Sad bastard music.

Look at me, leaving you hanging right at the end.

This week has been a struggle to get through, especially since it seems that everyone I come in contact with seems to find me distasteful just for being myself. Needless to say, it left me in a state where I very much didn't want to create content for something where all it contains is me. I'm sure everyone feels like they don't belong in the world, but I know not everyone takes it that hard.


So, yeah, I'm lonely, frustrated, and depressed. That's why I didn't post until Saturday after starting the year off OK and then some. I'll spare you from ranting about my first world problems of feeling unfulfilled in life while living in the largest major metropolitan county in the richest and most populated state in America, here's some good things that happened.

Soup inside

I made French Onion Soup for the first time, so that was cool. Granted, for my first time making it, I also didn't really make it, since I added in beef chunks and topped it with bacon. So good. It's definitely soup weather, since it's been raining non-stop. Not like California doesn't need it, but, I'm tired of being out in it.

I also made a Guinness beef pot pie, but I didn't take any pictures of it. It's a pie. Not much is photogenic about meat pie.

School's continuing to go well, now that the new semester has begun. My Short Stories class has been interesting so far. But, since it has over 60 students enrolled, it's not very engaging on a classwork level. I'm pretty much posting A level work to be ignored by goobs that get away with writing a paragraph generally with no depth or insight. And all the low hanging fruit pickers comment on those posts, lazy bastards. It's not like it's my grade that's going to suffer, but it's just another example of trying so hard, and getting so far, but in the end, it doesn't really matter.

"PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!"

Math has been insular, and mostly me just chugging through the daily work, trying to maintain as high a grade as possible. It's pretty much cheating, since I'm taking the lowest level of required Math, because of course my previous units didn't transfer. But being a basic college level math class, the other students attending it are pretty damn dumb. On the class forum, someone actually asked where the Roman numeral keys were on a keyboard. If you're also currently wondering that, there's no hope for you.

I'm already on week 3/8 for this session, and all I want is for it to be over. I want this year to be over to move on with the next one. Just hoping I can maintain my schedule of actually graduating by end of year.

My fiancée and I have officially begun wedding planning. My responsibility is looking for a DJ and catering, and all things entertainmentwise. So it's my job to make sure a party half in my honor is fun for everyone else who attends. What kind of twisted world do we live in where this has become an expected tradition? We haven't even gotten close to the nitty gritty of planning and already I'm longing for the days when marriage was little more than contract negotiations with a ceremony paid for by the father of the bride. I say nuts to this modern liberated woman business and saddle me up with 3 fatted calves and a parcel of land. If you've ever wondered why boorish and outdated modes of thought are still prevalent to this day, it's because the alternative takes too much work.

If you're confused how I can talk about being lonely when I'm also prepping to be married, let me quote OKGO's song, "The House Wins": You don't have to be alone to be lonely.

And in the best news, which will segue into our next part, I'm officially done with my draft of To Slice The Sky. Yay! 🎉🎊🎈

Now that I'm done with the novel for my second time, I'm currently giving it a read through and seeing what needs to be tightened up and fixed. The beginning needs a bit of work to catch up with the end, but it's all manageable. I was pretty surprised that it jumped in word count instead of shrinking with all the cutting I've done. There's entire chapters that were excised and changed, and whole swatches of useless first draft junk removed.

Today's chapter for TSTS picks up on Decker's side of the plan to deal with all of our problems with New America. While Trip is infiltrating Roplaxive's east coast servers, Decker is on the side of the country where the actual fighting of the clone rebellion is taking place. There, he's tasked with making sure that Gene Works Inc.'s rogue AI gets shut down before its infection spreads beyond the neuronet and into the real world. So here's part 2/4 of our climax. I posted it on New Years Eve on reddit to try and be all symbolic since the whole plan takes place on New Years Eve. However, because of that, or because this chapter sucks, or because the new title I gave it is dumb, it was wholly ignored. So... have fun!

Fat dog.

"I'm not fat. I'm just drawn that way."

Internet Archiving and You - The Necessary Job of Our Future To Make Today Matter

Hello world and internet archivists of the future (by me recognizing your profession, you have to save this blog's contest in the future. That's the rule here in the past. It's true, look it up. First link you'll find is this blog. Citationed). Welcome to another posting in our new weekly time slot of Monday. Maybe. Who knows. I'm trying to get myself to blog just to blog. Not really attach a day on it.

