Sam T Willis's Blog, page 2

It’s #NaNoWrimo time!

November has begun again, and I’ve once again dropped everything I was working on in order to dump infinity words into a Word doc in thirty days.  The goal this year is pretty simple: 138,000 words (or thereabouts).  That’s what it will take to finish the (approximately) nineteenth installment of the NaNoWriMo project I started way back in 2006.  Someday I’ll finish the whole thing.  Maybe three years from now.  And then I’ll start editing it.  By then, it will likely be the longest coherent novel ever written.  That probably sounds crazy.  But it’s November.  Sanity is for the other eleven months of the year.  These words don’t count towards the 138,000…so I’m off now.  Got writing to do.

#IndieAuthorDay17 is here! And there’s free stuff!

Howdy!  Today is Indie Author Day.  Click to banner (which I’ve shamelessly stolen) above for more details.  I’ll be appearing at the  this afternoon (2:00) for an author panel and reading.  I’m sure I’ll talk more about that later, after I’ve thoroughly embarrassed myself.  There might even be pictures!

But wait, there’s more!  Today is also…

Click that banner to be swept away to a list of twentyish free mysteries and thrillers, including Beaten.  You can also jump straight to The Primer‘s page on Amazon, where you can get three of my thrillers for free (for two days only).

As always, the best way to show indie solidarity is to give our books a read and a review.  Not saying, just saying.  More to come.

Book 5

Did I mention “Book 5” has become two books?

Like Break and Beaten, and then The New Program and The Volunteer, books 5 and 6 are going to be a novella-novel pair.  Probably separated by a couple months like last time.  From here I’m guessing book 5 drops in February.  I’m almost certainly wrong.

I just finished writing book 5.  As in today.  Book 6 has been in the can for about a month now, and I’m about to go back and dig into it for my first real editing pass.  Hopefully, it’s not too painful a process, but one can never predict these things.  Book 6 is a big one, it’s going to start tying everything together.  But first, we’ll spread things out even more.  Not just through space, but time as well.  I’m pretty excited.

All this means that I was totally lying about the series ending at book 6, though.  Since book 6 is what I’d planned for book 5 now–and I’m guessing I’ll wind up sticking to the novella-novel pair system going forward–we’re looking at an 8 book series.  Maybe we’ll roll up to an even 10 when the momentum inevitably runs away with me after I get going on book 8.  Who knows what the future holds?

Smashing

It’s been a while since I did my last “Home Improvement” post.  And things have been improved!  To tell this story in particular, though, we must go back to the very beginning.  To this:

Last summer, I bought some land.  For cheap.  The reason it was so cheap is that this happened to be sitting there.  No one wanted to deal with this for some reason.  Maybe it was the giant, menacing tower of bricks stretching so far into the sky that you can’t even see the top in that picture (it was probably eleven miles tall, give-or-take).

Our plan for dealing with this structure was simple: ignore it until next year, then pay someone to smash it.  Part 1 went super well.  Then next year arrived.  We called people about smashing it.  Most of them never called us back.  Eventually, someone did.  I managed to get him to come out and look at the thing.  He wrote up an estimate.  It was for super huge piles of money.  I told him I did not have super huge piles of money and asked if he could give me an estimate for if he, maybe, did a bad job or something.  His response was something along the lines of “STFU, n00b!  Only rich people deserve to have their houses smashed in!” and then never calling me back again.

Lame.

We went back to ignoring the problem.

Then, one day, when we were hard at work not smashing the building, I heard a creaking sound.  I went outside…and watched a chunk of the house fall to the ground.  Ignoring it was working better than we could have hoped!

Sadly, it was just a small chunk of the total monstrosity.  But it filled us with hope.  The structure could be defeated!

Later, we had a guy with a big truck come and do some other work.  We asked him if he could use that big truck to maybe pull down the evil chimney of death.  He said he could do it for a reasonable amount of money.  We’re pretty much best friends now.

Suddenly, the house looked different!

