Maybe Three For Three

I am thisclose to finishing Tomb of Night. The carnivorous scarabs and giant tentacle-infested rats have shown up, the villains are about to reach the tomb, and the quasi-angel isn’t far behind. It’s going to be fun.

I want this zero done by the time I go to sleep tonight. It probably won’t happen, but at least I can get closer, and my irritation at several other things–the damn stove, the bloody mortgage company, publishing in general–can be poured into supernatural combat and the sinking of an entire tomb older than prehistory. Because if I’ve learned nothing else, it’s that a city falling into the endless sands is good for the plot.

Come tomorrow the bulk of my time will have to go into revising Gamble, but I might steal a day or so (since December’s starting so close to a weekend) to really put this one to bed. The decompression on two zero drafts in as many months is going to be a doozy, but maybe it can be ameliorated by revision? (Famous last words…) There is rather a lot to revise, especially since I’ve gotten some…well, I don’t know if it’s bad news but it’s certainly unpleasant and hard to hear. Giving myself time to absorb and just sit with things would probably be best, but there’s work to be done instead.

So the schedule to the end of the year includes revising Gamble, getting a workable zero of Tomb of Night, getting close to zero-draft territory on Highlands War (if I pull this off it’ll be three in three months, though technically Highlands is at its midpoint already), thinking about the next serial (a problem for 2025, but I need to start planning now), and getting a few sample chapters of a romantasy together for my agent. That last will likely be what I spend Friday Night Writes on, and it will feel like playing hooky, I’m sure. Oh, and the Monthly Sales page will need attention tomorrow, there’s a whole tranche of holiday discounts and the like to highlight.

Once the year turns over, there’s Hell’s Acre to think about, and whether or not I want to bring the portal fantasy out. The betas like it, and I should probably hold to that above all else. No need to decide right away, and it won’t do the book any harm to sit on my hard drive if that’s the way it’s got to be.

And now, for somewhat of an announcement.


There’s a lot going on in the news cycle, and I should take this chance to reiterate: Just because I don’t say something publicly does not mean I do not notice or care. Sometimes I’m not qualified to give an opinion, so I keep my damn mouth shut. Sometimes I feel very strongly, yet it’s not my place to speak, so I don’t. Sometimes the risk of harassment and death threats if I say something is one I’m not willing to run at the particular moment. Sometimes–and I know this may sound strange–I just do not have the time or energy to get into it with a bunch of randos and Reply Guys, so I refrain and focus privately on the things I can do as well as my own goddamn work.

So, coming at me with a, why haven’t you said something about X, do you not even care? is unhelpful, unwise, and will only earn a big juicy block. I am not here to service random strangers’ emotional needs.


For one thing, there’s a Boxnoggin who needs walking instead, though he will be quite irate at the weather. There’s supposed to be rain, and the poor fellow holds me entirely responsible for that. I wish I had even a fraction of the power this canine attributes to me. A whole lot of things would be sorted Right Quick if I did.

Onward to Thursday, then.

Annoyance Unmitigated

I woke up ready to step out the door swinging, and so far nothing has mitigated that state of affairs. For example, I’m getting really close to recommending self-publishing authors not list separately through Kobo, though we desperately need Amazon alternatives for the good of the (rancidly monocultured) publishing ecosystem. Of course, listing to Kobo through Draft2Digital is currently still a reasonably good idea, since every penny helps, but I’ve listed a lot of things separately because I never want my eggs in a single basket. Unfortunately, the bait-and-switch in Kobo’s “Promotions” tab, as well as the ongoing clunkiness of their interface (how is it possible to get even WORSE after you’ve thrown so much money at your UI, dear gods, how?) are both terrible. I’m hoping they’ll mend their ways, but as it stands I don’t know if I can recommend listing separately through them anymore.

I’ve heard Kobo’s stellar for Canadian authors, so that’s a mild point in their favor. And I really, really want there to be some kind of alternative to Kindle. I just can’t deal with the constant “oh, we had TOO MANY people sign up for this promotion!” nonsense. If that’s happening 70-80% of the time, the problem is your promotions signup structure, and that needs to be bloody well fixed so self-publishers don’t have to waste effort.

