Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 16

24: Little Soft Creatures

Today’s sample is from Fair Balls, a Prohibition Orcs tale that’s going to my backers next week and the rest of the world next April.

The tiny sewn-hide ball settled into the cup of Ivan’s palm.

“Oscar, you see where Mick is?” Brigid said.

How was an orc to remember these human names? Even without coats human children all looked alike, little soft creatures that couldn’t feed themselves until they were twice Ivan’s age.

Brigid pointed. “Behind home plate? You stand there and catch what Ivan thr...

My Ebook Store Now Offers Gift Cards

Don’t know exactly what you want as a gift for Your Chosen Winter Solstice Holiday, but you know you want it to include my ebooks?

Tilted Windmill Press now offers gift cards. There’s no physical card, mind you. It’s a digital code that gets emailed to the recipient. But if Amazon calls this a ‘gift card’ I can too.

Yes, this is another lame excuse to take your money. Except it’s not your money, it’s money from your friends and family.

You might note that the cards are good for two years, rather...

November’s Noughtwithstanding Sausage

This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of November, and the public in December. A buck a month gets you early access and more.

These posts need titles, so I go for alliteration. Alliteration gives me an excuse to grab my primordial Oxford English Dictionary. I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t think folks quite appreciate what a font of wordage it is.

It’s ninety years old and smells like knowledge.

Anyway, it’s been quite a month. The Apocalypse Moi Kickstarter is now completely fu...

23: Bayseian Statistics and Fuzzy Hashes

I would love to finish this book before 2024. It’s not going to happen, but I would love to do it.

Redis is a database, but not in the way PostgreSQL or MySQL or sqlite or hash files or CSV files or Oracle are. While traditional databases prioritize getting data safely ensconced on the disk, Redis treats RAM as its primary data store. Redis has options for safely stashing data on the disk, including options that approach the reliability of traditional databases, but its primary aim is speed. Red...

Penguicon Auction, or: How To Make Me Shut Up

I’ve been a fan of Penguicon since they invited me as a GoH back in 2013. Some of the con staff even troll me.

Like many cons, Penguicon is struggling to reboot post-lockdown. They will make enough on registration to cover expenses, but that money arrives late and they need some cash up front. They’re holding a fundraising auction.

Some of the items are magnificent. Want to be a Guest of Honor, or make someone else a GoH? Personally I think we should draft Bob Beck and make him explain TLS. You ...

22: Sugarplum is a Lying Bastard

Ah, US Thanksgiving. The start of the You Will Love Christmas Forced Death March. If you own the proper sunglasses you can see that all the billboards are actually white, with messages in big black letters like BE JOLLY and CELEBRATE. Don’t wear the glasses too long, you’ll get a headache.

Today’s snippet is from “Heart of Coal,” a Christmas tale that will be on my short fiction bookstore next month.

They sent me to Wrapping, where I proved that I had failed art honestly. Bakery? Airborne flour ...

Penguicon fundraiser, featuring Orc-Cased Orcs

Did you miss the Prohibition Orcs Kickstarter–specifically, the orc-leather-cased exclusive omnibuses? I know many of you did. You told me about it. Bitterly and at length.

Orc leather? If you didn’t know — when an orc dies, their final gift to their clan is their remains. The clan uses every scrap, including the hide.

Penguicon, like all cons, is struggling to resurrect itself after the pandemic. That means money. They’re holding an auction to raise seed money. While their registration fees wil...

21: The Man Will Be Wrong

I offered an orc baseball story as a stretch goal for last year’s two-book Prohibition Orcs kickstarter. I really need to get the dang thing done, so I’m trying to drag it to completion this week.

Dad spoke of men. Before they had gone to the first school, Dad had instructed them every day until Ivan and Oscar could both chant his orders perfectly. Even now that they were grown orcs, old enough to claim work or a wife or attend reading school, he invited them to chant with him. When a man shouts...

Why My Short Fiction Is Exclusively In My Store

You might have noticed that I’ve stopped publishing my shorter fiction on third-party bookstores like Amazon and Kobo and whatnot. If it’s not credibly a novel by historical standards1, it’s in my store. If you’re unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity when someone asks me about my business model, I make a lot of noise about the importance of having your work available on every platform. Why would I break my own rule? Because I’m okay with exclusivity, so long as it’s mine.

My short stories ha...

New Christmas story: “The Rats’ Man’s Lackey and the Forbidden Tinsel”

Available exclusively on my bookstore for a paltry two bucks. Or free, if you’re a Patronizer.

“Someone in our household is practicing Christmas, and we will all be dead by midnight.”

Discover demons are real and, if you survive long enough, you might find supernatural Witness Protection. Stay alive by abandoning your life and your name and following Whackadoo Manor’s rules: no Vienna sausage, no Internet, no Bruce Willis movies or Swedish Modern furniture, and—no matter what—no holidays.

Even t...