See?  No chimney of death!  You can’t see the bit that fell off really, so don’t worry about that.  The point is that progress was being made.  But we needed to do more.  We already knew no one was going to come and help us.  So we turned to the same source of inspiration that had carried us through all the other projects this land came with: punk rock.

What did punk rock say?

It said to smash the damn thing ourselves.

So we rented the Grabber-Smasher.

And we set forth grabbing and smashing.

The Grabber-Smasher did that in a day.  Then a part of it popped open, and Grabber-Smasher blood started shooting all over the place.  The arm part of the machine didn’t work any longer.  The machine had been defeated by the house of death.  All hope was lost.  And we assumed we were going to have to pay all sorts of money to fix the machine.

Turns out not so much.  The Grabber-Smasher company was totally cool with the broken machine.  They came out and fixed it when we weren’t around, gave us some free days of grabbing and smashing, and we were on our way.

Quick break to allow things to get muddier and rainier before finishing the job…and voila!

The house was destroyed.  The rubble pile isn’t even taller than me at this point, which is pretty much a best-case scenario.  We’ve still got all that garbage to deal with…but at least nothing’s going to fall on anyone.

People are dolphins too 4 #PRD2

People are Dolphins Too 3 #PRD2

Grating Cheese all (The) Night (Dragon(s)) Through

(s)

The Dragon of The Night kept The Lava The Night Dragon

Pinned to the ground with one giant claw

While it used another giant claw to keep itself standing

And the other two giant claws to hollow out the moon,

Which it had recently broken in half

On The Lava The Night Dragon(s) face.

Cheese got freaking everywhere.

A few brave people,

Members of “The Night Dragon Nacho Enthusiasts League,”

Ran around at The Dragon of The Night’s feet,

Gathering chunks of free cheese

To melt and consume later,

Provided they survived.

(They didn’t survive.

It was stupid to think that they could.)

After the moon was nice and hollowed out,

The Dragon of The Night picked up The Armless Lava The Night Dragon

And shoved it into the place where the cheese core of the moon used to live.

Since The Armless Lava The Night Dragon was made of lava,

Which is by definition hotter than cheese can ever be,

Even straight out of the microwave,

The moon started to melt immediately.

So The Dragon of the Night put the two halves of the moon back together

And allowed the melting process to continue,

Thereby repairing the moon.

The Night Dragons,

Who were probably dead anyways,

Were trapped inside the moon.

There was no air,

Which didn’t matter because they were probably dead,

And it was super dark,

Which also didn’t matter because they were probably dead.

The thing that did matter was that they were trapped in what was,

Effectively,

The largest pokeball in the universe.

So that was the end of them.

Luckily for everyone in the world who was still alive,

(Which was a lot of people since the world is pretty much huge)

The moon-hollow-and-rebuild scheme,

Along with the posing and the long delay between The Night Dragon posts

Took so long that some kind of Deus Ex Machina appeared.
So that’s good news.

Big day…

Today is a big day.  This morning, I put the (final) finishing touches on the (final) edits for a short story that should soon appear in the debut issue of 518 Publishing’s new journal.  I’m sure I’ll have more on that before too long.  This afternoon, I finished the third section of The Primer, book 5.  That leaves one more section, which is already more than half written.  I’m hoping to have an entire manuscript draft by the end of next week.  It’ll need to go through about a thousand rounds of editing, and it doesn’t actually have a title yet, but we’re getting there.

Still don’t really have much in the way of blog momentum.

The Night Dragon(s) will be back in the next couple weeks.  People are Dolphins Too should be as well.  Maybe some of that home improvement stuff, too.  I’ve been doing a lot of sawing and nailing.  Fall also seems to be creeping up on us here.  I’ll be thinking about NaNoWriMo before long, which just seems crazy.

That’s all I’ve got for now.  Off to make tacos and think about titles.

People are Dolphins Too 2 #PRD2

People are Dolphins Too 1 #PRD2

Alt-text if you can’t read my wonderful handwriting.