It’s a busy week, and we got some spectacularly good news right before the Just Do It performance last weekend, so here’s what’s up.

Tuesday night – Charlotte Writer’s Club meeting at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at SouthPark. I’ve been going to this for a few months now, and am still deciding exactly what I’m getting out of my membership. The people are all very nice, and the speakers are usually pretty interesting, but there’s not a lot of sharing of member’s work that goes on. I did meet Jessie there, and I’ve since started to enjoy her blog daily, so that’s good. But I think it might not be something I invest too heavily into long-term. Just enough to get a little boost now and then.

Sometime this week I’m trying to get out to CAST to see Our Lady of 121st Street and review it for Charlotte Viewpoint. I like the script, and several of my friends are in it, so that should be fun.

Saturday afternoon I’ll head over to the Charlotte Comic Mini-Con put on by Heroes. I actually worked at Heroes for a while some years back when they were still on Central Avenue. This was back when I was playing Magic the Gathering a lot and I ran the tourneys at Heroes and basically made enough money working there to pay for my comics and my Magic cards. I’ve recently gotten back into reading comics, so there’s another cash-suck in my life, but these little cons are usually good for picking up trade paperbacks ridiculously cheaply, so I can get a lot of volume reading in. Comics have been a part of my life on and off forever, and this weekend I spent a lot of time curled up with Volumes I & II of Absolute Sandman, reminding myself how absolutely beautiful those books are. I think I’ll bust out my Chris Bachalo Death T-Shirt for Story Slam Saturday night in honor of the books.

Yeah, everything is leading up to Story Slam for me this weekend. 8PM kicks off another Carolina Writers’ Night, and this time I’m sharing the stage with a novelist, a guitarist/short story writer and a columnist. It oughta be fun, and there’s always enough beer at Story Slam to make me seem witty, so come on out. It’s only $10, and then you can buy a book later and one of us will sign it for you. If you’re lucky, the one that wrote the book will sign it!

So last weekend, just before I went on for Just Do It, Suzy pulls me aside and tells me that the testing lab called. Now most of you don’t know that Suzy was recently tested for the breast cancer gene, and given the fact that her mother, aunt and grandmother all died of breast cancer, I figured the odds of her not having this particular gene were pretty slim. And her doc had already told her that if she had the gene, then she should seriously consider a double mastectomy.

Now a lot of you have met my wife. There’s a lot of boob there. And I’m a boob man. So telling the two of us that the girls might have to be removed was NOT a happy statement. Besides the scary genetic stuff, and bringing back memories of her mother’s death, telling a woman she’s gonna have to have her breasts removed is a pretty big damn deal. So it was with no small measure of delight that she told me that the test came back negative, and she does not have the genetic deformity that typically indicates a prediliction towards breast cancer, so we can return to our regularly scheduled program of mammograms and routine maintenance. So that was our good news for the day, and it was good indeed.

Talk with y’all later, and I hope to see you at Story Slam this weekend!

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