Rainy Road Warrior Newsletter
I Have A Bad Feeling About This!
As I write this on Sunday, May 15th at 9pm EST, the GunEngine Zero Kickstarter campaign is at $819 with 49 backers and 11 days to go.
I’m aware that campaigns usually experience a lull in the middle weeks and this is why I was hoping our first week would have been stronger.
So all I can hope for is that there will be a massive influx at the end because it’s gonna take a miracle to save this.
Nightmare Fuel
In the last newsletter, I mentioned that the stress of the campaign was causing me to have nightmares and boy did I have a doozy the other night. By that, I mean it left me “shook.” My nightmares aren’t usually of the jump-scare or blood-and-gore variety. They are more about feelings of helplessness, sadness, revulsion or creeping doom. Like something horrific slowly unfolding before me and I’m powerless to do anything about it, which is exactly what happened this time.
In this particular nightmare, my entire extended family had gathered at some location. I don’t know if it was someone’s house, a hotel or some kind of resort. Anyway, night came and we all went inside to go to bed. Except for one person.
Now, I don’t remember who this person was supposed to be — if it was supposed to be a member of my family (within the reality of the dream) or if it was a stranger that just happened to also be at the location. At any rate, it was a girl. A teenage or young adult female. Nothing special about her. I thought.
The bed I was in was next to a large sliding glass door, where I could see out to the area just outside, which was basically like an empty parking lot.
When I pushed aside the curtain and looked outside, I saw the girl by herself. And she was lying on the ground. Like she was intending to sleep there.
So confusion started to well up in me. Why is this girl lying on the ground? She can’t seriously be sleeping there? Why is she doing this? Is someone making her sleep outside? It’s cold and she’s just wearing normal clothes. She’s going to freeze. Does nobody else see this?
Then, suddenly, her body started to stiffen. And become twisted. She was reaching out and writhing like she was having a seizure in slow-motion. The bones in her arms and legs were snapping, contorting her body into freakish poses.
I asked my father what was wrong with her but he didn’t reply. Nobody else said anything, either.
Then the girl’s entire head started to expand, like it was made of clay and it was being molded by some unseen, demonic hand. Her skull grew in odd angles, stretching out to inhuman proportions. One side of her forehead ballooned to the size of a grapefruit, her jaw became unhinged and dangled off to the side and her eyes started to slip out of their sockets. She eventually resembled Joseph Merrick, the “elephant man.”
She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t screaming. She just kept squirming on the ground in this horrific transformation and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But I seemed to be the only one who noticed this. I seemed to be the only one that was bothered by this. And that made me doubly confused.
Then my father walked right by her, picked up something (I can’t remember what) and brought it back into the house, without paying the girl any mind.
I said to him, “Can’t we help her? Can’t we do something?” And he simply said, “This is just how things are.”
Those words echoed in my mind as I woke up. I didn’t suddenly bolt upright and gasp like they so comically do in movies and tv shows. I just opened my eyes and felt this wave of sadness and guilt overwhelm me. I couldn’t move. Like I was in shock. And it took me a while to shake these thoughts and images and feelings out of my head. It felt so incredibly real.
It’s hard to adequately describe. But there is clearly a different feeling when you experience something through a screen (movie, tv or phone) as opposed to actually being there. Like watching a football game on TV versus being in the stadium. When you’re there, all of your senses are bombarded. It’s not just what you see in front of you, it’s the sounds all around you, the smells wafting past you and a thickness to the air that you can feel on your skin.
These are the kind of nightmares I have. And they’re more like memories.
I have no idea what they mean — if anything — but I feel like my subconscious is trying to say something to me. To make me understand something about the world or about myself. I have guesses, of course, but I couldn’t claim to have a definitive answer.
Oh and, now that I think about it, maybe if I’m still around this horror season, I can have a special edition of this newsletter in which I share some real-life “ghost” stories. These are things that I personally experienced and I’ve told very few people about.
We’ll see.
Crowdfunhumdingers
These fine folks were kind enough to support the GEZ campaign and promote it to their backers, so I’m doing the same. Check ‘em out and support them if you’re so inclined.
These are very different campaigns/books but, hey, variety is the spice of life!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dismaycomics/the-gallows-man-issues-1-and-2-golden-age-action-dark-comedy
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forbidden/theres-an-alien-in-my-toilet-issue-2
The Amazing Con-Man - Nashville
So, just this past weekend, I had a table at a convention in Nashville. This was the first show with my new setup and I found out that this was only the 2nd year of this convention.
According to the floor plan, there were about 50 vendors and we were in a (what I thought) was a fairly small room in a hotel. Traffic was decent but I noticed the same faces walking by over and over again the whole day. I was able to finally sell a couple of books (1 copy of Neotheric and 2 copies of six:eight) and a guy bought a set of my daughter’s books just as we were shutting down.
I talked to a few people about the GEZ Kickstarter and handed out some flyers so maybe that will bring some more people to the campaign.
But I’m pretty sure that I was the only vender selling comics. I saw 2 other people selling prose novels but I did not see anyone else selling comic books. Everything else was jewelry, “cutesy” crafts, anime/manga-related stuff and Funko pops.
So, if I’m still doing this convention stuff next year, I will not go back to this one. It was clearly not a comic book (or book) crowd. Nothing wrong with that just that it obviously isn’t a good fit for me.
I’m thinking that I need to start looking for literature or book conventions instead of “comic book” conventions, since those seem to be more about pop culture.
I’ll be making another post-mortem con video soon where I’ll go into more detail and I’ll upload it to my The Amazing Con Man playlist on Youtube, which you can find here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbdT7-MGwCZP1UaUldDk9vQ/playlists
Black Swan Song?
If the GEZ campaign fails, this adult horror anthology that I’ve been teasing may be my final comic book project. Depends on how it fares.
This Week in Randomness!
Warmer weather is just around the corner so I thought I’d share this little tip. If you’ve got a 4-door car, a quick way to cool down the interior is by cracking open the rear windows an inch or so when you turn on your AC. As you ride down the road, the pressure difference will allow the cold air to quickly force out the hot air. This is essentially the Venturi Principle, which I learned from working on carburetors in my previous life as a powersports mechanic. And the faster you drive, the quicker it works. So, when the cops pull you over for going 80mph in a 40mph zone, it’s perfectly reasonable to scream at them, “Trust the science!”
~Michael T Gonzalez
