Hello, friends and fans!
Welcome to another “Peek At My Week” for November 13, 2023! Here are some things that happened this past week! 
News About Writing & Publishing: This Is The Current State Of Things
- Writing: “Freedom Inc” (book 1 in my new sci-fi adventure series, “Threaders“) is now at over 78,500 words, and I’m still busy on the fourth part of the envisioned five for this book!
- Articles: This past week I posted: “The Kids Are Alright“, “60+ Secrets, Insights & Behind The Scenes Nuggets In The Galaxii Series“, “60+ Secrets, Insights & Behind The Scenes Nuggets In Panic! Horror In Space“, “40+ Secrets, Insights & Behind The Scenes Nuggets In Space Sucks!“, “20+ Secrets, Insights & Behind The Scenes Nuggets In Mirror, Mirror!” and “A Few Things You Might Want To Know About “When Darkness Calls”“.
- What Readers Say: I know I can’t please everybody (so I’m not trying to!). That said, it really pleases me when I see that I’ve managed to do it anyway! Drop me a line and let me know how you think I’m doing – or leave me a review on Amazon or Audible!
Neil Higgs found me on Twitter and decided he liked the look of my writing! Then he bought a copy of “Blachart“! I hope he enjoys it and I’m looking forward to his feedback!
- Reviews: Fellow author, Alex S. Johnson read a pre-release version of “Freedom Inc.” and left the following review:
Boy, Is This Entertaining Fare!
“What Christina Engela does best is transport the reader into territory that is both familiar and novel, by way of her cross-blending of genres from Science Fiction to Fantasy and Western. Her narrative style is old school, a hilarious omniscient voice that reminds me by turns of Douglas Adams and Mark Twain. The story? Star Wars meets High Noon, infused with 80s-style cyberpunk implants, but funny. It’s a space Western featuring larger than life characters such as Tang (short for Tangerine) and Mycos, two extraordinary outsiders who join forces to take down bad guys in all the places they visit on their travels. Engela weaves in flashes of autobiography which add poignant depth to the story, but the focus is on entertainment, and boy is this entertaining fare. You can have confidence that in Engela’s hands, you’ll sink for a few hours of enchantment into delightfully humorous storytelling with a breakneck Looney Tunes pace. Fans of Douglas Adams, Dr. Who, Monty Python, Robert Asprin, Neil Gaiman and Herge will get their money’s worth–and then some – from this book.” – Alex S. Johnson review of “Freedom Inc.” pre-release, November 8, 2023.
Bibliography – A listing of all my books:
Other Stuff:
The Kids Are Alright
For the hundredth time this month, it feels like, I saw someone around my age posting a meme praising Generation X for being “the last great generation” – apparently “before all these sissies were born”. That set me to thinking.
Yeah, us Gen Xers…. we’re tough, but for all the wrong reasons.
We’re tough, like callouses and scar tissue. With all the connotations of damage, wounds and depression and unhealed trauma that evokes.
We bottle up our trauma and present a “stiff upper lip” and just shoulder the wheel and carry on, rather keeping quiet about how we feel because that’s how we were brought up. We bottle it up – the disappointments, the hurt, the anger, the hopelessness, and we just soldier on – because that’s what we were always expected to do… even if it hurt us more in the end, and no matter how much – until we inevitably are forced to confront our mortality and frailty.
And then the millennials and Gen Z arrived.
Instead of just putting up with all the abuse we accepted as “just the way things are” like we did, they refused to be a part of it, began to force changes to the world around us, frustrating us and our forebears. Their arguments and their reasoning at first seemed to be just laziness and winging, and going against established everything – but, when we sat down to think about it, it hit home: they’re right.
The world we were born into was already breaking, and as time went on, it broke further. We Gen Xers got the tail end of the so-called ‘good times’, but we also started feeling the tail-end of the whiplash when all the bubbles began to burst. The Boomers just told everyone to “work harder” and called Millennials & Gen Z “lazy” when they wouldn’t put up with it. While my generation just knuckled down and got on with it, we did so reluctantly and rebelliously, and all wished there was a better way, but we could never see it. The truth is, we feared the consequences too much. It was too big a risk, and although we saw more of the “bigger picture” than our predecessors, we didn’t understand it.
Where we questioned ourselves for our failures to succeed in this world and blamed ourselves for our own brokenness, our successors saw things more clearly. They stood up and refused to be a part of a broken, abusive system. Unlike us, they refused to willingly lie down before the wheels of the machine.
Where the Boomers took their rebellion for weakness, their strength of character and determination gradually opened our eyes to the reality that it’s the system that’s flawed, not us, and that we suffered under it and still live with the damage it did.
As always, I’ll keep you posted about any further developments, so until then, I wish you all a pleasant week!
Cheers! 
In spite of some of my books having been on Amazon since 2005, not one of them has yet reached the magical 51 reader reviews yet! (The highest number any of them has, is 10 – which is a pretty good number compared to many others, but it’s still not high enough for the almighty Amazon!) I would really appreciate your help on this! Come on, leave a review – it’s free! 
