This passage from ‘Learning the Basics’ didn’t make it into last November’s NaNoWriMo. Maybe in the next book in the series. Or the one after that.
Category: Books
Another snippet from ‘Spoilers.’
It was eventually enough for her to bring up the troll again during another coffee klatch with Frank. Or, coffee and hot water; Frank claimed to not need the ‘flavorings.’ Oddly, he also ate the most sugary pastries he could. Fade chalked it all up to the oddities of grad students as she stirred her coffee. “I have a question that I don’t know if I want answered,” she said.
“Then do not answer it,” said Frank. Immediately, Fade noted.
“That was quick,” she said.
“Of course,” Frank said. “That is why they call it an ‘instinctive’ response.”
“Shouldn’t questions be answered, though?’ Fade said, warming to the topic a little. “Isn’t that why we’re in school, though? To find things out?”
Frank considered it. “I suppose that is one thing people might do in school,” he said. “Another, though, is to work out what to do with the things that have already been discovered. Or what not to do with them.”
Fade opened her mouth, contemplated the existence of sarin gas, and changed her point. “Okay, sure, maybe you have to be careful about outcomes when it’s something like chemistry or engineering. But we’re humanities students. None of our by-products are going to get weaponized.”
“That we know of,” said Frank.
Book of the Week: Shadows of Annihilation.
Shadows of Annihilation is the upcoming book in SM Stirling’s oh-man-is-this-alternate-timeline-screwed trilogy — I mean, it’s just going to be flat-out horrible in about twenty or so years, unless something changes — and I am looking forward to March. Which is probably awful of me. Then again, as Stirling himself likes to quote: “Adventure is somebody else in deep sh*t, far away.”
Moe Lane
Snippet from ‘Spoilers.’
Something from what I’m suddenly working on, after a conversation on Twitter today. It’s probably going to be this month’s short story. I expect it to clock in pretty close to 3K, too.
Continue reading Snippet from ‘Spoilers.’Operation JOE, Part 7.
https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/
Something had turned all the zombies on while I was getting the bullets, of course. And as usual. I think that they do it to say ‘hi.’ Or possibly ‘screw you, your friends aren’t immortal.’
“They’re only sort of my friends,” I muttered as I walked another burst across a knot of undead running down the hall towards me. Bad movies aside, you don’t need headshots for zombies. Well, you don’t if you use magic bullets. “A couple of them probably hate my guts.” That’s when one of the bastards grabbed me from my blindspot and tried to eat my hands. I twitched my fingers in a particular way, and glowing spikes erupted from both fists just long enough to shred the zombie’s head.
Listened to @HPLHS’s A SOLSTICE CAROL last night.
Because if you’re wrapping presents at midnight, why not do it while listening to a HPL Historical Society DART? Anyway, A SOLSTICE CAROL is excellent; I don’t know if it’s my absolute favorite Lovecraft radio play, but it’s definitely in the top three. The DART is a genuinely clever combination of Lovecraft and Dickens that manages to capture the mood of, say, ‘Pickman’s Model’ while at the same time remaining true to the mood of ‘A Christmas Carol.’ I found the climatic moment endearing and oddly sweet, despite the fact that it… ah, spoilers.
Worth checking out, in other words.
Back to editing Frozen Dreams.
Chapter 11 of FROZEN DREAMS is revised. I’m going to try my damnedest to get it all into first-draft status by the end of the year, then spend January getting it up to 80K words. At that point, it’ll be ready for people to look at, and try to possibly sell. I suspect that this is going to end up on the self-published track, though.
But that’s OK. I have plans. Which I’m mentioning here as an unsubtle way to encourage me to follow them.
Patreon Microfiction: “First Line of Defense.”
Had to fix a sentence in ‘First Line of Defense:’ it kind of came across as garbled. Ach, well. It happens.
Book of the Week: Steeple (Vol. 1).
Steeple is a comic book series (1-4 out now; this is the upcoming compilation of 1-5) by John Allison about a Cornish town that has stuff going on with witches and sea monsters and a new Anglican prelate trying to make friends with her opposite number in the Satanist temple, and that doesn’t sound very nice, does it? But it’s funny, and Allison isn’t grinding any axes about Christianity. He does have a strong-jawed Anglican vicar of a certain age punching sea-monsters in the head, though. Very player-character Anglicans, all around, in fact. I may play one, if I ever get to play in a campaign where that’d be appropriate.
Operation JOE, Part 6.
https://moelane.com/tag/operation-joe/
The armory door was locked, of course. It looked like it could be unlocked with a four digit number put into a standard keypad, only the numbers skittered around the keypad and changed color every time you touched them and the wrong combo would throw you across the room and up against a wall, moderately bruised and slightly on fire. Also: 1234 was not the right number.
God-damned puzzle locks.
Oh, I get the point of them. We have a lot of enemies in this business who are bright enough to use guns, but not bright enough or well-versed in mortal culture enough to figure out even the simplest riddle or puzzle. Fine. The problem is, They don’t get people like me to design the puzzles or riddles. Oh, my, no. They get antisocial geniuses with obsessions on their obsessions to create the most ridiculous conundrums possible. And then people just write down the answers and post them by the lock anyway, because who has time to learn Enochian well enough to do acrostics in it?