Moe Lane's Blog, page 56
May 31, 2025
The May Patreon stuff is up!
There’s a new Tom Vargas story! It has Father Mike in it!
Short Story: Tom Vargas and the Case of the Meddling Priest. …There’s a new Tom Vargas story! It has Father Mike in it!Roleplaying Game Material: The Cunning Land, Part 6-A: The Tricentennials (Part 1). …Okay, one more after this.
Patreon!
Snippet the Last, TOM VARGAS AND THE CASE OF THE MEDDLING PRIEST.
12,783 freaking words.
…
All cultist chanting sounds the same. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because cultists are dumb, so getting them to learn more than one chant is too much of an ask.
From what I heard, the first sewers for Cin City were put in when people still thought we could put in pumps or machinery later. When things settled down. Well, things are still pretty damned unsettled, I guess, because there’s plenty of little rooms and alcoves down here with nothing in them.
The cultists had decided to squat in one alcove, although from the look of things they had take it away from the previous tenants first. It’d been a fight, too. A small heap of dead chanecks had been piled to one side, while a cultist’s corpse — at least, I hoped that it was his — had been been stripped, then placed on a makeshift table. The five remaining were the ones doing the chanting.
Patreon!
May 30, 2025
‘Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold (Extended Edition).’
Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold (Extended Edition), Clamavi De Profundis[image error]
New Tim Powers dropping this year.
Oooh. Tim Power’s The Mills of the Gods is gonna be an E-ARC special as soon as Baen gets around to making it available as one. Keywords: Paris, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, reincarnation, conspiracy, supernatural, catacombs, Cybele, Moloch, and deicide. Can’t wait!
Welp, KING OF THE HILL is back.
You can get a lot of hints of what’s happened since KING OF THE HILL ended from the opening credits. Will the new show suck? Geez, what are you asking me for? I mean, sure, probably. Revivals usually do.
05/31/2025 Snippet, TOM VARGAS AND THE CASE OF THE MEDDLING PRIEST.
Got to finish this up.
…
The first one we found was dead, but it wasn’t our fault: he was like that when we got there. He was looking pretty tattered, too. He must have been fighting things made out of claws and teeth, and hadn’t quite won.
Lacy visibly stopped himself from pushing the corpse around with his foot. “What do you think?” he asked. “Chupacabra?”
I shook my head. “Wrong kind of cuts. Wild chupacabras do puncture wounds. These were made by claws.”
“We have clawed monsters down here?” asked Mike. “When did that happen?”
“It didn’t,” I told him. “We got the chanecks down here, same as always.” I squatted to get a better look at the corpse. Might as well: these pants were going to need cleaning, anyway. Maybe an exorcist. “Ehh, that might be from a chaneck’s fingers, or mouth. But they don’t go after people.”
“Even people who were cultists?” asked Lacy, as he looked around, and visibly decided not to light a cigarette. The fumes down here… “Maybe they started something.”
“Who?” Mike asked. “The cultists, or the chanecks?”
“Yes.”
Tornado Watch!
Well, that was exciting. We didn’t get many tornados in New Jersey – and almost none at the Shore – so moving somewhere that gets more of them took some getting used to. Not that Maryland is a patch on, say, Texas or Iowa, obviously.
Anyway, we piled into the basement, and now we have all piled out of it.
Tweet of the Day, You Laugh So That You Do Not Cry edition.
Ain’t this the truth. It could be worse, though. I could be bad at writing.
— Raconteur Press, LLC (@raconteur_press) May 30, 2025
Via @davefreersf.
PS: Books here.
#commissionearned
May 29, 2025
‘Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.’
I may have mentioned this already, but I was playing Paul Simon in the car once, and my wife got a puzzled look on her face. “What’s that?” she asked me. “It sounds like Simon and Garfunkel, only happy.”
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes, Paul Simon
#commissionearned
This has been a less-than-productive month. (Not really)
Sort of. I have to remind myself that I published a freaking RPG game this month and did two outside festivals. Both of which I should keep in mind. You know how it is, own worst critic and so forth…
