Whatever Flavour of Great

Roadtrip Z

Happy Monday! Cotton Crossing is $.99USD in ebook at AmazonBarnes & NobleApple, and Kobo; the entire Roadtrip Z series is deeply discounted in ebook until 3/22. (Details and links are on the Monthly Sales page.) A little bit of madness in March, as they say, and She-Wolf and Cub is still a Kindle deal for the rest of the month as well.

The weekend was…productive, at least. Another couple short stories brushed up and formatted for the anthology, which is coalescing quite nicely, and I even got some serial wordcount in. I managed to detach and spend Sunday afternoon on the couch with Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation, which is absolutely wonderful. Greek is singing through her English, and it’s marvelous. I’m glad I held off on her Odyssey until I could finish this one, which won’t be long. I wish I could find something comparable for the Aeneid, but my Loeb will have to do.

In fact, I’d love to retreat to said couch with the last quarter of the Iliad, but there’s work to be done. I’ve got the protagonist of the Sekrit Projekt in a bit of a pickle, where they’ve been all weekend, and it’s time to get that sorted. I’d love to do a bit more of the serial today, since there’s about to be another knives-in-the-dark moment. I think it’s time for someone other than our favourite sellsword to get wounded, which will scare the stuffing out of her.

Always a good time.

The backyard is quiet; I am uncertain if Deathwish Bunny is the parent of the nest Boxnoggin found in one of the ferns. At first I thought he’d found a rabbit corpse, since it was before dawn and I was pre-caffeine; however, I glimpsed something moving in the depths after dragging his snoot from the hole and realized what was going on. The dog is quite upset that I won’t let him Be Great, for whatever flavour of “great” requires him attempting to eat newborn rodentia. The tender-hearted may rest assured that we’re keeping him away from the nest; if the kits are still in there, they have remained unmolested. I did notice that something or someone covered the hole back up, so I’m assuming Deathwish (or some other bunny) has attended to whatever’s going on inside. In another week or so I’ll check the hole again, hoping to find it vacant.

In the meantime, Boxnoggin will just have to suffer. He also got a bath this weekend since the weather was warm enough to permit him drying in rapid order. We make do with dry or damp-towel scrubs during the winter since he is slick-coated and suffers the shivers if he gets chilled, but climate change has given us a few very warm sunny days so we’ve made the best of it. Of course, he’s quite upset that his familiar stink is missing and doubly put out that I washed the comforter on my bed so he can’t regain said stink from it, but we all have our crosses to bear in these trying times.

…this post has turned into a Doge Report, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He was an utter goofball this morning, requiring more than the usual cuddling and bellyrubs before deigning to let me get out of bed. Possibly he felt the dual inconvenience of bath and refusal to let him snack on bunny-nests necessitated a great deal of Speaking to the Manager, which would be me. Alas, he will remain unsatisfied upon both points, at least until he reeks of dog instead of the fancy anti-allergy oatmeal shampoo.

I’d better grab some toast and get going. The biggest decision will be which ankle to put the brace on; getting older is full of such quandaries. At least once I return from shambling about there’s a prospect of more coffee, and I can get a few plot twists ironed out while moving.

And awaaaaaay we go.

Books and Connotations

Catkins are coming off the magnolias and I saw an actual cherry blossom yesterday, though not on the tree down the hill who’s usually first past the post. I suppose I might be able to relax a bit instead of dreading a sudden cold snap? (HAHAHAHAHAHA WHO AM I FOOLING.)

I got to a major character death in the Sekrit Projekt last night, broke down crying, and decided it was time for bed. Going back over the raw text today will be uncomfortable–up until the very last moment, I thought this character would make it. I always do, I’m always pulling for them even when I know it’s impossible. This one’s going to wreck me even more badly than it does the protagonist, but that’s pretty much always the case as well. Sometimes I even mourn my dead villains, because I know precisely what made them what they are.

Anyway, getting to that particular plot-knot means that I am definitely past the halfway point in this particular book, which means there’s a bit of a slog before the slipsliding race to the finish. I know a lot of things will have to be expanded in revision, but that’s a completely different problem. Now it’s me and the book trapped in a cage, and only one of us will emerge victorious.

