20221031

[As usual, two weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Update: I have been sick with a mild, ongoing case of covid for a week and change. Got exposed on Oct 26, and most of the gaming group came down with it over that weekend. I also got my booster and a flu shot on the 28th (don’t do that. It sucks) as I was coming down with covid.

For the last week, I have basically sat at my computer (instead of standing, I rearranged to a desk and chair) and wrote. Way ahead on words, but that’s what happens when you sit in front of a computer for 8 hours instead of 3.

Finally feeling better. Exhausted and no reserves, but the brain is back and the aches and pains are way less. Down to one side of a sore throat that isn’t broken glass anymore.

Still taking it easy this week. Didn’t go anywhere for breakfast. Sure as hell not shooting.

Woke up to snow this morning. Not much more than a footprint. Early this year. The Fabulous Publisher Babe™ is entirely grumpy, but she hates snow. Too many times snowed in while living in Wyoming. Fortunately, all melting off pretty quickly this morning.

Last week, I wrote a long Harper piece. No idea if it works. Might just be a series of vignettes, but it sets her up for some things I want to do later. We’ll see.

I just now finished Gunderson #10, which was something of a sequel to #4/Blackmailers.

Dunno why, but writer-brain wanted to deal with costumed superheroes. And in Gunderson’s context of 1955.

Sat down and thought about many of the old heroic teams from the ’40s, including Justice Society and All-Star Squadron. Already had Miss Lynx, but she’s retired in 1955. Early 40s and too old to be running around chasing down bad guys.

It is a thing. Either the heroes no longer age, or you need to set the team in a specific era and leave them there. For Gunderson, that’s the end of Prohibition and the Depression. Then Miss Lynx comes back after Pearl Harbor and stays until V-J Day before retiring for good.

Historically, superhero comic publishers more or less collapsed in the late 1940s, and didn’t come back for nearly a decade. (End of Golden Age, then the Silver Age.)

In between, you have the McCarthy Era (which should have been called the Edgar Hoover Era, knowing what we do now about that piece of rancid camel shit) and the HUAC. McCarthy gets broken by Welch and Murrow in about 1954, with the quiet help of Ike. Perfect for stories set in 1955.

So I had to create whole new teams of heroes and villains for the 30s, the 40, and then the Patriotic 50s. All of that world-building was there for the story, but not much of it got used here. However, I have it, for any of three sets of stories I might want to explore.

Anybody got a preference for era?

Prohibition ends in 1932, but once folks have a taste for corruption and vice, it is hard to stuff the genie back into the bottle. Then you have the Nazis and “Yellow Menace” of WW2. Finally, the rising Atomic Age leading to space exploration.

And I have a lot of folks to explore, if/when I get there. You tell me.

Writing newsletters and such this morning. Then I think I pivot to the third Marrakesh novel.

Marrakesh is fun, because it is a complicate reaction to something else, in an “I can tell that story better” kind of way. Probably can’t, and it will be different, but the author in question didn’t plan to write a hugely long novel series, and got themselves trapped in space opera, where the stakes had to keep going up, even though the starting point was already high.

Marrakesh is space adventure. Mystery/Mission of the week stuff. Military SF, but not epic opera. Marrakesh itself is a CTT. Cruiser-Tactical-Transport. Big tug with two spaces where modules can be plugged in for missions. Gives the ship flexibility, and gives me a reason to stick them into some of these situations, because in coming up with various modules, I have about a dozen. (Feel free to suggest other modules, because I’m sure I missed some.)

The 2023 publishing schedule is currently off, because covid hit me and the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ to the point that we can’t finish the details of a Kickstarter and launch it in two weeks. We’re both too wiped out. So Corsac Fox will probably run on KS in January. Then go up for pre-order in the summer. Not like I don’t have a lot of stuff ready for next year. I even have Corsac Fox #2 done.

At this point, the only two novels not written for the 2023 schedule are the third Marrakesh (shortly), and the thirteenth Science Officer.

Plus I have nine Last Stand novellas done, two planned, and one open slot to write something.

Y’all stay tuned. Got a lot coming.

Cheers.

Shade and sweet water,

b

West of the SNOWY Mountains, WA

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