Bitin’ List Preview

Please read this small rant before you read this book. That would be cool.

This book is a first draft. It is going to be filled with errors in the categories of: spelling, punctuation, grammar, past/present tense switching, possible plot holes, second to third person narrative switches, POV switches, and honestly anything else that may not seem like “good” writing. If any of these are going to damage your reading experience, I understand if you do not read this book. 

What the hell am I doing, yeah? Why is this in your hands in a paperback or on a device?

The past couple years in my writing life has been absolutely brutal and my rejection sensitivity has been set off bad enough that now everytime I sit down to write I think, “wow, what is this going to make people think of me and my work?” 

That isn’t what I want for me or anyone else in the writing world. Especially not for me. I write my lil books to help people escape the ugliness of life and the world. I try to present real world issues and problems in society in a satirical way to help both writer and reader feel some small shred of distraction from how ugly the world actually is. How am I being effective to one half of that exchange if I’m worried about all of these things that are out of my control before I even write the first word?

I’ve tried to change my writing style, I’ve tried to change my presentation, I’ve tried to change the Damien-ness of it all while at the same time trying to be the most authentic person I can be for myself. So, you can see the issue, yeah?

This book is just really for me. I wanted to get back to the joy of just writing and sharing and not giving a shit about what happens after. My first book, Aphid, I put it together, released it, and felt overjoyed. I miss that feeling, and while it comes in spurts, the days my rejection sensitivity start are far more. 

This book is a love letter to artists who have inspired me in the past couple years to continue to be myself. It’s for Mercedes Varnado, Sabrina Carpenter, Willow Nightingale, Chappell Roan, Maggie Antone, Kacey Musgraves, Tom King, Emily Zeck, Amyl and the Sniffers, and of course Tyler Childers. These people have all kept me going the past couple years and helped me remember I just really need to be myself, yeah? 

Childers listeners can see the obvious tribute/homage in the title here. That’s purposeful and with more than a few meanings. Tyler Childers is an artist who writes what he feels. His songs are raw, emotional, and real. Every album comes with a sense of “this is how I wanted you to see this” and honestly a real punk rock mindset. Childers is a person who worked and worked to get somewhere and didn’t lose his heart or values along the way. I want to be even a shred as authentic as he is. 

Also, it’s a really cool title. 

Tyler Childers is also from Appalachia. Appalachians are often thought of as uneducated dumb dumbs. I’ve written about this before in the intro of a different book, I know I have, so I’ll keep it shortish. I get so tired of people being judged based on their mechanics; if their grammar is bad, they’re considered dumb. That’s just not the case and quite frankly I find it classist. Look at the state of the world we’re in right now. Some people live in areas where the education system is little more than a worksheet fueled prison system for young people. They’re treated like hassles, they aren’t respected, and they’re never expected to do anything with their lives unless they’re already set in the ninth grade.

Its bullshit. 

Some of the brightest, most clever, and genuinely good people are the ones who aren’t great at the mechanics of writing. Either they weren’t provided the proper assistance, they couldn’t focus because of untreated mental health struggles, they’ve been told they’re horrible at it, or they see no reason to bother because the most they can hope to become is a worker in a system that uses them up.

Society is treating people like they’re bad, useless, and without merit based on mechanics in one subject. There’s a bigger problem with our mindsets and how we fix them than a person who can’t properly write. 

There’s a reason ai is taking over our schools. It’s because people are afraid of doing work and being told it isn’t good enough, they’re afraid their grammar is shit, they’re not going to waste time doing something that is going to end in them being insulted. Ai is a cancer to creativity and free thinking. We’ve got to stop the issues that lead to it if we’re ever going to stop the massive growth of ai.

TL:DR - people who can’t write correctly = bad. 

I refuse to believe this. I’ve seen assholes write the most perfectly thought out and put together books and they’re still assholes. We have people running America who have degrees from the most prestigious universities in the world and they are shitty bigoted asswipes. 

At the same time, I’ve gotten badly written emails from parents thanking me for talking to their child about things, I’ve had students hand write me letters without a period in sight telling me they’re thankful I listen to them as people, I’ve had students in my classroom go from being combative to helpful when they realize I want to understand and help, I’ve seen people become better people when they aren’t told they’re dumb or lazy. 

