So I generally write space opera and space adventure. (Plus some dieselpunk that also qualifies here, as you’ll see once you read that series.)

One of the interesting things about this sub-set of genres is the importance of the vessel transporting your crew of misfits wherever they are going. Star Trek TOS had this lovely, elegant heavy cruiser of a ship, which meant they were going in harm’s way and confident that they could make it out the other side safely.

Han Solo had his hunk of junk that had it where it counted.

Etc.

Been thinking about the topic because I have a couple of new series spinning up, and in each the ship itself is a character. This is a useful way to think about it, because in Private Detective fiction (usually the hard-boiled variety), the city is also a character. Same with the old-school urban fantasy, when it was more Jim Butcher and less shifter-romance, like today.

When you read Marlowe, Los Angeles is a character. Same of Spade and San Francisco. You can’t just pick them up and put the story anywhere else and have it work.

So where my wife (the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) ) builds new magic systems every time she starts a fantasy series, I spend my time designing starships.

It took a different form when I started the Jessica Keller Chronicles, because the original RAN Auberon was a Strike Carrier. I’ve mentioned before how I played Star Fleet Battles when I was a kid (up until my mid-20s when I lived in Los Angeles). And my homage to that universe was basically taking a number of those designs and filing off enough serial numbers to include them. I even had the SSD books open when designing new classes, and wrote down all the relevant weapon stats and firing arcs when I did, so that I could keep things consistent.

But Jessica was EPIC space opera. Original CVS got replaced by a design roughly equivalent to a Fed SCS from Commander’s SSD Book #6, or maybe a B-10V variant (I can’t remember where I saw that one and not worth digging through all my old books to find it right now.) From there, up to the Heavy Dreadnought design, which is basically just using X-Tech and Type-4 Phasers on a warship.

But now I’m writing much smaller scale stuff. The Pizzafarmer stories take place on a smaller ship (Pizzafarmer), a fast freighter that wraps like a wishbone around a single cargo pod and is designed for a crew of 2-3. Got three of those stories done so far and an cut-down version of #1 will appear in a month or so in the new Blaze Ward Presents. “Bad Habits: A Nuns With Guns Anthology” I have two more that follow Wilson’s story, and space to go a little nuts with the whole wild-west element of things.

I’m in the middle of a new epic series of novels and decided I needed to rough out a floorplan for that ship (Ark Royal for other reasons). As I hacked several thoughts together, starting with riffs on the original Constitution class, writer-brain decided that what I really needed looked an awful lot like a D-7, with the bridge shifted around a little bit, but that same gooseneck design, with the Crew Section being the aft hull, where they could shield folks against warp-spawn while leaving the woman who is the Engine forward and exposed. I went an bought a table-top D-7 that’s about 9cm long by 6cm wide. It’s sitting on my left flying around the counter as I type.

The other new new series I just started involves the rough equivalent of finding a djinn in a lamp and asking for a wish. The main character is marooned on a planet and trying to survive when she comes across an ancient computer system roughly god-like in age and tech capability. The computer is at tech level 9, while Brannon comes from a culture midway through 6. The problem there is that the planet itself was abandoned thousands of years ago and marked “Previously Inhabited” (the name of the first story).

The machine will build her a ship to escape, on the understanding that Brannon and her sidekick never tell anyone else the truth.

Brannon’s culture would come back here and bomb the shit out of such a demonic thing as an Aware computer system, but this one is already several cultures old (20,000 years+), and willing to wait for the wheel to turn some more, retaining ancient human knowledge for whoever comes along.

So the machine will design and build a small-ish ship for Brannon and Hawny to escape in as part of story #2. And she’ll need to down-tech it to a point where it doesn’t upset the galaxy’s power balance overnight. And doesn’t summon killing fleets to her home.

So I sat down last night with all my old SSD books and went through them, making notes of every type of box that could be marked off in combat. Cruisers, scouts, tugs, pirates, freighters. The works. Then I meandered through some really old (and silly) ship blueprints. Finally, I have the officially licensed Klingon D-7 Battlecruiser deck plans, and went through all of those.

The thing about most RPG maps is that that the kitchen (galley) for a huge starship is usually smaller than the kitchen in my house. (Usually just a replicator unit stuck in a pantry or something.) And there is NEVER anything like laundry facilities. But EVERY ship has a desperately-oversized med bay. One of them I looked at last night had four beds in the medbay, for a crew of eight people.

