SKYLIGHTS finally gets a review!

On November 10, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing5 Comments

skylightscover02 I made some mistakes with the Skylights release, and I strongly suspect that the largest of them was not having seeded the world with a few promo copies so that it had a handful of reviews upon release. It has taken way too long for the book to get its first real Amazon review (there’s been a four-star rating on Goodreads for a while, but with no text appended) and I’m happy to announce that it’s basically exactly what I want reviews of my work to look like.

Okay, one more star would have been nice, but the words in the review are perfect. 🙂

Check it out.

And suddenly I’m a parent

On November 10, 2014November 10, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting7 Comments

Tonight I have to go to an open house for a local Montessori school. Want to? Am about to? I don’t know how to phrase it. Certainly no one is making me go; I think my main objection right now is that I don’t want to be old enough to have to be thinking about this right now. Pay no attention, by the way, to the fact that most parents my age are worrying about high school and not kindergarten. It’s not even that I want him to stay a baby forever or anything like that; as I’ve said on several occasions before, the older he gets the more I like him, so I suspect I’ll like kindergarten-kid more than I like three-year-old kid right now.

I will admit that I’m liking three. It’s a good age. It’s too bad that he had to go through the three years to get to three, where I liked him less, but three is okay.

So, yeah. Point is, I gotta go to an open house for a school I don’t know anything about, so that I can learn things about it, because maybe I’ll want to send my kid there soon, because he’s old enough that I need to worry about that. Blech.

So speaking of parenting: he noticed Halloween, right? We’ve talked about that. Which means he’s gonna notice Christmas this year for the first time, too. Which means that the wife and I have to make a decision about Santa Claus. I am, in general, against lying to my kid, and somewhat generically temperamentally against suggesting that he should adjust his behavior in order to receive rewards from supernatural beings.

I also don’t want to be the parent of the asshole kid who ruins Christmas for the other kids, and “let them believe what they want to believe and don’t worry about it” seems like kinda complicated advice for a three-year-old. My wife has suggested that we simply don’t bring it up and see what he brings to the table, and that seems like good advice.

An anecdote: We are at Meijer. We need to buy the boy a coat. As we pass the coat rack, an idle thought floats into my head: What if he decides he wants the pink one?

I, progressive Dad that I am, decide that I don’t really give a damn if he wants the pink coat. He picks out a dark blue one and tries it on and has a fit about the length of the sleeves. (Note: this is an ongoing thing. M’boy has issues with sleeves.) We try on an orange one. Same thing, only now the fit has a bit of a head of steam behind it and is getting a bit more obnoxious. We get him calmed down and my wife tries one more time to see if he’s interested in trying on a coat.

“The light blue one,” he says. I look. There’s a light blue one. With polka dots. It’s one of the girl coats.

You deserve this, I thought to myself. And the wife and I just sorta looked at each other. Looked at the coat. Neither of us really wanted to be the one to say no, because he’s fucking three, and who cares what coat he wears. At the same time, I noticed quickly that color wasn’t the only thing differentiating the coats. It turns out that girls’ winter coats from the exact same company– coats for three-year-olds, mind you– are actually cut different. They have froofy fur around the hoods, and– and this is the ridiculous part– they’re fitted. They have elastic on them, for the hips that three-year-old girls do not have. Which I suspect actually makes them less effective as winter coats.

Color? Wear whatever you want. My parental liberalism apparently ends at the point where my son wants to wear a coat that is fitted to show off his hips. I suspect he’s not about to start developing an interest in wearing girls’ clothing all the time, because I think we’d probably have seen that by now; he just likes the color light blue.

I shoulda just put it on him. He’d have had another fit about the sleeves and we’d have been done. Instead, my wife sucked it up and told him it was a girl coat and he couldn’t wear it. I’ve got a tiny bit of a dirty feeling in my mouth about it, but only a tiny bit.

No comment.

On November 10, 2014November 9, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

Spent most of the day hoping something interesting would happen…

On November 9, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

…and thus far it has not, at least nothing interesting enough to overcome my desire to lie in a heap and stare at the wall and groan. The drive home from Nashville was considerably more taxing than the drive to Nashville, particularly the more extended post-Louisville part, and “staring and moaning” has been about where my head has been at all day. There was some raking of leaves. The front lawn has, oh, 80% of the leaves that it had earlier today. A spot of shopping. Very little else.

Yeah.

How was your weekend?

