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.

Red planet blues

Ah, the beginning of a fresh week.

Well, I'm all done with By Starlight. Been plunking away at my NaNoWriMo book, Some Call Me...

The whole exercise of writing a novel in a month is quite mad. I hope you all know this. The people that finished their books days after have more drive than I do. I'm currently ahead of the curve, Sitting at 40.5k words. Making the last crawl towards the finish line at 50k.

My book started out easily enough as Django on Mars and it's sort of mutated into a revolutionary tale with meditations on the nature of consciousness, what value is a synthetic life, and where people call home. I'm a little upset with my going off on an AI tangent. But that's mostly out of fear that I'm not smart or interesting enough to not repeat old ground when I write about AI later. Granted this time around it's looking at an AI that "deserves life" opposed to an AI trying to destroy all humans. I toy with the notion of that, but I took the cowards way out to avoid a Shakespearean tragedy ending.

I was planning on posting my days work every day, but since I was pecking away only a few hundred words a day at some points, it felt like it would be pointless and annoying to do that every day. But when I'm doing rewrites in a month I think I'm going to post the chapters I'm working on.

I find it funny that I have plenty of stories and novels in my head ready to start writing, but this book really sprung up in the last couple months. I jotted down a bunch of notes right at the beginning of my fall semester of school, had a bunch of ideas in my head that clashed together that I realized I could blend into the same work. When I finished up By Starlight - Before Dawn right at the end of October, all the stars aligned to make this book work.

I've always wanted to write a story on Mars. I had an idea for a weird west story with vampire and werewolf cowboys that still needs some fleshing out before it becomes anything workable. And I've wanted to do some kind of more limited tech than cyberpunk allows. All of that together has become this novel that I'm going to get back to work on.

I'm hoping that this newfound dedication and speed of process rubs off when I start rewrites on my first novel I'm going to release next. That's my December project before shipping it off to the editor. Lots of work to do.