Rainy Road Warrior Newsletter
January 15, 2025
Death By A Thousand Cuts
(Note: Skip to the next section if you don’t care to read about my personal melodrama.)
As I predicted, 2024 wasn’t a great year, to say the least. Not only did my wife get cancer but then Hurricane Helene decided to blow through town.
My wife did finish her chemotherapy and had a lumpectomy. For those that don’t know, that’s just to remove the cancerous bits, not her entire breast.
But they also removed some lymph nodes and found that one of them had traces of the cancer. So, now she’s going through radiation treatments. While she seems to be doing okay, this has all taken a great physical and mental toll on her.
On top of that, our health insurance hasn’t been paying the bills that they should be paying. I’ve been on the phone with them (and the hospital) at least a couple of days every week for the past month or so to try to straighten this all out. I don’t know if it’s just incompetence or if these people truly are evil but they are working my last damn nerve!
So, yeah, then the hurricane hit here in Asheville. Actually, my wife caught pneumonia and was admitted to the hospital the day before the hurricane. Which, in a way, kind of worked out for us. It meant she was safe in a place where there were a lot of people that would look out for her. Me and the kids just rode out the storm at home and our neighborhood ended up coming through fine, for the most part.
We did lose electricty, water and cell service but the house was undamaged. And we were able to get down to the hospital everyday to stay with my wife for the 3 days that she was an inpatient. That helped a lot because the hospital provided everyone with drinking water and food and they had limited power, using their generators.
After my wife was discharged, we decided to leave Asheville because there were reports that water and electricity wouldn’t be restored for weeks, the kids wouldn’t be going back to school anytime soon and both of our jobs were on hiatus. So we went down to Florida to stay with my parents for a few days… all to be chased out of there by another hurricane! It was like we were living in a horror movie!
So we went to Georgia to stay with my aunt for a few days before finally heading back to Asheville. When we got back, power came back online a few days later but water didn’t come back for another 3 weeks, I think. And, even then, it could only be used for flushing toilets. There were “relief stations” set up around town at parks and shopping malls where we could get drinking water, non-potable water, food (MREs) and even wash our clothes. That last one also worked out well for us because our dryer’s heating coil burned out just before the hurricane and it took a long time to get the part delivered so that I could repair it.
So, yeah, 2024 has my vote for Worst Year Ever!
On With The Show
I just activated the pre-launch page for FrankenFury: The Monster of Martial Arts! Here’s the link if you want to sign up. Hopefully, we can get enough people on this to start off strong. The campaign will be to complete the book so if the campaign fails then the book will (probably) never happen. So please share this link if you can!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rainyroad/frankenfury-the-monster-of-martial-arts
This is the project that I teased last year. It’s basically Frankenstein meets Bruce Lee meets Spider-Man. I’ve been wanting to create something more appropriate for kids/teens and this goes along those lines. In that sense, I guess it could be considered in the same wheelhouse as GunEngine Zero. It’s the classic hero’s journey with a tragic hero fighting his demons — internal and external.
It obviously draws heavily from Eastern cultures (most specifically, Chinese) and is primarily a take on kung-fu films but there are a lot of other elements thrown into the mix. There’s some sci-fi, some philosophy, some humor and a little bit of horror.
I don’t have a specific start date for this campaign yet but I’m guessing sometime in March. In the meantime, I’ll be posting more teasers/info on here, on Twitter (nah, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to call it “X”) and on my website. I guess also Facebook and Instagram, although I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a lead from either of those so I won’t be bothering posting there too much.
The intent is for this project to lead into a much bigger and broader endeavor, which I’ll explain in time. So, stay tuned, Chachi!
Keeps On Ticking
By the way, the Fund My Comic campaign is still active. I’ll be keeping that to serve as a store front and for anyone that might want an alternative to Kickstarter to get all of my previous books. If the FrankenFury campaign is successful, I will add that book to the FMC campaign but that probably won’t happen until the end of this year.
And if you’ve already picked up a book, sharing this link on your socials could be just as impactful. Thank you!
Rainy Road Roundup! 5 Comics Ready To Ship! - FundMyComic
Wham-tastic!
Last year, I ordered one of these Wham Stands that I saw people talking about on Twitter and Facebook. I thought they looked cool and it was reasonably priced. The “whamblems” use magnets and are interchangeable.
I got it because I was planning on doing the local con that was supposed to happen in November but got canceled because of the hurricane aftermath. Hopefully, I’ll get to use it this year if I can get back into the con scene.
Now You Know!
I just found out today that (all?) Lowe’s have free air pumps located outside, near the contractor area. So if you ever need air in your tires (like I did this morning), don’t bother with the machine at the gas station that’ll eat all your coins and still not work (like happened to me this morning). Just head on over to Lowe’s and get your aire gratis!
Until next time!
~Michael T Gonzalez
