The Staabiverse

As the Day of Mothers approaches, I would like to thank a little lady who let me hitch a ride in her womb for nine months. A gal I call Mom.

Thank you for keeping me safe and sound when I was at my most vulnerable.

Thank you for the time in 1st grade when you stood up to a bully for me, and then later, when I was getting full of myself, setting me straight and telling me I would have to learn how to fight my own battles.

Thank you for grounding me when I was disrespectful in front of company.

Thank you for not feeding me to wolves at different points during my adolescence. I know that even on my best days I was a pain in the ass.

Thank you for cooking every meal, every day, even though cooking isn't your favorite thing to do. Thank you for the Hamburger Surprise (a big ol' slab of ground beef with an outer crust of mashed potatoes), the Saucy Suzan ribs, the multitudinous hamburgers and the lasagnas. Oh, the beautiful lasagnas. My Mama lasagna...it make the angels cry it's so good.

Thank you for making Deb and I individual birthday cakes, even though we shared our birthday parties.

Thank you for reading to us at bed time and making us pancakes shaped like Mickey Mouse (they were not licensed, so you faced some serious lawsuits).

Thank you for taking care of us when we were sick, and teaching us how to take care of ourselves. To this day, I treat my wounds with peroxide or rubbing alcohol.

Thank you for always putting us first.

Thank you for four years of driving me to high school so I wouldn't have to spend two hours on a bus every morning.

Thank you for your patience, because Lord knows, living with two adolescents...it must've been stretched to the very limit.

Thank you for always trying your best. And for making Christmas the most festive day of the year (even when certain Grinches, WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS!, tried to drag the room down).

And most of all, thank you for always being there. Thank you for keeping a roof over our heads, even when it meant dumping Grandma Palpatine's bucket and serving her meals day in and day out. Thank you for being a solid foundation when the world was nothing but chaos.

Thank you for your endless support and encouragement.

For these reasons, and about a million others I don't have room to list, you really are the best Mom.

I hope this first Mother's Day as a Grandma is a great one, along with all of the days that follow.

I love you Mum, now and always. Happy Mother's Day.

Love,

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhMGcPypqXU)

Greetings. Today, instead of waxing philosophical or sharing knowledge, I'd like to shamelessly plug and offer some free chapters from my novels. All of this, AND a bonus script.

The titles are links for PDFs of the first five chapters of the novels. Feel free to open them in your browser, download, print, share...go sick! I also included links to the Amazon, iTunes and Barnes & Noble sites where the full versions of the books can be purchased, Vampire's Waltz and Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire are as low as 99 cents!

Vampire's Waltz-

Background-This is the first book I ever published, but it's the third one I wrote. I was 20 years old, working at a laundromat making three bucks an hour. This was back in 1991. I didn't have any schooling or professional experience as far as writing went. I just wanted to tell a story.

It isn't very polished, but I hope it's entertaining. If I had time I would do a whole "Director's Cut" of the bad boy, but time and tide wait for no one. I always thought this one would make a good anime, but, again, who has the time?

Summary-An earthquake and a freak storm isolate Manhattan. The survivors struggle against the elements and the supernatural force behind the weather. It soon becomes clear that not only are their lives at stake, but the lives of every human on the planet.

Samples-The first five chapters of Vampire's Waltz can be downloaded here. To purchase it, head over to Amazon, iTunes or Barnes & Noble and enjoy. We're also on Facebook.

Shadows Never Sleep-

Background-I wrote this one back when I was 18, but I went through and gutted it a few years ago. It's still raw in places, and a couple of characters in particular need work, but this is the story I'm closest to. It's a little sci-fi/horror blend I whipped up. I hope you'll find it to your liking.

Summary-Terrorist attacks in NY leave only three survivors, each unable to remember anything about their attackers. A detective investigating the case works to restore their memories, but it soon becomes clear that neither he, nor the terrorists, are what they appear to be.

Samples-A free pdf of the first five chapters can be found by Clicking or right-clicking to download here. Volume Two, Three and Four are available on Amazon, as well as The Complete Volume if you're feeling froggy. We're also on Facebook.

Heart of Ice, Blood of Fire-

Background-I wrote this one back in 1992, the germ of it began while working at a crap retail job back in NY. I was walking to work, wondering if the "me" of a parallel universe had it any easier. Especially that bastard who passed the driver's exam on the first try and went into the electrical apprenticeship program. Prick.

Anywho, that one thought spiraled into another and I finally found myself with a little tale to tell. Now this was back before Fringe and other sci-fi shows that showcase the parallel universes. Although I'd be lying if I said Mirror, Mirror didn't have an influence.