Anyway, that’s a niche complaint on a Monday. And sure, I’ve got a broader one. I’m absolutely irate at the privatization of Covid vaccines and treatments–you know, the ones funded by massive taxpayer investment, now being “privatized” and turned around so some fat-cat pharma execs can buy another yacht while the rest of us run the chance of successive reinfections triggering Long Covid? Yeah, those. The proper price for a Covid vaccine is $0. The proper price for Covid treatment is $0. We’ve already paid, not only in taxpayer cash but in blood, death, and fear. Charging again is just murderous greed.

But what else is new? Oh, well, in the US we’re getting another paltry round of (possibly expired) at-home test kits, as a sop. Marvelous.

In short, I’m bloody well irritated today, and I suspect even a morning run will not ameliorate the feeling. Retreating into the NaNo book is pretty much my only option right now. Worse than the irritation is the knowledge that nothing will be done, that all my attempts to warn were (and will be) in vain, and the murderous cycle of repression and profit will continue unabated. It’s enough to drive one right into the bog. Oh, for a cottage with a mossy roof; oh, to come into town only every six months to drop off manuscripts for one’s agent and then back into the peace of the venomous swamp.

Unfortunately if I retreated to a nice bit of wetlands in order to live out my bog-witch dreams the fucking corporations would come to pave it over posthaste. I suppose I’m doomed to Cassandra my way through this period of existence.

Anyway, Boxnoggin still needs walkies and the wordcount won’t wait for the annoyance to abate, so off I go. Maybe I’ll get a chunk of this book off the plate today; the only solace is in doing the work as well as I can. That, and the dog’s utter joy when it’s time for him to stick his nose in clumps of wet greenery before peeing upon them.

It’ll have to do.

Exceeding Cheerful

Staggered to the coffeepot this morning and figured out a rather large plot point in Cain’s Wife, so that was fun. Having the entire architecture of a series shift a little bit inside my head before I even got a first sip of blessed caffeine is a strange feeling, a mental temblor. Part of that could be yesterday’s work, well over 4k on the blasted book. The heist is done, but now the heroine is naked and late for the auction.

That’s not even euphemism. I’d ask “how do I get myself in these situations” except it’s a fictional character, not me, and to be fair I knew this was coming. Today’s for writing the auction, and I can’t decide if it’s better for the high bidder to take possession of the item and find out it’s a fake…or if the magic holding the fake together should fail during the bidding itself, which will give me a combat/chase scene I’d frankly love to write. There’s a line that’s been beating in time to my heartbeat for months while thinking about this book, and it needs a home so it can stop bothering me.

I’m also thinking about the cost of living crisis this morning. Corporate greed and price gouging, added to a supine media endlessly bleating CEO and right-wing talking points, makes for an extremely unhappy state of affairs. The economy is doing well by objective indicators, but the perception is that it’s doing otherwise (again, due to price gouging and media spin), and that perception will be ruthlessly used to gin up racist “uncertainty” all the way through next year’s election. Corporations and billionaires will continue to think they can control the racist demagogue du jour, and that as long as they do so the profits will continue to rise. The historical parallels are right there, and they send a chill down my spine.

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it; those who do study history are doomed to be ignored when they warn of recurrence.

As you can tell, I’m in an exceeding cheerful mood. The caffeine may help, slipping back into the worlds I create might help as well, and there’s bread to be made today which is always a happy occasion. I just…keep working, hoping that the small effects of doing the next right thing will have some aggregate effect. And Boxnoggin has just trotted into the office to inform me that all this is very well, but the truly important matter is that he wants a bit of toast and then walkies, and those things can’t happen until I leave the glowing box on the desk and go get brekkie sorted.

I suppose history will have to wait, at least until he’s stuck his nose in every clump of greenery and the corvids down the hill have received an unshelled peanut or two. Then there will be the auction to write, and another combat scene in Highlands War.

Tuesday beckons, I must answer the call. Be safe out there, my beloveds.

Whipcrack and Switchboard

Normally I blog with the first jolt of coffee, but today I fell into Cain’s Wife, cleaning up the first 15k or so of text and making sure things are situated correctly for the revenge heist which sets off a potential apocalypse. A pleasant departure from the norm, all told, and the twig of intransigence that bloomed with me deciding to stop streaming (due to the bot and harassment comments clogging the works) has branched into an entire tree of no, I fucking won’t, and you can’t make me spreading in various directions.

Childish? Perhaps. Useful for protecting my working time? Absolutely. I suspect the whole “writing an entire portal fantasy in two weeks” thing was partly a result of that upheaval. There were other factors, naturally–trad publishing, being nasty yet again–but I think the relief and freed-up bandwidth gave a whipcrack and off I went to the races. Also, my dreams have been even more vividly coloured than usual lately, my subconscious passing messages along like a goddamn switchboard.

