[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.]
Having a Monday. Recovering from last week. Went down to Portland to help move my niece from storage unit A to B. She’s got temporary medical issues and cannot lift anything more than five pounds. We filled a 15’ truck twice. Three of us. After four hours driving down that morning.
Then I had an allergic reaction to her pot smoke, so instead of being down there for a few days, I stayed in a hotel Wed night and drove back to Seattle Thurs morning. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ rode home Friday on the train and I picked her up.
Busy.
Over the weekend, I nuked the Milestone Indie Publishing Newsletter off Substack. Conflicted, but they made it easy.
I am a proponent of the First Amendment. People are free to have their opinions, limited by threats and imminent danger, as the USSC has explored in great detail.
There are nazis out there. Racid racists. I’m related to a few, but I don’t talk to them anymore.
Substack has a Nazi problem. I don’t mind that they host those folks on their platform, because it could just as easily be reversed to the point that folks like me would be kicked off for not having a racist-enough opinion of things. Everything Hitler did was legal, because he came to power democratically, then exercised emergency powers to rearrange the laws to let him do the rest. The Holocaust and Liebensraum. War.
Substack fucked up, as far as I was concerned, when they took joy in announcing that not only were nazis welcome on their platform, but that they were working hard to financially support said folks, instead of grudgingly accepting their first amendment rights to be there.
When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. When you have nine people and a nazi eating lunch together at a table, you have ten nazis. Simple as that.
We have talked about moving back off Substack, but they make that experience as painful as humanly possible. Not even bad software could explain it, so I assume that they’ve done that on purpose. Couldn’t turn off billing or do much of anything.
Finally just downloaded all the emails, sent folks a note, and nuked the entire site.
You can celebrate your nazis and incentivize them. I’m not playing.
At the same time, I have NDAs around a new project, so I’m not at liberty to talk about it. Might be a replacement for Milestone. Might not. Not my project, but I got invited to participate and possibly make some money in the process. There will be more news come summer.
At that point, we’ll figure out our next steps.
Additionally, I’m tangentially related to the folks that are bringing Author Nation to replace the 20-to-50 conference in Vegas in November. Planning to attend. Might be a panelist or even a speaker. TBD.
I have a busy year ahead of me. Such that I’m hoping that I can hit 750,000 words this year, down from about double that two years ago. Had to cut things back across a wide swath of my life, mostly so I had that much space for the writing. Mostly, playing by ear at this point and not adding anything while looking for places to remove things. That’s why Milestone went away for a while*.
On the writing side, I am about halfway through Ollie 3. Gonna come in at 80k, give or take. There should be four of them total, with a big chunk of story wrapped up in 3, then one last mystery to solve in 4.
Space Opera Xenoarchaeology. Because I can.
Am working on a new universe. Also space opera, but unrelated to anything else, save that I’m using The Deeps as a starting point and hoping that I can start the first novel in that series when I finish Ollie 3.
Marrakesh is doing pretty well. Thanks to everyone that has had nice things to say about Diplomat At Arms. Varfelis Station is coming up next. And I have more Captain Boru stories to tell, plus Maddox and a few others.
For now, mostly just grinding. Keeping forward momentum as I try to keep the lights on around here. Hope your Monday is going well.
shade and sweet water,
blaze
West of the Mountains, WA
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