Summary-After the loss of her family, Angela Learty is resigned to live her life quietly, and alone. When she meets a charming young man at work, she doesn't think much of it. She doesn't realize this man has been stalking her, dimension after dimension...

Samples-A free pdf of the first five chapters can be found here.  To purchase it, head over to Amazon, iTunes or Barnes & Noble and enjoy. You can also find us on Facebook.

BONUS! Rise of the Pandas-Not a novel, but a screenplay. It started off as a response to the terrible Syfy movies, but I think it turned into a cracking good story. The title speaks for itself, but the plot involves some Pandas...who rise. TWIST! Download pdf here. You can follow the project at Amazon Studios.

Let me know what you think. Are they good? Should I flush them forever? Tips or tricks to save them? Leave some comments below and enjoy!

Tomas Staab

Twitter-@StaabTom

Living in a rural section of  Washington, there's one thing I've had to make peace with: Blackouts.

Every winter, without fail, we lose power. Most of the time it's for a couple of hours. When it's a really serious wind storm, it could be out for days. Now, for a city boy who grew up in NY (the last blackout before I left was some time in the 70s), the loss of power takes some adjusting.

When the power goes out in the daylight, it's not that dramatic. The clocks go dead, but other than that, there's no real visible impact.

It's the quiet that hits you. You never really notice how much humming, beeping and buzzing is going on around you until it all cuts out at once. The refrigerators (one in the kitchen and the kegerator in the laundry room), the dehumidifiers, and any other random gadgets all go silent.

Then, night falls. And if your whole neighborhood loses power, that's when things get really dramatic. You look outside and see nothing but darkness. Inside, maybe you have candles, maybe you have flashlights or lanterns. We have both. And it's enough to see by, but it isn't what we're used to.

We have a wood stove, so heating the house isn't an issue. As for cooking, we have to use the grill outside because the electric stove is kaput, so it pays to get some food cooked up in daylight and hope it isn't raining too hard.

The biggest hurdle is mental. It's making your brain slow down to this new pace.

If you write blogs, well, you gotta go old school and break out a pen and notebook. If you film, you have as long as your batteries last. Same goes for your tablet, laptop, etc. There's no more plugging things in when the bar gets low. You start rationing the power on your devices. Turning off the WiFi is normally the first thing I do to conserve power.

As for the internet, the router went out with everything else, so that's not an option. Even if you have a data plan and a phone that you can use as a hotspot, if you live in the boonies, all that phone is now is an alarm clock.

Going to sleep is strange, especially if you're used to ambient noise. With no power, you can hear everything in the house. Every creak, every groan of lumber, even when the cat sneezes two rooms away.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the power will come on and all of that wonderful buzzing and humming resumes. You wake up in the morning before the sunrise and the world is full of light again.

Everything goes back to normal.

But not really.

The dark is normal. The quiet is normal. This glowing, buzzing world we've built around ourselves is the unnatural thing. We've surrounded ourselves with a world that resolves around humanity, but when that illusion fails and we're faced with reality, with the quiet and the dark...things get weird.

I used to get anxious. I'd look around for things to do. "Oh hey, I can play some video games...oh, nope. Maybe catch up on...no."

Eventually, you're left with reality. Depending on the time of year and the weather, you may be housebound. It was during one of these nights that my wife taught me the card game canasta (because we're 90). We played and talked and she explained the rules to me fifteen hundred times and she beat me by a billion points. But it was a fun, quiet time. We played cards by candlelight for hours and not once did I wish the power would come back on.

This is how it was back in the day, before people elevated distracting themselves to an art form.

Don't get me wrong, I loves me some Netflix. We've spent whole weekends binge watching The IT Crowd and Daredevil, but it's different when you're sharing the quiet. During the last blackout we each read a book, occasionally pausing to chat and throw things at each other.

It makes me wonder what life would be like without any power. All of my electronic hobbies would be out the window, but I could take up woodworking (no power tools, just my hands and a sharpened instrument). Blacksmithing would be another non power option.

Gardening is always an option, but that is a different form of hobby. The plants grow as they please, you can give them all the food, water and light you want, but they will blossom on their time table.

A combination of the two would be beer brewing. I can still do that without any power. I'd be able to write, draw, cook.

The world wouldn't end. Maybe the world without power would be like a homemade rustic stew: rich and hearty, something to be savored. I guess we'll all find out when the robot/alien/zombie apocalypses strike. Judging from The Walking Dead, not only is there no power, there's no water pressure for a damned shower.

How about yourselves? How do you deal with a loss of utilities? Do you run somewhere where you know there's power? Do you have a generator, which is, at best, a temporary measure? Or do you make peace with your circumstance and adapt?

May the road rise to meet you until next time.