Technically we both win–it gets born and I get another notch on the belt–but at this stage it always feels an awful lot like a zero-sum game. And after this week I have to split working time so I’m not solely focusing on pushing this bloody great boulder up the hill, Sisyphus-style. It will also mean I say a more definite and thunderous no to a great many things people have grown accustomed to demanding from me, always a fun time.

I finished Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes this morning, listening to the rain on the roof as Boxnoggin’s nose was buried my armpit. (Don’t ask me, our dog is a weirdo.) It’s an eye-opening read, and I particularly enjoyed both Ghosh’s careful tracing of how a great deal of colonialism was built on opium as well as the connections between that trade and the fossil fuel addiction leading to climate change. His positing of the humble poppy as a force in and of itself is extremely valid as well. All in all, a fantastic read, A+, absolutely recommend.

Next up, Emily Wilson’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, since the Princess wants to read both as well and talk about them. She’s loved the Odyssey since childhood–Odysseus is, in her words, a picture-perfect explication of “that fuckin’ guy”, and not in an entirely pleasant sense either. As in any household, in ours there are a few terms whose connotations are completely dependent upon tone and context, and that’s one of them. It’s said with extremely loving and positive overtones when it’s, for example, “that fuckin’ chocolate guy“; however, when it comes to certain political figures it’s overwhelmingly negative.

I can’t wait to hear her takedown of Achilles, frankly, who I always found a bit of a jackass.

Okay, a lot of a jackass. I kept reading the Iliad going, “Wait, this guy is supposed to be a hero? But he’s a douchebag, Hector’s much better!” My feelings on both Helen’s husbands are a bit unrepeatable, as well, and don’t ask me about either of the Ajaxes. (Ajaxi?)

This is going to be amazing. I can’t wait.

The rain is taking a bit of a breather, so I should probably amble into the kitchen for some toast. Before then, though, I’m going to absorb the last half of my coffee in something approaching peace.

Pushing the boulder another few inches can wait for a bit while I do so. It is, after all, a Tuesday.

Hellebore, In Rain

All vivid now…like hellebore in rain…

It’s been a strange, sometimes frustrating week. I had one–one!–very good working day, and it has given me a hunger for more. I should be content that the Sekrit Projekt has not been killed outright, and has indeed passed what I think is the middle of its curve. Well, not really, the true break-point is the death of a major character…but good enough.

I’m still deeply tired of all the bullshit that isn’t writing, and there are two books I want very badly to get to. I just have to finish the two I’m writing now, revise the half-a-dozen in the pipeline, get a great deal of administrative work out of the way, and and and…

No rest for the weary, the wicked, or the writers. Ever, world without end, amen. Thank the gods for coffee.

It’s hellebore season, and I love everything about these plants. I could be content with a mostly-hellebore garden, frankly, save for the irritating fact that slugs consider them a delicacy. And I’ve already got hostas and roses about so I might as well continue with those too. Still, maybe this is the year I’ll get a few more Lenten roses in. It’s nice to think about, as well as the prospect of a blueberry bush or two where there’s now a surfeit of sunlight since the cedars are gone. (Which irks me to no end even now; they were wonderful and someone else’s neglect did them in. Alas.)

At least it looks like we’ll be back to proper rainy weather after a bit of a freeze; I knew we were due for at least one more heavy frost if not a downright east-wind howler. Even the cherry trees are Getting Ideas now, and I can see hints of purple on a few magnolias. The season marches on, and today I have to write an Uncomfortable Declaration of Affection in the Sekrit Projekt.

There’s that to look forward to. And the weekend will see more incremental progress on the short-story anthology. Slow and steady will win my particular race, even if I near expire of annoyance.

See you next week…

Dual Garde and Pointe

I suspect today would be trouble, and in fact could have spent an hour or so sunk in a book rather than freeing myself from a warm bed-cocoon, achieving verticality, and staggering for the Moka pot. So far Thursday and I are proceeding in what appears to be a truce. The quiet is not quite ominous, yet I am still en garde and en pointe.

It probably doesn’t help that I’m reading some rather depressing history (as usual) and yesterday was a 7k writing day. The Sekrit Projekt is halfway, near as I can tell, and I was able to hole up in the office, free of administrivia, to concentrate on getting over that mark.

I am cautiously optimistic. That’s all I’ll say, for fear of jinxing it.

