Category Archives: Personal

Progressive Fiction (not what you think)

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The Fabulous Publisher Babe™ follows a thread on reddit that talks about progressive fiction, except it’s not what immediately came to mind. The concept is for a series where the characters grow and age over time, rather than being trapped in a timeless state, book after book.

It struck her as completely wrong for a variety of reasons. Then she and I got to talking about it.

I don’t read a lot of science fiction these days (or much of anything). Partly, it’s a lack of things that entice me, looking at cover and blurbs. She, on the other hand, grabs dozens of samples from anything then reads the first bit to see if it is even worth pursuing enough to check out of a library, let alone buy.

One of the great things that Amazon did was destroy all the gatekeepers preventing writers from publishing their book and connecting with their fans. One of the worst things Amazon did was destroy all the gatekeepers preventing writers from publishing their books and connecting with their fans.

There is a lot of shit out there these days. Diamonds in the rough. But a lot of shit.

I’ve told the story about being in Powell’s books Beaverton for a book signing my wife was doing after OryCon, several years ago. They were all set up, and just waiting for a few hours for the event to start. I had money burning a hole in my pocket, and two deep rows of a big store, both sides, eight feet high. Thousands of shelf-feet of books.

I could not find a book I wanted to buy. Seriously.

She looked at me and said “Write it then.”

That became Auberon, which was originally supposed to be a trilogy. (Stop laughing.)

I hit several top 100 selling Science Fiction subcategories on Amazon last night, hoping I could emulate her idea of grabbing lots of samples and getting lucky. I won’t say I failed, because it is me trying a new way of looking at books.

I failed at finding anything to read. (3/400 is not a great hitting ratio, even outside of baseball.)

I grew up with David Drake and Doc Smith. Glen Cook, back when the Black Company trilogy was all there was (before it sucked). Old school science fiction adventure centered on real people thrust into real but extraordinary circumstances and forced to adapt. (Modern Chosen One fantasy stories do not work for me.)

Based on the blurbs I read last night, I might be one of the few folks selling well that do the sort of thing I do. Not counting dead people, which was about half of many of those top 100 categories (everyone has just discovered that Frank Herbert actually wrote a book once, since adapted into a movie recently), I went through 400 best selling on Amazon and got three samples to try my luck with.

None of them fill me with the sorts of excitement I remember as a kid or young adult. I know that there is good stuff out there, but my reading tastes meander differently than other folks.

Let’s start with that concept of progressive.

I found several series where the entire series is the same story told over and over again with different names. I mean, literally in one series it seemed like every book was about a (different) guy who found a working alien spaceship hidden in his grandfather’s barn, waiting for him to go save the universe. Oh, and he’s also a retired navy seal.

Some of you know who Marty Stu is. That was a metric shit ton of them in the titles I looked at.

And a whole shit-ton of (ALMOST ALWAYS MALE) characters who were extremely TSTL. (And mind you, this is ONLY THE BLURB I’m reading here.)

Another category read like 70s action fiction with the setting changed to SF. One story mentioned the main character as a middle-aged Vietnam vet. Uhm that would be 1990, give or take, not today.

Then there were all the bad-ass US Marine Force Recon Raider Navy Seal hero dude stories where he is is called upon to save the galaxy when aliens invade in the current day and somehow are vulnerable to 9mm bullets and a stiff chop to the throat. Or something. (Seriously? FTL Aliens are not going to invade earth and lose.)

I appreciate that people read for the escapism element, but all of these books were basically hammered down into an extremely narrow sub-sub-sub-genre with a 20# maul. And I’m not that reader.

Real people. Real problems. Real risk. Real solutions.

Can’t tell you how many times I couldn’t even suspend my disbelief to get through the blurb. Chosen One stories. Wish fulfillment fantasies. Fairy godmother aliens (or something). Super SEAL badass warrior human who can defeat every alien in the galaxy as they line up individually to be chopped with a sword or shot in the face.

I wrote Auberon because I couldn’t find something on the shelf at Powell’s that appealed to me. I appreciate today that Powell’s is all about paper, and a lot of SF never makes it that far, so I have a question/challenge for folks out there. Specifically, people who have read a lot of my books. You silly buggers, as it were.

Javier. Jessica. Valentinian. Daniel. Gareth. Phil. Pancho. Fairchild.

If I told you that I was looking for some fun series to wallow in, where the science can be fantastic and the hand-waving a little big, but we have real people doing adventure things, what series would you recommend? I tried Nutall once, but threw the sample away on about page 5. I’ve chucked a lot of stuff by recent Big Name Authors because the rampant sexism on the author’s part left me queasy.

I want big space opera adventure, where the good guys win and the bad guys gnaw on the scenery. Think about the old Lensman books for scale. Less White Savior Chosen One (seriously, Kim Kinnison is about as much as it gets, but those books also date to the 1930s, and Doc was rather liberal for his era. Just not ours.)

What series have you read where the characters age and grow? Jessica’s nine books cover sixteen years of her life, from mid-thirties into early fifties, with all the changes she goes through. Phil picks it up four years later. Heather’s series will be later.

One of these days, I’m gonna introduce you to Casey and Vo’s oldest daughter. (heh)

What would you recommend, having read my catalog and understanding that those are my kind of stories? David Drake. Doc Smith. Asimov, not so much because he and Clark never include any Setting and most of their females are helpless princesses. I also read a great deal of Chandler and Hammett for voice. Opinion. Snark.

Who should I be reading these days?

Curation

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I woke up one morning in a terrible rage. Like I hadn’t been in decades at that point. Fire and fury.

In the old days, it had been a defensive mechanism to keep people at bay. Keep them from getting too close and hurting me. And a lot did, at least until I learned to play with fire.

But that was the 80s, and we were different people then.

That morning though, the rage threatened to utterly engulf me. Tear me down permanently and control me for the rest of my life.

If I’d let it.

So I let it go. Let it pass and left it behind, as I set out to become happy. It was 2013, and I hadn’t known such a thing in nearly thirty years at that point. I can pinpoint the day, but I haven’t spoken with her in nearly as many decades, and there is no value in resurrecting old pains.

Instead, I decided that I wasn’t happy being angry, and didn’t want to be that guy.

So I became someone else.

Its been eight years now, and I still strive on a regular basis.

One of the most important things I’ve learned is to curate the list of people allowed to belong to my circles.

We all have circles of friends. Rings headed outward from closest buds to occasional hellos in the hallway.

I had let too many sour people into my life. Too many narcissists. To many gaslighters.

One day, I decided to curate better. My mother once told me the most powerful thing I’d ever known as an adult. “It’s okay to outgrow your friends.”

For many of them, I did. Didn’t understand then that most people stop becoming better people in their teens and just coast into death after that. Know it now.

They won’t ever change. And nothing can make them.

Most importantly, however, was the realization that it wasn’t my problem. These were not my monkeys. That was not my circus.

