down to basically forcing you to buy your prescription from the hospital on the way out, which is overcharged to the insurance, which causes the insurance rates to rise. (This despite our preferred pharmacy being included in the questions they asked).
Thankfully, Trish will get her surgery next week. Thankfully, I was fortunate enough to be covered by multiple insurance plans currently. It all just makes me sad, and angry, because our country is heading toward privatizing everything. That means profit, stockholders, and executives will determine pricing in a world where the price of everything is rising. Everyday Americans are sitting around watching Fox News pundits who make a ton of money and have no worries tell them everything is okay. It’s not. It’s getting worse, and worse, and I hope we soon find a way to right the ship.
Anyway… that’s what’s happening here and sorry to burden you all with it, but if you are reading this, I assume you care a little about what I’m thinking and doing and planning. Without further ado, let’s get on with it!
I am still auctioning off books from my personal collection with many more to come. None of our kids is really a reader except Katie, and she leans more toward Poppy Z. Brite than the older authors. I would rather these find a good home and honestly, the shelves look crazy with the ridiculous number of books weighing them down.
What’s New?
CONTEST! There is a new project I’m working on. If you have read my novella When You Leave I Disappear, you will be familiar with the strange website that provided writing prompts to the main character, who then wrote short stories based on them. They were single word prompts, like “Shunned”. I am running a contest. Send a one-word prompt to david@davidniallwilson.com before midnight on Sunday, 14 September 2025. If I choose your prompt to write a story for this new project, you will receive a signed (if you want personalized) copy of the book. No details will be available for a while, but this is a big deal for me.
Not required, but if you are familiar with the novella you will have a better idea the types of one word prompts that are likely to be chosen.
When You Leave I Disappear: A Novella by David Niall Wilson – Shortwave Publishing
shortwavepublishing.com/catalog/when-you-leave-i-disappear-a-novella-by-david-niall-wilson
From Writing What Hurts
1 – High School Years
Back in high school I had some unique individuals as teachers. One, for instance, was Mr. Monts. I may be botching the spelling of his name, it doesn’t matter. Mr. Monts was famed throughout the school, both for being the best and the strangest history professor in the school’s history. He began each new class by listing Monts’s Laws on the blackboard. I don’t remember all of them, but there are a few that stuck with me. A Student is one who studies. An instructor presents information. A Teacher is one who teaches.
And Mr. Monts was a teacher. Some of his students were allowed to skip class completely. He made the deal first day that if you came to class on the day of exams and maintained an “A” average you did not have to come to class. Everyone came anyway. You never knew whether he would be talking about the American Revolution, or reading to the class from the Just-So stories by Rudyard Kipling. He had the perfect voice for it – and I’ll never forget hearing him read about the Great, gray, green, greasy Limpopo River. I’ll also never forget what I learned in his class – that experiences like he provided were what education should be about. Not a list of deadlines, some memorized facts that sift in and out of the brain and disappear. Lessons – some about history, others about life. He was a great teacher.
I was probably blessed when it came to teachers. My creative writing teacher, Nell Wiseman, recently retired, I believe, has won acclaim for her work in Illinois education. I wrote a great number of poems in her class – that is what I remember best. We had to complete a poetry notebook that was turned in to an Illinois women’s literary society (don’t recall which one). First prize was something like $10 – more money then than it is now. I wrote what I thought was a very creative poetry notebook, and one of my poems – the Ballad of Daniel Dunn (notice the alliteration?) won second prize. What I remember best is that my poem about a bear caught in a forest fire due to a careless smoker won first prize.
Except I never got that prize. I had sold the poem (and an entire second poetry notebook) to a friend. He won first prize, and he didn’t even share the money. That was the down side. The upside is that at that moment in time, I knew I could write. I was certain of it. I had competed against all of the kids in my school who thought they might be interested in creative writing, and I’d taken first and second place. Of course, I had a lot to learn about what it meant to be able to write. That knowledge came years later, but that was the start.
I also had a teacher named Mrs. Plath. She was a very strict disciplinarian, but she truly seemed to love books. In her class I discovered Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (I had to go to the desk and ask her, after reading most of the book, if she was aware of all that happened in that book because I was afraid I’d get in trouble for writing about it). I also wrote a long poem called The Torture Chamber (lost to history) as an extra credit assignment, and a short story titled “The Thing at the Top of the Stairs.” That story, years later, was rewritten and actually published in 365 Scary Stories. Even at that age I was writing the sort of thing that would draw my creative attention later in life – and fairly well, I think. Still…I didn’t take it as seriously as I needed to. Later in this book I’ll talk about turning points, and how I think my career would be different if I’d applied myself even a little bit sooner than I did, but that is digression.
My early life was filled with teachers. My grandfather, an absolutely amazing man, taught me a lot about life – about being honest – about working with my hands. He took me fishing and taught me to polish stones to make jewelry. He taught me to make a Vinegar Sling and the wonders of foods like “brains and eggs” and homemade yogurt by the mason jar. He escaped a nursing home once, stole his own car from his house (a bronze VW bug) and drove it eighty miles to my house for a visit. He was a great man, and he blessed me with a plethora of images, ideas, and stories that continue to color and populate the worlds and stories I create.
You never know when you will encounter a teacher. You never know what the lessons will be, or when you’ll put those lessons to use. I was fortunate enough to have a wide range of influences at a very early age, and to be gifted with the sort of memory that not only recorded them all in detail, but that can sift them and rearrange them and put them to good use. The best of your stories come from your life; the things that have mattered to you, brought you to tears, scared the crap out of you and brought you to your knees with pain. All the rest is trappings and fluff…the important words flow when you are writing with emotion.
Most of what I’ve written that I believe matters in more than a superficial way came to me when I was writing what hurts. That’s what this book is about, at its core. Writing what hurts, what blinds, what uplifts and what captivates. Writing in that zone where the world fades, and you disappear into the words. Writing things that, when others read them, make you hold your breath and cringe in the fear that they’ll hate them, or not understand them, or laugh…
I suppose a book about writing needs to be broken into sections of some sort. Characters. Plots. The tools of the trade. I’ll get to all of that. First I want to establish the ground floor of this house of cards. I call it that because, in the face of someone else’s methods, dreams, and career, all that I write might blow away like it was caught in a stiff wind. Writing is a solitary occupation, and no two writers occupy the same little world, in the end. You take what you can use, discard the rest, and focus on the work. Let’s get to it.
What I’m Reading
On the Kindle I have Long Division: Stories of Social Decay, Societal Collapse, and Bad Mannersand I’m about 38% through it. There are some great stories here. I will hold off mentioning them until I finish the anthology. I will note that, having mentioned how I usually rate anthologies in earlier newsletters, this one is slightly above normal so far.
What I’m Watching
Banner & Cash – something we somehow missed when it came out. Holds up beautifully, funny, entertaining and a great chance to see stars we watch on current shows in earlier roles.
We are also still watching PEACEMAKER. Good stuff.
What I’m Listening to
In audio I am VERY MUCH ENJOYING Bitter Karella’s novel debut, MOONFLOW. The characters are crazy. The plot is crazy, but it is very well written, there are no cardboard characters, and despite leaning toward humor, there are deep issues at stake, and a solid horror backdrop. Also there are mushrooms and a cellphone glitch.
Buy My Books
UNIVERSAL DAVID NIALL WILSON LINK
Closing Time at the Sunny-Side-Up
The Devil’s in the Flaws & Other Dark Impressions