Tom Staab

The Staabiverse

Here and there throughout my life, I've suffered from bouts of insomnia. It's always the same, I go to sleep just fine, but then, sometime in the night, my eyes open and my brain has spun up to full speed.

I can lay there for hours, hoping-NAY! Begging!-my brain to shut down and go to sleep. But it just sits there, laughing at me. Like a bastard.

And so here I am at 3:09 in the morning writing a blog. Because if I had to spend another night staring at the minutes tick by on my clock I would lose my shit.

I wouldn't even mind only getting two hours of sleep a night, if my mind and body wouldn't start crashing half way through the day. I work on industrial machines to pay the bills and that isn't the kind of job where you want to have a "fuzzy head." You can muddle through it, but its rough. And if you're troubleshooting, you're going to miss anything that isn't a broken pipe spraying oil in your face.

The cruelest part of insomnia is that you won't be able to sleep in a nice, quiet dark room. You can lay there for hours and never get drowsy. Get behind the wheel of a car though in rainy, bumper to bumper traffic, and all of the sudden it's bedtime. I recently spent a drive home slapping myself in the face to stay awake.

It's not as pleasant as it sounds.

The strange thing about my stretches with insomnia is that they come out of nowhere. There's no apparent trigger or physical cause. I haven't changed anything in my diet or routine. One night I wake up and that's it, no sleep.

Sometimes it lasts for days. This time it's been weeks, with the amount of sleep I get a night decreasing. I've decreased my coffee intake, taken hot baths before bed, and generally tried to wind down before heading to sleep. And getting to sleep isn't a problem. Staying asleep, on the other hand, is the sticky wicket.

Now I need to look at other options (beside drinking myself to sleep, just a skish of a slippery slope there). The best option is exercising. Not after waking up in the middle of the night, that would just get my blood pumping and wouldn't fix the problem.  No, exercising a few hours before bed though, that might do the trick.

Of course by that time I'm exhausted and hallucinating because I've only had two hours of sleep. The key is to badger myself into starting the routine and seeing if it works. I just need to force my wobbly legs onto the elliptical steps and get my muscles moving.

The body is almost an after-thought though, the real problem with sleep deprivation comes from the brain.

After a while, you feel a lot like Al Pacino in that movie he was in...damn, what's the name of that? Took place in Alaska...ah, it'll come to me. That feeling of displacement, like somehow you're walking outside of the rest of Humanity, is strange. And as much as the people around you try to relate, unless they've been there, they can't. It's an extra level of isolation that adds to the general madness.

Eventually, though, I know it'll end. And hey, if the exercise strategy works, it'll force me to get healthier in order to solve the problem. If it doesn't...I'll think of something else.

How about yourselves? Have you stared at the clock in the middle of the night, watching those minutes drift away? What did you do to cure yourself? Did you cure yourself or did someone help? Please, share with the class. Via con dios!

Tom Staab

Today is the last day of a wonderful vacation. There were no grand trips taken, no dragons slain or anything accomplished.

It was a vacation dedicated to doing nothing.

And it was glorious.

For a while, there was this little voice that called me a slacker and a bum for not being productive. There are a ton of projects around the house and yard that could have been done. Hell, I have about twenty unfinished blogs waiting to be completed. Not to mention building a proper web site around this blog.

Instead I chose to do nothing but chill.

I can't remember the last time I had the opportunity to do nothing. Which is funny when you think about it because it's a resting state. Not a lot of calories burned when you're bunking off.

Oh, I did a couple of things; I filmed some footage for the new Staabiverse channel I'm putting up on Youtube and I made some homemade pudding (which was fairly easy, I'm not sure why instant is so popular). In the end though, I was in such a state of perfect relaxation I didn't even want to play video games.

All of this free time allowed me to contemplate how I've spent the majority of my life. It started with wondering why a week of free time should feel so precious.

Like everyone else, my life is built around my job. I spend a minimum of forty hours a week working (lunches are a luxury in my line of work. Sometimes I get them, sometimes I don't), then additional 17.5 hrs a week commuting (minimum). Roughly six hours of sleep a night. Squeeze in some exercise three days a week (if traffic isn't bad) and the rest is dinner.

The weekends are all about catching up on things that there's no time for during the week.

Constant motion, always doing something, going somewhere or planning on doing something and going somewhere.

And I don't think that's how life should be. Maybe if we were a race of immortals with a guaranteed ticket to Valhalla, then I can see the point in wasting close to twenty hours a week commuting.

As we all know, that isn't the case. Tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Hell, making it to lunch isn't guaranteed. Our fragile, silly lives could end any second. And instead of cherishing those precious seconds, we lease our lives to other people who profit more from our time than we do.

