Category: Books

01/27/2020 Book report.

Nothing to report, honestly. I still have the Patreon stuff for this month to finish, and although I’m in a good position to have it all done that’s because I was able to get a chunk of it taken care of today. Which is how it goes, sometimes. Honestly, I put this up because I need to give myself good work habits, and regularly reporting to myself what I’ve done is an excellent work habit to get into. Or something.

  • …Okay, I am discussing the book cover with the artist. That counts.

Book of the Week: NOS4A2.

Obviously, the real Book of the Week this week is the one I’m revising; but in the meantime let’s go with Joe Hill’s NOS4A2. It’s pretty good! Exclamation point because it was damnably hard to get the free time to actually start reading the book, the last few times I took it out of the library. There’s a Tim Powers vibe that crops up at least once, and obviously a Stephen King vibe, and Joe Hill knows his onions. Whatever that means. I think that it’s supposed to be something good.

01/25/2020 Snippet: the expanded IN HOC SIGNO VINCES.

It’s a free story on my Patreon, set in the same universe as FROZEN DREAMS; and while I think that it was a perfectly serviceable fourteen hundred word short-short story it should really have been a six thousand word one instead. So I’m working on that now. And for other reasons.

Patreon!
Continue reading 01/25/2020 Snippet: the expanded IN HOC SIGNO VINCES.

01/23/2020 Snippet, Frozen Dreams.

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?