Ari McKay's Blog, page 14

Winter

It has definitely been an interminable winter in the mid-Atlantic, but we got what I hope is the last snow storm of the season yesterday. It’s now colder than the ninth circle outside, but it’s rather pretty, too! Yet I’d prefer to stay inside and write, to be honest. This southern gal has never developed a taste for temperatures below about 65, even after decades in the north!

New audio book!

We have a new audio book! The first book in the Herc’s Mercs series, The Bigger They Come, is now available in audio book format from Amazon, Audible, and iTunes.

We’ve changed up our website as well. New header images, new layout! Our latest releases are now linked in the lefthand sidebar, and I’ve made a couple of other little tweaks to (hopefully) make the site a little easier to navigate.

Big Biscuit Bottoms: Murder Ballads playlist

Last year, we wrote a Valentine’s Day story that featured a main character who is a toy store manager by day and a Bluegrass musician by night, Andy Lane. In Dandy’s Little Girl, Andy’s band, the Big Biscuit Bottoms, were hired to play at an anti-Valentine’s Day party at a popular bar, and I had way too much fun coming up with their set list because I love Bluegrass, folk music, and old Country music. Given how often love turned to death and murder in these songs, it wasn’t difficult for me to compile a “murder ballads” playlist for the band.

Last year, I posted here with the playlist enhanced by videos. This year, I’ve gone a step farther and created a  Big Biscuit Bottoms: Murder Ballads set list on Spotify!

I added all the songs from the original set list in the story and added some others I’ve found since then. I’m sure I’ll keep adding to it as I find grisly, creepy new material.

Happy Valentine’s Day! ;)

Letters from Cupid Now Available!

Our Valentine’s Day story, Letters from Cupid, is now available!

We wanted to do something light and fun for Valentine’s Day, and we’d had a plot bunny about a secret admirer leaving notes on someone’s door. It wasn’t specifically earmarked for Valentine’s Day, but it did involve the note writer offering support after a break-up. We decided we could easily adapt it to fit the holiday, so we plucked that plot bunny off The List and wrote it!

I wrote Macon, the curmudgeon, and I may have let some of my own opinions about academia come out through him. To be honest, my opinions usually do slip out if we’re writing in a university setting. ;)  I love academia, but it has its flaws, and it’s no more immune to internal politics than any other job. And yes, the whole “sitting at the back of the room and grading during faculty meetings” thing does actually happen. We don’t like long, tedious meetings either! Unlike Macon, however, I do at least skim the agenda.

Torquere Press coupon!

Torquere Press is celebrating Valentine’s Day all month long with a special 15% off coupon! Just use “sweetheart2015″ as your coupon code when you’re checking out to apply the discount. The coupon code will work on preorders (like Letters from Cupid) and already published Torquere or Prizm books alike.

And just as a reminder, we do have a Valentine’s Day story from last year as well! Dandy’s Little Girl is available from Torquere.

Plot bunnies everywhere

I’ve mentioned before that Ari and I use Evernote for our notes and ideas. It’s really useful because you can clip articles and images from the web, upload documents, and create your own notes, all saved in specific notebooks.

We have one note that’s just an on-going plot bunny list. Whenever one of us gets an idea for a plot or character, the standard response is “Put it on the list.” Although now that it’s pushing 100 plot bunnies, I think it might be deserving of capitalization: The List.

Since the Herc’s Mercs series seems to have taken off nicely, we’ve been thinking more and more about ideas for continuing the series. We’d been lumping the Herc bunnies in with all the other bunnies, but last night, we decided it was time to give the Herc series its own bunny list. So I pulled all the plot bunnies specifically earmarked as Herc ideas plus a couple of others that we’d discussed as being of potential use for Herc stories and added them to a separate note in our Herc’s Mercs notebook.

The Herc plot bunny list is already 7 items long, which doesn’t count the two stories we’re currently working on. So if our readers like the Herc’s Mercs series, I don’t think they need to worry that it’ll dry up any time soon!

We have two Herc’s Mercs stories going at once because we started one, realized it wasn’t working out the way we wanted, and decided to backtrack and do over. However, before we got started on the do-over, another insistent Herc bunny came along, so we decided to roll with that one and get back to the do-over afterward.

Right now, we’re probably about 3/4 finished with the insistent Herc bunny, which features a retired merc whose attempt at building a second career as a private chef is interrupted when the circuit court judge he works for is targeted by an ex-con with an axe to grind. Ezra “Ghost” Levin ends up calling in a favor to his former boss, Cade “Hercules” Thornton, and getting a team of mercs to help him keep his judge safe. For those who liked Herc’s Mercs: Bloody But Unbowed, Daryl “D-Day” Greer makes an appearance in this story as part of Ghost’s team. :D

Blizzard’s 10th Anniversary

This year, Blizzard Entertainment celebrated 20 years of being in business and 10 years of World of Warcraft, and they had some really nice in-game events to commemorate the occasion.

They revamped the old Molten Core raid and gave us a 40-man raid for level 100 with a guaranteed helm and corehound mount and a (small) chance to get a pet named Hatespark and a weapon enchant. They also gave everyone who logged in during the anniversary event a Molten Corgi pet. It took me a while to get up to the necessary ilevel to enter the raid, and I initially planned to run it one time for the helm and mount, especially since it was a looooong raid. Even with a good group, you didn’t get out of there in less than 90 minutes, and if it wasn’t a good group, it could take over 2 hours.

