The truth in “It’s Better This Way, Really” is brutal, and many people in that world resist it. But the Cold Equations of situational mathematics are clear. Things have to be the way that they are.
Category: Books
Running into a snag in GARY AND THE WENDIGO.
Problem is, it works better as a love story. But Wendigos eat people. As a person, I am opposed to this. I am also opposed to making it dark. But I don’t want the Wendigo to be just a misunderstood sort of entity, either. These are all at least semi-conflicting issues to have.
It is, as they say, a puzzler.
Book of the Week: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau.
This is a pre-order special; I liked Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s MEXICAN GOTHIC a good deal, and I’m looking forward to The Daughter of Doctor Moreau. It looks like a fun 19th century gothic exercise involving passion and monsters, and I’m there for that sort of thing. Lord knows it can’t be more preachy than the original, either. H.G. Wells was never one to let story get in the way of a good, solid polemic…
#commissionearned
01/08/22 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
01/16/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
Right now I’m just adding bits in my head that I know I’ll need later. Actually making it all coherent will take more time. At least, that’s the plan.
I wasn’t looking forward to trying to get a straight answer from Oft about the Scout site at Erebus. I didn’t get one, either. And it was for a really annoying reason: he legitimately didn’t have one.
“I’m sorry, Pam,” he told me as we drank our beers. Including the Anticipant, who was surprisingly easier to handle once everybody had a couple of drinks in them. “If I knew what brought the Scouts there at the start, I would have told you. I was hoping the Anticipant would glean something from the site, but she could not.”
“How would you know?” I muttered.
Oft raised an eyebrow. “She may find it difficult to give details in a manner that you or even I can understand — no offense — but she knows what the phrase ‘This is important’ means, and she’s capable of saying it. If she doesn’t know, she can say that, too. And she has perfectly good ears.”
01/5/22 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
You ever wonder what a group of player-characters looks like from the outside?
Continue reading 01/5/22 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.01/04/22 Snippet, GARY AND THE WENDIGO.
Bigfoots!
One of the nice things about Bigfoots is, they don’t need much in the way of supplies. They do their own hunting and don’t need clothes, so they’re pretty good is living off the land. What they do need is mostly stuff like salt or corn meal or toothpaste.
Oh, and books. Gary liked books. He didn’t care what they were, either, just as long as they were in English. “It gets quiet up here sometimes,” he told me as we unloaded three crates full of romance novels and self-help books. “Reading helps with that.”
“I hear ya, Gary. You got a favorite genre, though?”
“Anything human’s fine.” He gave a loose-limbed Bigfoot wide shrug. “It’s all the same amount of weird to me, so I don’t care. You want coffee?
1/4/22 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
I’m trying to get GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND into draft form over the next two months, which will give me an achievable time schedule. So I started back up on the merry-go-round today. Huzzah!
How do you sneak into a corporate lab? …Well, you don’t have to do a lot of sneaking, honestly. Most of the security protocols get disabled when they detect two people walking in with calm demeanors and regular heart rates. When it comes to the Tomb Worlds, the corps don’t worry about corporate espionage nearly as much as they do about solitary maniacs looking for essential ingredients. For that matter, the corps worry more about the research itself than anybody trying to steal it. More than one solitary maniac with a bloody vision started out as a researcher who dug too deep.
Oh, are you wondering why anybody researches anything out here? It’s a fair question. Honestly. Folks do ask it. The answer is, the things we’re learning are worth the risk. It’s cold when you say it aloud — or write it down, I guess — so we don’t. But we all know it anyway.
01/04/21 Snippet, GARY AND THE WENDIGO.
Getting back to this one.
“Yeah,” Gary replied after thinking about it. “It’s very, huh, far, though? Not as many trees,” he explained when I looked at him. “You can see for longer.”
“Hmm, a fair amount,” I allowed. The cabin wasn’t at the top of a hill, just a flat spot on the side of the road; but from the porch you could see the ground start lowering itself to meet up with the river, down in the valley. I don’t know how far it was, really. We didn’t go down into that valley. But it’d be a hike, to be sure. “Somebody tell you about the clear space?”
“A little, Shirley Lee. I don’t touch the wooden poles, don’t go past them after dark unless I have iron, and if something tries to break them, I should go get help.” I wasn’t good at reading Bigfoot faces at the time, so I couldn’t see how unhappy he was about that. “They kept telling me that last one.”
“Who? The people who first moved you in?”
But he shook his head. “My paw and my uncles. Like there’s any help around here!” He stopped there, suddenly remembering that I drove up here to offer a hand, and everything. “You know what I mean.”
Kickstarter Watch: Locking down the audiobook!
…Sort of. What I have is an agreement with Sally (she’s the same person who did FROZEN DREAMS) that, should we hit a particular stretch goal, she can work on the project this spring and summer. The truth of the matter is, I glided for a long time on the FROZEN DREAMS Kickstarter, but the money is spent*, and I am down again to what I get from the Patreon and PayPal and KDP royalties and the rest every month. Liquidity is the great bane of the self-published, and it takes time to fill the money pools. But if we do well, things can be accomplished!
Particularly if I crack ten grand on the upcoming Kickstarter. I make that, then suddenly a second novel this year is no longer a pipe dream.
Moe Lane
*I didn’t waste it: it paid for chapbooks and MORGAN BAROD and art and other legitimate expenses. But it’s gonna be a while before raw sales lets me put out a novel every year.
#commissionearned