Anyway, Cain’s Wife is humming along and Highlands War turned in an unexpected direction yesterday. I was pacing from my office to the living room, wholly occupied with a separate plot tangle, and the solution to one I hadn’t even noticed popped into my head, whole and entire. It’s a good sign, meaning the work is growing to please itself. I don’t know how other writers do it, but I’m of the opinion that the work knows what it needs and genre designations, let alone marketing, can come later.

A lot of publishing tries to put the marketing cart before the horse that is the work itself, and then wonders blankly at the resultant shoddy mess. Any attempt from downstream to meddle in the creative process or force a writer to make something more “palatable” or “marketable” is merely attempting to dilute for the lowest common denominator, and the effects are rarely if ever positive. Now, maybe there’s a place for said denominator, sure, just not in my own equations. I’ve never seen the utility of truckling.

Anyway, Boxnoggin got a long ramble today while I worked on the last bits of the heist inside my head, as well as the escape on a high-speed train that ends with a kelpie chase. Well, not exactly chase since the protagonist tells me that in her world, very little is as fast over water as a kelpie. I’m going to trust her, since she’s the one driving this train. If I can get to the tango with the vampire boss who’s about to have a Very Bad Week Indeed, I’ll call today a good bit of work. There’s also this week’s subscription drop (I’ve opened up the Latte’s Worth tier on Patreon temporarily, though it stays open on Gumroad year-round) to get out the door, and I want to get Kaia and her troupe to the Shakespearean-tinted woods as well.

It feels marvelous to be working at this pace again, instead of wasting energy on providing supply for plagiarist bots and narcissistic harassers. Asking myself, “if nothing about this situation changes, how long are you going to stay in it?” has done nothing but good lately. Now it’s time for a shower, a fresh pot of caffeine, and letting a protagonist do some shopping in a magical boutique.

Can’t wait to get started. Over and out.

Pithy Little Terms

Fog this morning, full of the scent of autumn. No frost on the pumpkin yet, as my grandfather would say; if there was, I’d have to pop covers on the outside faucets and deal with the hoses. But that’s not a critical task just yet, and if I do it now ten bucks says I’ll need a hose for something before any freeze strikes. Murphy’s Law, Faucet Edition.

And oh, doesn’t it smell lovely. Stepping outside for Boxnoggin’s first loo break of the day and taking a deep breath restored a little bit of my soul. Summer is nice enough, and I know a lot of people like it. I just endure it.

After a couple of highly productive days, the books chose incubation yesterday. I know it’s because Gamble is getting ready for the spike to the finish, and long experience has taught me it’s better to just let the book do what it wills at this point. Didn’t stop me from waking up today and immediately thinking, “Who stays on the roof?” If there’s a three-man team guarding the cabin and one of them takes the eyrie, I have to figure out who’s up there when the real fun starts. Of course they’re all in communication with each other, and I have to think about that too. I know what needs to happen, it’s just a question of arranging the dominos so they fall properly.

I mean, I got the heroine out of the freezer with help from her pole-dancing classes, so the rest of this should be easy. Right?

Despite knowing this is a part of the process, I was in a state of high frustration (almost approaching dudgeon) by midafternoon. Even the Ragnarok book is holding its breath, waiting. Of course that particular story is going to be hard to get off the ground and keep aloft, for reasons which have little to do with me personally. I would be stomping and cussing, but that’s a waste of energy and in any case, if it were easy everyone would do it and it wouldn’t be any fun, right?

Doesn’t help that a crop of Reply Guys and Rando Calrissians in my mentions have started to become troublesome. I think the threshold for certain types of engagement is a little lower on some platforms than others, and after years of work I had such a robust blocklist on Ye Olde Twitters that I didn’t see a lot of the questionable bullshit.

I’m taking note of certain folks, but right now most of it is more prophylactic blocking and muting, especially on BlueSky. It helps that glancing at the replies to certain posts (not my own) gives one a wonderland of bad actors to just block right out the gate. The bigger thing on Mastodon is techbro bootlickers–the neckbeards who think Daddies Elon, Bezos, and Kahle will love them and maybe give them a few crumbs off the table if they’re just hateful and harassing enough to the people who point out billionaires and their grifts are NOT your friend. There’s also a lot of the “but I LIKE ebook theft and there’s no consequences, so it MUST be okay!” crowd hanging around, shouting about how LLMs and accompanying art theft “really aren’t all that bad” and how we should just all be grateful that “anyone can write a book now”.

