Moe Lane's Blog, page 652
November 20, 2021
Book of the Week: The Night Sheriff.
By Phil Foglio. I did not know The Night Sheriff existed! So that was a nice surprise.
The Between the Devil & the Deep GUMSHOE RPG Kickstarter.
Pirate adventures for GUMSHOE! And the Between the Devil & the Deep Kickstarter is being done by the people who got their print run once pulped by the PRC, so I’m reasonably certain they’ll be able to avoid using slave labor to print their books. I think I got burned once or twice in that regard lately, so I’m trying to be more careful. Check it out!
November 19, 2021
‘Spanish Ladies.’
#commissionearned
Posting has gotten screwy lately, huh?
Combination of schooling stuff, NaNoWriMo, and of course it’s almost Thanksgiving. I can’t wait to resume a normal schedule either, let me tell you. I’m also hoping to get more words in this weekend, which will be relatively quiet…
NaNoWriMo, Day 19: 1,510 / 41,280.
Hey! Got past 40,000 words.
Patreon!“Nur!” I said the next day. “Tell me about deathheart. I want to hear about the weird stuff.”
“What am I, a circus animal?” Nur shook his head at me. “I don’t just make up stuff, you know. I hear things. People send me things to read. I have methods.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize you couldn’t do it.”
“Nice try, Pam, but your reverse psychology won’t work on me.” Nur grinned. “Regular psychology does, though. What do you want to know about deathheart that The Process couldn’t tell you?”
“For starters? Just how it could get here from off-planet.”
“Smuggle it on one of the Earth agency ships,” Nur said immediately.
I looked at him. “That was fast.”
“That’s because that’s the standard answer, Pam. Corp- and colony-registry ships are checked when they leave a planet, checked when they arrived, checked while they’re there, and then they get checked again. But a Terran ship — from, say, S/CI, or the Lunar Authority, or, hey, the Adjudication Council! — nobody inspects their holds. You think the crews don’t know that? Hah! They totally know. And they don’t miss a chance to make some money off of that, too.” Nur paused. “Needless to say, I have no personal knowledge of any of those things.”
11/19/21 Snippet, THE STARS ARE WRONG.
This is getting interesting to write.
Patreon!Jak’s good humor guttered and died as we approached our destination. After full dark, the neighborhood of Crooked Point was no safe place for a single Guardian, and it did not welcome us in the morning gloom, either. I fancied I could feel eyes watching us as we moved through silent, too-wide streets. Some muttered it was naught now but the southernmost point of the Razor District, and so not worth any attention besides the scourge’s. Others were more sanguine, and dismissive of the muttering; but no respectable person visited Crooked Point these days. But then, a Guardian is not quite respectable.
But respectable or not, my heart sank to see the ongoing degeneration of the neighborhood. This was a better place, in my childhood, full of incense and vapors and the calls of priests; but all of that had drifted away, pushed aside by an increasing stream of Kee, backwards tribesmen from beyond the western walls. The new immigrants were brutes, ill-formed to our eyes, with the degenerate stamp of the ancients on their faces; and there was something very profane in the way they laughed, or cried. But the Kee proved useful, doing the hardest work for the meanest pay, with sullen but silent industry. So Seacity let them gather in the Razor District, and did not concern itself about the queer rituals and customs that the new arrivals brought with them.
November 18, 2021
Snippet, THE STARS ARE WRONG.
Still adding a little to this.
Patreon!It was the fifth day of the month of the Bloody King when I traipsed up the stairs to the case-room. It was generally agreed by all of my fellow-Guardians of the Way that the extra two flights of steps were well worth the unparalleled view of the mists of Seacity harbor… and the heady smells that came when the east wind freshened. That morning I fancied I could scent spices from Far Foreign ships, the exhalation of Seacity itself, the lingering fragrances and odors from the festivals last evening; and beneath it all, the musk of the sea. I have never gone far enough west to lose the sea-scent, and I hope that I never will. As long as I love the sea-scent, I am not wholly lost to madness.
But I indulged myself in contemplation for only a moment. It would be a long morning, no doubt; the day after Festival is a busy time for Guardians. Many people today would be waking up with the consequences of last night’s actions alongside them, and some of those people would react poorly. The ancients had a saying: If you would have peace, be prepared to slay. A wise thought, if from a vanished and vanquished people.
NaNoWriMo, Day 18: 1,520 / 39,770.
Every day is a gain.
Patreon!Syah paused. “Before you ask: no, I’ve never smoked deathheart. Nobody I know has. You smoke it, supposedly you get seventeen trips like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Seventeen, huh? Don’t tell me, let me guess: the eighteenth kills you dead.”
Syah swigged his beer. “Got it in one. As in, your brain leaves your skull via your ears. At high pressure.”
“Ahh! I’m eating here, Syah. And I was joking!” He spread his hands and gave me one of those too-good smiles, so I wasn’t sure if he was exaggerating. He might not have been. The Tomb Worlds aren’t for the timid.
“You don’t have deathheart on Jefferson, then?” asked Syah. “Must be nice.”
I ignored the very slight edge in his voice — the other colony worlds sometimes resent how ready Jefferson was for human habitation — and answered his question. “Not in the field. Back during the Assertion of Independence a militia company found what I guess you’d call a seed bank: there were a bunch of alien plants in it, ready to be planted. Deathheart was one of them. But that’s not surprising, right? The plant can thrive, under a lot of different planetary conditions. I guess Bolivar just hadn’t been cleaned up enough for humans yet.”
“Lucky us,” muttered Syah.
Cool lunar eclipse tonight!
Peaks at 4 AM, Eastern time. I may set my alarm.
What’s full and bright and red all over? Tonight’s Moon!
— NASA Moon (@NASAMoon) November 18, 2021
It’s the longest partial lunar eclipse since 1440, and it’s so close to total that much of the Western Hemisphere will be able to see the Moon turn red in Earth’s shadow.
How to #ObserveTheMoon: https://t.co/J9trqnx6mF pic.twitter.com/qdrXTXRGYF