There's only so much of this thinking you can take before you want your brain to shut up and watch Netflix. Which is what I did.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to sit on my couch forever. I don't expect, or want, anyone to pay my bills or feed me. What I do want is a say in how I spend the scant amount of time I have in this world.

My body's already breaking down, some of it is from the physical nature of my job, some is from a lack of time of exercise, but I don't see it improving by the time I retire (ideally) at sixty-five. I want to enjoy my time while I can. And the only one who's going to make that happen for me, is me.

I just have to crack the code. I need to find a way to buy my life back (and my wife's life as well), that doesn't include insane commute times, contorting my body into corners and around pipes, or working in the rain, snow, cold and the Summer sun at noon. Unless I want to.

The answer is out there. Other people have cracked the code in their own way, so I know it's possible. I just have to shake it out of this feeble mind of mine.

Enough of my rambling, how about yourselves? Have you had any realizations that changed the way you look at life? Or how you live it? Have you cracked the code? And if so, FOR GOD'S SAKE SHARE!

Live shiny and chrome,

Tomas Staab

Chaos takes many forms. In my experience though, Chaos is most like a hurricane.

There are different categories of Chaos. For example, a Category One would be the power going out and resetting your alarm clock to make you late for work. A Category Five would be your house burning down with everyone you love inside.

Fortunately, I've only had some Category Threes blow through my life.

The best way to fight Chaos, is the same way you fight a storm. You can't. Chaos is a force of nature and no matter how strong and tall you build your walls, Chaos will find a way in and it will shatter your world.

An example from my life would be a tale from shortly after I moved to the West Coast. My wife and I had been dating and decided to move in together. We rented a house big enough for her three dogs and my cat. And there we lived happily for two years.

That's when Chaos swept in.

First, a foreclosure notice appeared on the front of the house. After talking to the property management company, it turned out the owner of our rental house decided to stop paying the mortgage on it. We tried to contact him, we even offered to buy the house from him, but the jack-knob never responded.

Months went by and there were more notices on the front of the house until the auction came along. We went to see if we could buy the house, but the price flew higher and higher and we were broke. We watched as our home was sold to someone else, someone who cared as much about us as the previous owner.

In that respect, we hit the eye of the storm. The fellow who'd purchased the house was a very nice guy and he let us live there for a few more months without raising the rent. We decided we were done renting and wanted to buy our own house.

In the space of a month my wife found, financed and purchased our house. We didn't have a down payment (being broke and all) so we had to take out two mortgages. It was within our budget though, so all the stress we'd endured over the foreclosure was at an end. The foul wind of Chaos had left our shores.

Of course, it's when you let your guard down that you get hit the hardest.

One of my wife's dogs, her favorite, got sick and we had to put him to sleep. He never got to see the new house. Then, a few months after we moved, another of the dogs got sick one night and passed away before the sun came up. We had maybe two or three months before the third dog fell ill. We tried everything we could to keep her going, but in the end, she had to be put to sleep too. A few months after that my cat went to sleep and never woke up.

And that is when Chaos finally went on its way.

When we had no more tears to shed. When our hearts were as broken as they could be, that's when the clouds broke and the sun finally came out.

And by that time, we didn't care.

Time passes, wounds heal and pain fades.

You never forget though, how Chaos can sweep into your life and tear everything away. It throws every thought of security out of the window. How can you prepare or defend against something that comes out of nowhere? How do you fight a force of nature?

In all of my years of dealing with Chaos, the best way I've found to deal with the storm is to persevere.

No matter how hard you're battered, no matter how cold and fierce the winds blow, you can't give in. Keep your feet moving. Keep your head down, but your eyes straight ahead.

Chaos isn't all fury and destruction. Sometimes, Chaos is what we need to set our lives right. Chaos can bring about changes we didn't realize, or were too afraid to admit, we needed. There are times in our lives when the Order we desire, isn't what's best for us.

I'm sure I'm not the only one in the world to fall for the wrong person. Or have their heart broken by that person. Or realize afterwards that that broken heart was the best thing that could have happened.

Chaos will sweep into your life and turn everything inside out. And it isn't personal, any more than a hailstone going through your windshield. The important thing, is how you pick up your life after the storm. Do you grab a broom and some bags and get cleaning? Or do you sit around crying into a bottle muttering "Why me?" and "I don't deserve this."

The joke of it is, you won't know which one you'll choose until the storm passes.

That's all the yammering I have for one day, how about yourselves? Has Chaos run roughshod over your life? Did any good come of it? Did it make you a better person, or did it make you bitter? Until next time, keep those shutters bolted.

Tomas Staab

@StaabTom