If you just randomly clicked on a link somewhere and you ended up here, and now you're all compelled because I'm talking about internet archivists and such, let me tell ya a little something about me. I tend to not do well with structure, and really prefer to do things when I do them within my ever so endless checklist of wants and needs. I have the feeling that I have an obligation to do things, and I blame it on being allowed to put things in archival lists and queues. It was just steamsale, man. I have like ten more games to play now, and I want to try and rebuild the heavy metal theme park my buddy & I built back in the day on Roller Coaster Tycoon. Why are you trying to deny me that? Anyway...

You would think that expressing myself to a potential audience as a voice shouting in the crowd would give me more drive to actually do it, but man, I got other stuff going on just like you. I have to actually do all the stuff I talk about in order to talk about it. Lest someone call me out about it in the comments one day and go, "Yo that shit's lies, man. Ya dindo shit lolfag" and then I'm the one who's the asshole. No thanks.

But to quote Stan Lee in Kevin Smith's overstated commercial flop and understated cult hit, Mallrats, "You keep reading them, I'll keep writing them."

And more refers to stinkpalms.

So, yeah, Holidays and flash flood warnings, and playing Mass Effect, and trying to find a copy of Christmas Vacation and having to settle on the edited for basic cable where they abuse the hell out of saying non-defecation, "shit," but heaven forbid you let grandpa drop that he drank to deal with Christmas going to hell. I don't really feel like going on a censorship rant for no reason, but the mood may hit me.

Habenero Hot Sauce Tamale Shooters - only @ Black Angus

I made tamales with my family. AND for my first time ever, hot sauce, from my bongwater grown habaneros. We've got the beginnings of a Mexican restaurant from the amount of friends and family asking for some, so that's cool. Ended up with 16 or so dozen out of 75lbs of masa. We ended up doing a number of variations with the fillings. That is to say, when I took over stuffing, I mixed it up with all of the ingredients and stopped being as stingy as my sisters with the filling. My mom & I had a spirited back and forth about spreading masa. She's all into the glop it on and spread method, and I'm all about the nice even layer. I feel the superior tamales were shown in the final taste test. You know what the best part of masa is? The thin little bits that get stuck on the hoja that are all crispy. All I gotta say.

In the hot sauce department, it was cool making something out of a plant that grew by complete accident. Inspiration hit in thanks to catching up on Pretty Good Cooking. As luck would have it, the latest episode at the time was Habanero Hot Sauce. My only deviation from Phil's recipe is I added garlic, substituted lemon juice for lime, and in my final blend, I added cilantro. I feel that really boosted the flavor of it, while giving it a nice look in the bottle. Your food should always be pretty. Picture up above notwithstanding.

Present Day

So, yeah, that's what my week was full of. And serving coffee too early in the day and trying to slang words by night. Still waiting for responses back on all of my pieces. The waiting game sucks. Just silent indifference after an autoreply@donotrespond. But it gives you the opportunity to futz about with other things, as you nervously edit everything down by self doubt, and because you realize that rough drafts are way too unimaginative and stale.

I mentioned last week I have a lot of chapters done already that I haven't posted, so today's ramble about antique computer games and a potentially current discipline within the social sciences that will preserve internet history for as far as evolutionary life will allow us to spread the past knowledge of the internet, our diligent internet archivists, leads us to one of those chapters. Those stream of consciousness, mid sentence asides, are exactly what you came for. Same with meta, fourth wall breaking nods to an audience that was never really there. That one was for the internet archivists of the future that know when I finally abandon this site. I'm really swinging for the fences in this one.

Which is just silly because the chapter today is also silly. We met Trip's trainwreck of a mother back in what was at one point chapter 9 (my novel is going through metamorphosis) and now in, for continuity's sake, chapter 21 we meet Decker's. This chapter is light and airy and still needs some work, but it's meant to be a breather chapter before everything gets all serious (well, as serious as it could be).

Decker's mother is sort of an amalgam of my Grandmother and my mother. As well as how my far more latino friends were treated by their mothers. That on and off switch of, "I love my sweet Angel, even if he is a worthless troublemaker," is what I tried to capture. I really need to work on my Spanish in between classes. Would my audience grow if I switched languages?

