Moe Lane

I gotta say: Pelgrane Press has excellent customer service. I had ordered WORLDBREAKER a while back, but I guess it was supposed to get fulfilled by a third party at the time and never got shipped. I noticed the problem recently (I had gotten the PDF, too, which is why it didn’t register to me that the print copy hadn’t been shipped) and when I brought it up they resolved the issue right away. No fuss, no muss, no nonsense. It’s one of the many reasons why I buy their products.

You gotta wonder how those people thought all of this was gonna go.

This is likely the last Snippet. First draft is in the can, folks.

…Crap. I think that the first draft is done.

• 76,774 words. Yikes.
• Added some scenes, filled in some scenes.
• That’s… pretty much it, in terms of the book itself? I mean, it’s gotta get beta-read now. And I have to compile it for that, sure. But… huh.

Fever, Peggy Lee

Not because it looks like a life-sized Matchbox car.

The good news about the moldworker mage was the same as the bad news; he was a damned moldie himself. Hell, half of these guys were from working around the stuff. But they didn’t know how to throw magic around.

We were lucky that the mage wasn’t so mold-raddled as to try to cook off some fireballs, because those are bad indoors and the backblast don’t play favorites. But he also knew how to shoot steam out of his fingers, and hit us with a wave of the stuff just as we were regrouping from smacking the fighters around.

You ever get a shot of live steam in the face? The kind that the really Old Americans used to have? It’s not good. It scalds and blisters and even if you don’t lose an eye you’re gonna be blinking and blind for a little bit, and the mage got half the Brute Squad in his first attack and and got the rest to tangle themselves up. Or so I figured out later; me, I was blinking and blind.

If the moldie mage was smarter he’d have run then. Nobody good enough to hold off a Brute Squad by himself would ever be working in a moldworks, and he had a decent path to the door. But the icemold in his blood was doing the talking, and it said to keep shooting kens in the face with live steam. He was really piled it on, too. Panic and no sense of preservation will do that to you.

The problem is that kens — well, it’s a nasty lie that barbies don’t feel pain the way we do. That’s something that cabrones say so they can feel smug about looking down their noses. But a ken ain’t going to let something like being scalded keep him from going and messing up whoever is doing the scalding. It’s one of the things that keeps the barbie tribes alive and kicking up north, so why change what works?

We’re getting to the ‘hammer down one detail, six more pop up’ stage. This is not a good stage. I need the manuscript completed.

• 75.5K words
• Almost got this fight done.
• Had a Cool Thought.
• Am now trying to figure out how to rewrite final chapter to accommodate Cool Thought.

Which is great! Good Lovecraft movies that aren’t from the HPL Historical Society are hard to come by. The only problem is, THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE is not showing anywhere actually near me. Guess I might as well pre-order it…

I know what they’re doing the MR. JONES movie about (keywords: Stalin, Ukraine, 1930s). You know what they’re doing the MR JONES movie about. But some people are going to be extremely angry when this hits the screen in April.

Fortunately, they’re not going to be people I like very much, so I’ve got that going for me.