I didn’t have to tolerate it.

Frequently, it was a passive-aggressive form of abuse. People being dicks because usually you don’t snap back at your friends.

I’d gotten tired of it. But snapping back at many of these people was the thing they wanted most. They wanted the validation of knowing that they’d gotten to me. Provoked me.

Assumed power over me.

Ya know what? Fuck that. And fuck you.

So I began curating. Getting rid of folks that seem to be rageolohics. Gaslighters. Chronic and inveterate insulters.

Along the way, the folks with radically different ethical viewpoints went as well. We’re past politics. Politics is a discussion about what the tax lexy rate should be or how many fire fighters the county needs, not whether or not entire groups of people deserve legal protection.

Ethics.

Happy required that I jettison the riffraff. The punks. The scum. The folks who had never evolved one bit from their fourteenth birthday.

I could leave them behind.

You could do that in the old days by moving to another state and not telling anyone your address. Or phone number. Or leaving it unlisted. Did that. More than once.

These days, the entire world is (currently) bound up in a single set of networks that allow me to have conversations with friends in Costa Rica, Nigeria, Egypt, England, and Australia in a single day. And I have.

But therein lies the problem. Everyone is there.

I have to rely on other folks to help curate things. If you want to be my friend, I ask who your other friends are. And airlock those folks with no ethics. No human decency.

A few sneak through from time to time. Maybe they hide themselves until later, when the truth comes out after some terrible event where they forget which set of lies they’ve been telling people.

These days, my curation standard is often to block random strangers I’ve never met or spoken with, because the words that have come out of their mouth on someone’s wall where I can see them were so utterly atrocious.

The world is going to hell. Has been. We’re in the Fall of the American Empire. Rome fell. France fell. Britain fell. China fell.

Everyone falls. Our fall will be ugly and painful and last for the rest of my life and then some.

But I don’t have to be angry at the world. Because I don’t have to deal with bad people.

I’m willing to curate my friendships. Toxic people get airlocked. Don’t care if they are family or long-time pals.

Toxicity is bad, and I don’t have time for your bullshit, bubbles.

I refuse to give you power over me and my happiness.

I can always find better places to go, and better people to share my time.

What have you done lately to ensure your own happiness?

I hardly remember him…

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Long, shaggy dog story short, I had to do some interesting emotional processing over the weekend. A great deal of this story isn’t known to most people. Folks were there for parts of it, but not all, and I haven’t really talked about the whole that much.

Background: going back 35+ years, I have a tendency to reinvent myself around June 1 every year. Consciously. Select things I don’t like and chuck them. Hobbies I’m not prioritizing. People that maybe are bad for my mental health.

Cleaning house. Annually. Just easier to take stock every year.

As a result (and a lot of trauma when I was younger), I don’t really have great memories of certain eras. And I mark my life in compact, easy-to-define eras. High School until 1986. College until 1989. Grad School Plus in SoCal 90-95. Places I lived in California. Leaving Cali in 95. Leaving KS for good in 97. Changing jobs and lives in Seattle. Buying the house in 2001. (1990-2001, I moved 17 times. Nuff said?)

So I am not kidding when I say that something was “so many me’s ago I barely remember him.” I might have simply buried the memories and moved on. I do that. Not generally a confrontational kind of guy, if I find it easier to just walk away. (That’s another story and a few beers to get out of me.)

Some folks get off on that emotional rush of confrontation.

If I get that angry, I’ll make people sorry. And I’ll hold grudges for decades. Folks can attest.

Neither here nor there.

Got tossed back in on myself last weekend and realized that I had things that needed to be processed. The guilty likely won’t read this, and I can’t make them any more enemies than they’ve already chosen to be.

We each of us get up in the morning and decide to be good. Or evil. Simple as that.

Background^2: Donna was diagnosed in July 2005 with Stage 4 Breast Cancer. The kind where you have six months to live, make your peace with God. That kind. Stubborn woman. She did surgery to stabilize the right femur that had been eaten. Then radiation. Didn’t cure it. Mostly stabilized things. Chemo after that, but in those days, it was a question of whether the chemo killed her first or the cancer. (They have since made enormous strides in research and treatment. She might have survived today. Nobody knows.)

She was a stubborn woman. I chose the half of a loaf that she would give me over none. We weren’t married, because she’s spent the better part of a decade telling me that she’d toss my ass out on the street if I even mentioned it. (And she would only move in with me in the first place because Washington state does not have common law marriage, mind you.)

One day, she looked at me. Sometime middle of 2007. (Told you, too stubborn. Six months wasn’t going to work for her.) Decided that maybe she wanted to get married after all, so she could be Mrs. Ward. Ya coulda knocked me over with a feather, but I eventually processed that, and we did the thing.

I had been largely ostracized by my side of the family. All three of her daughters and families accepted me, and I’ve talked to all of them recently, this many years later. The wedding was in June of 2008. Of everyone there, my best man was Perry. Her Maid of Honor was a woman she’d known since Jr. High. Everyone else were her extended family.

My side hardly had any commentary when they knew she was sick. Probably wise of them, because they didn’t like her. And I still made the better choice to tell them to get stuffed.

The doctors gave Donna six months in the summer of 2005. She died in July 2008.

On a Monday, it was functionally over. I called on my way home to say hi, like I did every day. Except that her oldest daughter answered instead and told me the news. They had given her enough morphine to kill the pain, and were counting the hours at that point.

I stayed up with her all night, but she was already gone mentally. Never really got that moment to say goodbye, but I held her all night. Passed out in the morning and her youngest took over the watch. She woke me and we confirmed that it was done. My wife was gone.

Donna made lists. First up was cremation. I have an urn in my bedroom that simple says “Lots” because that was always the answer to “How much do you love me?”

We held a wake on a Saturday a week and a half later, skipping the Saturday of the oldest granddaughter’s birthday. Each of the three girls got up and read their essay “Why Mom always loved me best” and it was good. Lots of tears. Lots of friends, both mine and hers. Even her oncologist came, which surprised me. But he was an amazing doctor.

Then she was gone.

I got up that Sunday morning and looked in the mirror, asking myself what the hell do I do with the rest of my life. At the time, I was 39. Widower. Three grown step-daughters, with the oldest only five months younger than me. (Did I mention Donna was twenty-one years older and still a total babe up to the end?)

This is where the processing starts. I’ve largely dealt with loss and recovery. But not anger.

I had told the entire family that I wasn’t going to a wedding in Kansas City that summer, because Donna was too sick to travel, and I didn’t want to be away from her. Not at the end.

The grumbles I got from those folks reminded me that they’d never any of them been nice to her. And that’s saying something. Only my mother was friendly. All she had asked was “Does she make you happy?” and left it at that.

But that Sunday, I started getting calls from folks that honest-to-fucking-God took the tone of “Well, you don’t have a reason not to come to the wedding now.” (One of them even said those words out loud to me.)

