Just for the heck of it, I posted a list of the comics I bought this week over at Sourcerer. Go check it out and let me know if anything else came out today I should buy.
Month: November 2015
#FridayFictioneers: The Vigil
So, turns out this is actually posted Wednesday. I feel like if I write it on Wednesday it’ll get a little more attention, plus the weekends are starting to get a little bit hashtag-heavy, so we’ll do this on the day it launches for a bit.
“It’s been a year,” the girl in white said. She picked at a scab on her knee.
“That’s right,” the woman in white answered. “Tomorrow, we learn.”
“Do we really have to stay up all night?”
“He was your father,” the woman answered. “For your father, we wait all night.”
“And if he rises?”
“If he rises with gladness, we welcome him. If he does not rise, we leave him.”
“And if he rises without gladness?”
“Then we shall see,” she answered. The ceremonial knife dug at her back. She would have to decide swiftly who it was for.
(100 words)
Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!
Happy Veterans Day
I plan on spending the day staring at my phone and using my prodigious mental powers to make it ring. Hopefully your day is a bit more reverential.
Also, I miss my grandparents. I miss all four of my grandparents, but to the best of my knowledge my paternal grandfather (the source of the “Luther” in my pen name) wasn’t ever in the service, and my maternal grandfather (the pair pictured above are my mom’s parents) was in Patton’s Third Army, so he’s never far from my thoughts on Veterans Day.
IMPORTANT EDIT: I am informed by reliable sources that my paternal grandfather was in the Navy, although I believe he remained Stateside. His rank on his discharge papers is listed as Hospital Apprentice First Class, and he was discharged in April of 1946.
In which numbers are stupid and words are stupid and money is stupid and spreadsheets are stupid and everything is stupid
I was already not in the greatest of moods when I got home this afternoon; I spent the afternoon struggling to fix my parents’ laptop, a task I should have tackled weeks ago and I am starting to suspect is actually a world-class trolling attempt on Microsoft and Sony’s part, because no one could ever possibly think that Windows 8 is a real operating system.
(“Upgrade to Windows 10, it’s free,” you say? “Die in a fire!” I say, because I’m fucking trying to, and I didn’t realize the magnitude of the fuckery until I tried to remove the cancer software from the computer. Everyone involved in making Windows 8 should spend the rest of their lives in jail.)
Anyway. I got home and put together a spreadsheet to help me try and suss out how many books to order for some of these cons I plan on being a vendor at, and what I have concluded is that it is going to be virtually impossible for me to make a profit at any of these things, especially if I eat while I’m on the road. Now, I can literally make profit if I sell every book I bring with me, under some circumstances, but we’re looking at maybe a $3 an hour salary I’d be making over the three days of the con. Is that worth it? I don’t know.
And if I don’t sell everything?
Better mood tomorrow, I promise.
More on yesterday’s announcement
C2E2 had seventy thousand attendees last year, guys, a number that puts me firmly into what is this I don’t even mode. I’ve got plenty of time to figure it out, but right now I don’t even have a sense of how to order books for an event of that size. I’ve basically spent no money at all other than the hotel and the actual registration for Starbase Indy because I (deliberately) overordered so much for InConJunction. But… hell, if I sell a book to one percent of the visitors at C2E2 that’s seven hundred books, which is thousands of dollars to print and get to me. My conversion rate for InConJunction, despite how poorly most of us thought that con went, was way more than 1%. Then again, InConJunction wasn’t that big, and I could count on damn near every person at that con walking past me at some point. That’s not going to be the case at C2E2, and I don’t really have much of a way to estimate how many of those folks I even have a theoretical chance to sell books to.
I need folks with con experience. I know I have one Zen master of Zen floating around in my online circle, but if any of the rest of you have any experience with selling things at large conventions and have any particular advice you’d like to give me, I’d love to hear it. Particularly since I don’t have a huge cash reserve floating around right now, so whatever books I do buy are going to have to be put on a credit card, which hopefully will be then paid off with funds from the con. Which, obviously, is going to have an effect on how many I feel comfortable ordering.