Is the English speaking world tired of me already? Am I over conflating the dynamics of grassroots marketing with a lazy and self-driven exploratory energy to make myself seem like, to an internet archivist of the future, on the cusp of my game, ready for a breakthrough? Probably.

I always imagined releasing this novel when I was first outlining it. I couldn't keep up with the schedule of that, so this has worked for me so far. I have until, what, February or something for it to be a year of me posting chapters? Lazily at that? I wanted to release a book online then package it at the end, and when I think about it, that's exactly what I've been doing. I thought of it more along the lines of me releasing chunks of chapters, and adding in notes and such in hyperlink, like above, to hilight where certain ideas were pulled from, in order to give a better understanding and more tangible world to the text. Since this is my first time doing something like this, it's pretty unpolished, and sorta slapdash put together since I'm learning on the fly, but like I said up at the top, I do things at my own pace and be real about it.

And that pace has ramped up to give you the chapter I've been hyping up as if to overconflate its value as a pet scene. How you feel about it may vary, but here's my pet dog in his Christmas cape.

Source: Internet Archive Photo - Dogs in clothes

Excuses to day drink and start fires

What is up my D-O-G-E's? How does you this Labor Dabor?

Blah blah, sorry missed last week, and this is a day late, blah.

Trust me, not much was missed by me not checking in. Just busy days at work, and busier times at night, learning Español and finishing up The Martian Chronicles. I also finished writing the next chapter for To Slice The Sky. It seems like Act II has mostly been revisions and full on rewrites to accommodate a slumping mid-section that didn't really rise action, and sort of meandered about without much direction.

It's been a pretty mixed bag of emotions doing rewrites for this draft of the novel. Here we are staring down at the last quarter of the year, and I'm 1 chapter away from closing up Act II. Granted, everything for the novel flows considerably better, and should just need a proofreading and slight tune-up around the newer additions to get everything uniform. So I'm sort of exasperated with myself for not being further along in the process, and that I've done such huge sweeping changes on things that weren't working. But on the bright side, I'm also realizing that since I began the outline back in Summer of 2011 that I've thankfully become a better writer during that period and can discern that what I had at first was crap, and now I'm able to craft much more coherent narratives. At least I think I can. You're more of a judge of that than I am.

I've also decided that for the omnibus version release of The Lilim Chronicles wave 1, I'm going to have to go back and do one last retouch on By Starlight as well as Urban Legends of the Future. For the release, not only will I be editing the two collections, but also making some needed changes to make the world more cohesive. They'll be getting new--unifying--covers, and I'll be rebranding myself as well.

I've been working on a writing assignment for my Spanish class, and my original topic was going to focus on Latino/a science fiction authors. I came across two major problems, 1) I needed articles in Spanish, and everything I found on the topic was in English. & 2) Every article was pretty much a repeat of, "Where are all the Latino/a science fiction authors?" A quick look at the name at the top of this website, or the name above the link you clicked to get here, probably has you wondering, "What the hell does that have to do with you, gringo?" Well, my father's European surname and Western naming conventions aside, I'm Mexican from my mother's side. I specifically made my character Decker Mexican-American because pretty much the only Latina character I've had to look up to in Science Fiction is Vasquez from Aliens, and while externally I'm a blue-eyed, lightly tanned, whiteboy I grew up with my mom's family in Los Angeles.

In my writing, I've wanted to express a lot of my frustration with being trapped between two worlds as a mixed race person in America, and try to write a lot about conflicting dichotomies, and while it's all well and good, I don't feel that my voice does anyone anywhere much justice coming from another white guy trying to tell everyone how to live. That, and my current pen name is clunky as hell, and being called, "Chris-py" my whole life is pretty old after thirty+ years. So after two paragraphs of justification, with the re-release of my wave one books, I'm going to be changing my pen name across the internet, borrowing my mother's maiden name. So, my book making moniker will be Christopher Fernandez going forth. Doesn't that just flow so much better? Say it out loud with an accent: Christopher Fernandez. ¡Muy picante!

Reconnecting to a culture that got lost in pre-civil rights era American white washing has been a thing in my adult life that I've tried to achieve, and along with learning Spanish like my aunts/uncles/mom never did, this is just one more link in that chain. Not like I'm planning on changing my actual name, but as far as pen names go, Bollweg just ain't sexy. Which is probably one of many reasons I've never heard it used during intimacy.

