New ★★★★★ review for BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 1!

On August 14, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

Go check it out. BA’s slowed down on reviews lately, and this one’s really positive. 99 cents at Amazon!

In which life laughs in my face

On August 13, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching7 Comments

I have been saying all week that as soon as I spent money or took time setting up my new classroom (especially if I did something like, say, unloading an SUV full of supplies, that would be a pain in the ass to reverse) I would get a phone call from the office informing me that oh, wait, we’re going to need you to be the guidance counselor after all.

I should back up a bit.

It’s only just hit me that I don’t think I’ve talked about this– I’ve been campaigning fairly hard for the guidance counselor position in my building, because it keeps me out of the classroom and lets me do a lot of stuff that I’m good at while simultaneously removing the discipline crap that was my least favorite part of my job last year.

Long story short: I didn’t get it, and I’m not going to get into why, because it involves a lot of complaining about very specific people and no small amount of insinuations of bad faith from individuals I do not work with. I didn’t get it. Good enough. But we still don’t have a guidance counselor– a kind of important job right now, since guidance counselors make the schedules and school starts next Tuesday.

So yeah. I’ve been fairly convinced that I was gonna get a call once I did something irrevocable. I walked past the office on my way out of the building today and waved at my principal, who beckoned me into the office, which was otherwise empty and dark.

Where I discovered that, no, I’m not going to be the guidance counselor (still), but I do get to have a substantial portion of the guidance counselor’s job dumped into my lap tomorrow, and I get to do it anyway.

At last count, I’m packing three different jobs into my current position: I’m going to be teaching, I’m still wrapping up a huge amount of stuff from last year, which won’t be completely off my plate until September 30 and which became a much huger pain in the ass yesterday for reasons that, again, I apologize, but I can’t get into, and now I get to do scheduling.

Go ahead: ask how well I know the scheduling software. I dare you.

At least that’s decided

On August 12, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching6 Comments

I’m teaching next year. Full stop, I’m done thinking and/or worrying about it. I’m back in the classroom, and it will be absogoddamnlutely my last year working in schools, because I’m resigning at the end of the year whether I have a job lined up or not.

I have, what, six days to get my head on straight and my classroom ready.

Fuck it. Let’s do this.

Right now

On August 12, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

3:43 am and I’m looking at my phone instead of the sky because ow, my neck.

C’mon, Perseids. Represent.

More on audiobooks

On August 11, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing3 Comments

I have The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 set up for auditions on Audible, if anyone out there fancies themselves a narrator. I’ve actually already received one audition for it, which surprised me. The guy had a wonderful voice, but his timing didn’t feel right for this book. I could listen to dude read nonfiction all day, though.

I will probably have all three books up by the end of the week, because it looks like it’s possible to do them as a straight revenue share– in other words, I wrote the thing, someone else records it, and we split the royalties when the audiobook sells. Right now I think I’d prefer to do it that way than “buy” a narrator– after all, I don’t make any money off my books if they don’t sell either. (If you’re a narrator, and that bothers you, let me know, because I haven’t really thought through the ethics of this. Each of us getting a cut of the royalties seems fair to me, though.)

Creepy Children’s Programming Reviews: SLUGTERRA

On August 11, 2015August 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, Television7 Comments

images I’m actually pretty sure I… like this one? We have a new hotness in the Siler household, the latest of any number of new hotnesses, and this time he’s plucked a thing called SLUGTERRA out of the Netflix queue to mildly obsess over for a few weeks. SLUGTERRA is interesting; it’s the first show he’s ever really liked that I thought “Oh, this show is designed to sell kids a bunch of dumb shit,” except since we watch it on Netflix we don’t see any commercials and so– ha!– we evade Disney X D’s(*) capitalist clutches. That said, before I realized the show was designed to sell kids shit, I’ll freely admit that I thought Man, this would make a fun turn-based video game.

So there’s that.

Anyway! The premise. It’s weird. The show is set… underground, I think? Maybe under the real world? And there are people, but also trolls (they’re blue!) and whatever the mole dude is:

They’re called “slugslingers.” They shoot at bad guys with guns.

The ammunition for their guns is slugs. These dudes:

When the slugs get shot out of guns, they twirl a little bit and then they can spin a web, or set themselves on fire, or freeze stuff, or turn into spinning blades, or any bit of nonsense you can imagine, and sometimes they punch each other out of the way, and sometimes they just explode, which seems kinda lazy, and they’ve only got one of each kind of slug that they have and so once they’re shot I guess they just wander back to their owners for some reason. There’s probably something complicated behind it because this show has a Goddamn wiki but my kid is four so he’s not too into the details. Oh, and also they ride around on mechanical animals. There was this one episode where a dude was riding a robo-snake. I approve of robo-snakes.

The sound design, believe it or not, is the coolest thing about the show. The little slugs make cool noises when they’re being fired at each other. I like the sounds they make.

There are bad guys. This is Dr. Blakk. Yeah. Blakk.

Ooh, scary. This is Dr. Blakk’s henchman. His name is– I am not making this up– El Diablos Nacho.

large_size_Slugterra_009_D5 — Your name is a REALLY stupid name.

He’s actually scarier-looking than Dr. Blakk, but his name is Nacho and there’s a grammar error in the first two words of his name and plus there’s no Spanish in this world anyway so why the hell is his name El Diablos Nacho and I refuse to worry about it.

(See the little red canisters on his shirt? And the blue ones on the good guys up above? They have to slam the slugs into those before shooting them, then put the canisters into the gun, then fire the shot. It’s very 1800s. I want to know how the hell this ecosystem evolved, and who realized you could shoot these things.)

It’s a fun show. I like the characters, and the setting is pleasantly weird, and like I said the sound design is stellar. I just can’t get behind calling a dude El Diablos Nacho, though.

(*) Why is that space in there? Because if you take Disney X D’s name and you write it without a space, WordPress turns it into Disney XD, which isn’t a word, and wait, is that why it’s called Disney X D? How do you say that? And how do you turn off the substitution in WordPress? OMG OLD.

A reasonably serious question

On August 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing13 Comments

Where are y’all at on audiobooks? Do you listen to them frequently? More or less than regular books? If any of my work existed as an audiobook, would that make you more likely to purchase it?

Indie authors, do any of you have audio versions of your books? How did you create them? Was it worth it?

I am not an audiobook person. But I also like new markets. Trying to figure out how many of y’all are into these things.