Neglection

Last week and this week were full of hard work, setbacks (the posted chapter today had to be re-written twice since I lost about 2 hours worth of work one night because of it not backing up to my cloud storage) and Fallout.

I finished the Far Harbor DLC and have been wandering around the Commonwealth in my dapper suit, topped in a black fedora and glasses. I've been making tons of Jet, since I have nothing else to use fertilizer for, and been peddling it around, making a ton of caps. If you're huffing Jet in The Commonwealth, it's most likely been cooked up at my chem station. So, essentially, I've become the post-apocalyptic Heisenberg. I am the danger. I am the one who knocks.

Been plugging away at school, managing to keep my grades up. I've been reading Babbitt for class, and the satire is all too real in this day and age, which saddens me because it means it was all too real in 1920, which means it's been all too real for a while. In this election year, all it's been is soul crushing image after soul crushing image, with fears being tossed about like bad race slips. My disillusionment with the political landscape of America is back in the red zone, and that's all the political talk you're going to get out of me.

This is the last chapter of To Slice The Sky I'm going to be working on for this month. I'm switching gears completely to try and shave down and edit my NaNoWriMo book, Some Call Me (Steampunk Django on Mars) since tor.com has opened up unsolicited submissions again, and they're particularly looking for Space Opera and Cyberpunk. While they won't accept anything that's been published before (so By Starlight was out), I feel that Some Call Me has enough elements of Space Opera, with punk grittiness, to qualify. If not, it's not like I'm not used to the, "It's not quite what we're looking for".

So, without further ado, here's your dog picture:

The American Pit Bull Terrier Dream

I wish you wouldn't use me for page views.

I should not have said that...

This week was eventful. Some of those events were fun and by choice, but some where not. Regardless, progress on To Slice The Sky has been sluggish.

Some work has been put in on proofing/form editing Chapter 10. Not much, because what was going to be a productive day turned into my writing partner/editor being called away for other matters. So that was a bummer to say the least. Especially since we're getting into the nitty gritty of the climax. Where we're proofing is right at the beginning of act 3. The cards are on the table and our plucky heroes are about to pull together their plan for one last ride to freedom.

On the rewrite front: Still hacking apart Chapter 3 into something actually readable. The worldbuilding aspects of it are being leaned up in thanks to the previous releases. After all, I've technically already published 3 chapters out of To Slice The Sky as short stories. Say Goodbye, Hollywood (which covers Decker's story in between Chapters 3 & 4), Sucking Out Loud (a slice of life from Trip & Decker living in Das Komplex between Chapters 10 & 11), and The Clone Wars (what our rebellious clones do during Chapter 9 while Trip and Decker have a road trip across The Wastes). I've even gone over the backstory of an important character, Manner, in Mind Your Manners. (If you're wondering what I'm talking about, you can pick up my short story collection, Urban Legends of the Future, for free in eBook form on Smashwords. I'd appreciate it if you left a review after reading.)

I still have another "Interlude" short to write that happens when Decker and The Clone Wars gang are on the road between chapters 5 & 6 that evolved out of a cut portion of the novel itself. I wanted some way to show that Native Americans were slowly reclaiming and nurturing the blasted out parts of middle America where no one's really settled. I scrapped the part of the chapter for many reasons. Some of them are these:

1. It was well researched, but kinda hokey.
2. It had werewolves in it, and I wanted to keep the novel more humancentric.
3. It originally had the group leaving Clonetown (which is essentially the leftovers of West New Jersey down to Philadelphia) southwards to the ruins of St. Louis to follow the Mississippi river bed up north to the ruins of Dubuque, IA where they cross over the outer border of Metro City. I don't know how well you know American geography, but you wouldn't really dip down south to Missouri since it's a pretty straight shot west from Jersey to Iowa. To be fair, if you're going to New Jersey, Iowa, or Missouri, you have bigger problems than the route you take to get there. I even wrote in a whole argument about why it was dumb they were too far south.
4. It was pretty much a Wacky Wayside Tribe scene. It was just there to interject action into the boredom of a cross country road trip when all the sights are bombed out buildings, dead plants, and pockets of radiation.
5. Speaking of wastelands and post-war tribal society, I played the Fallout: New Vegas DLC - Honest Hearts - for the first time after I wrote the scene. I realized the scene was too similar to survive as it was.

So those were all pretty good reasons for cutting it out. The kernel of the scene is going to be the story (travelling group happens upon wary settlement that could use some outside help against a new threat) but the details and structure are completely different. From the notes I have scribbled down, and the original scene, the story's looking to have more of a solarpunk bend to it. When I wrote it, I had this guy in mind as the leader:




Now, inspired by The Many Mothers in Mad Max: Fury Road, I'm thinking of something more matriarchal. Not an all female enclave or anything, but definitely an elder lady keeping things together. That and I feel that the elderly are a rarely explored topic in Science Fiction.