Yesterday also saw Boxnoggin bound and determined to catch a rabbit; coincidentally I have found the place in the nor’eastern fence the ferals are slipping through and I have a rather bruised arm. Lord van der Sploot would absolutely adore to break every barrier in his way while chasing Deathwish Bunny (as I have christened this new visitor to our backyard) but so long as I am capable of deterring him from making Extremely Bad Choices his ambition will have to remain (alas!) unfulfilled.

Deathwish Bunny is so named because he seems to have grasped that the dog is strapped to a lumbering biped uninterested in chase, capture, or homicide, and has taken this to mean he is the ruler of the backyard. In fact, Deathwish the Bun-Bun gives me rather filthy looks while sitting by the Venerable Fir, as if to question what the hell I’m doing in his demesnes. All while Boxnoggin quivers at the end of a leash, nearly vibrating inside his harness with the desire to please omg just once, just let me chase it once.

Even one time would be too many. I have a healthy respect for just how silly the dog can be when left to his own devices. Consequently His Majesty Bun-Bun is laboring under the dual misapprehension of inviolability and immortality; as spring advances we’ll see how the squirrels feel about his claims. Of course they can climb, so the ground floor doesn’t matter too much–but if he starts competing for certain resources we might see a bit of jostling. And of course both love taunting a certain square-headed canine.

You know who isn’t taunting him these days, though? The local corvids have discovered that doing so, as well as buzzing me to demand things, does not get them what they want. A system has evolved wherein the crows wait patiently (albeit loudly) at certain points for largesse, and if I am in a giving mood roasted peanuts in the shell are scattered after a two-tone whistle. And before anyone starts bleating about feeding wildlife, the rewards are random and please take it up with those who scatter peanuts for the damn squirrels first, since the crows manage to get a substantial portion of those without my feeble efforts, thankyouverymuch.

…that sounds rather bad-tempered of me, but there’s been a positive plague of Reply Guys and finger-waggers lately. Fortunately they are outweighed by the very nice people, especially those writing to me now about liking A Flame in the North. Thank you, my beloveds–I keep meaning to do a From the Mailbag post, and keep getting sidetracked or having no time because there’s writing to get to.

Speaking of which, I’d best get underway. Boxnoggin is going to adore today’s sunshine even if we both dislike the chill, and I’ve my own corpse to shamble through something approximating exercise as well. I have big dreams for another uninterrupted chunk of writing since there’s a daring escape to pull off and a major character’s demise to plan for. For those of you who just gasped, you know that’s always a risk in my tales. I’m not looking forward to it any more than you are. (I already cried twice yesterday at an imprisoned protagonist’s emotional nadir, fa cry-eye.)

Time to drain the dregs and get some toast. There might even be some blueberry-lemon crumble left, we’ll see. All in all, there’s room for cautious hope.

But I’m still wary.

Leap Day Bitch Break

Selene

I turned my alarm clock off for yesterday and today, and boy howdy was it ever the right choice. Insomnia hasn’t been biting as hard as it used to, but a night and a half of it is a danger sign I’m not going to disregard. Plus, today’s February 29, which only rolls around every four years.

When a bitch needs a goddamn break, a leap year’s extra day will work as well as any other. I’m only going to work on things which please me today, and that might mean fanfic. It certainly won’t mean anything I have to strain over. Oh, and also in honor of leap day, Selene is $2.99USD in ebook through these retailers (it doesn’t go on sale often, but I heard the pleas of my Danny Valentine fans…), Rose & Thunder is $3.99USD through these ones, HOOD‘s Season One is $1.99USD through these, and The Complete Roadtrip Z (all four seasons) is deeply discounted to $9.99USD in ebook here. There are other sales in March and April, but since this is a frabjous day I went all out scheduling these.

We’ve had hours of rain and it looks like the trend will continue through the weekend, which pleases me to no end. Of course I’ll be physically miserable halfway through my morning run, but that’s more than balanced by the joy of getting home, slithering into a warm shower, and drawing dry socks over my lower paws. I have officially reached the age where good socks are a blessing, a luxury, and damn near a courtship gift.

