Moe Lane's Blog, page 150

Shattered Space is out for Starfield.

So I’ve been playing it. Well, after they got Starfield Script Extender to work, at least. One entertaining thing that’s come up is Bethesda’s weird little habit of trying to pump up the drama of having my character join yet another faction. I’m always amused by that. Like I’m going to buy the DLC and not play it? So yeah, yeah, hail the Great Serpent and show me the cool ship I’m gonna have at the end of this which I’ll never fly because I actually got the corridors* to work right on my current starship. And I can go from one level to another without having to jump down some stairs.

Sorry. It’s just that it took forever to figure out how to do that. I’m gonna brag about it.

*Starfield desperately needs some designated four-way and two-way corridors that are clearly labeled. They got it working for Fallout 4, they can get it working here.

#commissionearned

10/01/2024 Snippet, THE GOBLIN.

So, hey, you know how I don’t do grim, much?

Yeah, the rules are gonna be different, this month. Starting with how I’m going to try to do a 3K story every week for Patreon, just because I want to icepick a couple of ideas instead of lingering over them. I’m also going to be invoking more horror this month, too. Just because.

Patreon!

The Goblin

It’s an elvish lie that we can only come out when it’s dark. There I was, deep in the elf-wood, wasn’t I? Right in the middle of the Bright, too. No bursting into flames, no screaming at the light, none of that. Thanks to my goggles, I wasn’t even squinting. See? Total lie.

The elves know it’s a lie, too. They just tell the vist different to keep them in their hovels at night, and too afraid to go far into the woods. I mean, sure, my people do stay out of the Bright unless we have a reason to be out and about then, but that’s just to make it harder for the enemy to see us.

It’s tricky, hunting your prey in an elf-wood. The trees kill everything that isn’t them, so there’s no brush or thickets to hide in, and any branches that fall off dry out and break up within a couple of days. I had to slip from tree to tree, trusting in my bark-colored cloak and ability to guess when it was safe to move. It also helped that I knew where the prey was going, more or less. There aren’t many places in an elf-wood that are different from each other, and I had already scouted out them all.

I try to be prepared ahead of time like that.

Happy 100th Birthday, Jimmy Carter.

…That’s it. Happy birthday. The man hit one hundred years old today, and is in hospice. I’m not mean. Besides, Carter set in motion the movement to give Americans drinkable beer again. I was there when the beer renaissance happened, and I’m absolutely grateful for it.

So, you know: fair’s fair, and all that.

‘Leave Her Johnny.’

Leave Her Johnny, Stan Rogers

#commissionearned

The September Patreon stuff is up!

Huzzah. Short story is only three thousand words, because I realized I needed to work out who those guys actually were. I have a better feel for them, now.

Patreon!

Behold!

Short Story: Deadlime . A Fermi Resolution story! I have thoughts on what these guys might do.RPG Material: Resurgence, Part Five: Problems. This may be the last one of this batch.

Snippet the Last, DEADLIME.

Actually, writing a ‘mere’ three thousand words had its points. Less BS, more getting to the action. Will contemplate. I got more stories to tell of these two if you like them.

Patreon!

Moving through woods that used to be an Old American ‘suburb’ was always odd. After hundreds of years, a lot of roads were inexplicably still there. The ones that weren’t left behind grassy paths that were only now starting to sprout trees. The path they were on was one of the latter, and the only thing that bothered the two men was the way it left them with slight rises on either side.

Both men instinctively knew how the way to track monsters was to follow your nose. There was just something about the way unnatural creatures smelled that couldn’t be scoured away, or covered up. And everybody knew the Universal Dominion to (and too close to) the west — easily the biggest monster-maker on the continent — didn’t even try to get rid of the smell. They liked it when people got a whiff of evil on the breeze. That made regular folks afraid, and fear was one of the Dominion’s best tools.

Which was one reason why Oxamn and Nat went after the hodag without really even thinking about it. Monster-killing was what fighters did. Besides, if the damn thing were breeding spawn it’d just make sense to kill it now, before the problem got too big for two swordsmen.

That was one hell of a ballgame.

The Mets-Braves game got pretty damned real in the last two innings. Dare I even say…

Shermanesque 8th inning for the Mets.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) September 30, 2024

Line score doesn't even tell half the story of how nuts this has been pic.twitter.com/e4NouZhGsz

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) September 30, 2024

…Mind you, Atlanta’s gonna come out for the second round seven feet tall, and farting fire.

The Intriguing NOSFERATU trailer.

It’s… I’m not entirely sure I want to take my kid to see NOSFERATU. It might be a touch weird for him to watch it with his dad. It’s got a complicated vibe about sexuality, death, and desire going on there.

But we might go see it at different times.

A good month for KENP!

So, I busted through getting 10K pages of my stuff read on KENP this year (essentially, Kindle Unlimited):

…and I had this entire, kind of cranky, wall of text talking about this, and what it means for the industry, and whether KENP is a trap, and a bunch of other stuff I associate with aching eyes. Honestly, though? I should be focusing on the fact that all of this means a bunch of people read about twenty-one of my books for the first time this month.

Which is the goal. And I should be thankful for it. So, I am. Thanks for reading!

Moe Lane

I’m calling this at 5:30.

You may deduce from that just how successful this weekend was from a book-selling point of view. If you have any friends that are not yet awakened to the glory that are my books, now would be an excellent time to tell them about them.

Moe Lane

PS: I’ll be fine. It was just a long two days, and not really great ones.