Moe Lane's Blog, page 579
March 21, 2022
My dude @bfleuter had his clothes stolen.
Because being burned out of your house and stock isn’t enough excitement for one decade, it seems*. Anyway, I don’t have a commission that needs filling at the moment, so I bought another pin. They’re good pins anyway.
Hey just pushing this one more time now that I gotta buy new clothes and pay for a vet bill (cat's are okay one just got into something she shouldn't have, and needed some meds to pass it) https://t.co/m9kyW1hDJo
— Ben Fleuter (@bfleuter) March 21, 2022
*Although… hrm.
Tweet of the Day, Pigs Will Just Straight-Up Kill You, Man edition.
I hesitated to embed because of the swear word, but… that was a f*cking idiot bear. You know what you need, to fight pigs? A hand grenade, and a safe place to throw it from. They put lugs on the sides of boar spears because otherwise the wild boar will just keep coming up the shaft, purely to wreck your day before it dies. Their domestic cousins are likewise ill-tempered about being raised as a food source.
Fucking idiot bear https://t.co/2LwT4mVDpC pic.twitter.com/hMIAHe800n
— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) March 21, 2022
March 20, 2022
Connection problems all day…
…add to that the fact that I couldn’t concentrate worth a dang at all this weekend, and you get not the most productive of times. Then again, the lack of concentration happens at the end of all my crowdfunding ventures, so I shouldn’t worry too much about it. Although I will, anyway.
Patreon Microfiction: Just Outlive The Bastards.
The protagonist of Just Outlive The Bastards… well, s/he has patience. That’s a Virtue, right? So at least we’re not talking about somebody who is utterly evil.
Patreon!Second TINSEL RAIN stretch goal down! On to the audiobook!
That means everybody gets the extra stories now – and I’ll bundle up all the Fermi Resolution art and maps I’ve commissioned for our first-day supporters. Huzzah!
Moving along: we’re over halfway to the audiobook stretch goal with, okay, four days to go. But why not take that swing? The Kickstarter ends Thursday: tell all your friends!
March 19, 2022
03/19/22 Snippet, THE DECALOGUE KILLER.
I decided to start writing the ending, because it’s the middle that i’m having problems with. Here’s more from the middle.
Patreon!I’m no newshound sleuth, trying to solve deadly mysteries, or anything like that. You got people already to do that kind of thing. Sure, I may do some investigating, here and there, but it’s usually about why a city official suddenly has new toys in the driveway, and a tab at the strip clubs. And I’m fine with that. It was for sure that staying firmly on the other side of the yellow tape was all that I wanted to do with this story. Just like the cops wanted me to do, I thought.
I thought. Sgt. Meyer set me straight on that, sort of. “I’m here to leak details on the Killer to you,” she told me that night. If that sounds abrupt, it was for me, too: she walked right up to my bar booth and said it before she even sat down.
“You’ve got a weird way of saying ‘Hello,’ Meyer.” I waved to the waitress. “And don’t you have a pension to worry about?”
What should my *next* publishing project be?
As the Kickstarter winds down I’ve been calculating likely cash flow for the rest of the year, on the assumption that it never hurts to do contingency planning. Obviously, at this point TINSEL RAIN gets published as soon as I can get it back from the editor, and the cover designed. No worries there. But where does the Glorious Moeticae Empire go next?
Here are my options:
Publish nothing else this year. Advantage: that speeds up the process by which I get GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND ready for next year (probably 2Q 2023 in that scenario, which is great). Disadvantage: I publish nothing else this year.Chapbook! Advantage: they’re cheap to produce, so I can put at least one together this year. Disadvantages: it’s good that they’re cheap, because they don’t sell all that well. It’d also push GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND back a couple of months.Get the RPG finally ready for commercial sale. Advantage: It vexes me. It vexes me, and I shall have it. Disadvantage: See ‘Advantage.’…Something else. Danged if I know what, though.Thoughts?
THE SHAPER OF WORLDS Volume III Kickstarter, revisited.
Frank J Fleming’s got a story in this Kickstarter, I like Frank, and God knows I should shut up about my Kickstarter every so often, so… check out SHAPERS OF WORLDS Volume III. They’re 69% of the way there, with eighteen days to go, and every little bit helps, hey? Besides, this isn’t a zero-sum game.
Book of the Week: Theft of Swords.
I have a +4 reaction to people who back my Kickstarters, so when Michael J. Sullivan kindly decided to back my latest one I decided to give his Theft of Swords a whirl. I’ve already chuckled three times and laughed out loud once during the first chapter, so it’s going well. Roguish and thievish fantasy, but not grimdark: I can dig it.
PS: Sullivan also gets full points for using names that are easy to pronounce. No, seriously, I’m not being facetious at all. Tolkien could get away with ‘interesting’ names because he was a linguist of terrifying erudition and potency. Most writers are… not. I am genuinely grateful of having characters who I can keep track of.