You may have also noticed the site looks subtly different; there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to get rid of certain plugins and services provided by companies who have drunk deep the “AI” Flavr-Aid. No more Google, thank you very much–I am weighing even turning off Analytics–and I’ve done a lot of work over the past few days to make sure I can switch away from the Jetpack plugin wholesale if Automattic tries scraping sites where it’s installed. To be strictly honest I don’t think the latter will happen, but I’m not leaving any openings. “AI” and “machine learning” enthusiasts have proved themselves so rancid and exploitative they will never be welcome in my house, world without end, amen.

It’s a huge goddamn grift and I’m tired of it. Even the faintest whiff of that nonsense is enough to turn me away entirely.

On the bright side, my coffee tastes exceptionally fine this damp grey morn. I mean, the first hit of caffeine is always a blessed event, but sometimes the stars align and one receives a superlative jolt. Perhaps some of it has to do with also getting a decent night’s rest after a week of uneasy-at-best toss-turn, or the fact that the Muse has turned away from certain types of input and is back to history books. The latter is a profound relief. I’m not me when I’m not writing, and I’m even less me when I can only get a quarter-hour’s worth of uninterrupted daily reading.

Boxnoggin will not enjoy beginning our walkies in these conditions, but he’ll like skipping them even less. I suppose I’d better finish this marvelous set of espresso shots and amble for the toaster.

Give yourself a wee bit of a break today if you can, my beloveds. You’ve earned it.

Lightning, Once, Enough

Rolled out of bed to find that the Moka pot had been prepped on the stove for me, and one of my children (who had kindly set that up for their poor caffeine-dependent mother) was absolutely bursting to tell me all the news. Apparently that plagiarist Somerton is back at it with a fresh empathy-free nopology1, testing the waters to gain some engagement dollars from hatewatchers; I am continually amazed at the rinse-and-repeat cycles granted certain shameless narcissists.

Yesterday was a bit of a wash. I got a lot of administrivia handled, including things that couldn’t be done on the weekend, but that bled off the force I needed to get certain other things moving along. As a result, the writing part of the day felt like clawing my way out of Sarlaac pit. Both the serial and the Sekrit Projekt are chonky bois2 and being past the point of shiny-and-new makes for a lot of current to swim against, even without the Sisyphean emotional labor on the Sekrit. I want to add a third project to make them jealous, but so much of my energy is spent pushing against the resistance of previous damage there’s not a single leftover erg. Maybe that’ll change when edits for Chained Knight drop and I take time to do revisions on that book and Gamble.

At the very least I’ll be using different mental muscles. Sometimes that’s as good as a rest.

The promo experiment over the weekend went well, too. There’ll be a second experiment next month, and if that goes well I’ll consider recommending the particular promo platform to others. I was amused (and touched) so many folk decided any book capable of garnering that particular “fuck God” review was worth picking up for four bucks and giving a whirl; thank you all. I hope you like it.

I wrote Moon’s Knight during lockdown, in something of a fugue state. And I wasn’t going to publish it, but the howls of protest from my beta readers–who received an early draft on the theory that it might help them escape their own stress during that time–convinced me otherwise. There are whole passages I got to revision on and thought, whoever wrote this sounds like me, makes the choices I would…but I have no memory of this place. It was a very Gandalf set of moments, and I was quite jumpy looking for the Balrog.3

Chained Knight will be out later this year–I already have the cover, it’s a real beaut–and maybe I’ll write the third Tale of the Underdark next winter. I know precisely what happens and how it closes the circle. Of course, these books are variations on a theme rather than a proper series, as I’ve said before. If Moorcock could do it with a certain albino Melnibonean, why can’t I with a riff on something else? It’s the sort of project I wouldn’t be able to do without self-publishing technology and the experience garnered over the last couple decades, so at least I can feel good about that. Even if nobody ends up liking these books, I’ll be happy.

Of course, the response to Moon’s Knight has been overwhelmingly positive, notwithstanding that one hilarious “fuck God” review. Which, again, was absolutely priceless promo, the likes of which I might not ever see again. Ah well, hit by lightning once is enough. The amusement itself is worth the price of admission.