And here you see a screen cap of my corehound’s ass. I took this cap because of the enormous skeleton I ran across in one of the zones. When I realized what I was looking at, I took this cap and wondered WTF had been big enough to leave behind a skeleton this size and if there were any more of them lurking around the zone.

And here’s my fiery helm! I took this screen cap because DAMN, Stable Master Raven. This guy hangs around shirtless in my garrison, and he’s a large part of why I haven’t replaced my stables even though I’ve already gotten the quest mounts from it.

They also have a PvP event, and you got a title depending on your faction. I’m Alliance, so my new title for winning the Tarren Mill vs. Southshore battleground is “Terror of Tarren Mill”. >:)

I wasn’t planning on doing the PvP event because I’m not really into PvP. I suck at it, to be honest. But on the last weekend of the event (well, until they extended it), I decided what the hell. I hopped in the battleground queue — and lagged like you wouldn’t believe as soon as I zoned into the battleground. I was dead pretty much immediately. Fortunately, the lag dissipated as my system adjusted to the new zone. Unfortunately, we lost that BG. Undaunted, I tried again — and we won. Someone in there knew what strategy would work best, and — amazingly! — people actually listened and followed the strategy, so we won, and I got my title!

Blizzard ended up extending the event for an extra week because there was some issue with the event ending a day earlier than it should have. They fixed the bug and gave us an extra week to play, so I decided to try the raid again to see if I could get the pet. I reminded myself that even though it was a long raid, the pet would be unavailable once the event ended for real, and it would likely be insanely expensive on the auction house.

I ran the raid… three or four times? I can’t remember. It was often enough that I was getting really tired of sinking 2-3 hours of my life into this raid every night and not having any luck getting the pet.

The Sunday night before the event was scheduled to end (for real) on Tuesday, I decided to run Molten Core again. I zoned in, and no one was trolling, which was nothing short of miraculous. What ensued was not only the best MC run I’d been on, but the best LFR group I’ve ever been in, hands down. A lot of the group, including the raid leader, were from the Moonguard server, and they were a wonderfully knowledgable and pleasant group of people to run with. The raid leader even marked the trail we should follow to avoid trash mobs!

We didn’t have any trolling or wipes, everyone was helpful and friendly rather than impatient, and by the time we reached Ragnaros, I decided this was going to be my last MC run whether I got the pet or not because I couldn’t possibly get a better group than this, and I wanted my last memory of the event to be a good one.

And then we downed Ragnaros, and I looted him — and I GOT THE PET.

Best night ever!

I thought once the in-game anniversary events were over, that would be it for Blizzard’s anniversary stuff, but no! They had one last trick up their sleeve.

They sent this lovely replica of the statue that stands outside Blizzard HQ to all players who activated their account within 60 days of the game launching back in November, 2004, and have kept their account active since then. I bought my game the day it was released, and I haven’t let my subscription lapse since then, so I got one of these beauties!

I had no idea they were doing this until a friend of mine asked me if I’d heard about getting a gift. I hadn’t, but a box was waiting for me outside my door when I got home from work the next day. I love my statue! I think it was a really cool gesture on Blizzard’s part, and honestly, yeah, I love the fact that they gave me a little something extra for sticking with them for ten years. But I’ve played the game because I enjoyed it then, and I still enjoy it now. It’s given me a lot of pleasure and entertainment over the years, and I plan to stick with as long as they keep releasing expansions.

“Letters From Cupid” available for pre-order!

Letters From Cupid, our Valentine’s Day story for 2015 is now available for pre-order from Torquere Press! 81 pages / 23000 words for $3.49

Breaking up with his boyfriend has left English Professor Derek Chandler feeling lonely and down. He begins to think that he just doesn’t have the passion to sustain a long-term relationship — at least until a letter from a mysterious “Cupid” tells him not to lose hope. Intrigued, Derek replies to his anonymous admirer, and they begin a correspondence where Derek discovers he isn’t the only one with doubts about his desirability.

Dr. Macon Pinney has admired his colleague from afar for quite a while, but he only intended his initial note to Derek to offer encouragement. Macon doesn’t believe that outgoing, sociable Derek could ever be interested in the type of quiet, withdrawn man he knows himself to be. And yet when Derek writes back, admitting his worries about never finding a true partner, Macon can’t help but reply, sharing his own feelings from the safety of anonymity.

But will Macon find the courage to step out of the shadows and admit to Derek his identity, or will both men spend the most romantic day of the year alone?

Herc’s Mercs: Bloody But Unbowed now available!

The third book in the Herc’s Mercs series, Herc’s Mercs: Bloody But Unbowed, is now available! It’s about 40,000 words/141 pages for $4.49.

Daryl Greer isn’t a bodyguard. He’s Hercules Security’s “odd-job” specialist, as wild and dangerous, as he is competent. Fiercely independent, he resents his older brother Matthew’s view that he spends his life “playing G.I. Joe”. When he’s sent to rescue a kidnapped scientist, Dr. Emerson Winfield, from a terrorist organization, Daryl finds himself attracted to the snarky, outspoken man even though Emerson is the kind of rich, successful person Matthew claims could never be interested in a hick like Daryl.

For his part, Emerson doesn’t care about Daryl’s lack of polish; he’s more interested in the incredible chemistry between them. He sets out to prove to Daryl that they can make a relationship work despite their differences. But Daryl’s defensiveness about his career drives a wedge between them — and if he doesn’t find a way to deal with his issues, Daryl might lose Emerson forever.

2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

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Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 48 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.