Let’s get our heads out of our asses, folks. People live in different worlds than each of us. Some of them have it better, some have it worse, some have it worse but it looks better. We’ve got to get past judging people based on things that are out of their control. 

That’s why it’s important for me to try this first draft experiment. There are people in the writing world with amazing ideas and things to say who simply get shunned or overlooked because they don’t have the best mechanics and lack the resources to fix that. 

I think this intro is longer than any chapter in the book, sorry! I hope you can find some enjoyment in the story that follows despite the rough draft feel, I hope you can distract yourself for a while with it, and I hope that every day you have more empathy than you did the day before. 

K thx. 

1 

The apocalypse was really dogshit boring. climate change didn’t get us, aliens didn’t show, bang bring back the bomb no nuclear war, no disease, no radioactive mosquitos. It was just downright lame as fuck. 

Zombies?

Who had zombies? 

Whoever you are you’ve just one a life time supply of spoiled milk because all of the super markets are filled with it. If you like cottage cheese you may be in luck. But no, dear reader, all of the meats and dairy products have gone bad. Even if you’re a vegan you’re probably shit outta luck, yeah? About all you’re going to find in a real end of the world scenario is canned meatballs. 

It’s an end of the world scenario with the walking dead. You know the whole gimmick by now. It’s like telling you Superman’s origin again; no need for it really. It’s gotta be more like the start of the movie Mosquito in which an alien spaceship crashes and a mosquito drinks an extraterrestrial’s blood and grows fucking massive. But, there weren’t any aliens, remember? The end of the world just sort of takes forever. One bite, two bite and so on. That takes a long time. Look at Night of the Living Dead, now take into account inflation and all that. That’s where the world is right now. Also, take into account how social media would probably react to people biting each other. There isn’t any “people are the real evil” crapola either; the world is tired of that. 

This is a story about a girl named Waffle House. Her mom overhead basketballed her tiny infant body into the dumpster after having a grand slam breakfast from Denny’s. The dumpster was between a Waffle House and a Denny’s, in an alley the locals call World War Waffle. Two teenage boys all riled up on hormones and maple syrup found her and had no idea which restaurant threw the dumb ass little baby away. They just left the Waffle House and decided maybe their girlfriends would think it was sweet they adopted a little dumbass dumpster baby. Waffle House was her name for half an hour. She started crying which lead to one of the parents of one of the teens finding her. After that, she had a really solid and happily mediocre life. She did prom, graduation, all that shit that people do. She didn’t go to college because - fast forward to the good part. Character development is overrated. Get to the gore and blood and violence and male-gaze woman killing shit. 

Waffle House’s adopted family renamed her Ellie Danvers, then they all went off and died during the whole zombie thing. Ellie mourned, she mourned heavy. Her mourning was so heavy if it were actually a morning it would take about fifteen of those nice cinnamon iced coffees she likes to get going. She’s been walking for five years. It’s been a mess. She walks backroads, highways, dirt paths, through the woods… anywhere really because the zombies sort of only hang out in groups so she can spot them from a mile away. They just stand there with their mouths open staring at each other most of the time. If they get a whiff of your cinnamon iced coffee in the air though, shit is going down. Ellie thinks their eyes don’t work the best, she thinks they can’t hear anymore, and she knows they can’t taste because she’s watched them eating some pretty gnarly looking people. Who could even know where they came from or why it spread through bites. The news media was all confused, some people covered it truthfully, but then there were idiots making things up confusing everyone. Thanks, social media and the MAGA mindset. Fox News was saying some crazy shit about Tom Hanks causing it all to get back at JD Vance for something. None of that even matters now… the idiots were idiotic, the careless were careless, and the people who thought it wouldn’t happen to them had it happen to them. 

Ellie knows they hate anything perfume or body spray related. They have to, that’s the only explanation for why they smell so bad. Living people do not smell that way unless they are afraid of personal hygiene products. Smelly ass. 

Ellie bounces from supermarkets to gas stations to suburbs. They all have places to sleep, and a lot of them have the cans of cinnamon coffee she likes.

It was all boring… all the way up until she bumped into a familiar face.