Aside from moral queries into what is and isn't cultural appropriation, I finished reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Man, what a fantastic read. It definitely is a collection that builds upon itself and got way better with each passing story. In particular, I really loved the chapters Usher II (where a former English professor builds Poe's House of Usher on Mars, inviting all the moral watchdogs from Earth on a deadly tour through it), the highly reprinted, "There Will Come Soft Rains," (a story of an automated house when there's no more humans to automate for) and the final story, "The Million-Year Picnic". For being such a fan of poetry, I'm really surprised I wasn't ever as enthralled with the lyric delivery of Bradbury's prose back in high school. It's so flowing and evocative that pages disappeared before my eyes before I realized, "Oh, shit. I was so wrapped up in the flow, I don't know what I'm reading about." And going back, realizing all these beautiful words I'd read were about such bleak and alienating topics.

Even if the science has harshly shown everything about The Martian Chronicles to be a Space Opera fever dream from 1950, the biting satire on Cold War American life, and the destructive tendencies of well meaning Americans when faced with the consequences of our cultural lifestyle, is as fresh as it was 66 years ago. Yeah, sixty-six damn years, and we still haven't learned a damn thing, and are possibly on the verge of making all the same mistakes we've been warned about for over half a century. It's things like that that make me wonder if everything I wrote about representing the Latino-American science fiction writing population is a waste since clearly humanity has learned jack and shit from reading SciFi over the years.

But at least we have smart phones now.

Well, without further ado, here's chapter 16 from To Slice The Sky. Dog:

A savage journey to the heart of America.

Welcome, welcome. Come in, grab a seat, get comfy. Beer, wine, toad poison extract? Wow, gotta get my blogging fingers moving again.

So, last month was pretty non-stop action with some quick gasps for air. I unfortunately found zero success in my expected output endeavors, yet I managed to blossom in other manners. I went back to the Midwest to visit my dad's side of the family in the middle of nowhere southern Minnesota. I hadn't been back to the farm in about four years, so it was great seeing all my cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all over again. We ate great food, had stoic and reserved conversations that were rude enough for family but polite enough for company, drank beer, shot guns, rode four-wheelers, and blew shit up. Good old fashioned 'merican fun.

I really do love the family farm. I of course couldn't appreciate it when I was a child, spending my summer or winter break visiting my parents. I always managed to have a great time, and viewed the Midwest as a sort of safe haven from my wild and fast Southern Californian daily life. I never had to go to school out there, I pretty much got to do what I want, my dad works at a college, so I got to hang out in the library since classes were always out of session. Though there were a couple instances where I ran into cool Gen X college kids as a teenager, and I was deemed cool strictly by virtue of living in Los Angeles, versus Janesville, WI (home of Speaker of the House, and former Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan. I know where he lives. His neighbors had Obama signs in their yard in 2012). Those trips to my dad's house, and to my grandparent's farm, weren't always the happiest, as I've always been wrathful and sullen in sweeping fits, but I have far more pleasing, or at least funny, memories than a lot of moments back home in the San Fernando Valley. I guess I have a sort of Bob Crosby, "Way Back Home," mentality about it. Living through it wasn't as cool as I remember it, I'm sure, but being there now was the recharge I needed. And here's a bonus dog picture of my grandparent's farm dog Ben.

"I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL!"

Aside from family farm reunions and remembering fond times past of wasting away my days playing Doom and watching cartoons, I got a little work done on editing the first part of Some Call Me... Not nearly enough, but that was in part of enjoying people's company or being distracted by fleshing out other shorts. Well, and popping a Xanny bar on the flight to Chicago. At least I slept a little. I started a new short while sitting at LAX, waiting to take off. Then another as I was in the middle of my layover in Chicago watching Golden State do well while at the bar, but then lose it when I wasn't looking. Not that I'm a super sports guy, but it was a good game of basketball with great room energy (only myself and some dude in a Seahawks hat were repping for the West Coast), and those moments of social effervescence are magical and unique and we as a species should cherish them when they happen. However, once I left that bubble, I remembered I was in O'Hare International Airport, and that place chokes on boners.

