As is their custom, Baen is putting up the E-ARC for 1637: THE FRENCH CORRECTION up early for sale on their site. It’s good to get new books in this series. After Eric Flint passed, it was all up in the air for a while.
God damn cancer, anyway.
I have blocked out all the chapters and will be assembling and adding from this point out. Hopefully this will speed things up.
So instead of gibbering, I went with polite conversation. “So, Betty. Here for the sun, the surf, or the sights?”
‘Betty’ dimpled at me, as the waiter set down our desserts. “Oh, the thought of doing the beach down here sounded divine, Mr. Vargas!” Damned if I know why I was expecting the Banshee to bobble her response. “Cinderella is so industrious, honestly. It’s all so full of commerce and enterprise, and while that is lovely, I could get all of that at home.”
She waited until we were alone again. “And that’s really the answer. Mostly.”
“Mostly?” I took a bite of my chocolate cake, and raised an eyebrow.
“Problem?” asked the Banshee as I took a healthy slug of water. At least, I hoped it was healthy. Better to find out now if it wasn’t.
“The cook added cayenne pepper,” I told her. “It ain’t bad, but my mouth wasn’t expecting to get bitten back.”
She looked at her own cake, shrugged, and speared herself a deliberate hunk of it. “Cayenne and cinnamon,” she noted after a deliberate bite. “No arsenic, though. Shame: it always adds a bit of piquancy to a dish.”
I surprised her then — by laughing. “Nice try. Arsenic doesn’t have a taste.”
The sale actually starts on Thanksgiving, but what the heck. FROZEN DREAMS and TINSEL RAIN will both be on ninety-nine cent Kindle sale until December 5th. This sale is for the United States and the United Kingdom both!
Tell all your friends!
#commissionearned
Will need to make this a bit harder on Tom in the next pass-through.
I’d gotten instructed by Old Man McGavin himself. It sounds like more of an honor when you’ve never actually met the guy. He was one of the luckiest monster-hunters we’ve ever had, only he couldn’t ever explain why he was lucky because he just was, all right? Worse, he had a bad habit of oversimplifying. Like these buggers: all I could remember of the lecture right now was Don’t get hit.
Yeah, big help there, McGavin. Like, would it have hurt you to tell me that the yapokvil’s tail was all bendy?
I only figured that out when the freaking tail-barb smacked my impromptu club right out of my hands, dripping nasty crap on them for good measure. While I was still gaping at that, the tail came back for a swipe across my gut that sent me rolling into what suddenly became a stinking pile of hay. At first I was glad there wasn’t a pitchfork in there. Then I wished that there was, because a nice long pole with spikes on the end would’ve been handy.
The yapokvil should’ve come right after me, but it was one of those monsters that liked to play with its food. Well, I assume. I didn’t ask. All I know is, when I came out of that pile again, it was still scuttling about a little, like it wanted to find the perfect angle for gnawing on my intestines. It didn’t care like I might have my own views on the subject, either.
Fair enough. I felt just the same about its opinions.
As usual. No, really. Notre Dame has been targeted quite a few times over the last few centuries, and it’s shrugged all of its attackers off, in the end. Far be it from me to suggest that there’s any sort of reason for that, but if you’ve ever played the In Nomine TTRPG, perhaps you may not be surprised…
…being a successful writer can be done, people obviously can do it, everybody’s got to figure out their own way to get there, and they do the new-minted Ultraviolet-clearance writer will deliberately rewrite The Computer’s source code to make it treasonous for any other Violet-clearance clone to use the same trick.
:pause:
Yeah, the simile kind of died screaming under the knife there, at the end. Sorry about that! Anyway:
Looks like it’ll be fun. Fun, close, and Sunday, May 18th, 2025. It’s the first time I’m doing the Arbutus Arts Festival, so I don’t know what to expect. I do know that there’s beer, so if you’re in Baltimore County that day come by to grab a book and a brew. Or a bunch of books and a brew. I’ll happily sell you my entire back catalog.
Comeuppance!
“So those are your tourists?” Lucas asked Catty. He did try to keep the smirk out of his voice, but not very hard.
“Not as much as you, gramps,” Catty replied, in a voice sweet enough to make your teeth ache. Lucas’s smirk popped like a soap bubble — well, that’s a lie. Some of it decided to visit my face. “And they ain’t my tourists, neither. These aren’t the usual flounders, come slumming. They’re…” she broke off, frowning.
That got my attention. When a teenager starts giving off looks like that, a lot of times it’s because somebody hadn’t been friendly to her lately. Or they’d tried to be too friendly, too soon. Girls and boys grow up quick in New California, but not that quick.
Lucas must have picked up on that, too, because he choked out his incoming snit-fit and got his head on the job. If this was one. “These guys can’t take a hint, Catalina? Even when it’s swung at their heads?”
“Only Six Hours? A NIGHT?” is very firmly in the ‘Humans are Space Orcs’ tradition of modern Internet fiction. I enjoy that genre very much, by the way. The trick is to find something new that works as a hidden superpower.
I’m not going to be doing number updates, unless I somehow manage to write twenty-eight thousand words tomorrow (which is what I’ll need to get back on track). NotAWriMo is no longer on the table, and that’s fine. The important thing is to get this book finished, and I finished the trip to Red Beach today. I needed it done.
Buy the first two books in this series!
At least the Banshee didn’t make us wait for the fireworks.
I’d expected something dramatic, and quick, and I was half-right. The festivities started with the biggest ‘broomstick’ — the one that could seat twenty — suddenly shuddering under multiple explosions of arcane fire. In a second its entire surface was covered in overlapping, expanding circles of flames, each of which changed color when they encountered another line of fire. It was weirdly beautiful, until you really thought about what those flames would have done to a person, hey?
The smaller brooms started flying randomly right away, which I figure meant the link spells must have fallen apart. But that was good. It made it look like they were trying to escape, only the Banshee wasn’t having any of it. One by one they exploded, in a cloud of splinters and smoke. Denny snarled at the steady pace, or maybe it was because it was so slow pace. “What the fuck! What is this, a game to her?”
“Yes,” I told him, as leadenly as I could manage. Above us, the last small broom pinwheeled through the sky. “She’s a Dominion Archmage. This is a game, and we’re all the toys. So stay in the box.”
He opened his mouth, and I raised my voice. “I said, stay in the toy box. This only works if she thinks she’s killing her some wild mages out of spite, along with all their stuff. If she doesn’t, every town and village within ten miles of here will get their own personal fireball, just to be on the safe side. And you didn’t ask us first if we wanted to get caught up in your drama, compadre.”
#commissionearned
