Moe Lane's Blog, page 616
January 4, 2022
My Internet’s real wonky tonight.
I think it’s because of the unexpected snowfall up here, and the repeated freeze/unfreeze. We’ve lost Internet outright a couple of times last night, and it’s crawling now. Fortunately I was spending most of the night working on getting THE STARS ARE WRONG ready to be sent out. You never know: somebody might buy it!
At least, I think it’s pretty good. I seem to have gotten at least a little better at this, over the last few years. Go figure.
So, let’s see if this goes through…
1/4/22 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
I’m trying to get GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND into draft form over the next two months, which will give me an achievable time schedule. So I started back up on the merry-go-round today. Huzzah!
Patreon!How do you sneak into a corporate lab? …Well, you don’t have to do a lot of sneaking, honestly. Most of the security protocols get disabled when they detect two people walking in with calm demeanors and regular heart rates. When it comes to the Tomb Worlds, the corps don’t worry about corporate espionage nearly as much as they do about solitary maniacs looking for essential ingredients. For that matter, the corps worry more about the research itself than anybody trying to steal it. More than one solitary maniac with a bloody vision started out as a researcher who dug too deep.
Oh, are you wondering why anybody researches anything out here? It’s a fair question. Honestly. Folks do ask it. The answer is, the things we’re learning are worth the risk. It’s cold when you say it aloud — or write it down, I guess — so we don’t. But we all know it anyway.
01/04/21 Snippet, GARY AND THE WENDIGO.
Getting back to this one.
Patreon!“Yeah,” Gary replied after thinking about it. “It’s very, huh, far, though? Not as many trees,” he explained when I looked at him. “You can see for longer.”
“Hmm, a fair amount,” I allowed. The cabin wasn’t at the top of a hill, just a flat spot on the side of the road; but from the porch you could see the ground start lowering itself to meet up with the river, down in the valley. I don’t know how far it was, really. We didn’t go down into that valley. But it’d be a hike, to be sure. “Somebody tell you about the clear space?”
“A little, Shirley Lee. I don’t touch the wooden poles, don’t go past them after dark unless I have iron, and if something tries to break them, I should go get help.” I wasn’t good at reading Bigfoot faces at the time, so I couldn’t see how unhappy he was about that. “They kept telling me that last one.”
“Who? The people who first moved you in?”
But he shook his head. “My paw and my uncles. Like there’s any help around here!” He stopped there, suddenly remembering that I drove up here to offer a hand, and everything. “You know what I mean.”
Need opinions on Samsung Galaxy A20 camera tripods.
I gotta do a video for the upcoming Kickstarter, and like pretty much everybody else in the universe my video recording options have been retreating to my smartphone. I use a Galaxy A20, which is perfectly fine for video – but I don’t have a tripod for it. Before I dive deep into Amazon; what’s the standard choice for people who expect to need to film on a smartphone on a regular basis and want the picture to remain steady?
#commissionearned
January 3, 2022
Patreon! Patreon! So good they called it PATREON!
Stories! Microfiction! Gaming material! Only a dollar a month! But you can give me more*! The more I get, the more I can do! It’s really in your vested interest! PATREON!
Patreon!…Sorry about that, but a lot of what I worked on today involved how best to advertise my stuff in 2022. This is a year where I need to ramp stuff up, as it were. I spent a year learning, and another year refining what I learned; now it’s time to apply the knowledge.
Moe Lane
*If you are already giving, you do not have to give me more.
We knew that Nick Cage was playing Dracula in the upcoming movie RENFIELD, right?
I ask only because I can’t find that post anywhere. Anyway, Nick Cage is playing Dracula in the upcoming RENFIELD flick. Funny thing: at first I had that reversed: I thought he was playing Renfield in DRACULA. Which would be, like, more… on point for him, right? It’d be a lot less surprising, is all I’m saying.
This one I assume I’ll see in theaters. I like me some Universal monster movies.
Kickstarter Watch: Locking down the audiobook!
…Sort of. What I have is an agreement with Sally (she’s the same person who did FROZEN DREAMS) that, should we hit a particular stretch goal, she can work on the project this spring and summer. The truth of the matter is, I glided for a long time on the FROZEN DREAMS Kickstarter, but the money is spent*, and I am down again to what I get from the Patreon and PayPal and KDP royalties and the rest every month. Liquidity is the great bane of the self-published, and it takes time to fill the money pools. But if we do well, things can be accomplished!
