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On August 20, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography6 Comments

First day of school

On August 20, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Work3 Comments

Something has occurred to me. My brother, who has gotten the good looks in our family, has dressed as Axl Rose for Halloween on at least a couple of occasions, and has a phenomenal costume.

My physique is more appropriate for Homer Simpson.

Next Halloween, we’re both dressing as Axl, only I’m going to make him wear a sign around his neck with “1987” on it. I will dress identically and wear a sign around my neck reading “2014.”

It will be brilliant.

In other news, I’m about to go spend a week’s salary, literally, on new clothes.

Sigh.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On August 20, 2014August 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Forgot to do this last weekend, and I’ve had a swarm of new followers lately, so let’s do a Wednesday station identification. Check out The Benevolence Archives for your Kindle or smart device for just $2.99!

I’ve decided to start doing periodic– maybe once or twice per month– reminders on the main page of the blog of the various places I can be found on the Interwebs. I pick up 50-75 or so new followers between the blog and Twitter every week, so it’s probably a useful thing for new readers. Regular folks, if you see the STATION IDENTIFICATION tag, feel free to ignore it.

So here’s where to find Luther Siler on the interwebtron:

You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here. I am on Twitter pretty frequently as I use it for whining while I’m writing in the mornings. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
I’m starting to try and use Goodreads more often too. My author page is here; I am accepting any and all friend requests at the moment. My novel Skylights has recently had an ISBN assigned and a page created for it if you want to add it to a bookshelf.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.
And, because I can’t possibly link it enough, you can read my novella The Benevolence Archives for your Kindle or smart device for just $2.99 if you click on that thar linky-thing there.

Another early look at the SKYLIGHTS cover

On August 19, 2014August 19, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

As always, the caveat that this is preliminary as hell and is basically just a color test– my artist and I exchanged half-a-dozen emails last night about various aspects of this, including one thing I griped about (the sky’s too pink.) But I’m still too excited not to share it.

Basically at this point there are helmets and logo work to do (I approved a helmet design yesterday) and then refining the colors until gorgeousness happens. This is what Casey and Jamie’s final work looks like so I have no doubt that the final colors on this will be spectacular.

I’m going to restrain myself from posting any further updates until you get the final image. Hopefully in a couple of weeks; finalizing the colors will take a bit.

Another!

On August 19, 2014March 29, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

This is the second day in a row, and the third out of the last five, that I’ve gotten mail from these people. This one was addressed to both my real name and my pen name. Honestly, I wouldn’t have mentioned it this time around, but 1) they cunningly dodged my new “don’t even bother opening their mail” policy by sending me a postcard this time and 2) they include numbers that give some insight into just what a shitty deal their original “Ultimate Publishing Package” is.

I won’t be mentioning them again unless it’s really entertaining. But nonetheless:

Here we learn that they want to charge you $237 to print a hundred copies of a fifty-page book. The original cost, remember, was $1600, less a $601 “discount,” to $999. Of course, no one anywhere actually writes fifty-page books, and if I were to self-pub Skylights through them it would cost me an additional $746 on top of the not-actually-$999-it’s-really-$1118.40 cost that their “Ultimate Publishing Package” entails.

In other words, $1864.40– nearly two thousand damn dollars— for a hundred physical copies of a book that I’ll never be able to move and a bunch of other services that I can either a) do for myself because they’re free or b) when bought in bulk, which this company is certainly doing, are minimal in cost.

That is a lot of profit, kids.

Then again, they spend a lot on postage.

Okay, seriously, that’s enough now.

On August 19, 2014August 18, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

This is from the same fuckers who wanted a thousand dollars from me last week to do some shit that I could do for myself for free. This person appears to not be aware that they sent me the previous letter, and holy shit they’re not even trying. I hate this company a lot.

I will not turn the page over. I also will not even open the next letter.

In which I ignore the Pope Emeritus’ crappy grammar

On August 18, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

And here we go, right? Everybody has to be back tomorrow, and the kids return Wednesday, and Open House was tonight. This year’s Open House involved a mad dash between 3:00 and 4:30 for new clothes, as I don’t own a single pair of slacks and didn’t remember that Open House was tonight and not tomorrow night until just after midnight. I literally had the librarian look me over for tags before exposing myself to the general public.

Also, the new plan for questions about my job is definitely to lie, because I made the mistake of telling the cashier at the clothier’s that I was buying an outfit for Open House, and could not convince her that there were roles other than “parent” or “teacher” that might nonetheless compel one to attend “parent-teacher night.”

“So, which one are you? A parent or a teacher?” she asks.

“Neither,” I say. “I work in the office.”

“So what do you teach?”

That’s literally exactly how the conversation went. From now on I teach 8th grade Algebra and that’s it. Truth is inconvenient and annoying.

I really only had two conversations with parents tonight, as nobody actually knows me and there aren’t many people who go to parent-teacher night to talk to the new staff they don’t know. One spent fifteen minutes telling me how wonderful her kids were (which led to me spending ten minutes discussing the University of Chicago with her older, high-school-aged daughter, who apparently has them on her shortlist) and the second showed up with ten minutes left in the event, spent five of his ten bitching about how his wife had told him the wrong time for the event, repeatedly ignored my suggestion that maybe he take his sixth-grade son to where the sixth-grade teachers were, and then asked me what the hell he’d have to do to “get some information.”

“You could have asked me a question at any point in the last five minutes,” I said. “Or you could go meet the sixth grade teachers, as I’ve suggested several times now.”

“I need some information, though!” he says, still without actually asking anything.

At which point I literally told him I didn’t have any more time to talk to him and walked away.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which of these two fine individuals smelled of hard likker. I ain’t telling you.

Yeah… uh… never mind.

On August 18, 2014August 18, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, WritingLeave a comment

First things first– I’m trying to post this via email. Any wonkiness in the formatting is therefore because of that, and I’ll try and fix it later today.

I have decided, regretfully, that I don’t have time for Pitch Wars this year. Not to enter, mind you– the manuscript I was going to use is done, although having looked at it recently it does still need some work. The query letter wasn’t going to be a huge deal to write. This actually just really hit me last night as I was fiddling with the query: I don’t have time to win.

Leaving my job aside, I have no less than three books (yes, three– mwahahaha) on my plate right now. One needs to be beaten into releasable shape within a month. One is half-finished and currently languishing, and if I don’t find the time to get back to it with a quickness it’s going to die on the vine and that would be very, very bad. One is a Big Sekrit and I don’t wanna talk about it right now.

I don’t have the damn time to add a fourth. If I were to write a wonderful query letter (and mine was basically fully-formed in my head, needing only to be put onto pixels, which would have taken about an hour and which I absolutely have time to get done today) and it would win, that would mean I’d either have to put everything else aside to work on CLICK between now and the agent round, which is in… November?… or I’d have to find a way to work on four different damn book projects, plus care and feeding of the blog, plus my job, plus my wife and son.

Naaa gaaa dooo it.

So. As much as I like the idea of Pitch Wars, and as much as I’ve enjoyed poking fun at the other authors and the mentors and interacting with people about it over the last month or so… it ain’t gonna happen this year.

Dammit.