Never sure what the shipwright was working from when he did that, but I always start with bathrooms and laundry when laying out floor plans. (As a point of reference, when I designed my house, I worked outward from having a double-shower AND an oversized bathtub in the same room. I cut the two bedrooms smaller to fit the decadence I needed.)

Because the ship should be a character. The Millennium Falcon is fast and breaks down a lot. The Tardis can go anywhere and sticks out a little. Space 1999 has the Eagles. Jessica has her various steeds. Pizzafarmer has his courier.

Does anybody know a good place to lay hands on “real” blueprints for submarines? Both Boomers and Hunters? Those are the best bet for what a starship would really look like, when you get down to it.

I’m not sure yet what Brannon’s new ship will be like, but I get to think about how the technology will impact on her storytelling. If she just returns home, will the authorities confiscate it? She’s in their military and was escaping from a battle in a badly mangled gunship when she crashed on this planet in the first place.

I have some ideas for her that will make her not wish to go home immediately, but that makes her something of a deserter as well. So now she has to make some hard choices. And the bosses will have to also decide what they want to do about this woman.

The ship will be the third main character, after Brannon and Hawny. Similarly after Wilson and Sparrowhawk in those stories.

What can and can’t you do, as a result of the ship you put your heroes in? How does that impact on the stories? USS Enterprise NCC-1701 could take on all sorts of monsters and enemy vessels, while either Battlestar Galactica was a Space Control Ship. And an Imperial Star Destroyer (or a Super like Executor) didn’t back down from any task, but chasing a YT-1300 through an asteroid field was a bad choice.

How much time do you spend on making your starships characters? How much better/richer/deeper/funner would your stories be?

What are the limits to your imagination?

Backstory: A friend reached out because he has a cousin who is a writer and who got offered a contract by a publisher and could I take a look at it? Sure.

I’ve been making a full-time living as a writer for several years now. Plus, I have a background in legal research, going way back. And have worked in the field in a variety of ways. Am not a lawyer, but I could lay hands on a few that owe me favors without much work if I really felt the need.

Didn’t need them here.

It was a shitshow of a contract. And had very obviously never been put in front of a competent lawyer, because of the amazing number of typos I found with just a basic read. Some of said typos even rendered the contract not only probably unenforceable, but accidentally gave the author rights the publisher intended to assign themselves. (Really bad typos, but I won’t put them out there, in case those idiots here about this and fix it.)

The payment schedule looked good on first blush, but when read closer, they copy/pasted eight lines without changing the wording, so they ended up having to pay at the much higherfourth  rate than they should start out at, because they can’t read.

But the best part was the rights grab. I read for those. These rat bastards broke it into several pieces and hid them pretty well, but as soon as I saw the first one, I started looking for the other parts. I’m a rat bastard that way.

First, the author was supposedly assigning copyright “in perpetuity.” Do I have anyone in the house that knows ANYTHING about copyright law?

Second, she assigns to them license to use the Author’s name, image, likeness, and biographical material for advertising, promotion, and other exploitation of the Work and the other rights granted under this Agreement [emph mine]

[note missing period at the end of the previous sentence also. No lawyer has read this document.]

Third, she assigns them “the sole right to develop sequels or prequels, new or additional titles in a series, or related works using any and all such elements, and [they] shall be free to commission or contract with any other person(s) for the preparation of such sequels, series, or related works.”

Read that again. They can hire someone else to write more books in her series without her permission.Or paying her. And still slap her name on the front because she licensed them all her personal information in the process.

———————

Right about now, a couple of you are screaming “They would never do that!” at the top of your shrill little lungs and probably stamping your widdle feet angrily because YOUR editor loves you.

Riddle me this, Batman: If they would never do it, why did they decide to include it in a contract they created? This wasn’t something they just downloaded off the internet, except that in this case, it looks like that was exactly what they did, because nobody involved over there understands one damned thing about how contracts work.

No, they assembled this contract paragraph by paragraph. (I can still see most of the welds.) I’m sure they promise you they would never do that, but why should they need that right?

On the payment side, the reversions clauses were pretty good. Good enough that I’d say okay if not for the rights grab side. Author can revoke if the company goes into bankruptcy or if monthly sales fall below a pretty high threshold for a first book by an unknown author.

