So when you have a massively rare panic attack, and once you are coherent enough to listen to everything going on around, and you say "I wrote a story." and she says "You wrote a story? and I say "I wrote a story. For First Responders."
When all the trash has been deleted from my Google Search listing (I never would have figured we would have to pay to have the trash removed, but it is a market. For the trash makers and the trash removers.)
Anyway, I realized that there is a whole bunch of information over two decades and absolutely nothing up to date, including my LinkedIn. But I like my LinkedIn as it is.
Back to the First Responder. I have PTSD dating back to cancer coming back when I was a kid. I could handle it coming once, but it came back right away. I wasn't a fan.
When something like that happens, sure, I know, in levels of trauma, it's absolutely not the worst. But it does have a lasting effect on you.
My first book, The Crumpled Note: A Teenager's Battle With Cancer (not the story in this discussion above) was a journal about me going through cancer treatment as someone in high school. It mentions the default hero mode a lot of people go into when they know the upcoming suffering. A kid in high school has often has no kids, and no kids to suffer if they die.
I had a lot of success in beginning of Internet Marketing and Online Advertising in 1996 and early 1997. I wrote the most popular History of the Internet, frequently cited until Wikipedia came out. It stopped in 1996 because I couldn't write myself into a history, regardless of how I felt about a situation.
Way off track here. So, "You wrote a story?" ... "For First Responders."
Losing people was never something I was good at. Grief is a terrible thing. I try to forget how to spell it. Part of the dozens of reasons my newest book is called "Teaching With Typos."
My first book, as noted earlier, is The Crumpled Note: A Teenager's Battle with Cancer.
I also wrote two short stories, novellas, I guess depending on your genre-ology, Angel Unassigned: Or the Proposal to Someone Who Will Accept Another One Broken, a story of three, and Angel Reassigned, a story of two.
Angel, Unassigned utilizes characters from a made-up organization called Stellethee Security and Logistics. I was already in the process of writing an online game using characters from the Stellethee Group, so I wrote them into the story, and altered the end of Angel, Unassigned to allow it to carry further into the online game.
I went into a diner to finish editing Angel, Unassigned. I failed to edit it because the server wanted a copy of it. (Happy Birthday, btw, I'm sorry I always get caught up in projects when I'm anxious.) I had duplicates of the other things to edit but not that. In the Stellethee University, we would call that failure to prepare for the obvious outcome. An unintentional, not "the normal me," response to anxiety and PTSD.
When I opened this file, to write some HTML, I was intending to write a short blurb about how you can read a lot of cool stuff that happened to me in the past 20 years. I guess you can read the introduction to Angel, Unassigned, follow #stelletheeU, and play Prevent The Trace ARG for now.
I told the First Responder to tell people she saved a life that day. It was probably more than a half dozen people involved who did. I'm glad to say the following.
Flashing lights. It was always flashing lights to Angel.
"When you see an accident, that's someone's best friend in there," he'd say.
See You Tomorrow. Bye.
-dave - PO BOX ONE, PARADISE, PA 17562
