Moe Lane's Blog, page 875
July 14, 2020
So, downloading Civ III from Gog.com…
…might have been a mistake. 10:30 becomes 11:15 becomes oh crap, it’s after 1 AM. On the other hand, it was only six bucks and I’m getting tired of waiting for Bloodlines 2 or Cyberpunk. Assuming that they even make their deadlines, which isn’t guaranteed these days.
07/14/2020 Snippet, TIPPED ON A STIFF.
Tsk, tsk. Well, this is Tom when he was a little younger. And dumber. And not quite as aware that people hide knives in their sleeves.
Patreon!Now, they grow sicarios tough in Cin City, and nothing I had just done was going to put these guys down for the count. But this was Rick’s. When somebody starts punching around like this, everybody else figures it’s time for the bar fight. After the first ten seconds, it doesn’t even matter who’s on which side. It’ll all get sorted out when the cops show up.
In the meantime there was plenty of confusion and delay, to quote the Lore. I took advantage of it to get up to the doohickey guy. Up close he looked foreign, northern foreign. Not barbie foreign, though. He looked like he was maybe from the badlands; he had the cold eyes for it, and the gait that comes when you wear leathers all day instead of an off the rack Cin City suit.
I smacked the doohickey out of his hands, on general principles. “The hell you thinking, pal?” I shouted in his face. “You know what the cops do to anybody caught with a magic item in this town?” I figured, being a foreigner, he wouldn’t know the answer was ‘not a damned thing, unless they had to.’ Although using one to stalk a noblewoman wasn’t real smart—
And that’s when the son of a bitch stabbed me.
So, you’re tough. Nothing gets to you. It all bounces off.
Prove it. Listen to this all the way through.
X Minus One was a goram national treasure.
Moe Lane
PS: I put it up a few years ago, yeah.
The THE ROCK Honest Trailer.
Some of Honest Trailer’s Honest Trailers recently haven’t been as awesome as they could have been, but their own about THE ROCK is pretty solid. Now I need to see if I have this one around somewhere. …Huh. Nope.
The one-month FROZEN DREAMS anniversary!
People always seem to only sporadically talk about the numbers to this stuff, so I figured I’d demystify it a little.
Basically, I put up FROZEN DREAMS a month ago (June 14th): as of last night (July 13th) it had moved 114 units. The vast majority (104) were Kindle books; obviously, 10 were paperbacks. Working out how many books were sold during the Kickstarter is complicated, because of multiple formats and people getting extra copies, so I’m going to use 150 as a low-ball estimate. So, we’ll call it 260 in total, and 114 for the month.
All of that means… well, a lot of people seem to have different opinions about what it means, and the implications are likewise not uniform*. I think that it’s doing fine. I think that it’s also fair to say that arguably the book’s doing better than average.
But, my droogies: ‘average’ in this business is a chill place of loneliness and despair**. If you have an author that you’re fond of (this is not a passive-aggressive technique for looking for more reviews***), and you’re not in the habit of reviewing books you read: you well and truly will be doing them a favor by reviewing that book they wrote and you liked. And yeah, I think I’ve mentioned all of this before, but it bears repeating. The metrics for success here are convoluted, and not always obvious from the outside.
Anyway, if you have any questions about any of this, ask ’em and I’ll try to answer. But you knew that already.
Moe Lane
*Unless the person in question works for a book promotion/distribution service. For those the meta-response is uniform: “Let me rewrite your question into one where the answer is ‘Use our services!'” Seriously, I’m waiting to see somebody respond to that when the question is “Should I let my cat watch me as I write?”
**And I thought political writing didn’t pay much!
***I’ll come right out and, err, write it: if you liked FROZEN DREAMS, here’s the Amazon site and here’s the Goodreads site. But not everybody has my nigh-invulnerable self-esteem bordering on insufferable arrogance, and those other people could use the boost that comes from a good review.
July 13, 2020
The GHOST OF TSUSHIMA trailer (with Kurosawa mode!).
(Via Coming Soon) That just means you can play GHOST OF TSUSHIMA in black and white. Which is actually pretty cool.
Comes out July 17th. I’d buy it, except that I can’t seem to find the time to play anything on the PS4. And yes, that annoys me.
FROZEN DREAMS audiobook progressing nicely.
We spent tonight prepping the audiobook for FROZEN DREAMS (that’s not the link to it; the audiobook isn’t ready yet) for Audible. It’s progressing well, I think. The files are almost ready and the biggest limiting factor is probably going to be the auditing process. As you might imagine, Amazon is going to want to make sure that the book is what it claims to be. I’m sympathetic to that, really. I can think of at least three ways to cause mayhem otherwise, and I’m not even trying hard.
Things continue on.
Universal’s LITTLE MONSTERS green-lit.
Gonna be interesting: “Universal Pictures is set to produce a family-friendly monster movie titled Little Monsters, and it will be written and directed by Toy Story 4’s Josh Cooley. Just to clarify, this movie is not associated with the 1989 Fred Savage and Howie Mandel film, which has the same title.” Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I kind of want to see goofy classic movie monsters, just as long as it’s truly family-friendly. The idea appeals to me.
Again: family-friendly. No grimdark or gritty reboots. If they can find somebody funny who can stay clean-mouthed when the camera’s running, that’d be a bonus.