In videogame news, I've mostly been building shit in Fallout 4 with the new DLC stuff. I've built myself a bunch of cool settlements, but that means I now have to venture out into the Commonwealth to scavenge more garbage for building components. I've noticed that my entire point of Fallout 4 is to get every single person to think that I'm the nicest guy ever because I murdered everything around the shell of a former town and built up a bunch of shanties with sleeping bags and mattresses, telling people to sleep in huge communal rooms surrounded by automated laser turrets. And I expect them to be happy on top of that. Really only whatever settlement I choose to live in ever gets any cool decorations. But that's because A) I only have so much time available to pointlessly build virtual things no one is ever going to see besides me, and B) I learned the hard way that when you force the game to load so many random items (that you spent hours carefully manipulating into place to give the illusion of life and function to this environment) it starts crashing all the time.

So, yeah, because my game kept crashing on me, I had to pack up and move from my old, super awesome spot, at Coastal Cottage:

Can you believe they're just giving these away?

I support being in control of the guns.

Participant trophies

Support your Local Comic Shop.

Just like the White House.

And now I'm rolling deep at Red Rocket filling station. Yes, I'm showing pictures to validate me spending time doing it:

Open for business.

"Come on, The Cheat. We're blasting off to the MOOOOOON!"

The Blaire Witch must have been here again.

So I went back home, built a bunch of fake buildings that wouldn't pass code, and I wrote the beginnings of a couple short stories. I've also started rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and will be posting season recaps. I don't know if I'm going to do them at a whim on this blog or include them in my weekly posts, but rewatching season one, I have to gush and groan about it. So if I make a surprise post before next Sunday, it'll probably be that. I've noticed that every episode has something redeeming in it, which is appropriate with redemption being a running theme of the series. I can't wait to gush on about it.

But this week is reserved for my own works. In the last three days I've gotten out two quick chapters of To Slice The Sky. Draft two of chapters 12 and 13 are complete, and They're coming up right after this dog picture.

This is a trick

OK blog. You don't like me, and I'm indifferent about you, but we're going to get through this week if you like it or not.

So this week was one full of uplift, upheaval, realignment of goals, and a shot in the arm for creativity. I'd rather not weigh in on the heavier aspects of it, because, well, this isn't a private blog for me to boo-hoo and say casually offensive things about what makes me angry. This is for the hypothetical future fan to stumble upon, and have enough time to kill and read back entries, and think, "Oh, cool, so this is where that part came from."

Or, I don't know, something like that. That's what I do when I look at people's websites. I creep. But that's the type of guy I am, a creeping voyeur who thankfully has an internet connection and doesn't have to stare into people's windows. I'm simply fascinated how varied people live, and have a generally curious nature. At least I have the good sense to people watch in a way where they don't know I'm staring at them. You know, like a polite creep.

There, I avoided telling you something personal with something else personal. I hope you're satiated hypothetical reader.

Anywho, this week was full of getting writing done, both for school and for rewrites. I'm trying to pick up the pace and make up for lost time a few months back. I've been watching Batman: The Animated Series and Superman Adventures concurrently on Amazon Prime. I've watched Seasons 1, 2 and half of 3 of Batman so far, and the first for Superman. I'm normally not much of a Superman fan, and find it difficult to find him interesting, but the Animated Series version works for me so far. It was a pretty solid first season, not amazing, but good. I do enjoy a little more depowered Supes, since I feel everyone just goes right to invincible and can punch a planet type power level, and that stuff doesn't excite me. I did quite enjoy the Lobo episodes. I recall enjoying them when they aired as well. But Lobo is the main fraggin' man, so there is that.

And let me confirm your suspicions, I did get the idea of substituting fuck for frag partly because of Lobo. Also from the old term for deathmatch kills and fragmentation grenades. Skag is '70s slang for heroin, which I've never done, but I think it makes a great defecation word too. Now that I think about it, I think I heard skag used in some show I watched recently. Can't recall which one, but it'll come to me.

I also just started playing Rock Band 4 again, now that the songs from 1-3 are available. I have so many songs already, and there's even more that I still want to download. Rock Band really is one of my favorite game franchises. I've had so many magical moments playing that game with friends, and moments in the middle of parties getting everyone singing along and having a grand ole time. And even playing solo, it's just a fun damn game. It combines two of my loves of music and videogames, and it's one of the few games where I haven't gotten worse at it with age.

So after all of that, here's your dog picture and chunk of story. Chapter 11 is very close to being done as well and may get sandwiched into this post. Later skaters.

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.