And I’m like, how wonderful, instead of being shitty in my mentions, how about you personally go and do that? Get a few books written and through the publishing process, try to make a living doing this, and if you’re still at it after five years or so, then maybe you can open your mouth to me. But never mind, because I’m fucking blocking your nonsense, Jesus Christ in a chariot-driven sidecar.

That’s another one of my grandfather’s pithy little terms. He was also fond of “Christ on a pogo stick”, but for some reason my grandmother considered that blasphemous in the way a sidecar wasn’t and would hiss at him about taking The Name in vain. (I don’t know what she expected; he was in the merchant marine, then the Navy, then was a cop for twenty years.)

Anyway.

Now that we’re starting to see the class-action lawsuits and possible regulatory action, the LLM/AI grift has passed its crest. The people who were going to make a lot of money have fled (or are halfway out the door if they’re slow) with their cash and the only folks left are the bagmen or the marks. And like any grift, if you don’t know whether you’re the top of the pyramid, the bagman, or the mark, you’re a mark and being fleeced.

We saw this same pattern play out with NFTs and bitcoin. It’s just amazing to me that a lot of the same people taken in by both are so rabid defending AI now.

In any case, there are groceries to get today, a new recipe to try, and waiting patiently for Gamble to finish incubating and poke its wee nose out of the cave so I can grab it, drag the remainder free, and pummel it into zero-draft shape. I might also get everyone off the damn plateau in Highlands War. All in all a busy day, and that’s not even counting walkies.

Best to get underway.

Bold Decision, Let’s See How It Works Out

The bold decision to leave my alarm clock un-set last night seems to have been the right one. I feel a lot less zombified than expected after yesterday’s scramble; there were a lot of moving parts, not least a high-anxiety video meeting, and I’m back to juggling three books again so there’s very little wiggle room in my daily energy ration. Fortunately the rains have moved in and every drop is a balm to my drought-tired soul, and if I treat my throat with honey and tea from now until Saturday I will probably have enough voice to do another Great Chapters read.

There’s a bit in Great Gatsby that I love, and think deserves to be read aloud. I’d love to do a whole Reading with Lili on it, but I can’t afford the time or energy outlay of dealing with a barrage of harassment and threats–how dare I say what I think of literature, after all!–so it’ll just be the plain readings for a while. I have thoughts of doing vids for Patreon subscribers, but shoehorning that kind of time commitment into the schedule…

Yeah. Anyway. Yesterday saw the arrival of a messenger in Highlands War, a particular conversation I had planned from the start in Gamble (finally got the hero shot, or at least winged), and I also managed to get the protagonist shoved into the pond for the Ragnarok book, which has acquired the working title The Doom of the Elder. It felt rather like juggling chainsaws, and I fell into bed with the weariness of the wicked yet victorious.

Triple-book juggling is more honored in the breach than in the observance. Gamble is heating up and will be spiking for the push to a zero-draft finish soon, so the other two books will have to be content with 200- or 300-word days when that hits. Highlands is in the middle of the long slog and a serial to boot, so it will trundle along slowly until I get to the rock-climbing bit planned for near the end. And of course Doom (I’m going to love referring to the book in that particular fashion) is a complex series-ender having to swim against a great deal of behind-the-scenes trouble, so it’s a stubborn, grit-my-teeth act of faith to keep chipping away. Each book demands something different and is in a distinctly separate part of the work cycle, so I can switch from one to the other when a particular set of mental and emotional muscles get tired or close to burnout injury.

And naturally I have other work queued up for when these are moved into the revision pipeline. Song that never ends.

My productivity took a helluva hit after 2016, and an even more monstrous one in 2020. It’s…pleasant? to be back in the saddle to some degree? I’m tired of witnessing the world’s disintegration, and hopeless despite the fact that things seem to be swinging in the opposite direction. Too much has happened, too much cruelty has been shown–even now, most of the people I see when I have to leave the house to acquire groceries (or do some other critical task that can’t be put off) seem to delight in breathing disease over everything with their naked face-holes, deliberately disregarding the fact that we’re still in a fucking pandemic, for Chrissake.