Not any of them called to say how sorry they were that I’d lost her. None of them came out for the wake. Or to check on me, all alone in that big house and wondering what the hell to do next.

I’d taken two days off work Tuesday and Wednesday, but then I was sitting around staring at walls. At least at work (a job where I’d been for all of four weeks), I could do something. Anything.

And I had an amazing boss. On Donna’s birthday that November, he instructed one of my peers, another department manager, to get me drunk at lunch on the company card and then make sure I made it back to the office to sober up. And she did. And I did.

When Fabulous Publisher Babe™ started meeting my family, my Mom was living out here in Seattle. I got her cataract surgeries, new hearing aids, and a place where she didn’t pay rent, so she could work to get herself out of a debt that rest of the family had browbeaten her into getting. I think at one point I had given her something like thirty thousand dollars, just because she would have been bankrupt and out on the street without me.

That was how my family treated her. My new wife finally understood a few years ago that we went beyond dysfunctional. Imagine me growing up around four narcissists. Bad ones. Vicious ones. Martyrs. The bad blood in my family is ugly and goes back four decades just with my siblings.

When Donna died, they didn’t any of them have anything useful to say. Instead, I got the massive guilt trip abuse to come to a wedding because I didn’t have any reason not to now.

I’ve talked to both of my sisters in 2021. One called because she was finalizing details of my mom’s estate after Terry died last November. The other called on my birthday.

That was an interesting event, because she was drunk. And continued drinking heavily for the hour we were on the phone. I doubt she even remembers it, because she was blackout when we were done. But I got to listen to an hour of her ugly vitriol and gossip about the rest of the family and how much they all hate me. With details I’d never heard before.

Not surprised. I chose to be happy. None of them even understand how.

Haven’t talked to my father in several years. But now I understand why. He married a woman who dumped me to date him instead. (Did I mention dysfunctional?) And that woman hates me for reasons I have never heard. Don’t really care at this point, because I have two other families that accept me. Like me. Choose to include me in their lives.

I have five step-daughters, because Donna had three, plus two had best friends that considered her their other mom, and just accept me. Talk to all of them regularly.

I have a second wife and her family is amazing. Everybody likes everybody else, which is alien to me. Completely insane. My Brother-in-Law called to sing me Happy Birthday. Nuff said?

So I had to process. If you read this, that means that it passed muster with the boss to be public. I’ve left out enough that nobody can really bitch, other than those people who are all martyrs to whatever cause they chose this week.

I chose to be happy. I get up every morning and no longer serve evil. (and bubba, there were years…)

I have her family, and her family. And they are great people. On Donna’s side, I have a step-grandson that I hope shows an interest in publishing one of these days, so we can train him up in the business. My books will remain in copyright for seventy years after my death. If I went tomorrow, he’s eighty when that happens, and I plan on four and a half more decades of productivity first. His great-grandkids.

On the other side, she had a grand-niece who is fourteen and a business shark. I want to hire her to learn advertising and train her up on our catalog.

It is sad, no longer really having my entire side of the family as folks that I could call on. Or invite over for a beer. At the same time, they made those choices.

That’s my current motto: “You made those choices. Now go make better ones.”

Every morning, you have that choice. Most people fall into a rut and that’s the end of their life.

Don’t end up like my family did, dysfunctional because the narcissists are martyrs who snipe and savage everyone else.

Let my family be enough of a lesson.

Kosnett

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As everyone remembers, I started playing the Star Fleet Battles (SFB) tabletop board game in the early 80s. Played a LOT. Had the early editions, then the collection when they redid everything. And a lot of SSD books and expansions. It was good. Played up until I came back from Los Angeles in 95. (broken and angry. Different story for a different day.) Haven’t really played since because none of my gamer buddies were into that.

Instead, I played Warhammer 40k for a while. (Small Eldar and Space Marines forces, then large Imperial Guard Heavy Armor. Then super orky cavalry army.) Got out of that and played Flames of War for a while in the mid oughts and later, before selling everything off again and calling it good.

Between 1990 and 2001, I moved a shit ton of times. Usually zip codes. Frequently time zones. My SFB stuff took up a heavy double milk crate. It is currently in my office, tucked under the shelf where the kitty watches the hillside for bunnies.

When I needed names for Republic of Aquitaine officers, Phil Kosnett was one that had been used in SFB. (Those folks tuckerized a buddy who went on to become a Foreign Service Officer and eventually Ambassador. Phil recently returned from being the US Ambassador to Kosovo, and I think (haven’t confirmed with him yet) that he is done and retiring.)

CS-405 was the ship I needed, to tell that story. At the time, I had no idea Kosnett existed as anything but a James T. Kirk stand in for SFB. But he was the guy who got things done in various historical scenarios in SFB, so obviously he made a good impression back then. And I used him.

I had completed writing Petron before I discovered he was a real person. Which just made it all the more awesome.

With that in mind, I had promised a follow-on series to Jessica for Phil. (Plus three others, if you were paying attention. And hopefully I’ll get to them eventually, as well.)

Encounter at Vilahana was written with Phil and Alison Kosnett directly in mind (though I didn’t know she existed at the time either and she occasionally wants to know why I don’t retcon everything to include her. She is in the opening of Vilahana. Phil actually sent me the idea for that opening commentary on the former Alison Smith.)

All this is on my mind because just now, I wrote the final bits of book five. Empire at Gloran.

So:

  1. Encounter at Vilahana
  2. Consensus at Aditi
  3. Hegemony at Dalou
  4. Princes at Ewin
  5. Empire at Gloran

As I’m writing the last epilogue this morning, it’s Phil and Heather, reviewing what they’ve done and looking forward to the ^final^ novel in the series, which will be Domain at Yaumgan.

I’ve written them in pairs up until now, but didn’t really have the terrible problem that needed solving for Six. These have not been your typical military space opera with grand, epic space battles filling whole chapters. Its been my chance to create a handful of random new cultures, somewhat isolated from everyone else, and then explore them.

Because Phil is an explorer. A diplomat. He’s also a hardass who will punch you in the mouth if you need it. (The First Centurion. I haven’t asked The Ambassador, but he’s like 6’3 tall, so I wouldn’t recommend needing to find out.)

If you pay attention, you will see a lot of Star Fleet Battles in the cultures of the Balhee Cluster. I appreciate that most of you have only read Vilahana, but trust me, if you look, you’ll see them. That was intentional on my part. Part of the homage to Star Fleet Captain Phil Kosnett and the Constitution-class Heavy Cruiser USS Kongo (NCC-1710. again, in there, because I can). Partly my way to say thanks to Phil for being such an amazing guy.

So I have just finished #5 a few minutes ago. And I have a few projects to complete before I go after #6, because writer-brain finally decided to tell me the plot and story arc. Thus, I have to go invent a whole bunch of new cultural notes and issues to address.

And it’s gonna be fun.

