Moe Lane's Blog, page 893
July 29, 2020
The ET Honest Trailer.
…Oh, that was perfect. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.
Just got the pencil sketch in for the FERMI RESOLUTION RPG worldbook cover.
There’s one minor tweak that I need have done, but otherwise it’s gonna pop, I think. Ben Fleuter does good work. Can’t wait to tease it out to folks.
Ach, what a weirdly productive month it’s been. I’m getting to the point where I need to start thinking about all the other stuff I’ve been — well, not neglecting. Money was paid for these projects; people need to get their money’s worth. But I got a manuscript that needs a second pass-through, then an alpha reader handout. And soon it will be November, and time to write another book. Busy, busy, busy…
Moe Lane
PS: Four away from my target number for the month! Tell all your friends!
07/29/2020 Snippet, TRADE NEGOTIATIONS.
The Tom Vargas story is now a novella, and won’t be ready this month. But TRADE NEGOTIATIONS is almost done. One more real scene after this, so no worries. We’ll put this up — after renaming it.
Patreon!It helped if you thought of mind-controlled soldiers as something like less smelly, but better-armed skeletons. Adventurers knew how to fight people, sure. They could even learn how to do it without getting broken inside. But it’s just easier to get in the right mindset when fighting monsters, because then you don’t have to feel bad when you break them. Besides, in this case Jimmy didn’t even want to break them; he was after the mage.
It was him and three other guys against twenty-four, looked one way. Looked another, it was four against one, with the one having twenty-four bodies to try to sort out on the fly. And in yet a third way, it was him against the mage, only the mage was getting distracted by the way that Jimmy’s three companions kept switching attacks and pushing her slave-soldiers around. It wouldn’t work for long, but Jimmy didn’t care about ‘for long.’ He cared about getting within sword range of the mage controlling the fighters.
And he did.
Afterward, he whirled the mage’s blood off of his blade and shook his head at the waste. The slave-soldiers had been set to go wild at the mage’s death, as usual; the problem was, they were mostly going wild on each other. Not completely — one of his crew was down, and it took a few moment of brutal sword-work to keep the now-feral soldiers from ripping out the throat of a second — but it was more butchery than fighting. Jimmy always hated these scenes, hated feeling like he was a murderer. But what could he do? The Dominion refused to give up cruelty, even in its death throes.
But the mages still died, at the cost of ‘only’ half of his troops dead or too wounded for full duty. That was apparently a really good score for a military operation against Dominion mages, as far as Jimmy was aware, but Adventurers operated under less forgiving rules.
The “Well, THAT was rude” THE PALE DOOR trailer.
(Via GeekTyrant) I suppose that there may be extenuating circumstances not present in the trailer for THE PALE DOOR. But as presented, the response seems… intemperate. And ultimately self-defeating, surely?
I mean, obviously yes it’s a horror movie and a supernatural one at that. But really: if this is how you treat people who have done you a favor, then it’s no wonder that nobody will ever do you any favors! Next time, try enlightened self-interest. It’s not perfect, but it’s rarely stupid.
The audio files for the FROZEN DREAMS audiobook are done…
…and sent back to the producer for final revisions and whatnot. There was nothing major, so the changes themselves aren’t going to take too long. However, I don’t know how long Amazon is going to take to process the files for final submission.
But once the files are back from our revisions I can get on with distributing them to Kickstarter backers, which will blue out another entry on the Action Plan. Not much left on that front, really. Huzzah!
Moe Lane
PS: Buy the book!
July 28, 2020
Tweet of the Day, This Excellent Headline Improves On Second Reading edition.
I can say with some pride that I retain a certain childish sense of humor about certain things. Even at my age!
Via @EsotericCD.
'Scrotum frog' is essential to Lake Titicaca region and must be saved, experts say https://t.co/H41HwbLMUc pic.twitter.com/3SJEmgVM4Y
— New York Post (@nypost) July 28, 2020
Light posting today.
It turns out that Reviewing audiobook files requires a heck of a lot more in the way of attention than I thought it would. I gotta buckle down and get this done if I want it done before the end of the month. And I can’t really do anything else, either. Whaddya gonna do?
Reviewing the FROZEN DREAM audiobook today!
It’s very exciting. And very time-consuming: I’m supposed to check every chapter of FROZEN DREAMS, which is something I hadn’t realized earlier but makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? The truth is, I don’t really ‘do’ audiobooks, so a lot of this is fairly new to me.
Still. All part of the job. Any suggestions on how to optimize the review process would be helpful, mind you.
Moe Lane
July 27, 2020
I could use a blind playtesting group for the FERMI RESOLUTION RPG worldbook.
Both a group that has familiarity with GUMSHOE, and one that does not would be acceptable; or, indeed, both. I’d learn different things from each. Either way, if people are interested I’d need them to grab the rules and play the game in August, and get back to me with feedback by the end of August. Hopefully by then I’ll have an editor to go through the text so I can get it to the layout artist and then get it back to be sold. And maybe the print run Kickstarted.
Either way: if you’re interested, feel free to apply via comments here or email me via Backerkit. If you backed the Kickstarter then you should already have the playtest version in your mailbox already; if you did not, well, it comes free with FROZEN DREAMS in certain pre-orders and I’ve reopened the store.
