Tag: politics

Tears, sweat, blood

To cite Arkada of Glass Reflections:  ladies, gentlemen, and others, I present to you the final installment of Act 2.5 of “Defiant.”  Yes, you read that right:  the writing component is complete.  Editing and ret-conning the four parts of this 18-month, 85.5k writing exercise into a proper novel will begin.

And therein lies your chance, you followers of this blog and those that have wandered in via my sole social media presence on Gab.ai:  if you so desire, you can d/l and read the entire story between now and Saturday, for free.  It’s very, very rough, but you’ll get what you pay for. Come Saturday, whenever I wake up, I’ll be pulling the entire ‘free webnovel’ down as I begin to turn it into a commercial novel.  As always, I’ll do the first-pass editing myself.  Second and copyediting – and a cover – are as yet an unknown; after the layabout wife and the Dog With the Golden Nose, it’s all ramen and Taco Bell salsa packets here.  My sole, possible, hard-deadline, is January 26th, when I might have another Creative Writing panel at Ohayocon.  If I do, I’d like to say, “since my last panel, I’ve published two books… what did you do?”  Keeps the snarkers from snarking.

Anyway, there’s just over thirty five hundred fricking words below the fold!  Open a bottle of wine or make a pot of coffee, the one right next to that bottle of bourbon, sit back, and, please, see what I’ve seen… and have fun!

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Noblesse Oblige

Made some revision to the end of my last post, when I was blindingly drunk.  I’m now, of course – it’s Saturday night – but at least I’m older not to write!

Local politics.  I’ve no stomach for it, but Nichole has to have this out with the Mayor.  Fret not:  like all of Defiant, I cannot keep myself from killing people.  This overlaps a tiny bit, to my last post, because I saw the wrong things.

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Peace is Our Profession

As Churchill noted, jaw-jaw is better than war-war.  But, there are some people that just need killin.’  Cannibals, for instance.  I know way back in Defiant Act I, wrote that how they were dressed and cut their heads, “it was hard to tell the men from women.”  So, I could be really edgy and call them tranny-cannies; that should trigger a few thousand hate-hits to my little blog.

Meh.  I’m just here to tell the stories they show me; as Nichole discovers, sitting across from Mayor Johnson, in his study, politics is work.

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“Oh my God! We’re Supposed to Start a War!”

Said Prince John to his brothers and Queen Eleanor, around 1185 in Chinon Castle.

I feel the same way.  From my last post, I knew I’d seen enough to move things forward; not all in one day:  my notes point toward about 11k words of story.  But, time to get going!

So why do I have Teresa kissing Nichole outside the Miller Library?  WTF does this have to do with the Cannibal Army storming the Lewis & Clark Bridge?  Where’s the killing?  Where’s the nerve gas?  SRSLY?

If nothing else, I’ve SEEN when the breathless messenger comes rushing into the room where N and the Mayor are having their very guarded conversation, announcing the loss of the bridge to the Enemy.  That’ll get things rolling!  N has some funny, but pointed, things to say about how/why Japan lost the Pacific War, starting with Guadalcanal, and how that impacts His Honor’s response.

Bleeding Jesus, but I need an Editor!

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Pirate Twins 13: The Spy Who Loves Me

This was, originally, two posts:  I really wanted to get up and ahead one in case an outbreak of RealLife (TM) prevented me from finishing this no later than Friday.

But, it just didn’t work.  It was awful.  So I moved a couple of things and smoothed the transition (but I bet y’all can still see where it is) and am posting it.  Your win, my loss.  Sorta.

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Pirate Twins 10

Was originally going to stop this whole thing at #10.  Momentum and the gathering thereof.  So, maybe #15.  This is a little shorter, as there’s not that much talking in it:  Logres and Europa get some together-time and use their mouths for something else.  If you’re below the age of twelve, this segment has icky-mushy stuff in it.  You’ve been warned.

It’s the weekend, so I think I’ll get another drink and go ahead and write #11.

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Xenophon’s brother

Just over another 10k words this weekend!  As I said to a friend of mine, I feel like a wrung-out dish rag.  But, once I’d the key – the sight – from late Friday, it was so easy!  Part of my last post was just that:  Chris and Cat closing the gap between them.  What I wrote since then was the 3+1 times they made love (slightly different than having sex), although I only covered #1 and #+1 in detail.  That, plus another one of Chris’ recall-dreams of his time at Neuroi Corporation, this time, talking with his kid sister, Maya, made for a fantastic weekend!

Anton is sleeping with Chris & Cat’s next door neighbor; that’s complicated!  And he’ll be giving them a tour of the northern ‘no-go’ zones around Camp Pendleton.  The civilians of San Diego think the Mexican Army killed about 100k coming south from the 19MM in the LA Basin.  Truth is hard, sometimes.

After what he sees, it finally occurs to Chris to reach out to experts beyond him:  even machines suffer from the “if I’m good at this, I’m good at everything!” mental illness.  The moment he does, he’s going to realize just what he’s overlooked, and how close he and his beloved are to an horrible, violent death.

This is SO COOL!

PS It was pointed out to me by someone in RealLife that my ‘below the folds’ are all banal (my word, not theirs), not ‘the good stuff!’  Well, duh!  I welcome everyone into the world I’m making, but this is work, and I want to be paid for it.  ‘Defiant’ was, and is, for free.  Intellectual property is worth at least, if not more, than physical property.  Example:  a water pump is worth money; learning how to make a water pump, one or two orders of magnitude more.   To continue the analogy, my snippets, in and of themselves, are slightly entertaining.  I hope, once complete and edited, y’all think that they plus the other 45k words are worth US$7.

Thank you so much for reading!

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