The year is more than halfway done, can you believe it? 2021 has been a better year for the world than 2020, and hopefully things will continue to improve.
I guess ‘better’ is a relative term; if you’re in a country with surging COVID infections, or if you’re living in Haiti where the president was assassinated, or Ethiopia that is basically in civil war, or South Africa where there are people dying in protests, then maybe 2021 isn’t much ‘better’. Honestly, even in America, things aren’t great. We got the COVID vaccine, and yet people have stopped getting it (I got the one dose) and infection rates are spiking in some places, there’s still racial and gender inequality, and the slow erosion of the American democracy continues with little resistance. So maybe nothing is ‘better’ about 2021, except for those daily death toll figures. I think that’s not so horrifying.
We were off for a week, so I’ll let you all get to the serials, dear readers. Do enjoy and stay safe out there.
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This week:
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Leeland is on the moon and this dream just keeps getting more and more weird. What’s on the moon, you may be asking. The answer is disturbing.
The Black Dream Cycle: “I am a very lucky man to be in possession of the memory of traveling to the moon with the Brethren of Leng on the black ship. It is a worthwhile journey despite the destination. The view is stunning, the moon is like a damaged pearl hanging in the space above the Dreamlands like a mystery and nestled in an awesome backdrop of the twinkling cosmos.”
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Individual components of electrical systems are fairly easy to understand. We all understand how switches work, they only have two settings. Understanding is the easy part, installation is my kryptonite.
Electricity Sonnets: “A switch is dichotomous, it goes on/Or off, but not just that…”
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Max takes over the shuffle for the next few issues. First up, a story about a girl named Fiona. Check out the song too, it’s awesome.
Shuffle: “Fiona English was a pseudonym. She wore the name perfectly though. It sounds like a stage name and it seems to fit a white woman of classic beauty with an arch accent and a diva attitude to match. Fiona was black, the first of her kind, but all other things are true about her. When she was on, of course.”
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Pandemics are not fun, we all know that first hand now. Randall Coffey is in a nightmare; as the pandemic rages, his daughter isn’t even in the same country as her family. And is it a zombie apocalypse? It seems like ‘zombie’ isn’t the best way to describe the Living Dead.
They Live: “The mysterious virus that spread to every corner of the world and killed about five thousand people a day, threw the world into chaos, but there was no large-scale collapse of societies or cultures around the globe. The humans of Earth maintained calm among the population of the uninfected by corralling the dead and infected onto the island of Guam.”
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The baby nightmares continue. This time, we meet Wes’s other editor (I’m jealous), and she shares her thoughts on the whole baby situation.
Selections from Wes E.L.’s Dream Journal: “The editor at the paper where a lot of my freelance work is published in print is a woman in her late thirties called Pam. We’re friends; she’s made the long trip out to my house to have dinner with Valeria and me, and we’ve met up before when we were in Asheville. She’s a nice person and she’s the funniest person I know. She’s a fairly tall woman of Mexican descent, single mother of three kids.”
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Angie ate the Rarebit and she had a dream. Hear it now!
Welsh Rarebit: “I don’t think the sun ever went down. It was always the perfect time to be doing whatever it was we were doing. If we were playing hide and seek in the yard, the sun was out bright, with just enough cloud cover so the wind could cool the day. If we wanted to sit out at the firepit in the backyard, the sun was low, on the verge of setting, but it never went down.”
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It’s the PRL Serials Volume 1! Tomorrow may be full of doubt, but you, dear readers, can count on the PRL for the best serial fiction on the internet.
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PRL Serials 