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On November 9, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Hi! I’m Luther Siler. I’m the author of Skylights and The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1, both available at various ebook retailers easily accessible from whatever magic rectangle you’re using to access this page. 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. Between Twitter and the blog I probably add 100 or so new followers a month, 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 or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. I am on Twitter pretty frequently; I use it for liveblogging TV, whining about anything that strikes me as whine-worthy, and for short, Facebook-style posts. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being. You are not a human being if your profile mentions SEO.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I am accepting any and all friend requests at the moment. I am looking forward to the day when my Goodreads account has more friends than my Facebook account; it won’t be long.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts here.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.

Thanks for reading!

It’s THE WALKING DEAD time!

On November 8, 2014November 8, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television

…well, mostly. My review of the latest episode, such as it is, is up at Sourcerer.

#Nashville: Final food post

On November 8, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Stories5 Comments

So we decided to go to Jack’s Bar-B-Q last night. Me and four of my colleagues, packed into my rental car which, as it turns out, does not have a middle seatbelt in the back seat. Whoops. Nashville in general is a horrifying tangle of highways, right? It’s confusing as hell. And downtown Nashville at first did not appear to have much going for it. Until we hit the neighborhood where the restaurant was:

Oh. So this is where Nashville’s nightlife is. And there was some sort of major concert going on tonight, so there were millions of people out– look at the upper left of the picture to see the size of the crowds on the street.

Eventually we found a spot in a parking garage and left. Then my boss pointed out the door we’d walked through:

This door has no external handle. Once it’s closed, you can’t get back through it. Because it’s secret, you see. So we were gonna have to figure out another way to get back to the car on the way home.

Finding Jack’s wasn’t hard, and the live music blaring from literally every door on the block made waiting in the holy-shit-people-are-you-kidding line worthwhile. The reason finding Jack’s wasn’t that hard is that the line extended out the door and halfway down the block.

(Not pictured: a hundred people behind us.)

Once we got inside I saw this sign, which I post here, and also on Facebook, without comment:

Right before we got our food, I turned around and took a picture of the line behind us, which hadn’t exactly gotten smaller. Remember, this gets outside, turns right, and goes on for another couple hundred feet:

Now, a genuinely weird, if oddly convenient, thing about this place: their service was slow as hell, which partially accounts for the length of the line– but also meant that finding a table wasn’t terribly difficult, because people were tending to eat and go.

I got a combo platter again. Brisket, sausage, and pork shoulder, plus a piece of something called “chess pie” at the recommendation of my assistant principal, who grew up in Tennessee:(*)

Apparently something happened to my eyes when I had my first bite of chess pie. I want to marry chess pie. The barbecue was goddamned delicious as well. Even the cornbread in the corner, which doesn’t look like much, was pretty good. The food made the endless wait well worth it.

And then we went to the Parthenon. Which doesn’t seem like a sentence that I should be ending an article about barbecue with. Did you know that Nashville has a full-size replica of the Goddamn Parthenon? Because it does:

The food made the trip worth it.

The end.

(*) True thing: spellcheck just tried to tell me that “Tennessee” was incorrect, the little wiggly line not going away until I removed an S. I double-checked, feeling that perhaps I’d lost my mind, and fixed the spelling back to how I’d had it to begin with. Weird.

In which I continue to eat well

On November 7, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

Made some better decisions today– I bought some stuff last night to have for breakfast this morning, so I wasn’t roped into paying extortionate prices for granola, and walked over to the convention center rather than taking the shuttle so that I could explore a little bit. I found a sushi place, far enough away from the bulk of the convention that there wasn’t going to be a line at lunchtime, so I ate well for lunch. Like fitty-dolla-to-hell-with-it-I’m-getting-reimbursed well. Om nom nom, goddammit.

I’m currently holed up at a bar in the atrium. The bar is actually closed, so it’s basically just a free seating area, and I’m going to work on the book while I wait for the next session to start. I’ll do one more today and then head back over to the hotel. Tonight, barbecue.

This is the waterfall twenty feet away from me:

It’s cooler in here today, too, which might be because it’s a bit cloudier outside or might just be because I’ve managed to avoid the ridiculous crush of people that yesterday was so plagued by. This place certainly does pretty.

Anyway, I’ve got an hour before I need to find my next session. I’ve gotten some fiction done today already, but I’d like a four-figure word count before I leave the conference. Wish me luck.