Moe Lane's Blog, page 810
November 18, 2020
Day 18, TINSEL RAIN NaNoWriMo: 37138/60000.
Today was almost a complete bye day – my youngest had to go to the dentist to get some baby teeth taken out, and that more or less torpedoed my schedule – but I did manage to get enough of my brain together to write some fight scene. Fortunately, I have a buffer, so I’m still ahead of my target number! Unfortunately, I now need to rebuild the buffer before Thanksgiving! Ach, well.
Patreon!‘That’ was a rattling doohickey — I’m sure it had one of those weird alchemical names like The Refining Pickle of Antimony or whatever, but ‘doohickey’ works — and from the way people were reacting it wasn’t supposed to be doing that. Or graduating from rattling to hopping on the table like a jumping bean. But people didn’t start clearing the space until the doohickey started puffing out purple smoke. Even I knew that was a bad sign.
One interesting thing about alchemists: they’re real good at diving for cover. Teresa and I didn’t have anybody in our way as we ran towards the doohickey, which made for a nice change. Normally there’s this one guy who wants to get right up and babble something or other until he gets shoved out of the line of alchemy, but this time we had a free path. Happy day!
Yeah, yeah, if I didn’t want to give messed up doohickeys the chance to blow up in my face, I could always run the other way. I can’t, though. That’s not how it’s done. Something bad might happen, and none of these people it might happen to had it coming, probably. Or if they did, I hadn’t heard about it yet, which is pretty much the same thing. I can carp about it all I want, and I do, but I’d better be going into trouble while I’m flapping my gums.
That’s why I was heading towards the doohickey, at least. And Teresa? Eh. Adventurers. Just what it says on the can, right?
The Cyberpunk 2020 Humble Bundle.
Although Humble Bundle’s not quite calling it Cyberpunk 2020, mostly because it is 2020 and – contrary to popular opinion – things aren’t actually as bad here on planet Earth as was predicted. You get used to that real quick when you have an interest in dystopian fiction. Compared to what we were told things would be like, things are actually pretty good. And yeah, that’s even when you factor in the coronavirus.
Anyway: $15 gets you a lot of classic RPG material. Just in time for the actual video game RPG, too. Check it out!
24 hours and counting on the TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION Kickstarter!
Last day of the Kickstarter, and the last chance to get in on the ground floor of TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION! It’s been a learning experience and a half, and I’m glad to have had it. I’m also ready to get to the next step in the process. The goal is, after all, to publish.
Pfizer finishes Phase 3, reports Covid vaccine 95% effective.
A leading coronavirus vaccine candidate developed by Pfizer and BioNTech will be submitted for regulatory approval “within days,” the companies announced Wednesday, after their final analysis suggested the drug was even more effective than previously thought.
The U.S. pharma giant and its German partner said their Phase 3 trial was now complete and that it found the vaccine was 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19 — up from the 90 percent announced last week.
(Via Hot Air Headlines) That number represents over forty thousand adults in that stage. Side effects were remarkably mild: a small percentage reported fatigue or headaches. …I can live with either, thanks. Pzifer says it can get 50 million doses out by the end of the year and 1.3 billion in 2021; if Moderna’s vaccine (which needs only standard refrigeration) also works out, we’re in a good position to have the coronavirus suddenly slam into a brick wall. Which would a no-fooling good thing to have.
November 17, 2020
The “Wow, this looks engrossingly bad” IRON MASK trailer.
There’s just something about IRON MASK that’s fascinatingly awful. But, like, in a kind of good way? It has the potential to be one of the great goodbad films, if only because the CGI manages to look highly unrealistic while at the same time being polished to a fare-thee-well. It will suck, but it might be worth watching anyway. I just don’t know.
11/17/20 Update, TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION Kickstarter.
We made it past the $1000 mark (thanks to both old and new backers)! That means we’re up to five stories in the short story sampler, and with any luck we’ll hit six before the TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION Kickstarter ends. Which is excellent. There is still one $100 pledge level left for anybody who wants a character with their name in TINSEL RAIN; but time is, as they say, running out. The Kickstarter ends Thursday, after all.
In the E-Mail: GOD CANCER.
Got it as part of Greg Stolze’s Kickstarter. So far, so good! It reminds me a bit of Charlie Stross’s “A Colder War,” but that’s to be expected: it’s a Mythos story partially set in Antarctica. The similarities are obvious. But it’s its own thing.
Moe Lane
PS: I’m also keeping an eye on Greg’s funding model, here. He’s using DriveThru Fiction to distribute the book and it looks like his Kickstarters are there to pay for publishing fees and whatnot, while I’ve been using mine to cover the gap between my existing funding and expenses. I might want to fiddle with that, at some point. Something to think about.
In the mail: Hunting Four Horsemen.
I actually bought a physical copy of HUNTING FOUR HORSEMEN, because it’s Jim Geraghty and he’s a buddy. It’s a CIA black ops thriller in a post-coronavirus universe, with the added benefit of not being 750 pages. I loved Tom Clancy’s work, but he really needed more editors willing and able to tell him Cut it down another 20%.
Day 17, TINSEL RAIN NaNoWriMo: 36392/60000.
60% done! Huzzah. It’s starting to feel kind of like a book, although this one isn’t being written all that sequentially. And, honestly, there’s 20K words that need to be added to TINSEL RAIN after NaNoWriMo*.
Patreon!*I’d also like to note how there’s a tuckerization opportunity for TINSEL RAIN, courtesy of the new Kickstarter. Get your name in the book! One spot left!
I ducked through two alleyways and hopped the fence to a cul-de-sac, before my luck finally coughed its last and died. There were a few more of Rowan’s boys in the cul-de-sac than I could manage on my own, and I wasn’t exactly quiet when I jumped in. I don’t even think they were waiting for me; I saw a map of the city on a makeshift table. They were probably planning how to look for me, only to have me show up on my own. See what I mean about my luck dying?
There’s a time for the quipping, and there’s a time for just flat-out mayhem. I was going down swinging, and maybe I wouldn’t be getting up again, so it was time to make it all count. There was a dim chance I could push my way through; and, if I didn’t? Ehh, there were better places than this. Shamuses don’t always die in their beds.
When they’re outnumbered ten to one, some people hit the weakest person first; other people, the strongest, or the leader if he’s not the strongest. Me, I look for the one who reacts first. I mean, he’s gonna be coming after you right away, so you might as well? This gang’s veteran or badass or whatever looked older, so he was probably unflappable or some other annoying kind of stoic. You can’t really punch somebody like that and expect him to fall over.
What you do instead, is trip ‘em. And boot ‘em in the head while they’re getting up. You have to be really stoic to ignore a boot to the head.