Standard language in place for an audit at the author’s expense, once per year, except that I’m willing to bet good money that the first hint of an audit request would trigger the contract termination clauses by the publisher, just so they didn’t have to open their books to scrutiny by an accountant legally required to report fraud to the authorities of the scale I’m pretty sure they’ll engage in at some point when the money sags. (Have known more than one author who threatened an audit and got everything back in days. Along with an NDA.)

Professionally offended, but I understand that a lot of old school writer organizations think that is how it is done. And how it should be done. Newbies are thrown to the wolves, because being a “published author” is the be-all, end-all dream of so many people. Reminds me of kids getting off the bus in West Hollywood with a suitcase and a dream, at the moment when the pimp walks up.

I’d publish her under better conditions and a cleaner contract, and I have never met the woman, nor read her book.

Can some of you people at least read the contracts these shitty, junior varsity houses offer you before you sign them? There are a lot of them out there, so it’s not like you couldn’t find a better deal if you walked, but too many kids will accept a shit deal, get utterly screwed, and then give up on their dreams, never to write another book again.

You can help prevent this. In writing, there is a whisper network of “bad agents/bad publishers” but nobody wants to talk about it out loud. If you take some of the old farts aside and buy them a beer or wine, they’ll tell you things, but nobody will own it in the light of day.

Whisper network.

You know who these people that put out that contract really remind me of at the end of the day?

Harvey Weinstein.

What have you done to make the publishing world a better place?

at 8 am every morning, I have a little doohickey on my phone that chirps to tell me if there is a birthday today or tomorrow. That’s my alert to get my ass to writing if I got up at the usual time, but today I slept in a little. First Monday back to normal in a bit, as Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is well enough to go back to her house and kidnap a happy kitty.

It just chirped. Looked down to see who’s day it was, because the coffee has not kicked in yet.

Perry Clark. 4/13

Very few of you will have known the man, but he was one of my best friends in the world 15 years ago. Even after he had moved to Atlanta pursuing a job and a woman. At one point, I bought him an airplane ticket to fly back to Seattle for a week and handed him the keys to my truck. Saw him twice, but he and I talked regularly and he was catching up with all the friends he hadn’t seen or emailed in a couple of years.  But that’s another story.

I don’t talk much about 2008. In roughly March, Sean disappeared off the face of the earth. Just gone. Emails returned “box full.” Phone calls went unanswered. As far as I know, he either died, cut everyone off, or went into witness relocation. Gone.

That hurt, but it wasn’t as bad as what was coming. In July, my first wife Donna died of breast cancer. That’s also a story for another day.

Late February of 2009, just under a year after my horrible year started, I got a phone call.

Had left Perry a couple of voice mails, but he’d not returned them. With him, it could have been anything, because he had a weird life from time to time.

But the phone rang. Had it programmed on my phone, so saw his name pop up.

“Where the hell have you been this time?” I asked.

Long pause.

“Is this Blaze?”

Oh, shit. (sorry, long break for a good cry)

It was his sister on the phone, but I already knew, just from the tone of her voice.

He had been at Church on a Wednesday afternoon, cooking for the congregation down in Atlanta. The man had had many jobs, just cooking was the thing he loved more than all of them.

So he’d been there in the kitchen, generating love for everyone and talking to the pastor when he’d told her that he wasn’t feeling well, so she had him sit down.

His lips turned blue all of a sudden and he died right there in her arms before anyone could do anything.

Phones didn’t have lockscreens in those days, but they hadn’t been able to find his charger by the time they got over the emergency. It was dead and it took his sister going through his apartment to find the cord so she could power it up and call me (among several others.)

To this day, I keep his last picture on the refrigerator, where I can look up as I type this and smile at him smiling back at me.

It’s been eleven years, and I miss him, because today would have been his 58th birthday.

So I have started putting up short fiction at the Store on my website. Most of it it $0.99, which makes me a few more pennies than selling them elsewhere.

However, I’ve gotten a few requests for some of the longer stuff that’s in the can right now without publication dates. I wrote 20 novels in 2019. Not all of them are out. Or even on a schedule. What they represent is a bunch of new series/universes that are not connected with anything else. Or weird stuff, like some sword and sorcery fantasy that is the first novel of a trilogy to follow Rebels. Or an Urban Fantasy Book 1 that kind of snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking. (I’ll blame Caroline for reading the original short story and asking when I was writing the novel.)

