Joe’s Comments (group member since Aug 31, 2025)

Joe’s comments from the Try Not to Die: An Interactive Adventure group.

Things are getting better all the time. I look upon everything in the past as the building blocks of who I now am. Once I'd reached the ultimate low it was as if I had discarded the baggage of the things which broke me, allowing me to start from scratch and become the real me. As the song says "The Only Way is Up".

Being part of your life and your work is great for rehab and a lot of fun.

My personal history reads like one of those 'misery lit' books that were all the rage a while ago. I've lived one of those unlikely lives in which I've endured 'Guinness Book of Records' qualifying mental and physical damage which could easily be written off as deluded bullshit fantasy were it not for the physical evidence of an abused childhood such as the dozens of scars on my legs where I was fastened to a post with barbed wire and left out in the rain to free myself, or the burns on my arm and hand where my dad proved to his friend that I have a high tolerance for pain by using a lit match and a lighter on my wrist to see which I could tolerate longer before he put a cigar out on the back of my hand. What he didn't know was that I have Asperger's, so I process a lot of things differently, including my reactions to pain, not as though he would have cared. He'd probably have doubled-down. He was a singularly evil beast.

At one point I ended up in prison for the crime of discussing a potential book plot with one of my brothers, who mentioned it to a friend (a cop with nothing better to do), resulting in me being remanded in custody for nine months awaiting trial. While there I had psych assessments, not so much from the angle of helping me, more to find out if I was capable of the stuff I had discussed. For the record I was acquitted. I'm not psychotic, just 'different'.

I've been mugged four times, one of which was so severe that it left me with significant scarring (my skull was smashed and my face burst) and brain damage with associated memory loss etc. I have a lot of residual incurable damage from that to add to a wealth of illnesses such as Meniere's Disease, Asthma, Type 2 Diabetes, High Blood Pressure, and a benign mass the size of a grapefruit on my left Kidney. To quote Dr Malcolm in Jurassic Park: "Life finds a way".

My 'conditions' are somewhat restrictive and my life is lived in near total isolation. I only regularly interact socially with one person in 'real life'... my fiancée (we live together), and we see her mom sometimes. Even though I have been part of online writing communities for decades and am quite involved in the horror writing community, I've only ever met one member of the horror author community in person, which as luck would have it was Mark Tullius. My fiancée and I met him for a couple of hours at the Frankfurt book fair. We couldn't stop long as it was a brief detour on our way to spend a long weekend at my fiancée's mom's.

Mark is every bit as nice in person as he is online and then some.

I'm spilling the beans on my background as none of it is secret, and I just want to throw it out there that if anyone reading this has any issues that they believe nobody will understand then think about how you have responded in your mind as you have been reading my post.

If you're the kind of person who will dismiss it all as bullshit then you're probably in the majority, as no matter how much we'd like it to be otherwise, the world is a hostile place, BUT if you're the kind of person who is able to relate to what I have said in any way, or has any kind of empathy with it, you're not alone, there are others like you, and making yourself known can be the difference making someone like me feel safer in the world.

Mark knows about making connections, he's very good at it, and the world is a better place with him in it, so I am glad he fights and wins.

I'll end here as I'm just rambling now. I hope you all find the happiness you deserve.

I'm glad he's going to be funny, it gets a bit tedious reading any kind of books that are just wall-to-wall violence for the sake of it with nothing to balance it out.

Just read the first chapter. Ready for the Poll.