Particularly if I crack ten grand on the upcoming Kickstarter. I make that, then suddenly a second novel this year is no longer a pipe dream.
Moe Lane
*I didn’t waste it: it paid for chapbooks and MORGAN BAROD and art and other legitimate expenses. But it’s gonna be a while before raw sales lets me put out a novel every year.
#commissionearned
The Cyrene Fleet [The Day After Ragnarok]
The Cyrene Fleet
Free Ship Cyrene
Type of Vessel: Motor Torpedo Boat Tender
Size: 5100 GRT, 11,000 long tons (loaded), 410 ft long, 60 ft beam, 22.5 ft draft
Speed: 14 knots
Complement: rated 289; current complement 200
Armament: 1 Mark 12 5”38 caliber gun; 6 twin 40 mm guns; 24 single 20 mm guns
Support ships 8-12 armed PT boats (copies of the Elco 80-foot model).
Affiliation: currently, the Fukien Coastal Self-Defense Council (the name changes every few months)
Officially, the USS Cyrene was seized by mutineers prior to the armistice with Japan. What records exist of the mutiny also officially show that the mutineers were originally listed as ‘missing in action’ prior to 1945, and who conveniently disappeared after the Cyrene was delivered to an anonymous consortium based out of the breakaway Chinese province of Fukien. The current crew complement are mostly American, all honorably discharged – and most of them were on the Cyrene, just before they unaccountably were transferred out immediately before the aforementioned mutiny.
There are only four people with access to and knowledge of the Cyrene file, and all four feel that this constructed backstory was unnecessarily complex. The point is that the Free Ship Cyrene is the ostensibly independent flagship of a fleet of privateering commerce raiders. The vessels it services (and under its command) are increasingly locally-made copies of 80 foot Elco PT boats, and have proved adept in capturing civilian ships, raiding isolated Japanese outposts, or inserting material and men into remote locations for various shadowy organizations – all without any official link to American forces in the Pacific.
None of this fools the IJN, although the fiction means that the Japanese are forced to classify the Cyrene and her crews as ‘pirates,’ to be hanged or simply sunk on sight. This means that the Cyrene fleet operates mostly in the triangle formed by the Philippines, New Guinea, and the Marianas. From there, the Cyrene can direct operations either west to the South Asian Sea, or east to harass Japanese resupply of Ponape and the Marshall Islands. And then there’s all those contracts the ship keeps getting to patrol up near something called “Monster Island”…
The crew of the Cyrene and its PT boats are best described as freebooters or filibusters: none of them object in the slightest to furthering Allied interests in the Pacific, but they are equally adamant about doing well by doing good. They won’t commit treason, and are disciplined enough to avoid committing atrocities just for fun; but it can be a hard life in the South Pacific. You can’t always take prisoners. Or keep the ones you have. Or be too dainty about how you further those Allied interests.
In other words, it’s not necessarily true that the Cyrene fleet will find itself on the same side as, say, a group of adventurers with a strong moral code. Particularly if it involves something that is independent of Allied interests in the Pacific – like, say, a treasure map. Freebooters love treasure maps; it’s practically free money. All you have to do is go there… first.
Nothing could POSSIBLY go wrong with this Blockbuster revitalization plan.
Blockbuster DAO is a new social media handle that is trying to generate $5 million to buy the intellectual property rights to the Blockbuster Video brand from Dish Network, its current owner. The plan, according to FX Empire, who first reported the plans (via ComicBook), is to rebuild Blockbuster as a streaming service that they hope will revolutionize the film industry. A DAO, or Decentralized Autonomous Organization, would run on the Blockchain and automate most decisions, ostensibly putting more power into the hands of viewers to determine the future of licenses and original programming on the streaming service and eliminating human error.
…Nothing, do you hear me? Nothing! This will not somehow result in the destruction of all the Works of Man. The Time of the Dark Machines is not at hand. This is not the prophetic testament that will herald that unholy gestation and grim apotheosis.
Why, the very idea is absurd.
January 2, 2022
‘Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now).’
To anybody reading this from the year 2109 AD or something, presumably for a sociology class: I have no idea what the bicycle is supposed to represent, either. Sorry. Also: there are no particular political subtexts in my early novels, except of course for my adamant loathing of Marxism. Feel free to show this statement to that professor you can’t stand!
Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now), C+C Music Factory
