Staring down a new knee and a new chapter
Well, it’s the day before knee replacement surgery. I’ve been writing like my brain is on fire, mostly to distract myself from the fact that someone is about to take power tools to my leg. That’s not a metaphor. That’s… tomorrow.
I wish I could say I’m handling it with grace and poise, but let’s not kid ourselves. I’ve had at least one full-throttle panic attack, and my wife deserves a medal. Or possibly hazard pay. Or a vacation that doesn’t involve me texting her from the living room to ask, “Do you think I’m gonna die on the table?” for the fifteenth time.
See, I’ve never been a follow-the-rules sort of person. Neither has my body. If there’s a rare complication, a weird outcome, or a path no one else’s cells have ever taken before? Buddy, my body’s already packed a lunch and started walking it.
This knee has been my nemesis since 1997. And before that, Osgood-Schlatter disease gave me grief after I grew five inches in fourth grade. I haven’t grown since. I’ve been 5’8″ since elementary school. You can imagine how weird that was standing next to my teacher, Mrs. Brooks, who had dwarfism. I looked less like a student and more like a visiting security guard assigned to the class.
Anyway, tomorrow I will become part robot. Titanium, baby. The bionic age begins and at some point down the road… yeah, the other knee’s getting scheduled for the same. One at a time. I’m not that hardcore.
Meanwhile… in Fictional Carnage
While my real-world body is preparing to be disassembled and put back together with power tools, my fictional world is… honestly, not faring much better. Lately, I’ve been deep in the messy, teeth-bared heart of a scene where everything goes sideways for everyone. The scene where a plan that was already morally questionable explodes into chaos and blood.
Let me set the stage. A vampire (Victoria) and a werewolf (Stephen) were supposed to be managing a delicate operation. Turn one woman (Grace) into a vampire, tidy up the process, move along. Simple, right? Just your everyday supernatural business merger. But Stephen, our resident werewolf with a bad habit of indulging his violent impulses, goes completely off script.
Instead of just helping with the turn, he snaps. Mauls someone. A pothead named Derek, who is sweet, a little clueless, and absolutely did not deserve to be on the menu. And here’s the kicker: this wasn’t an accident. Stephen wanted it. This is what happens when the leash slips.
Now, this is not your garden variety werewolf mauling, because it can’t be. Too much carnage and the whole city starts asking questions nobody wants answered. So the aftermath has to be… curated. Managed. Victoria’s furious because Stephen’s blood lust always risks blowing the secrecy wide open. But even mad, she’s pragmatic. They’ve already lined up a scapegoat. A human patsy who’s going to take the fall for Derek’s death, letting law enforcement sweep it away, nice and tidy. The supernatural world doesn’t like loose ends. Unfortunately for them, the universe loves them.
Enter Officer Bellamy. Local cop. Superstitious. Definitely not trained for this level of weirdness. He arrives on scene to find blood in the mud, a body that doesn’t line up with any crime scene he’s ever seen, and a witness he wasn’t expecting, Wendy. Poor Wendy. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She was hiding in the greenhouse, hands shaking, breathing shallow, because every fiber of her said, Run, but something else said, Stay. Watch.
And guess who else is watching? Stephen and Victoria, half-hidden in the woods, overhearing this unfolding mess, realizing that a civilian saw something she absolutely should not have. Now they have to decide: Clean up the witness? Finish turning Grace? Fight about it until the sun comes up and one of them kills the other? Option three is always on the table with these two.
The kicker? A task force. The real world humans investigating this is going to close the case. Derek’s death will get pinned on that tidy little scapegoat Victoria and Stephen lined up. Case closed. No further questions. Nothing supernatural to see here, folks. Except Nicola knows the truth. And now, so does Grace. And they’re both trying to navigate that razor thin line between what can be reported… and what must never see daylight.
This is the kind of story I’m writing. Murder. Magic. Mud. Supernatural politics held together with duct tape and sheer stubbornness. And new characters are creeping in, too. Civilians who never meant to get tangled up in this, like Wendy, whose fight-or-flight instincts malfunctioned in the best possible way. Witnesses who become problems. Problems who become players. Because in this world, once you see behind the curtain, you don’t get to unsee it.
Sound stressful? Yeah. It is. It’s also… weirdly comforting. Because when everything feels chaotic in real life, there’s something cathartic about diving into a fictional world where chaos has teeth—and the characters fight like hell anyway.
This Is Where I Beg
Look, I’m needy. I’m not even pretending otherwise. If you’ve had knee replacement, major surgery, or just stared down something terrifying and made it through, I want to hear from you.
Drop me a reply. Give me your best advice. Tell me it sucks for a bit, then gets better. Tell me how to survive the first few days without contemplating throwing myself into a volcano. A volcano with excellent wheelchair access, of course. Or hell, just say hi. I’ll take it.
I’ll be offline for a bit, but I’ll be back. With a bionic knee, a pile of story drafts, and probably a few pain medicine fueled story ideas that absolutely should not be written but maybe will be anyway.
Wish me luck.
Harlo
P.S. I’ll drop a little breadcrumb here. I’m quietly tinkering with another project. A different newsletter. One under my real name. For context, I spent years doing tech training and support at one of the tech giants, and I’ve got a doctoral degree in adult learning which is the fancy way of saying I’m a nerd who loves explaining things. I’m itching for an outlet where I can share that side of myself, helping people figure out tech without wanting to chuck their laptops out a window. More on that later.
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