Moe Lane's Blog, page 562

Processed three chapters’ worth of TINSEL RAIN edits in a row.

My brain hurts, but at least now I have a system in place to efficiently handle fixing up TINSEL RAIN. So far, the editor isn’t making me do anything too horrible. I am actually a bit of a pushover when it comes to my deathless prose: I take the position that if I’m paying somebody large sums of money to go over my work, surely that means that I should at least take their suggestions seriously. As long as the words reflect what I was trying to say, naturally.

As always, check out the TINSEL RAIN pre-order store if you missed the Kickstarter!

Tweet of the Day, Pay Your Creators (Even If You’re Disney) edition.

I diffidently suggest that this decade may end up being not the best time in American history for the Disney Corporation to engage in legally dubious activities that do not reflect well on them.

The #DisneyMustPay Task Force Calls on Disney–Again–to Pay the Writers https://t.co/lETPYaGXNO via @victoriastrauss

— Karl K. Gallagher (@KarlKGallagher) April 28, 2022

New Kindle Vella: SHE IS A DUCAL MODEL IN A ZOMBIE-LURKING GOTHICK WORLD.

My wife gave me the idea for that title. Moe, she says, Moe. If you must do this, go with Gilbert and Sullivan*. In fairness, I told her I was looking for a bad pun.

Anyway, the first three (and free!) episodes of SHE IS A DUCAL MODEL IN A ZOMBIE-LURKING GOTHICK WORLD** is now live, after many an annoying adventure along the way yesterday night. The rest will hopefully load today.

And check out that cover! Made using only the finest paint.net pixels. Artisanal, those are.

*I am paraphrasing. Perhaps unfairly.

**Formerly THE DEFENSE OF CASTLE WINDERMERE, which would have been a fine title except that a) the party was only briefly at Castle Windermere and b) was never actually shown defending it.

#commissionearned

Check your emails for the TINSEL RAIN Backerkit survey!

They’re mostly in, but if you signed up, check your spam folder. And, of course, you can always pre-order TINSEL RAIN here! …And that’s pretty much it.

More on that Kindle Vella story thing.

Public Service Announcement: save all episodes as drafts first. That way, should you miscount and not put the episodes in order, it’s relatively easy to fix that. By replacing the text in a rippling cascade down the episodes; because once an episode is submitted, there is exactly NO way to unsubmit it before it can be reviewed. Which can take up to 72 hours.

This PSA has been brought to you by the barely-concealed urge to… wow. My YT music mix just put Drowning Pool’s Bodies on. That’s it. That’s been precisely my mood for the last two hours.

Moe Lane

PS: The income you can pull from Kindle Vella for the next two months is absolutely worth it, actually.

The CHIP N’ DALE: RESCUE RANGERS trailer.

I was going to start this with, Where the heck is Gadget? But then I watched the actual trailer, and now I’m going: What the heck is going on here? It’s clearly got a WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? vibe to it; but can they sustain? And can the Mouse manage to laugh at itself for the entire movie? And is the wildly divergent animation styles going to make my nose bleed if I watch it for long enough?

…And Where the heck is Gadget?

#commissionearned

Getting a new Kindle Vella ready.

I just need a better title than THE DEFENSE OF CASTLE WINDERMERE. It doesn’t really fit, anymore,. Something with a bad joke involving zombies and cooking would work.

Carlotta had settled on a group of six, evenly divided between Davies’ soldiers and Baxter’s ‘diamonds in the rough.’ On the soldier side she had Lieutenant Jeremiah Witherby, and Sergeants Jones and Robinson; on the other was Jimmy and Loud Mary and Other Billy. All six had shuffled a bit, once it had sunk in that they were actually beyond the castle walls, but Carlotta could hardly blame them for that. After all, she was feeling the same way. Besides, they settled down quickly.
There was always going to be some revenants who might come within scent range, so Carlotta began her spell the moment they were out of sight of the castle.

“Everyone!” she — well, duchesses do not hiss. “Gather close. This spell can be most tiring to cast.”

She was exaggerating, but only a little. Before the apocalypse, she would have assumed that adapting an arcane ritual without books or mentors would have been nigh-impossible to do properly. These days, ‘properly’ was rather more flexibly defined; but so was ‘efficiency.’ Having the party huddle close helped a great deal.
Then again, so would not being masticated first. She used a deadfall clearing to perform the ritual, which would give them at least a little clear space for the inevitable fight. And, as she privately admitted to herself; if her party could not handle a few revenants among the treeline, best to find that out ahead of time.

5/6 of MOON KNIGHT done…

…and it’s very possibly the best Marvel series Disney+ has done to date. MOON KNIGHT started messed up, and it’s kept it up since then; and, given how Hollywood* the hero’s mental illness is, it’s doing a pretty good job giving you the feeling of what kind of trauma’s he’s going through. It could still blow up the ending, but we’ll know next week.

This would have been an absolutely awful movie, by the way. There’s no way you could do this in two hours without it being far too rushed. But as a six-part miniseries MOON KNIGHT works.

*Which is to say: gratuitously and cinematically incorrect.

‘Red Rain.’

Red Rain, Peter Gabriel

#commissionearned

Sony to require timed game trials for new Playstation+ games.

This is good news, right? It feels like good news.

Sony has begun communicating with developers about its plans for timed game trials for PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers. According to sources speaking to Game Developer, developers working on games that have a wholesale cost of $34 or higher (€33 in Europe, ￥4000 in Japan) are now required to create time-limited game trials of their games. (Update: This number was previously referred to as the retail pricing, it has been updated to reflect that it refers to wholesale pricing.)

These trial versions must be at least two hours long. 

At least, for game players. Game companies might have a different opinion. And there’s something about this that I’m missing…