At some point, I also plan on Heather having a series, set another stretch in the future from Vilahana. Because I can. And you’re having almost as much fun as I am.

So get Aditi when it comes out in November. Dalou and Ewin are (currently) April and May of 2022. Gloran and Yaumgan are going to be in the fall.

I still don’t know if there will be a book seven. I’m leaning against it, if only because it really needs to be its own series spun outward, considering where things are headed right now.

But it will be fun. Epic. Interesting.

Hope you come along for the ride.

In media res

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In Media Res

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res)

A narrative work beginning in medias res (Classical Latin: [ɪn ˈmɛdɪ.aːs ˈreːs], lit. “into the middle of things”) opens in the midst of the plot (cf. ab ovo, ab initio).[1] Often, exposition is bypassed and filled in gradually, through dialogue, flashbacks or description of past events. For example, Hamlet begins after the death of Hamlet’s father. Characters make reference to King Hamlet’s death without the plot’s first establishment of said fact. Since the play is about Hamlet and the revenge more so than the motivation, Shakespeare uses in medias res to bypass superfluous exposition.

“…bypass superfluous exposition.”

I finally figured out why so much classical fantasy bores me to tears. They start by expositing. All over the scenery. Several chapters of it. Huge, globby paragraphs that seem to go on forever and ever and ever. Until I forget why I picked up the book in the first place.

As some of you have noted, I tend to start stories kind of in the middle. That’s an outcome of using Lester Dent and the 7-point-plot-structure. A Character, in a Setting, with a Problem.

Generally, you want your first five hundred words to be Setting, which is not description of what the character sees, but their emotional response thereof. Maybe one sentence of plot or foreshadowing, then you dive headlong into story.

This is different from Pulse Pounders, which frequently begin with a gunshot or a bomb exploding or something that starts a mad dash car chase immediately, with everyone only slowing down a few chapters later after the immediate crisis has passed.

I want to hook you. Pull you in. Make you see the world and start engaging in it. Many classical works (I pick on fantasy because it has been bad about this historically from Tolkien and others) think that you first need several chapters of the main character being perfectly ordinary in their perfectly dull home, doing utterly mundane things. At least until a chorus of singing dwarves breaks in. If you were still awake to hear the opening notes.

In media res assumes that you can just start telling the story, and then go back later and fill in “what happened before.” In many ways, this is telling instead of showing, but it also picks up the pace because the main character and their problem are in motion, and they have to talk to other people about what the hell is going on. Or to figure it out at all.

Think of a Corellian Blockade Runner coming into view, pursued a few moments later by an Imperial Star Destroyer. We’re in the action. We immediately know somebody is running and somebody is chasing. We have a promise of space opera action on a grand scale. Two droids argue about whose fault it is as they Laurel and Hardy their way around, exiting stage left pursued by a bear.

Does your opening chapter serve any useful purpose as far as your plot itself goes? Or is it an information dump of all the neat things you thought up in the process of doing your worldbuilding? Would all the information speed up your story if you used micro-setting to insert a clause here or a sentence there instead, as the hero runs?

Got to talking with Renaissance Babe™ today during the Wednesday Mastermind and had to explain to her that I had an entire novel’s worth of material that happens prior to the beginning of the story I was coming up with, just because the two main characters were not “born on page one” as the old saying goes. Stuff will start in the middle of a problem, caused by a whole slew of other problems and try/fail cycles that happened off-stage years ago, the outcomes of which are only now starting to come to roost.

You’ll be emotionally engaged in these two characters before you really understand just how messy things were that they even ended up meeting.

It changes the emotional signature of the entire story this way. In a bad case of (semi-)mistaken identity, she breaks him out of jail, thinking that he’s someone else. (Technically, she’s both right and wrong, which is even better.) She wants him because he owes her money, him having stolen her share earlier.

Except it wasn’t him. That comes up pretty quickly, but the how and the when make it fun to explore. Because we started in the middle, rather than having an entire novel where the main character turns out to be a real prick to everyone around him. He gets to be the villain in this novel because all of the chickens eventually come home to roost, in one of the weirdest ways I’ve thought of yet.

Action. That’s one of my signatures. Much less talking heads, and even then, talking to a point or a purpose, usually followed by moving.

I’m not writing a literary piece about how dysfunctional my family was. (And bubba, it was pretty nasty, for nobody ending up in prison.) I’m trying to entertain you. That means grabbing the reader by the lapels on page one and dragging them (as Dean instructs us) to the bottom of the lake and holding them there. You are in the moment, being pulled along as the story unfolds before you ever have a chance to stop and admire the wholesome banality of the shire.

If I did that, you might put the book down and walk away. Instead, you have to read just one more chapter, as my brother-in-law complains about when he tries to keep useful bedtimes.

Start in motion. Stay in motion. Bypass superfluous exposition for micro-setting detail that adds tastes and textures without ever slowing the action.

(She also accuses me of using food descriptions and fashion porn to great offensive use, but that’s grounding the reader, because a good biscuits and gravy with chicken fried steak means your stomach rumbles while you read, if I’ve done my job.)

Character, Setting, Problem. In media res, rather than spending chapters explaining your world and how some prince or magic sword was lost and how an oracle rose to prophesy the coming chosen one child. Screw that. Gimme the old fart wizard grabbing the kid by the arm as he walks out of the bar with a gruff “hey, we need to go save the world.” line to start things with a bang. (Seriously, I’d eat that shit like candy.)

Readers like a mystery, if you dangle it just right in front of them. Draw them in. Entice them.

Drag their silly asses to the bottom of the lake before they know what happened.

You do that by starting in the middle of something much bigger.

The Organic Approach

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My official job title with Knotted Road Press, Inc. is Marketing Troll. (Seriously. Says so in the incorporation papers. She’s the boss. I just work here.)

Part of that is to address marketing issues in addition to my usual stuff. That means trying things to see if they will help build sales and revenue, which has been kinda a pain in the ass as COVID has worked so hard to shut things down, ruin lives, and depress the hell out of people.

Last year, some folks saw a tremendous spike in revenue from their catalog, because folks were staying home and needed something to entertain themselves after they finished the BBEG at the end of Netflix. So they read.

But it was not a universal thing. Some authors saw explosion. Some saw nothing. A great many sputtered and guttered, losing whatever traction that they might have had previously.

I have theories, but without undertaking a massive double-blind statistical analysis designed to test, I cannot prove anything. And that level of work is not going to happen. I do, however, assume Amazon has done all the math. (If any of you have connections, I grok t-sql at a rather high level and would love to ask a few questions and watch them nod knowingly without ever divulging anything. Just to know.)

My sales went down a bit initially, then slowly recovered. Not great. Not bad. The first thing we had done back in the winter of 2020 (Feb-Mar) was to cut out all major expenses from the budget. At the time, that was audio books and translations into German. (We got lucky, in that the US Small Business Administration offered us a loan at ridiculous rates, so we were able to afford two more Science Officer novellas into German at around $8k US total, and take years paying it back. Worth it, as they paid off and continue to earn us money and fans.)