It’s enough to make one despair, even if the WGA strike has reached a successful conclusion (let’s hope they stay strong in support of SAG-AFTRA and the video game folks) and there’s finally some real legal action looming against Amazon’s monopoly (more properly monopsony, as several Reply Guys huffily informed me lo these many years ago and one just as huffily informed me was improper terminology recently, since nothing on earth will please a techbro Rando Calrissian) as well as a class-action suit against the huge plagiarism machines we’re calling AI. Oh, and the Biden Administration is looking to restore net neutrality, so that‘s a piece of good news.

I should feel more hopeful than I do. Beating myself up over that would be counterproductive, though, so I’m not gonna do it. Instead, into my imaginary worlds I go, descending into the cave to fight the monsters and haul the stories, blinking and battered, into the light. And of course, every day must see walkies, for Boxnoggin is a creature of habit and dragging me out for a bit of exercise does us both good.

I suppose I’d best gnaw on some toast and get going. There’s three books’ worth of wordcount waiting for today, after all, and a subscription drop too.

See you around.

Fever and Rain

Well, it had to happen. Since we mask pretty religiously around here, we haven’t had much in the way of respiratory illness since March of 2020, when the Princess brought back what might have been the very first strain of plague just before the airlines shut down. She and her bestie had spent years saving up for that vacation, and managed to get home right before lockdown. At the time we thought it was just travel crud…but now I wonder.1

Anyway, the weather has shifted. We went from dry 90F days to mid-60s and rainy, and at first I thought the Prince and I were simply adjusting to the change. Then came the fever, the coughing, and the need to go looking in the medicine cabinet for a box of Mucinex2. We’re still not sure if it’s Covid, RSV, flu, or just an opportunistic virus taking advantage of stress and weather change.

Yesterday was the worst, and it aligned with pushing to finish the copyedits on Sons of Ymre 2. Thankfully this copyeditor is one of my very favorites, since she does not attempt to rewrite my book(s) in her own voice as some have. Don’t get me wrong–CEs are unsung heroes 98% of the time! It’s just that the remaining 2% can be…rather a doozy, and sooner or later statistics bite everyone. So it wasn’t that bad, but I had other things planned for the day as well and had to put them off in order to get the most critical stuff out the door.

There’s also rather good news about the Ymre books I can’t share yet, though I can say that the first two Ghost Squad ones are about to go live in audiobook. (All four Roadtrip Z seasons are available in audiobook too!) And of course The Dead God’s Heart is in audio form as well, if that’s your jam.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about John Scalzi‘s excellent point that “the failure mode of funny is asshole”, especially on social media.3 Yesterday saw someone I quasi-respected go full-on defending the theft of author/artist labor for so-called AI, and since they solicited my opinion on the point I gave it though I was pretty sure the request was disingenuous in the extreme. I was right, and remarked upon it on social media…and of course, along came a troll.

A few years ago I might have granted some grace, or simply muted. Now? Blockity-block-block, motherfuckers. Blocking is self-care, and if you’re trying to be “funny” but the vibe hits me the wrong way, out the airlock you go. I had a moment of, “is this person just trying to be amusing, and failing dreadfully?” Then I realized I didn’t care, between my current physical misery and the need to ruthlessly curate my life and space.

Life is too short to do emotional labor for jackass randos.

At least there’s rain. Someone in the neighborhood has a wood stove going, too, which would be pleasant if I wasn’t hacking up a lung. Boxnoggin isn’t going to like a short ramble rather than a long one today, though perhaps the damp will change his mind. Each year when the rains roll in he is dead convinced I have changed the weather just to spite him personally, and gives me long-suffering looks while lifting his paws as high and delicately as possible. Poor fellow, to him we are incomprehensible gods, dispensers of good things but also torments.

I’ll give him a bit of yesterday’s bacon when we get home. That should salve the sting.

The world looks rather underwater-funny, since I’m still rocking a mild fever. But so much has to get done today, and I can’t put much of it off. Being where the buck stops means one can arrange things to suit oneself, certainly–but also means that there is no last resort or backup. I’m just enduring until I can return to the relative comfort of horizontal, whether it be on couch or bed. Vertical rather sucks right now, and even coffee isn’t helping.

Time to get Thursday cleaned up and ready for the merry-go-round.

  1. And the utter failure of public health in the US means we literally can’t tell if we’ve had plague or…something else. ↩︎
  2. Guaifenesin is WONDERFUL, especially if one’s lungs feel a bit congested. ↩︎
  3. Scalzi’s comment policy was also a model for my own, when I allowed such things. ↩︎