Today is for a meeting of clan-lords during which a certain sellsword receives what is, to her, very bad news, and a scene during which two prisoners somewhat bond over their fate. It’s the latter I’m looking forward to most, since it presents a chance to invert quite a few tropes. Turning such things inside out pleases me mightily, and honestly I doubted I’d get to ever write this particular scene. There have been many dark nights of the soul lately, only a few shafts of random light poking through to accentuate just how hopeless I’ve been feeling.

Quite frankly, it’s been awful. Maybe some of that is breaking up, though. Hand over hand, clinging to a rope made of stories, I keep climbing–and throwing out ropes of my own for others in different pits. It’s a life’s work and as I get older it seems more and more inevitable; I was always going to end up here, and I largely don’t mind. Weaving a net to keep others from the abyss keeps me occupied enough to struggle upward another few handholds.

And now it’s time for breakfast. Boxnoggin was an absolute fur-covered brat during yesterday’s walkies. He’s simply in that part of recovery, which means I need to be even more vigilant about making sure he doesn’t re-injure himself–a thankless task, to be sure, but a necessary one. I just heard him shake his collar as I typed that last sentence, so off I go.

Happy Tuesday, my beloveds. Let’s keep hauling ourselves upward.

The Devil Does Promo

The interval after one gets the first sip of coffee down but before the initial blessed intimation of caffeine in the bloodstream is a liminal space. Thresholds are funny things, and this one’s no different. Technically caffeine’s one of the few substances capable of going straight across the stomach lining (along with aspirin, very simple sugar, and a proportion of alcohol) and by the gods am I ever grateful for that. It’s not so much that my brain needs jump-starting–the collection of squirrels inside my skull is always coked up and singing, thank you–but coffee seems to impose some order on the damn chorus and bring the body into sync as well.

Whew. Anyway, over the weekend I did an experimental promo thing with Moon’s Knight, offering it for $3.99US in ebook. (It’s still going; today’s the last scheduled day for the price drop even though the official promo is done.) I’m testing a certain marketing platform, and I also highlighted the sale on social media. I can’t tell which proportion of sales is which yet; those analytics should be interesting.

Of course, it was sort of a gimme, since this is the book that garnered one of my favourite Amazon reviews, in which a pearl-clutching “Avid Reader” took exception to the protagonist thinking, “fuck God” at the funeral of her best friend. Normally I don’t glance at such things, but the stars aligned in this particular case and I had to laugh. I mean, you can’t buy promo like that, it’s bloody priceless. I’ll probably find that the bulk of the sales are people who saw that on my Mastodon or Bsky feeds and said, “that sounds like a good time”.

The fact that the book almost wasn’t published at all–only the intervention and insistence of my beta readers convinced me to do so–only makes it funnier.

You all know how much I loathe marketing, but if this is the year I’m prepping to go full-feral indie, I need to get more comfortable with it. Intellectually I know that living under late-stage capitalism means we’ve got to use the tools we have, people won’t know about the books unless I tell them, and that it’s necessary and good for an artist to talk about their stuff and make a living. But the brute work of promo does not move me and I have no patience for the douchebags who want to shame artists for having to engage in it, so I’ve been avoiding the whole shebang except when I absolutely cannot.

Needs must when the devil drives, though and Mama’s got rent to pay. I keep hearing that bit in Always Look On the Bright Side of Life where Eric Idle riffs, “Incidentally, this record is available in the foyer…some of us gotta live as well, you know…”

There are far worse earworms upon a Monday morn.

Today is for setting up the next pitched battle in Highlands War and getting a protagonist locked in a dungeon elsewhere. After, of course, Boxnoggin gets his ramble and my own corpse its endorphin-producing shamble. The former will be reasonably pleasant since his leg seems well on the way to full healing, but I’m still keeping him on very easy walkies and discouraging indoor parkour. He is only moderately upset at that last bit since we’re providing canine puzzles and lots of other not-so-leaping fun and encouragement to keep him occupied. (By “puzzles” I mean “very easy Kong toys”, since…well, we love this dog, but he is not a rocket scientist, let’s put it that way.)

The morning has been passing weird, which is to be expected on a Monday. I’m waiting for the Chained Knight edit letter to drop, at which point I’ll shift to revising that book and Gamble. Hopefully this week should see some other things shake loose…but if they don’t I’ve got more than enough to keep me occupied. Rather like Boxnoggin, in fact.

Time to grab some brekkie and stagger forth.