Going forward, one of the things was to keep expenses low, by approaching everything with a strict eye to cost/benefit. April 2020, my Amazon Advertising expense literally exploded, as Amazon started showing things to everyone. At the same time, nobody was buying (I think they all went into KU and stayed there) so my costs weren’t balanced. I ended up shutting down almost everything and dialing back everything else for about 4-5 months.

Kindle Unlimited (KU) lets folks read anything they want in the KU catalog for a fixed, monthly subscription price. Lovely for the reader, but not for someone trying to break in as a writer. It is a treadmill that forces more and more books out of you every month for a declining income because the monthly share-out money is not growing all that fast, in comparison to new books being cataloged in. Put it this way, in the way back, Traditional Publishing probably published less than 50,000 books per year. Amazon usually sees at least 1,000,000 new titles per year, and I suspect that has gone up over the last five years. At some point, it will be two million.

Outside of Amazon, none of the other ebook retailers (Kobo, Apple, Barnes&Noble, etc.) really offer any sort of useful advertising tools. As a result, you have to head over to third party options, such as Facebook ads or one of the daily newsletter blasts (Bookbub is the biggest currently, AFAIK).

This is where it gets interesting. If I asked ten people if any one of those tools had worked for them, I’d get twenty-seven answers. Some people say FB is the greatest ever. Others have seen absolutely no movement on the dial from expensive programs. Even folks that do extensive and invasive A/B testing, over and over again, aren’t seeing reliable results. Doesn’t have to be great, but needs to be reliable for that kind of money.

Part of that comes down to the fact that books are not widgets. Every book is a completely unique thing, and readers have variable tastes. Some might want cookies today. Some scones. Some decaf soy mochas. As a writer, it helps if you have a wide bakery of literary options when someone walks in the door, but that is not a guarantee of success.

This year, I slowly dialed my Amazon advertising back up to where it had been. I twiddle with it regularly, trying to fine tune my expenses by dialing down things with a bad return and dialing up things not getting seen. Right now, I’m spending about $400/month there, which is more than I like, and more than I used to, but sales have slowly returned and keep moving better.

I take the organic approach, which is the point of this blog. There are programs where you can participate in some giveaway where everyone who signs up agrees to get your newsletter, in return for the chance to win an ebook reader filled with books by every author participating. Second place is just the ebooks. Third place is a set of steak knives or something.

I’ve tried a few of those. And seen a massive unsubscribe rate every time I send folks out that first “Welcome” email following on. They don’t want to hear from random author, even though they agreed to.

So I don’t do those anymore. Not until I get a better deal and less headache.

This last summer, a particular website reached out to me blind and asked if I wanted to by an advertising spot on their main page. Science fiction centered. Probably my audience. But then I dug in and noted that I was being asked to spend hundreds of dollars for my tiny ad to be buried in with a ton of others, all the same size. No way to stand out. High cost. Low expected benefit.

After some back and forth, I realized that they were a little desperate for advertisers, thus an aggressive discounting, but their main page still had empty spots. Middlemen, who had a model that wasn’t working. Or no longer working is more likely. The world has changed as a result of the COVID lockdowns.

Didn’t do business with them, but a week later somebody else reached out. They were discounting $29 to $19, and also discounting their Author of the Day deal. I ended up doing it, spending I think $63 to get placement on their daily SF newsletter. Low cost, so something I was willing to experiment with.

The Science Officer (book one of Javier) was the deal. Sales of the book on Amazon doubled for about two weeks, which wasn’t much. But I also saw the series spike pretty solidly as well, which means money. The ad campaign paid for itself that way within one month.

Interestingly, I saw newsletter signups explode. As I said, I’ve taken the organic approach to building my list. Getting fans, rather than random pedestrians off the street.

I used to forward my blog to Facebook, but they kept breaking the link at their end, so I just cut it. Still feed places like Amazon, Goodreads, etc., so I get people signed up coming from there. But this particular daily deal caused a wonderful (and sustained) uptick in readers.

I send the Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter on the first of the month, with the publishing news coming on the 15th. Every time I send Redneck, I see a few unsubscribes, because folks aren’t really interested in me as a brand, but I have more net signups, so I have been growing slowly over the years.

In August, Anti-Stodgy went to 833 recipients. That was the Before. September went to 899. I just sent October to 1,041. I actually had to upgrade my mailerlite account finally, because I had moved into the second category, and have to pay for the account (about ten bucks a month, which is a nice deal, all things considered).

I know folks with twenty or fifty thousand subscribers. Some of them make stupid big money. Some aren’t. I make an above-average, middle-class living as a writer. Less than I did as a Database Architect in Seattle in the before time, but my goal is to keep building that to the point that I exceed that income, without any of the stress and crazy shit I had to put up with in those days.

The Organic Approach means that I’m taking my time. I can do that, because I got lucky in places, and planned in others. (“Assume Success, plan for Victory” instead of assuming failure and trying to mitigate it as well as you can.)

My newsletter folks will wash out some that aren’t that interested in my brand of entertainment, but that’s fine, because those folks who remain with me are the ones that want to buy my books. To keep me in a lifestyle to which I could become accustomed. Trust me, not putting on pants is its own special kind of victory.

I’m building fans. Some of them have even turned into friends, to the extent that I invite them to the house for dinner whenever they are in town. Sometimes, they come to Seattle specifically to visit. It is an amazing thing.

My process won’t work for everyone. Some folks preach a prosperity gospel of things you MUST do in order to succeed. I ignore most of them, because I know one of their secrets. Most of them are trying to make as much money as they can today, because they have a gimmick and it will fail soon and leave them with nothing.

I go back and look at the folks preaching some trick five or ten years ago, and they are all gone now. New folks with new theories have replaced them. For now. Every gimmick fails eventually. I have a different goal.

I want a career that is still going strong thirty years from now when I’m in my eighties. My plan is to have an entire stack of novels done, edited, covered, and ready to be published when I die, so my great^whatever heirs can keep making money off my estate for a long time. I’d like to live to see 2060. (Technically, 2070, if I can swing it.) If I died in 2060, my books would remain in copyright until 2135 CE. And I’ll have a LOT of books by then. Just started novel #73 yesterday. Writing 12-18 novels per year right now. Gonna have a party when I hit 100. Probably early 2023, so mark your calendars.

Organic. Solid, because you get the authentic me, rather than some character that a marketing survey had decided would be most advantageous this month. You get the highs and the lows. You get the Anti-Stodgy campaign and the Redneck Chef. You get the sticking it to the man and the politics of social and cultural revolution. Because that’s me.

I have (hopefully) built up a cadre of folks that find that sort of thing interesting and fun, and will continue to support my by buying books. I even had a special, inner crowd of folks that support me monthly on Patreon (https://patreon.com/blazeward) and get to see stuff long before it ever makes it into print. And I have a lot of short fiction that I have written especially for them, just so I have a new story or series to share with them every month.

