[As usual, three 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.]

Finished Science Officer 15 yesterday. Cliffhangared the hell out of it, but that’s fine because I’m planning to drop 15 and 16 a month apart. And 17 if I can get it done in time. Nov-Dec 2025. Maybe Oct as well.

Y’all finished book one of Scattered Tribes, so I am starting a new thing in November. Got #1 done. The Forever City. After this and a newsletter, I’ll start #2. Goal is to keep them all under 16k, because they want to run away and be novels. Which they will, just not immediately. Like Scattered Tribes, this lets me sidle into a series sideways. And keeps you folks entertained along the way.

I only have so many hours in the day to write. And I’ve consciously dialed things back from the old days. Still planning to hit 1,000,000 this year, but only barely. Taking at least a week off in November when I go to Vegas to the Author-Nation conference, where I’m giving a talk on “Breaking Discoverability.”

Wrote a B4B that will come out in November. The (call it a Ted) Talk is 40 minutes long, so I’ll cover about a third of what’s in the book. Mostly me distilling down what I know today. Buchman assures me that I’m going to break minds and ruin lives with this talk, mostly because too many young authors are still being told that they can have a TradPub career that is emotionally and financially fulfilling.

Oh, buttercup.

It’s all about hard work these days. Marketing. Business. And a lot of luck, which is part of the reason I got as far as I have, and hopefully I’ll get struck by lightning again at some point, when it could really help. I’m too feral for pants, let me assure you.

Tiny Greathall proceeds. We tiled, but it has been too cold for the mortar to set, so we installed the door, closed off the front, and put in a space heater. Probably fully cured tomorrow and we can grout it. At that point, molding and paint touch-up are the major pieces before we install the bar itself and hang all the shelves where the whiskey goes.

I inherited the worst third of the collection, after she took the best third and he drank the middle third. Still a lot of nice stuff here. And two gallons of cider and a gallon of wine, all home grown, got killed yesterday. I’ll decant them into different bottles today or tomorrow, then backsweeten them to my tastes sometime this week.

Tonight, we will have a toast to the Battle of Hastings.

BACKSTORY: The physical bar comes from the Piper’s Man-cave. He’s extremely Irish, so he did it as an Irish Bar. I’m extremely English, but replacing an Irish Bar with an English Pub is simply rude on a lot of levels. However, I’m technically Norman, when you got back on the Ward side, which is why this is a Tiny Greathall. Cider, wine, and I’ll make mead at some point. (Probably honey brandy, because why the hell not.)

Today, we celebrate the day in 1066 when the Normans beat the hell out of the Angles, Saxons, and Celts, and took their land. It is also Indigenous Peoples Day, marking Columbus as a rapist and cultural murderer. We’re kinda caught crossways here, but celebrating the Irish side of things (via the Normans) means less celebration of the English (and everything they did to the Irish). And yes, I am aware of how squishy that gets. I probably know more history than most of you. And I have come to develop a deep and abiding loathing of English culture over the last couple of centuries. They really leaned into the racism in their colonial efforts, when with just a little unbending on their part they might still have an Empire.

A lot of people celebrate kicking the English out. Even the Scots would like to.

Today, I also mark that I live on land that might be Snoqualmie, Puyallup, or Duwamish. (All those records got destroyed along the way, and I haven’t been able to find solid answers.) Ravensdale, WA, out SE of Seattle in the Cascades, just past the first north-south ridge.

At least here, everyone is welcomed as a citizen, once we manage to get rid of a subsect of racist shits that are still mad that black people and Native Americans were granted citizenship. At least they are dying off, and the kids coming up to replace them are a lot more everything in all the good ways. We survive this coming election intact, and I have hope for our future.

Get your asses out and vote. We have a republic, if we can keep it. Otherwise, you are looking at a return to monarchy and empire, which only ever profits a very small group of people, and you aren’t one of them.

We must forge a better future, so get off your ass and help.

And have a lovely Monday.

shade and sweet water,

b

West of the Mountains, WA

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