Moe Lane's Blog, page 115
January 26, 2025
01/26/2024 Snippet, IRONGHOST.
This business with Deadlime is rapidly turning into a three-parter. Then again, I put a bunch of other stuff up on Patreon this month so people will probably forgive me if I end on a cliffhanger.
“Are those…. golems?” Oxman asked. “I’ve heard of them, but never saw one before. Or two.”
Nat’s face was a combination of scowl and wince as he stared down at the scene, his body wedged against the roof edge to keep himself as steady as possible under the constant shuddering. Finally, he shook his head. “That’s not human magic. Doesn’t taste right. They’re too big for golems, either. Something that big weighs tons. You’d need to spend all your spells just to get it to walk.”
Oxman took his own stare at the two slow-motion fighting figures, two stories below. “Hold on. They got markings on them — crap, that’s Old American heraldry! I thought they didn’t even have magic.”
“Yeah.” Nat paused. “We think. But maybe… I guess they had stuff like golems, huh?”
“So this is wild magic?” Oxman took a quick look around. “Because if it is, we should just drift off now, and to Hell with Deadlime. There’s easier ways to make a living.”
“Oh, good,” Nat responded, already checking his gear. “I was afraid you were going to be stubborn about this.”
Patreon!
In the category of ‘Things I say here…’
‘…so that I do not say them somewhere where I will start a fight:’ I truly despise the pay-for-reviews system that exists in the periphery of the self-publishing ecosystem. It’s predatory, it’s expensive, it plays on fear and desperation – and, most damningly, it doesn’t work. Readers don’t actually care about purchased reviews. Certainly not enough to be worth the money it takes to buy one! Kirkus, for example, will charge you four hundred and fifty bucks for a 250 word review, deliverable in seven to nine weeks, annnnnnnd that’s pretty much it.
:pause:
And they say you can’t make money off of writing in this culture! It’s actually easy! You just have to be in charge of the cargo cult.
Moe Lane
PS: I’m disgusted, more than anything else. I don’t have the undercurrent of anxiety permeating the psyches of a lot of people in the self-publishing field, and I am truly grateful for that. It still annoys me to see people being preyed upon. There’s better ways to make a living, dammit.
Patreon Microfiction: None of the Answers are Good.
Really, None of the Answers are Good. Which is why people aren’t asking that many questions. As the sage once said: I could tell you, but then you would know.
Patreon!
January 25, 2025
‘The Downeaster Alexa.’
This is easily my favorite Billy Joel song.
The Downeaster ‘Alexa,’ Billy Joel
01/25/2025 Snippet, IRONGHOST.
I absolutely need to buckle down on this. Or maybe break it in half.
It took ten blocks and one hour for Nat to start feeling the thuds coming up from the ground, too. They were too irregular for machinery, and too powerful to be natural, which made both men automatically cautious and careful in their movements. Nat in particular knew that the Old Americans supposedly once said, If you don’t understand it, it’s dangerous. He had always privately thought that far too realistic to have really come from such a happy-go-lucky people, but truth was truth.
They also instinctively knew to be quiet. As they grew closer, the thudding from the ground had become a rattling in the walls, and the rattling was now a shivering of the earth. Whatever was here was not treading lightly.
Patreon!
Book of the Week: The Sky People.
We’re finally getting the third volume of SM Stirling’s The Lords of Creation in June, so it’s time to revisit the series, starting with The Sky People. This is the Venus one. I’m not going to lie: it’s good, but In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (the Mars one) is better.
#commissionearned
Aiming for 125 followers on the FERMI RESOLUTION WORLDBOOK Backerkit by the launch date!
Obviously I want considerably more – five hundred would make for an excellent start, but right now I am at ninety-six, including me. If I get a good enough follower count on the Fermi Resolution Worldbook Backerkit, the company will consider helping to boost my signal, which would be awesome. Everybody who buys the game is a potential customer for my novels, after all. And vice versa.
So we’re plugging! Sign up to follow the project here. Back it on February 4th. Tell all your friends!
Tweet of the Day, …STOP IT. edition.
Stop it, or I’ll bury you alive in a BOX!
Today in manmade horrors beyond our comprehension: pic.twitter.com/XnyWyN5a0u
— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) January 25, 2025
January 24, 2025
I have the Sleep Madness.
I just… hit a brick wall. I blame the kids’ midterms, mixed with the weather. Everybody’s sleep patterns is for the birds. See you in the morning…
Map for the Fermi Resolution Worldbook adventure!
This actually… doesn’t look too bad, really. I’m using Campaign Cartographer 3 for this, because it has a black and white map option. It’ll honestly do for what I need it for, and I paid for the program years ago.
Be sure to join up!