Organic, because not forced. Slow, because not flash in the pan. Careful and deliberate, because I want folks coming back time and again to see what’s new.

How are you building your career?

Building your stories into chains…

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The topic of world-building and series building is a bit near and dear to my heart today, mostly for all the wrong reasons.

I build a lot of universes for my science fiction. I try to keep the independent, and in doing so play with the technological advances, culture, etc, so that each isn’t just a thinly-veiled copy of the previous one. Filing the serial numbers off, we call it.

Not every idea is going to turn into an six-novel series, though. I can only write so many words in any given year, and so I approach the topic of novels with care. In the meantime, I tend to write chained short fiction. This lets me jump in on a topic and just sort of work out a lot of details on the fly as I want to write story number one.

And I always assume that a new story is going to be part of something bigger, at least in the planning stage.

That means details, notes, lots of brain-dumping into a doc file. Character names, descriptions, etc. Everything that was important enough to include gets saved for later, just so I am consistent.

But I had a problem this month.

A couple of years ago, I started two new worlds, mostly to let me go into side topics to keep my Patreon folks entertained by letting them read things well before anyone else got a chance. One of those turned into Yasmin of the Desert.

The other was Ollie.

Running joke around here. I needed to create an administrative assistant who could answer certain emails without necessarily letting the person on the other end of the line know that they were talking to me. Sometimes, you want to present big enough that you have PEOPLE.

So I created the character of Oleg Chilikov. Oleg is derived from the Old Norse name Helgi, derived from heilagr meaning “holy, blessed”. Chilikov comes from Bulgarian/Turkish and means “steel.”

Seriously, Holy Sword is how it can be rendered into modern English, and too good to pass up.

I even introduced him as a character in the Jessica Keller Chronicles, but he only has bit parts and then vanishes again. (And I’d have to stop and look to remember which book. Goddess of War, I think, but don’t quote me. I’ve written a few since then.)

Then one day, I had a weird idea for a Xenoarchaeologist in a deep-space setting. And decided to let Ollie star in it. (He actually has an email at KRP, for those of you who know.)

To be extra mean, I named his ship Boundary Shock. Heh.

So I wrote the first few stories. All was well. Silly adventures in space, intended to be part of a long, serialized story, like I like to do.

Except that something went wrong. As the story unfolded, it started getting too serious for the initial tone I had set out in the first couple of stories. And it was getting worse as we progressed.

So I finished five of them and was about 8800 words into #6 when I literally put the whole thing away for better than two years. Didn’t help that a soft apocalypse hit in there, further throwing me off and I didn’t want to go into that dark place that Ollie and Rufus threatened to take me.

I can’t write dark when I’m happy. And I can’t write happy when I’m dark. Not believably, anyway.

So I put Ollie away.

Fast forward to late summer 2021.

There is a call for SF stories with an intended title of something along the lines of Have spaceship, will travel. A riff on the old television western, for certain fans.

At the same time, I have a Boundary Shock Quarterly deadline coming up in January for the theme of Veterans. What does a soldier do after the war?

Writer brain looks at that and says two-birds-one-stone. We’ll create a new universe and tell two stories. All well and good.

Except that story #1 turned out to be MUCH darker than I had anticipated. Strong story. Great characters. Great conflict, because I have a strong hero and an equally rugged villain. (Your hero and your story are only as good as the villain. Keep that in mind.)

So story #1 works great for Boundary Shock Quarterly. That will be Roland who you will meet in Issue 018 in the Spring of 2022. But I don’t think that the other editor wants me to go dark. They have said to keep military SF to a dead minimum, but I know writers. They’ll try to shave those corners anyway. Grimdark. Hard-ass. The works. I will stand out by being a little sillier.

So I looked around for what I could do in the meantime.

Writer-brain suggests that Ollie might work for the anthology call. He might. Not sure yet. Got folks looking at that story. If it works, great.

At the same time, I was done with projects for now, and looking for what to write next. So I reread all of the Ollie stuff to see. I had expected to have to redraft everything, and I might, except that I managed to reel myself in just before going utterly dark. Or rather, I left myself at a place where I could dive into dark, but then shift back out and explore the lighter tones.

Serious topics do not always have to be grimdark, people. Sometimes you need a drop-koala sidekick who gets drunk on Human chocolate. That’s Rufus. And a xenoarchaeologist who prefers cargo shorts, photographer vest, and only wears shirts or pants when it gets close to freezing. Ollie’s a little weird, but lots of fun.

So I hit the end of where I’d left #6 and writer-brain kicked me in the shins. At that point I started filling it in.

Forty-thousand words later, and I have finished the first long arc of story. But I have a problem. 1-5 are individual short stories. Self-contained. Split in time and space from each other, in order to let me bounce across the top of the longer story instead of everyone walking to Mordor.

Those five come in at about 29,000 words. Plus #6 which is now 51k at finished draft.

Normally, I write long novel arcs. Or self-contained short story arcs. Pizzafarmer, who you will meet at some point. Flight Officer Brannon. Yasmin is out and I will probably write Vol 3 as a full novel, instead of the shorter pieces that made up Vol 2.

I asked one of my First Readers to just blast through all 80k of rough material, not to correct anything (though he will) but to tell me if I have a novella and a novel, or a longer novel on my hands. I know where the story goes next. Writer-brain has been sitting on all that for two years without bothering to let me know.

If I had a Traditional Publishing career, I’d be in the process of functionally redrafting everything from scratch to turn the whole into a single manuscript, without the odd pauses at the front. Because I am Indie, I have the option to do it my way.

So do you.

Read that again.

You can put out anything that your readers/fans will buy. People, I’ve published a novel written entirely in poetic form. The Forestal. And people buy it. (It is really weird when someone in Japan buys a copy, which has happened more than once. Thank you, Japanese fans!)

I can put out the first five as short stories for $0.99 each if I wanted. I can gather them all up as a novella (probably $2.99 at that point. Maybe $3.99.) Or I can do a little cleanup and just have five shorter pieces at the front and a full novel at the back, all under one title and spine, and send it out for $5.99 like I normally do.

Personally, I’m hoping that the anthology takes #1, at which point I will drop #1 wide when I get the rights back, and probably just drop everything as a single book. Already planning what the ‘next’ novel is. And the one after that.

Seriously, when you have that much world-building done, it flows pretty well.

This is the freedom that comes with Indie. I don’t have to deal with an agent telling me that she can’t sell something until I completely rewrite it to a form that a traditional-style publisher knows what to do with. I am my own best agent that way.

You are your own best agent. Stop listening to folks telling you that you have to do something a particular way, unless they will be paying you.

Heinlein’s Rules #3.