Since these don’t have dates, and might not come out until 2021 at the earliest, I want to run an experiment. I’m going to put them up in the store, but for only $2.99, with the hope that fans who do buy them as Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs) will help make them better. Nobody has read most of these except me. And maybe Dorn, because he travels so much.

My hope is that folks will buy them at the cheaper price (most of these would be $4.99 or higher when I finally finish off the series or the arc) and send me emails with corrections, questions, or typos. These books are not necessarily rough, because I’ve gone through them several times, but neither the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) or the Canadian Copyeditor Babe(tm) have worked their magic on them yet.

If folks like this, I’ll make a little money on the side, at a time when book sales are a little weird (everyone is bingeing Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+ right now instead of reading), and let folks have early access to some of the novels in the can.

• Air Pirates of Cyrenaica (1937 Dieselpunk/Pulp SF): 2
• Taft Station (Fall of Space Rome Space Opera): 1
• Science Officer Season Two: 2
• Scour (Post-Apoc with a steampunk flavor): 1
• The Hunter Bureau (Aliens have landed and the cops have to handle crime): 2
• The Maat Project (Seventies Thriller but not SF): 1
• Shrike the Orque (High Fantasy): 1
• Labyrinth (Classical Urban Fantasy without romance or shifters): 1

So you can see I’ve got over 10 things here (10 and a novella, anyway), not counting Handsome Rob Book 4 or the four Lazarus novels I have done to date.

Thoughts from the peanut gallery? Flight of Cerberus (first Air Pirates of Cyrenaica is up now as a test and to see what my fans think. Have folks done or seen something like this before?

Name: Unknown

Whoever you are: thanks.

So I got a note on Amazon a couple days ago of “errors” in Flight of the Blackbird. 14 of them (I think).

Well, shit.

Went and looked them up. Some awesome person who has the right kind of brain had nailed 14 typos or related mistakes in the manuscript. Every single one of the suggestions they pointed out were square on the head. Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) went through the manuscript and fixed them and uploaded a new version Thursday.

If you have a copy, now is a good time to trigger a fresh download. 14 fewer errors on my part.

I know some writers who get personally offended when someone points out a mistake they’ve allowed to get into print, usually after two editors and half a dozen passed. Shit happens.

But we live in the modern age. Someone was able to flag them into the Zon, who let us know. We were able to fix them. If you have an old ebook, you can get get a better version. If you have old print, you’ve got a collector’s item now.

🙂

So whoever you are: Thank you for making my book better.

Kinda totally awesome.

I’m in a storybundle and it will be over in a week.

New series. New universe. Heap-tons of aliens of all sorts.

Book one of an awesome new series, but this is an exclusive, so you can get started now and really enjoy yourself. I’ve gotten lots of comments from folks on how much they enjoyed this book and are looking forward to the whole run.

But I’m here with way more fun stuff.

Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) is also in here, and takes your old fashioned Urban Fantasy sensibilities and rockets them into space.

She’s got you covered, too, with a new starter set to take you through the whole range of the Huli Transport universe. Read more here: https://www.leahcutter.com/2020/02/visions-of-the-future-bogo/

From Leah: “Soooooo – You’ve bought a copy of the Visions of the Future bundle, right? It contains some of my favoritest authors, like Ron Collins and Robert Jeschonek and oh yeah, that guy I’m married to, and others! All good!

BUT – if you need yet another incentive to purchase the bundle, I got you covered.

From Feb 17, through Feb 23 2020, if you send me an email with the proof of purchase of the entire bundle, I’ll send you a link to the Huli Transport Starter Set!

What exactly is the Huli Transport Starter Set? It contains “Fox and Hound”, the short story that inspired all of Huli Transport. It also includes “Dancing with Tong Yi,” the first short story of the novel “The Immortals’ War” – which is chockfull of Huli Transport stories. There’s “Transitions” which is Ao Dan’s origin story. Plus “Teapots and Tempests,” a never before published Huli story. And last but not least, the first chapter from the novel “The Strawberry Girl,” which is a Huli Intergalactic story that takes place a couple of centuries after “Origins: Huli Intergalactic.”

