[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.]
More rain. First Pineapple Express finished by dropping something like 8 inches of rain in a week in places. Weekend was dry. Rain started again Sunday night with the second Pineapple Express.
Levy actually broke in Renton yesterday and folks reached out, but I’m WAY up in the mountains from Seattle. If you look on a map, find Kanaskat, WA, out southeast. That’s probably the closest town to me. And I’m up on a hilltop, up on the plateau. Snow is usually the only risk.
That and wind, because power lines are never buried, so when trees fall over in squishy soil, they take out power lines. Fortunately, the crews were hauling ass all fall taking out threatening branches, so until trees go, we should be good. And that damned bomb cyclone last year knocked a lot of shit over so we might have a couple of years.
Hoping.
Reminder that the Kickstarter link is finalized and ready to go for the Make 100.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blazeward/make-100-2026-collection
Five volumes: 60 stories SF. 20 Fantasy. 10 Thriller. 10 Superhero. $25. Hell of a deal.
Those of you lagging three weeks will watch it go live, as that’s the first week of January. Running three weeks. Tell all your friends because I’d like to make life-changing money from this one.
Pants are still overrated.
Finished Survey Corps 3 and working on the thriller. Plotting out next books, but writer brain really wants to dive back into Kincaide’s war and finish that epic trilogy finally. Target is 175k words, same as the first two, so a doorstop. And epic, because it will conclude things, though I haven’t worked out more than a couple of plot threads, plus the understanding that I have an immense crew of characters who need their various arcs concluded.
Also working on something that might dance the line between Magic Realism and Science Fiction, just because I had a weird idea the other day and want to explore it.
And I found a fun book in the book store yesterday. Time-Life did a series on aviation called The Epic Of Flight in 1980. Book store has them, and selling individual copies for $2. And they know to flag airplane books for me for Red Branch research, so I have gotten a few.
Yesterday, I found The Aeronauts and brain clicked. I had a story in Blaze Ward Presents #4 (Cloak and Dagger) about a pair of young women who ran away from life in the Post-Napoleonic Era (1820+) to have adventures as Aeronauts. Have a whole bunch of things planned that never got into the first story, but were set up for long-term.
Yesterday, I realized that they would work just fine as historic Action-Thriller, so now I need to look at upcoming themes for Thrill Ride Magazine. Because historic is just fine there. And all the tech toys are things that will be invented over the next 10-20 years anyway, so now we’re James Bond instead of The Skylark of Space.
Lots of science to confirm. Tech to research. Adventures to undertake as balloonists and renegades. Gonna be fun, because that one book covers a lot of the balloon tech I need.
So watch this space for more fun.
shade and sweet water,
b
West of the Mountains, WA
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