RIP, Maya Angelou

On May 28, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I love this poem:

Too sleepy for titles

On May 27, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories2 Comments

Fascinating thing (note: not really) happened this morning; I got up and went to work, feeling fine other than being a little later than I wanted to be. Got hit with a mild coughing fit while walking to my classroom and talking with another teacher and commiserated with him about how the coughing was just bad enough to be annoying but not enough of a deal that I’d bother seeing a doctor or missing work because of it. Both of us joked about how it would be better if it was.

Twenty minutes later, I let my co-teacher handle Success while I went to the men’s room. Where I, more or less completely without warning, got sick and threw up. Which: fun! So now I’m home, having spent most of the morning and early afternoon sleeping and occasionally reading something. I’m in that lovely place– I think I’ve discussed it here before– where I’m sick for approximately two minutes out of every hour but during that hour I feel like absolute hell.

So yeah. That’s my day so far. Managing Twitter is about as complicated as my life has gotten. I probably ought to think about going back to work tomorrow; then again, I was fine with going to work this morning and look at what happened. Stupid body.

Not a good sign

On May 26, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

About to go outside and mow, and I just tried to put a pair of shorts on. I was already wearing shorts.

In which I make a thing

On May 25, 2014May 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Writing3 Comments

When I got up this morning that planter box was a small pile of lumber in my garage and the 450 pounds of dirt inside of it were in my car in the driveway, so I figure I’ve accomplished all necessary Grown Up Shit for the weekend. Note the post hole digger in the background; the posts in the corners are six inches deep in the ground, so the box ain’t going nowhere nohow. (Also note that one two cubic foot bag of soil claims to weigh 40 pounds. This is bullshit; maybe if it’s completely bone dry, and this soil was very definitely not bone dry. I’m estimating 75 lbs. per bag based on being too lazy to just weigh the shit and feeling like the internet’s estimate of 12o lbs. is insanely high.)

Anyway, point is, soon there will be tomatoes growing in here. I like tomatoes. They’re tasty. And that, shit, I still have to mow, so I guess I’m not done with Grown Up Shit after all. God, I hate outside.

I made Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 free again yesterday and didn’t tell anybody. This was an experiment; I wanted to get some idea of how many sales/downloads I would get absent my own promotional efforts, if I just let Amazon and the whims of the Internet determine how many copies moved. There’s probably some interference happening from the day of the week, although I’m not sure whether Amazon would be busier on a Wednesday than a Saturday. (I am less likely to order from Amazon on the weekend because Sundays add an extra day for stuff to get to me; I don’t know if other people think like I do. The Internet seems to think that Wednesday is slower than Saturday.)

Anyway, point is: there were 84 downloads on the free day earlier this week, which I hyped heavily and repeatedly on every online venue I had available to me. Yesterday, with literally no promotion whatsoever, there were 21 downloads– all of which, presumably, were to people unknown to me, since unless someone from the blog or from Twitter or whatever just happened to click through and notice it, there’s no reason for anyone to have known about it.

This tells me that Amazon is not going to help me very much with promotion. This also tells me that I’m probably going to have to invest in some sort of paid advertising if I want sales/downloads to grow beyond the people I have immediate access to– because the first 100 or so copies downloaded (free or otherwise) appear to have gone almost entirely to people either from the blog or from my actual life, which means that my supply of additional humans who I know that might download my book is probably dwindling. The next time I do this I’ll keep it free for a couple of days and see what happens on day #2 of the promotion. Don’t hold your breath, though; I’m likely not going to make it free again until I make back what I paid for the cover, which will take a couple more sales if I don’t pay attention to the fact that I have to pay taxes and maybe another ten if I do.

I feel like there was one more thing I wanted to blog about today, so there may be yet another post later tonight. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of your Sunday.

Yes, this

On May 25, 2014May 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

Chuck Wendig appears to have disabled “official” reblogging, so I’ll do it unofficially with an excerpt and a link:

I understand that as a man your initial response to women talking about misogyny, sexism, rape culture and sexual violence is to wave your hands in the air like a drowning man and cry, “Not all men! Not all men!” as if to signal yourself as someone who is not an entitled, presumptive fuck-whistle, but please believe me that interjecting yourself in that way confirms that you are. Because forcing yourself into safe spaces and unwelcome conversations makes you exactly that.

Thing is, it is all men. We’ve all pulled some bullshit of some variety or another at some point in our lives, and we’re all enmeshed in the sickness of our society. No fucker is innocent, and I include myself in that. It’s all of us. And it needs to fucking stop.

New favorite Google search result

On May 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Writing3 Comments

…my blog shows up on the first page of results when you Google the phrase “what the hell is that thing in the middle of the Burger King sandwich.”

Not sure why you’d Google that. But if you did, you could end up here.

Also, The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 has acquired a sweet new five-star review. Go check it out, if you like. The book’s only $2.99!

Review: THE BONE FLOWER THRONE

On May 24, 2014May 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews6 Comments

#WeNeedDiverseBooks and a few other related hashtags have been trending on Twitter lately among the circle of people I follow; mostly writers. The impression that I’ve gotten is that the hashtag is primarily directed at literature for very young readers and pre-readers, but there’s no reason it has to be; all segments of literature benefit from diversity– diversity of authors, diversity of publishers, and diversity of subject material.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you T. L. Morganfield’s The Bone Flower Throne, the only book I have ever read set in tenth-century Mexico. And not for lack of trying– this book was a blind order based on a Big Idea piece at Scalzi’s blog, so it was ordered based on the setting, the cover, and a maybe 500-word introductory piece by the author.

Check this one out, folks. The Bone Flower Throne is on my shortlist for best books of the year right now; it’s got it all– compelling characters, a fantastic setting, interesting villains, errythang. I’m generally not a huge fan of historical fiction but when I like it I tend to like it a lot; Morganfield either did an immense amount of research into Toltec society or did a magnificent job faking it, which for my purposes is functionally the same thing. There are two more books coming in the series and they’ll be day-one orders when they show up.

My only complaint is not really a complaint, more of a warning: names in this book tend to be… tricky. To start, most of the characters have two or three of ’em: an Aztec name (such as Quetzalpetlatl or Topiltzin), a translated name (Little Reed or Smoking Mirror) and sometimes they have nicknames or ceremonial names or their names change at pivotal parts in the story. It means that keeping track of everybody can be more than a little bit challenging at times, especially since the Aztec names are all going to be long and complicated and hard to pronounce for a lot of people. Also, to keep you from needing Wikipedia: a tlaxcalli is a tortilla. 🙂

Five stars. Check it out.