If they will pay you, they can ask. That DOES NOT mean you have to do it, just that they are probably offering you money if you do. The editor gets to ask, because they have the checkbook. Some deadbeat in a coffeeshop better have a successful, CURRENT career as a writer before they are allowed to tell you something is wrong. (Don’t listen to someone who published their last TradPub book before 2010. The world they lived in is long gone and will never come back.)

So write the story as it demands to be written. You have fans of your writing who will buy it. (However many, even if it is just your Mom and a cousin. That’s money. Keep at it.)

I can be a little experimental because I have fans who expect me to color outside the lines occasionally. I’ll still bring the popcorn and space battles at other times, but I’m going to give them a fun, running start at something, so they will be entertained.

Build it the way you see fit. Call it good. Publish it.

Do not make the mistake of redrafting it fourteen times to get it right, because while it might be pretty at that point, you will have stripped out all the emotion. In here, you’ll get Ollie, Rufus, and Mani being a little silly, even as things get dark. Humor, dirty jokes, grand performances, the works.

Because I’ll bring it all back after we get to the old Imperial Capital at Baikonur. Then we’re off on a grand, merry chase, looking for signs of the ancient beings that first created the Ohran Web that connects worlds together.

And I’ll be having almost as much fun as Ollie and the gang.

Good and Evil

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So the first four Wednesdays of every month (I get a few off over a year), I have a mastermind conversation with some pro. Writing and Publishing Peers, Writing Student (who is a concert pianist, former nude model, social media small businesswoman, literature expert, and composer), or Classical Composer.

You learn a lot of things, talking to people beyond the gang at the coffee shop, unless you’ve found/built the right crowd.

Today was Writing Student (Renaissance Babe, honestly, but she doesn’t always like that title). She had just finished reading a rough draft of a new Book One (the cyberpunk stuff, written using the Heroine’s Journey as envisioned by Carriger), and had comments, questions, and things I could learn. I haven’t dug into her comments as yet, but they’ll be good, because she and I came back to it time and again over two hours today.

She’s read a number of my works now. Some of them haven’t been published yet. But things she needed to know at each stage as she learns the elements she needs to conquer Indie Publishing.

One of her comments today came when we were discussing themes of my work. She pointed out that I frequently return to the overarching theme of good and evil.

So I defaulted back to something Kris Rusch uses as a measure when she is reading or writing a story.

“Why this story?”

Why did you write it? Why should I read it? What is it about this that compels? Why did you pick this topic/story/idea over the others?

Why?

I’ve been evil. We don’t talk about those days much. A great many of the folks who might remember them are no longer around. A few of them died early of the sorts of roughness that such a lifestyle engenders. I got lucky and escaped.

I no longer serve evil. But there was a time…

Good and evil is a grand topic. I could write about romantic, comedic misunderstandings. Fish out of water stories. By-the-numbers mysteries.

But I write about characters. People. She has noted that I write “messy people in lived in worlds.”

They have fears. Dreams. Hobbies. Favorite foods. They were not, as the saying goes, “born on page one of a blank piece of paper.”

Frequently, you know you are in a Blaze Ward novel when someone is sticking it to the man. The man usually deserves it, because he is in service to evil. I’m about embark on a new world, where the main character is a wanted outlaw, because he was a high-ranking soldier in the (republican) Commonwealth Army, on the run after the monarchy has been Restored by a counter-revolution. He used to hunt aristocrats. Kill them because if you kill enough aristocrats, you can’t really have an aristocracy.

He was a warrior dedicated to founding and preserving an elected republic. With undoing the divine right of kings and forging a nation of laws rather than monarchical whim.

And that makes him an outlaw. Because the king’s side returned.

Who is good here? The man who wants laws, or the one who wants the divine right of kings to be above any law, anywhere?

For everyone who suggests that aristocracy it a better form of government, I suggest you go study the history of English king Charles I, executed in CE 1649. To quote Roland, my main character in describing someone drawn loosely from Charles himself: “You might never find a more mendacious, churlish, garish, and vulgar man if you spent a lifetime trying.” (I know a few other more recent politicians that might apply to, as well.)

Would you want someone above all laws deciding what your rights were? We live in a modern, democratic world, where the laws are above the leaders, not the other way around. Think about some of the politicians who have blown up their careers recently (Cuomo of New York State comes immediately to mind): Would you want to live in a place where nobody could touch a man like that? You think he’d make a great king?

That’s the problem with aristocracy having any political power anywhere. For every good one, you are likely to have hundreds of useless or aggressively vicious ones using their god-given power to run roughshod over anyone and everyone. You just have to look at human history for any example. How many kings do you know have “The Good” after their name, versus “The Terrible” or something?

But what is evil?

Roland sees it in the Divine Right of Kings. Haselrig (his foe), sees it in the chaos that allows any charismatic charlatan populist to gather together a mob and rule without restraint. (A republic, for example.)

All of us moderns want restraint. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness require that we have the personal freedom to find it. Now imagine you are tied by birth to the land upon which you were born. Subject to the whims of a lord who can do anything he wants, any time he wants. That wasn’t overthrown that long ago, either.

Sound like fun? Nobody wants to be born into the lowest rung of society, unless there are protections. Where do those protections come from?

From laws. Laws above, not below.

So I’m going to explore evil, but it is a relative concept. Roland sees it in a completely different manner from Haselrig. In their confrontations, I expect it to explore many of the same themes as Valjean and Javert did, because if you are going to steal from other writers, steal from the best.

Victor Hugo influenced RL Stevenson. I see Stevenson’s fingerprints in a television show that ran 1977-1982, starring Bill Bixby as an outlaw pursued to the ends of the earth.

Again, Valjean and Javert.

It is all a matter of perspective, when you get down to it.

But that perspective also rests on your ethics.

Who do you serve?

Homeowner skillz

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So after a week camping, and a day driving a Mini Cooper with a camper trailer behind it (mine looks just like the picture on the main page), I was exhausted. It had been a long week. Sub-standard for other reasons.

I wanted a bath.

I designed my house’s bathroom with an oversized tub on one side and a double shower on the other, because I take these things seriously. Got in, got it just right, was all set to have a nice soak.

Fortunately, I’d gone early last night. We’d eaten dinner at about 430 after the drive home, so I was in the tub around 530.

That proved beneficial.

Went to turn off the water and the post to the cartridge snapped.

For those of you without plumbing experience, you have a hot water pipe from the tank and a cold water line from outside. They come together at the cartridge, which has inputs from both sides and mixes them, based on where you set your controls, either twisting a single dial like I have, or turning the two lines until you get the right mix.

And I’ve never had a post snap off, but I immediately recognized it for what it was.

So I yell for help and open the drain. Fabulous Publisher Babe™ had been on the couch with a happy kitty on her lap, but comes running.

First things first, turn off the water, both lines in my case, because I have a main line for the house next to the heater tank, as well as a hot out line just above the tank itself.