This starter set is not available at any retailer. It is only available via this BOGO.”

So get read and then go have some fun with the rest of her Huli Transport Universe, as she’s doing a special to get you set up for those Chinese gods out causing mischief in a wider, alien universe. Then you can go places like The Strawberry Girl.

Time for your science fiction to get wider, crazier, and way more exciting.

Go expand your mind. You’ll be glad you did.

Most of you have been paying attention enough to know that I occasionally get invited to participate in story bundle collections. Starting today, we’re live with a new one called Visions of the Future.

A little fun background: A couple of previous times, I got contacted at the last minute because someone had dropped out unexpectedly. Like three weeks before the bundle went live. You can’t delay a new bundle without serious repercussions.

Folks know I write fast and generally SF. The first time, I got contacted with “Hey. You got anything on this theme?” and the response was “No, but I could write you something in 2 weeks. That work?” That became Fairchild. A similar “oh shit” moment became Can’t Shoot Straight Gang Returns only that time with a one week turnaround.

So this time, there was far less emergency when I got the call with the hopeful “Ya got any SF that’s never been in a story bundle?”

I had a shit-eating grin on my face as I sent back a list of SIX never-before-published Book Ones and asked “Which one would you like?”

Truly an awesome feeling. Especially as none of them were yet published.

So I got invited to include the one I had marked as “Alien First Contact Space Opera.” (The list also included: Earth-based SF detective after the aliens land, Post-Apocalyptic Dystopia with a steampunk feel, Fall of Rome-style Spy Thriller on a distant space station, Alternate History Dieselpunk set in Egypt in 1937, and another Handsome Rob Gig spy thriller.)

Yeah, I been busy, because I have Books Two done on a couple of those above: Lazarus and Air Pirates of Cyrenaica.

He picked Lazarus for Visions of the Future. If you’ve been keeping score at home, you know I’m 2/3 done with book three right now. It is an exclusive on the bundle, meaning not available anywhere else, so you should get it there, along with a bunch of other cool stuff I’ll talk about in a future blog.

Lazarus.

So I’m soaking in the tub one night. I do that in the evening frequently as a way to wash off the day. Lets the brain shift into a relaxed mode.

Brain ignites. No other way to describe it. It does that occasionally, when writer-brain has been chewing on something long enough and chucks it over the fence to front-brain.

I get out, get dry, get dressed, and walk to the computer. Open a new doc file (mind you, I’m in the middle of a writing Phoenix at the time but this WILL NOT WAIT.)

New doc file. Start typing.

Not much has changed since I banged that first chapter out. He has no name, because I didn’t even stop to world-build until later. Just typed. Figured out the names, the tech, and the politics after I put chapter one away and went back to Phoenix. At that moment I had to get out all the words as fast as I could.

Towards the end of what would become Chapter One, the details start making sense. He’s Robinson Crusoe, sort of. Lost and shipwrecked. Or maybe Yasuke, except not black.

Fish out of water, and all that implies, minus the romantic comedy elements.

This was the novel where I sat down and started exploring all the different ways an alien could move. Walk, slither, glide, leap, roll. Seriously, I had fun, trying to come up with as many different alien species as I could. Got more that have not made it into the series yet, but will, hopefully.

Aliens should be more than human actors with a nasal prosthetic. I realize that on television, the budgets preclude craziness, unless you’re 100% anime, but there are no limits to my words.

And I would love to see this story animated at some point.

And book three is close to done. There will be five. Escape, Return, Rebellion, Revolution, Alliance. Or something like that. They’ll come out after Star Tribes completes its run, I think.

This is your chance to read Book One: Escape now. It is going away in three weeks and won’t be published anywhere until probably the fall.

Get yours today.

Some of you have heard me talking about a new tool coming to do covers that is easy, fast, and relatively cheap. The folks at Bookbrush have now made the Cover Creator.

You should already be using Bookbrush to do your marketing and advertising images, because is it so easy and useful. However, you can do covers with it now as well. That’s what I’ve been up to since December.

Assassin is just one of my covers. Here’s another:

So how did I do it? That’s the subject of a new Technical Manual I wrote.

The Book Brush Cover Creator Primer

For $1, you can learn how to do these same sorts of covers yourself. Learn about your various brands and how to make your books look professional and not spend much (or any) money on them.

