I’ve never had much success with blogging, mostly because I could never focus on a subject or settle on a niche to drill deeply into. But a writer needs a platform, I am reliably and repeatedly told. So, here we are. Here and on Substack too!
Unfortunately, I don’t possess an encyclopedic grasp on anything under the sun as so many of my favorite writers here and elsewhere do. I settled on this blog as a place to record the views and thoughts of an average, pew-warming, Joe Schmoe Catholic trying to make sense of the world whirling around him.
While my thoughts might not be deep ones and my views hand-me-downs from far sharper minds than my own, they are, by the best exercise of reason possible to me, made my own honestly. I offer them up, not as dogma certainly, but as a mere record of what I am thinking at the moment fingertips meet keyboard. And they are open to both criticism and change.
Will my thoughts and views be of any interest to anybody? I don’t know. I suspect that anything of interest I might have to say will manifest in my fiction.
Well, just as I was fixing to start blogging in earnest, (weekly posts) I injured my back. Or so it seemed. I did feel like I pulled a lower back muscle while harvesting watermelons, but nothing that would result in more than a couple of days of a sore back. The pain worsened daily and the days turned into almost six weeks before I could muster enough strength to crawl into an MRI. We go looking for a herniated disc or maybe a fractured vertebra, but lo and behold, we find a monstrous lymphoma parked across my lumbar!
This lays me up for another batch of several weeks while I undergo the first two of five chemo treatments. The third treatment is scheduled to begin the 23d of this month and I and my doctors are cautiously optimistic that the treatments are working thus far. My back pain is no longer debilitating. No longer bedfast, I can move around with the help of a rollator and even wipe my own ass again.
It’s the small dignities that make one feel human.
Most importantly, I’ve been able to write the last couple of weeks and more than a few hours per day. This has allowed me to finally finish GLORY & EMPIRE, the second book of my space opera. FEDERATION & EMPIRE, the third book is also done (more on that later) so keep an eye out for both books. I hope to see them published by month’s end.
In the meantime, I ask for your prayers on my behalf.
May GOD richly bless you,
Carlos Carrasco
March 21, 2026
Carlos Carrasco 