Do you know where your water turnoff valve is? Every house has one. Don’t know about apartments, because I haven’t lived in on in 20 years, but they might, near the water heater.

Then, it becomes a case of dismantling the damned thing.

The handle has an allen-head screw you turn to get out.

Do you have an allen wrench set?

Once the handle is off, you can access the cartridge itself, but I wasn’t sure where the damage was, so I went ahead and we took off the faceplate from the wall, so we could see the pipes inside and make sure they were still dry.

The cartridge is generally a cylinder about an inch across, and several inches long. My faucets are all Moen, and I bought them local, so I was confident I could get a replacement on the fly.

Mind you, 6pm on a Thursday, when the hardware store probably closes at 7pm.

So I had to get it out, get dressed (in that order), and then drive into town to find the replacement.

Once you remove the handle, there are several pieces you remove by unscrewing a bolt holding the center of the shaft. At that point, you have (in my case) a brass post coming out of a plastic piece sitting in a copper pipe.

Cotter pin (or whatever you call a thing shaped like a horseshoe about an inch long) holds the unit in. Pliers for that.

Then the cartridge itself has to be pulled straight out of the wall and the pipe junction is is struck in.

We’ve had plumbers doing major things as we added water to the barn, so my lines have had grit and yuck all summer, which might be why the thing got dirty enough to stick and when I turned it, it snapped.

The replacement unit includes lubricant, and my bath after we got everything replaced amazed me with how easily the handle turned.

At the hardware store, we took the old cartridge with us. (ALWAYS take the thing with you when replacing or repairing, so you can compare them, or show it to the expert. ALWAYS!) In this case, this was a standard 1222, so easy enough to find. Expensive as hell, but shit happens and I wasn’t in the mood to order it online for delivery in a few days. Not with all my water shut off.

Got it home, got it reassembled, got myself a proper bath.

This is the video I didn’t need to watch, (How to Remove & Install the 1222 Cartridge) but I have replaced such things before. Or pulled cartridges out so I could clean them, tighten them, something.

Plumbing is engineering. A little art, a lot of science, a dash of black magic. Good plumbers are amazing people dabbling in forbidden arts.

At the same time, we have ModCons. Modern Conveniences that make like so much better. Otherwise, I might have had to call out a plumber late on a Thursday night, playing emergency rates, and be looking at a $500-$1000 bill as a result, on top of $55 for the part itself and my lost bath.

I mention these things because a lot of folks might not even know where to begin, if they have a shower or bath that simply will not shut off. Most likely, your cartridge has died, or something. They can’t move much, so chances are they break inside, like mine did.

Repairing/replacing is not an impossible task, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I wondered as we drove home how many people knew how to approach the task. Homeowners who are nerdy or rednecky enough, but this might not be the sort of thing parent teach their kids these days. I never learned it at home, but that was due to other reasons unrelated to the topic at hand.

Most of what I know in those realms I taught myself along the way, often referencing books because the internet as a repository of all human knowledge came much later. (I got my first email address in 1991, with a BBS from school, for example.) Libraries and used book stores were where I gained knowledge, and I still have whole reference shelves in my office dedicated to “how to” without looking up a youtube video. (I’m a writer. That’s what we do.)

So today’s discussion for you folks involves making sure you know what questions to ask. My Moen 1222 is not necessarily what you have at your house, but maybe you should catalog those things now, and take the time to watch a few videos, just so you understand what you are looking at when it comes time to do some weird-ass home repairs.

Like taking your bathtub plumbing apart while naked and soaking wet on a Thursday evening.

Won’t say anti-stodgy, because I have six faucets in my house (two kitchen, bathroom, two shower, one tub) and I have now opened or replaced five of them in the last five years.

You do know how to take your faucet head apart to get out dirt and gravel that has accumulated, right? You are aware that you might be seeing reduced flow when those get dirty?

When was the last time you cleaned our your faucet or shower heads, anyway?

Food for thought, and hopefully you are having a less exciting week than I have.

Cheers,

b

I rolled a 1

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I rolled a 1.

Easy enough to do. In Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition, the Gamemaster occasionally calls for a skill or attribute roll when you are doing something. In this case, I was making coffee, like I do several times a day.

Except that I hooked my pinkie on the cup as I went to set the milk down. And turned the mug over. And snapped it into a perfect twist, dumping coffee all over the counter and the floor, but somehow not down my front. (Anyone who has ever eaten with me is surprised, because I tend to wear my food.)

Utter, freaking mess. Several towels. Bunch of paper towels. Clean it all up with a sponge after getting the mess cleaned up.

I had just gotten home from several hours of Tai Chi, so I was a little tired and needed the coffee. Still needed it, but Fabulous Publisher Babe™ needed to go to Home Depot to pick up two more orders that had come in. (Lights and counter top.) So I asked her to hit a drive through to get me coffee.

Because I needed coffee. Like, badly.

Got it. An hour later, I am more tired that I was. Might take a nap.

Why is this important?

Because any gamer will tell you that a 2% chance of failure comes up a lot more than people expect. Rolling a 1 is on a twenty-sided dice (d20) so it represents a 5% chance. The other day, I had one of my players roll with Advantage, because is was something he was supposed to be good at.

That’s where you roll the dice twice (or two dice) and take the better result.

He rolled double 1’s. I made some bad shit happen that I hadn’t planned, because obviously it was his day to spill coffee all over the fucking place.

This is the age of pandemic. There is a vaccine available that appears to be extremely effective. We know this because there is a whole control group of idiots who refuse to get the vaccine (it is free pretty much anywhere in the US these days), and they are dying. In fact, this new variant, called Delta, is much nastier than last year’s version. Intensive Care Units (ICU) are overloaded to the point that emergency rooms have to turn away simple shit like broken arms, or leave folks in the hall for hours while dealing with fuck-ups who wouldn’t get a shot, and are now possibly dying from a preventable disease they refused to believe in.

It is possible to roll a 1. Breakthrough infections are possible. I could get delta. According to rumor, it would end up being a reasonable flu because I got fully vaccinated as soon as I could (the last person in a close group of eight friends, including one in the Army, one with open heart surgery last year, and a fireman, plus wives.)

I don’t want it. I don’t want to accidentally kill someone else who might have a compromised immune system. I have friends who can’t get the vaccine for medical reasons. (Real medical reasons, not your youtube bullshit.)

As the latest surge gets worse, I am going back to feral. Doctor wants me to see an allergist. And because I’m over fifty, get a colonoscopy.

Don’t wanna. That would involve going to the hospital, at a time when that’s going to be a place filled with idiots who refused to take care of themselves or anyone else. I will wait until fall or winter or maybe even spring.

After this surge of political stupidity is done. Assuming it is.

I do my tai chi with a full mask that I made out of drapery fabric. I have to hold it under running water for about 10-15 seconds before it actually gets wet. Solid. A bit to chew on when breathing heavy, but I don’t want your germs.

Ask any gamer. You can always roll a 1.