As a writer, you don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a cover any more. Get yourself a subscription to Book Brush. For $99/year, you’ll get Cover Creator as well.

Learn my secrets and theirs and make yourself great covers. And do it for way less money than you used to.

The Book Brush Cover Creator Primer

we’ve been way too social over the last week or so. It’s been wonderful, and I’m glad we did, but I needed to take a day off. Normally on Sunday morning we go down to Krain, WA (just north of Enumclaw) and have breakfast at the Krain Cafe. Damned good food and amazing people.

Today, we came home and changed back into pajamas and are having something of a goof off day. I just made myself a redneck mocha (areopress coffee and hot cocoa mix, with coconut milk). Just hit send on the latest BW newsletter. (the serious one as opposed to the redneck chef one). Writing a blog because I can. And want to.

Got to thinking about circles over the last few days. There are a lot of people I know (my wife the Fabulous Publisher Babe(tm) knows everyone). But I don’t encounter all that many people IRL. Don’t have a job anymore, except to write, so that and gaming group folks are about it, except when we do special events.

But there are a lot of lives I sort of follow on social media, and then it gets weird when I run into them in the flesh, as it were. I know way more about them in cyberspace than I do meatspace, so I have a moment of hesitation engaging.

Last night, at a friend’s birthday/Xmas party, I got hugs. I used to hug, but in the modern age, I’ll hug men and stay reserved around most women. They get it initiate.

I think they appreciate my not assuming a hug, but it got me to thinking last night about all my circles.

These are not Venn diagram circles, but the layers each of us has around themselves at how they interact with people. Closest friends and family who get the whole story. Folks who get the reader’s digest condensed. The elevator pitch edition. The none-of-your-damned-business people. The strangers.

I’m an introvert. An extremely gregarious one, but last night I didn’t feel like engaging in direct conversations, because of all the people at the party, I knew two that I would just talk to. A dozen more I have talked to and who know my name. Two dozen faces I more or less know, but might only see at this particular party. Maybe don’t even know their name (except I usually remember names) or they don’t know mine. Maybe only ever shared a dozen worlds in the last few years.

Internet friends, but not IRL friends you go have a beer with.

I have internet friends who rant and unleash their anger, but I have had to learn to just shut up and listen, and hope I can gain context from the words. Angry black men (with damned good reason, mind you) but if I ask what’s going on, I risk becoming a target. (Again, mind you. Been there, done that, got the scars from what I had thought was an innocent question. Ignorant certainly.)

It isn’t their job to educate me, but sometimes I get lost because I’m not part of their inner circles, same as they aren’t mine. Maybe never met in the flesh, because they live in North Carolina or Georgia, most of the country away from me in Seattle.

So I listen, and contemplate circles.

You ever do that?

Stop and try to figure out if you know someone on the interwebs well enough to ask a harder question than the weather, unsure if you’re about to be virtually bleeding as a result?

These folks don’t know me, except from what I’ve posted and the sides I’ve taken in the past, if they saw them. I can be an ally. Am I a friend?

Hard to know. Strangers come up to me at the party for a hug, and she commented that she felt like she knew me so well, because we interact on the social medias, but this was the first time we’d actually met in the flesh to say hi.

I’ll take her word for it that we kinda waved at each other last year at the same party, but I didn’t know who she was, except a face in that crowd. Got my hug. Had a brief conversation about her kids, because she had just bought a sweater for her oldest that was similar to the one I was wearing.

Small talk. The kind of thing you share with a relative stranger, rather than someone you tell dirty jokes to. Don’t know her well enough to make the sort of sarcastic jokes I might with the gamers who know I was raised by pirates and sailors. Partly, it’s the modern age, and I’m okay with that. I have other women I do make those jokes with, because they’re just as salty.

But it’s the holidays, and I only maybe see these people in the flesh at someone’s holiday party.

Kinda sad. Kinda strange. Kinda interesting, in a philosophical way. (And I’m a trained philosopher, so kids don’t try these stunts at home.) Not really sure where it takes us, other than the need to unplug and talk to those people in real life.

I frequently try to get people to meet for coffee or a beer. I’m happily married, so not even remotely a threat, but people are shy. Easier to talk with all the cyberverse between you, because on the internet, everybody is one state over.

How do y’all handle that sort of question with circles?