Moe Lane's Blog, page 846
September 13, 2020
09/13/2020 Update, DUTIES Project.
13,140/32,000 Words.
Worked on: The Fight in the Grove
DUTIES is going to be four previously published stories: “Processing Duty,” “The Fight In the Grove,” “Frogman Prince,” and (my personal favorite) “Meatbags.” I was originally going to type “published on Patreon,” but since all the magazines out there insist on treating them as bloody reprints they can damn well not be hyphenated-published stories. Fair’s fair.
A bit of a taste:
In the beginning, there was the Earth. He fell in love with the Sky, and She with Him, and from their union She began to birth the rain. From the rain came all the living things of the world, including the trees — and Those Who Speak. The dryads and others who hold that title do so because they speak for the trees. Oh, and all other creatures that cannot speak on their own; but mostly the trees.
Alas, not all trees are good trees. Once upon a time, some trees had roots that drank too deep, in the wrong soils, and brought up into the air and light that which should have remained dark and deep. Are these abominations malicious enemies of Earth-Father and the Sky Lady, or merely mindless opposites to the Gods? I do not know.
I do know that when wood and plant encounters this corruption it is perverted into an evil mockery of itself which seeks only to grow and dominate, until only it remains. This was the first bittersap, and it twisted many a forest until Those Who Speak learned how its filth could be purged.
Patreon Microfiction: Don’t Fiddle With It.
Yes, ‘Don’t Fiddle With It’ is slightly banal. It’s supposed to be. The banal is ultimately the point.
Patreon!September 12, 2020
I’ll take ‘Too Much Time and Matches On Their Hands” for $300, Alex.
Via GeekTyrant. …Well, that’s one way to make it through quarantine.
Book of the Week: Dislocated to Success.
The premise of Iain Bowen’s Dislocated to Success is fairly straightforward, as ‘Islands in the Sea of Time’-type stories go*: what would happen if Maggie Thatcher’s UK was sent back in time to 1730? Answer: the British would end up having a fine time of it. It’s a fun read, not least because the author is quite sound on Maggie. As is only fitting.
*This is, indeed, a genre.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh…
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh:
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh, Sandy Petersen…
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! IA! IA! IA!
And So It Begins: Tom Vargas #2.
I don’t even remotely have a title for this one, yet. It’s also not being actively worked on, every day, and won’t be until November. And, obviously, it’s not going to be on the publication rotation until at least three projects from now. But… I have a plot, and at least I’ve got a start.
Patreon!I get a lot of people knocking on my door. I don’t always want to hear their knock, either — but for Daisy I’m always gonna make an exception. It ain’t what you think: Daisy Fukunaga Araujo’s a grandmother and usually a cheerful one, although today she still looked a little sad. But better than she had at the funeral, at least.
Daisy did brighten a little as I hastily cleared off a seat, in the fine old tradition of a New Californian Shamus. I keep those papers around special, just for guests. Dunno why, but clients always like to think that we’re always up to our necks in Cases needing Clearing. Makes ‘em feel special when we take theirs anyway, I guess.
“What can I get for you, Daisy?” I said after she was situated. I keep a cabinet of various things that can be mixed with other things to create drinks; you never know what a client would want to drink. “I can put the water on the boilrock, if you’d like tea.”
She gave me a not-real-strong smile. “Thank you, Tom” — it’s always ‘Tom’ and ‘Daisy’ between the two of us, not ‘Shamus’ and ‘Artisan’ — “but I’d rather a whiskey, if you have one.”
That stopped me cold. Oh, not the whiskey itself; Daisy’s no teetotaler. But if we were starting with the hard stuff then I was already on a Case; and it wouldn’t be an easy one, either.
Not that it mattered, hard or soft. I mean, it’s Daisy.
September 11, 2020
‘Rattlin Bog.’
Rattlin Bog, Darby O’Gill
…If I could find it, I’d put it up. This one ain’t easy to track down.
The admittedly self-aware SAVE YOURSELVES! trailer.
I mean, SAVE YOURSELVES! comes out and explicitly admits it: the hero and heroine of this alien invasion movie have no skills. They are millennials fighting a skirmish with giant tribbles, and apparently losing. I’m not gonna lie, that amuses me.
The movie’s probably dumb, but the trailer makes it past the first checkpoint.
09/11/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.
Easy translations!
Patreon!“…These are the correct pages?”
David looked them over, and nodded. Which I expected; he had told me which ones to reproduce, and I am more than capable of doing such a simple task. “You are an alumnus too,” I pointed out. “What did you do to the Library?”
He seemed a little nettled by that. “I didn’t do anything to them,” he said (I found his tone a touch evasive). “I just got tired of the way they make researchers jump through hoops for a taste of — okay, that’s the formula I was thinking of.”
I looked at it again. I could read it, but… “It’s nonsense.”
David shook his head. “No, it’s in code,” he said as he started jotting things down in a notebook. “These medieval alchemists loved codes. Well, ciphers. Though the handwriting would have been enough, for some of those guys.
“Anyway,” David said after some tedious scribbling and calculating that I will skip over, “here’s the translation.” I looked at it. Even then, it seemed gibberish — but then something seemed to click, and the instructions suddenly made a good deal more sense. Hardly surprising, I decided. Chemistry is derived from alchemy, yes? It’s no harder than David reading Chaucer, I suppose.
