Moe Lane's Blog, page 648
November 29, 2021
NaNoWriMo 2021, Day The Last: 625 / 55,000
Punch the button, because I’m calling it at 55,000. GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND is a mess that will require more words and entire sections written, or rewritten; but the plot works and I can come back to it after I lick TINSEL RAIN into shape. And at 55K it’s above the ‘official’ target number. I’m well-content.
Patreon!…
the sudden unexpected death of a person is one piece of information The Process avoids volunteering, even when you’ve explicitly told it to keep you updated on disasters and tragedies. Our best cyber-semanticists have tried to figure out why — which is to say, they’ve sat down with The Process and asked it to really, really think about why it has that particular glitch. They’ve never gotten a straight answer: The Process isn’t physically broken that way, and it can’t find a flaw in its programming. It invariably professes simply not to know.
I think that’s the ultimate proof that The Process is sapient: it’s capable of self-delusion. If I was a nigh-omniscient knowledge system that had ‘woken up’ in a post-apocalyptic wasteland to discover that everybody was dead and I didn’t know why, I might be just a bit reluctant to officially notice it when anybody else died, right out of the blue. It would be a hell of a reminder of my ongoing fundamental failure to understand what had happened.
And maybe that’s why The Process pushes itself so much. It’s the last fragment of the Amalgamation, surrounded by the corpses of worlds. But it can’t do anything about it, except get us humans up to speed in what was suddenly an actively hostile universe. If there is anything like a chance for justice, or just revenge, it will come from our hands, not its.
It’s a Hell of a burden for anything thinking entity. Which also may be why The Process always insists that it can’t actually think. Whatever you have to do to keep functioning, right?
Water is Wet Watch: More Spider-Man flicks planned.
In today’s ultimately non-shocking news:
[SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME producer Amy] Pascal was quick to confirm that Sony will continue to collaborate with Marvel Studios on Spider-Man movies, and those movies will indeed star Tom Holland.
“This is not the last movie that we are going to make with Marvel – [this is not] the last Spider-Man movie,” Pascal revealed. “We are getting ready to make the next Spider-Man movie with Tom Holland and Marvel. We’re thinking of this as three films, and now we’re going to go onto the next three. This is not the last of our MCU movies.”
In other words: Sony has precisely zero intention of not making another three popular movies starring an endearing actor while he’s still young enough to credibly do the part. …Sounds fairly reasonable when I write it out like that, doesn’t it? It’d be different if the Tom Holland Spider-Man flicks sucked, but they don’t. So, sure, make some more.
#commissionearned
The THE SILENT SEA Netflix trailer.
I might watch THE SILENT SEA, if only because the Lunar horror aesthetic matches a fantasy-horror project I’m… ah, never mind. Shouldn’t say too much ahead of time. Anyway, it is of interest.
November 28, 2021
I’m locking down the cover art for TINSEL RAIN.
Hope folks like Fritz Lang movies. In other news: this means I absolutely have to spend December locking down getting TINSEL RAIN in shape for my alpha reader. I don’t regret getting GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND up and running this month, but starting December 1st I need to be on the stick with the Tom Vargas sequel.
In other, other news: I’m going to need to put a Kickstarter together in March if I want to get the book out earlier than Christmas 2021. Particularly since it’d be the only way I could fund an audiobook. Doubly-particularly since I’d have to pay the audiobook person more money, because she wouldn’t be getting residuals from it. Ah, the joys of self-publishing…
My novels: still only 99 cents!
MY LOSS IS YOUR GAIN! I should have put more intermediate steps in my Black Friday sale! You can still get my novels for extra-cheap!
FROZEN DREAMSMORGAN BARODTALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION
NaNoWriMo, Day 28: 1,520 / 54,380.
Really, I have absolutely nothing against either the Boy or the Girl Scouts. My wife was a Girl Scout. And yet…
Patreon!The most alarming thing about the Scout camp was how 95% of it wasn’t alarming at all. I’d vacationed in camps like this, growing up on Jefferson; the colony didn’t have full electricity until I was in flight school. If you didn’t mind chemical toilets and food cooked with open flames, it’d even be luxurious by my childhood standards. It was certainly prettier; the buildings were carefully made, then smoothed and polished to clean-lined elegance. Look at a photo of the place, and you’d decide it was peaceful, even serene.
As long as you didn’t go inside.
For example: there was a library (the cabin doors were locked, but I discovered very quickly that the keys were invariably on the top sill). Inside were two rows of school desks, and shelves full of books, each bearing the Scout logo. They apparently needed books on things like woodworking, knot-tying, and carpentry… plus social engineering, demolitions, anatomy, space-based tactics, enhanced interrogation, pharmacology, and eschatology. And those were just the ones I looked through.
The one on enhanced interrogation had both diagrams and photos. It was also written for teenagers.
Patreon Microfiction: Normalcy.
(September 11th was on a Saturday, this year.)
…Nothing further to say on this one.
Patreon!November 27, 2021
‘Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town.’
YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS? THAT’S RIGHT! THE TRADITION CONTINUES!
Back from traveling.
Obviously. And I will be very happy to have this book in something resembling a first draft by Tuesday. It’s changed a bit in the process, but that’s all right. What’s the point of writing a book when you know how it’s going to end?
Hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving!