So. Yeah. Anybody’s got a way to help me get a handle on how to manage this, feel free to drop me a line.
REBLOG: Pearson to become the gate-keeper for student teachers in Illinois.
You have GOT to be fucking kidding me. This– this nonsense RIGHT HERE– is why no sane person wants to teach any longer.
Sandra Deines (center).
-By Sandra Deines. Sandra is a member of the Skokie Organization of Retired Educators IEA Retired and a retired Park Ridge high school teacher.
Starting this fall Pearson will be in the business of deciding who becomes a teacher in the state of Illinois.
The Illinois State Board of Education has adopted a rule that designates Pearson’s “edTPA” as the means by which student teachers will be evaluated and granted certification.
As the fall semester begins, all student teachers in the state will be required to pay an extra $300 (on top of the tuition they are already paying) and arrange for videotaping so that they can submit a lengthy narrative that covers the planning, execution and evaluation of a series of lessons with one of their classes as well as a ten-minute video of themselves carrying out their lesson with a class.
Student teachers are required to get…
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An entertainment and an announcement
First, a bonus story for those of you who have read Searching for Malumba, particularly those of you who have gotten to the chapter called “A Long Day, Pt. 2.”
Out of nowhere, my Bruce Banner Facebook account just got a friend request from Caesar, of all people. I haven’t heard from Caesar since the last day of the Washington DC trip I took him on when he was in 7th grade. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to do that, because he had transferred out of our school earlier in the year, but the adults involved basically looked around and went hell, he’s a good kid, let’s just not tell anybody, and it ended up working out fine anyway.
Caesar, and this will only be funny to those of you who have read Malumba, is a politician now, as in “he is actually running for state office in 2016,” and he has a Facebook page full of pictures of himself in a nicer suit than any of the ones I own, standing next to important politicians, including one former President and at least three people currently running for office.
I approved the request immediately. This is one of the ones I have wanted to be able to keep an eye on. 🙂
And now, the announcement, and this one’s a big one: I have just received confirmation that I will have a Small Press booth at C2E2 2016, running from March 18th-20th of next year. This means that I have three convention appearances currently planned out and official: Starbase Indy later this month, C2E2 in March, and IndyPopCon in June. I’m still trying to get into one more in August that I’ve not been to before (and which will also be a really big deal), and I’m thinking about going to next year’s InConJunction, which was the one I want to last summer. If Starbase Indy is fun and profitable, I’ll seriously consider doing that again next year too, but we’ll see how the first one goes.
That’s a big deal. That’s tens of thousands of people who I’ll have access to next year in person and not through my blog or Twitter. 2016 could be a very, very big deal for Luther Siler.
I’m excited already. 🙂
NOPE
I’m not writing about fucking Starbucks cups, and you can’t make me. I’m sick to fucking death of the type of evangelical Christian who thinks that they own all of November and December and that the rest of us have to behave exactly how they want or they’ll make everyone miserable. And they don’t get any more of my brain cycles. Fuck ’em all.
Anyway.
Regarding the Jayashree post from a couple of days ago: I was woken up from a sound fucking sleep last night to quickly type the name of a new story into Wunderlist, at which point I spent an hour trying not to get up and go piss and deal with some vastly annoying heartburn because the cat was in between my legs and I didn’t want to dislodge her. Both she and I lost that battle eventually, and the story’s about half written in my head right now. I’m just setting it earlier in her life to avoid having to deal with the, uh, fallout from Jayashree and the Young.
The story, by the way, is called Jayashree and the Gallows Pole. Let that one roll around in your head for a while.
I’m at my parents’ house all day today keeping an eye on my mom. Not sure if that means I’ll be around more than usual or less; I do hope to keep up with my NotNaNo word count but beyond that I’m basically just waiting for it to be tomorrow so I can play Fallout 4 23 hours a day for the rest of my life.
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