Usually when age is brought up, it's in a life extension context. So you're dealing with people who usually haven't aged physically from biological immortality, "reset" their bodies via rejuvenation/mechanization/genetic therapy, uploaded themselves into a clone/sleeve/machine, etc. or in general made it so they're not really old people. Sure they prominently pop up from time to time, but a majority of SciFi is a young man's game.

Aside from having experience working with the elderly, elder care is a for real issue in the coming years, especially as life expectancy rises. People live to 100 without even trying these days. Of course we have all those parts of the world with ridiculous infant mortality rates that offset the scales, but modern medicine and lifestyle has allowed a lot of people to live a lot of years. Not dying of typhoid by 30 is pretty cool, but still having a bunch of old people sitting around watching TV all day with the volume on max leads to a slew of social issues. It'll also lead to a bunch of olds needing reading material, so why not cater to a growing market?

Aside from that, I've started drafts of a few stories for Wave Two once To Slice The Sky is released. I've also been working on new covers for Urban Legends of the Future and By Starlight - Before Dawn to match To Slice The Sky.

Furthermore, I'm planning on releasing a Wave One Omnibus 2 ways. One is the books separated as per their original release order. The second is in-universe chronological supercut format. This means that the aforementioned short stories at the beginning of this post will be woven in between the chapters they belong too.

Sound frustrating and Disjointed? PROBABLY! We'll see. I'm taking this self-published author thing one mistake at a time. Toodles.

Sleepwalk

This past week has felt like a year.

Sales were actually existent for By Starlight - Before Dawn. Thank you to everyone who bought a copy in eBook or Paperback. If you bought it in paperback, you can get a free kindle version through matchbook. If you bought it on Smashwords but would like a paperback, I'll be running a promotion Thanksgiving weekend for 50% off. And while I make sure all my products are the best quality I can make them, I'm a fan of the printed word, so the paperback is the preferred version in terms of formatting and style. And it looks great on a shelf when you're not reading it!

My busy week has mostly been filled with me plugging away at Some Call Me... for NaNoWriMo. I'm at the close of Act 1 and 15,813/50,000 words in. I've also been annoying about my progress on social media already, so I'm less excited to be throwing up my hands in the air and celebrating the first week of my new novel being written.

I really should be more excited, because the story is turning out really fucking cool. Of course it's a mess currently, and being done for the word count at this point. But, there's definitely a diamond surrounded by a bunch of coal in there. I've been wanting to write something set on Mars ever since I read Bradbury's Martian Chronicles back in 11th grade English class when I was supposed to be following along in Huck Finn. And while I've read more than my fair share of cyberpunk and generic Science Fiction, I haven't really delved into Steampunk as a literary genre (really only read Bruce Sterling/William Gibson's The Difference Engine. If you have suggestions where to go from there, please share in the comments). Or westerns.

I've never read a western. Watched tons of sing-songy Gene Autry ride alongs, rough and tumble John Wayne and Henry Fonda fodder, and blood and whore drenched Spaghetti Westerns, but never read one. So translating the feel of the idealized Wild West on a planet that will kill the shit out of you if you step outside, all won by the power of your steam powered sidearms, it felt like a fun challenge. And it really has been. I've been having a blast writing it, with only one day of slogging through that dreaded but necessary exposition so far. I haven't been this stoked about writing something than I was when I first wrote To Slice The Sky.

But you didn't come here to see my rattle off things that I'm currently writing (unless you did. Did you? If so, sorry, your time in this world grows short. The collectors will be by shortly with pliers and hacksaws to make sure you never make that mistake again). You're here to read what I've already written and polished into a presentable state. We're almost at the end of By Starlight. Our players are gathered into place, and shit is about to get real as we slide into the action packed climax.

So here we are this Sunday. Part 7/8 of By Starlight.

Startling revelations about the mating habits of fictional characters

Welcome back. Continuing on with promoting By Starlight - Before Dawn, we now arrive at the next step in the tale of Tressie, Johnny & Gribelle. Rising actions and fun with body mechanics await you in the text below. The covers are complete, the proofs have been read, and at least the eBook versions are available for pre-order. I wanted to stick with Halloween as a release date, opposed to releasing whenever, mostly because I think I deserve at least one release date to be Halloween in my bibliography. If only I could write fast enough to Long Halloween it and release a new horror upon the world every holiday. One day.

So, about those eBooks: Amazon. Smashwords. Each version has a separate cover. While the Amazon version is the "True" cover, I still like the Smashwords variant better. I fear I may be trying to make eBooks like comics. The paperback is still being worked on. The paperback sports much nicer formatting than the eBook. Both of which have better formatting than this blog.

Beyond cover variations, the Smashwords version of the first book in the Lilim Chronicles: Urban Legends of the Future, is now available for free. Non-related to the Lilim Chronicles, my poetry book, Pretty Words for Hateful Bastards, is also available at whatever price you want on Smashwords.

If you download, please review. But I've talked enough. It's time to give you what you came for.