Thomas Wictor

My Extravagumbo Website—the one you’re reading—is finally online. Its nine months of gestation matched my own, and its course in life seems destined to match my own. Welcome to the world, cyber self! Fasten your seat belt, take your Dramamine, and strap on that cup. You’re gonna need it! Here’s the battle your daddy fought with the evil Web designers for nine months.

Personally, I no longer need a cup, since I’ve developed chitinous scrotal armor. But you, baby self, will need time to ossify. Time and much pummeling.

I starting messing with this in December of 2012 and went through five Web designers and three massive ripoffs. I got back a little more than half of my money and put one designer out of business, but I lost about $5500. Was it worth it?

That’ll be up to you, readers. Scott Thunes tells me that having $5500 stolen in this business…isn’t all that bad.

“Think what you’ve learned,” he said.

I’d pay $5500 for someone to take a melon baller and scoop what I’ve learned out of my head.

At any rate, here it is. Everything you see except for the triptych on the home page came out of my own head. My brother Tim designed the triptych. As I said in Ghosts and Ballyhoo, I like threes, so I wanted a triptych. Then I turned Ghosts into a trilogy. Volumes Two and Three will be ready in a couple of weeks, I think. Today I made the final corrections on interior designs, and the covers are ready.

The Military Trilogy will become a tetrology, but after Volumes Two and Three of the Ghosts Trilogy are done, that’ll be that. Currently, I’m out of juice. It’s just situational, I’m sure. In a few days I’ll be able to see things more clearly. Right now, though, it’s hard to be excited about much.

The next step is to finish the fourth volume in the Military Tetrology, and then I’ll begin another novel. I’ll also be adding galleries and videos to the site, along with regular news updates.

Here’s the backstory to the Website. Hopefully the major acts of screwage are done for a while. If not, I’ll deal with it. What other choice do I have? I suppose I could go completely bonkers and waste all the effort of the past two years, but that seems a little histrionic.

Nobody’s dropping nerve gas on my head. I’m still upright and breathing, and there’s a pretty little cat that spends a lot of its time on Mom’s porch. It used to run when it saw me, but now it lets me walk within a couple feet of it when I collect the mail. It isn’t afraid of me anymore. I always say, “Hey, puss-puss. That’s a good kitty.” It seems to understand that I won’t hurt it.

I hope you like this…thing. Since I can’t make personal appearances, this is the clearinghouse for everything. If you want to know something about the work, come here. That is all.

Except for some Stephen Crane.

There was a great cathedral.
To solemn songs,
A white procession
Moved toward the alter.
The chief man there
Was erect, and bore himself proudly.
Yet some could see him cringe,
As in a place of danger,
Throwing frightened glances into the air,
A-start at threatening faces of the past.