The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I’m on day 7 of a Thirty Stories in Thirty Days challenge over at Patreon. They’re all microfictions, but still– a new story every day for a week. Tomorrow, day 8, is gonna be a Benevolence Archives story– the first new one since Tales came out.
Just thought I’d point that out. $1 a month gets you access to nearly everything on the site, including a bunch of other stories, and $2 a month gets you a whole exclusive book.
I am not normally the type to read instructions, at least not at first. I’m perfectly happy to go over them once I’ve taken a shot at something, but my usual method is to muddle in and see if I can figure things out before touching the instructions. I’m not stubborn about it or anything like that; I just don’t go for the instructions first.
My new banner arrived today. I like it! It looks nice! And I should take a second and thank Jamie Noble Frier for the amazing artwork and Michael J. Martinez for the cover blurb. (Have you read Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3 yet? Get on that.)
The new banner is built into that base. It did not come with instructions.
Have you ever used one of these things before? There is a tension rod behind the banner itself. It hooks into the metal piece at the top of the banner, but 1) you need to know the feet are there (they rotate underneath the base for ease of transport) and 2) you need to be standing on the feet before you try and pull the banner up because otherwise the base is going to snap up toward your hands after a second or two and the whole thing becomes very unwieldy and also 3) it is not immediately clear how to hook the top of the banner into the top of the tension rod, especially if you do what I think is the natural thing and try to pull the banner up while standing in front of it, meaning that you’re obscuring your view of the tension rod while you’re pulling the banner up.
This means that two or three times you will either lose your grip on the banner or you will not seat it properly and it will crash back down into the base at what is frankly a terrifying velocity and volume and you will yell loud swears and your son will ask you what is wrong in a vaguely frightened tone of voice that you will be ashamed for making him use.
So. For future reference:
Learn from my mistakes, y’all.
And, in accordance with tradition, the Benevolence Archives books are free today at Amazon. Go grab ’em!
(And, for the love of God, if you’ve read the latter two, please leave a review.)
May the Fourth be with you!
I realized a bit too late that my Kindle Direct term was about to run out and I hadn’t used all of my free days, so a bunch of my books are going to be free for the next few days. In particular, I just discovered Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is #2 on Amazon for free science fiction anthologies, which seemed important enough to put it on blast on every social media outlet I have. So forgive me if you’ve seen this four times in the last few minutes, but if you were to want to download that book right now or tell your friends to, seeing my book at #1 would be kinda awesome.
…so you may be interested to learn that BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES Vol. 1 and THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE are both free ebooks at Amazon through Sunday. It’s a good weekend to spend inside reading, yes?
More later, but I figured I’d make sure this was out there.
Something Vloggy read The Benevolence Archives and had some nice things to say about it. I’d embed if I was sure that views here would increment on YouTube. Anybody have any idea?
In the meantime, check her out.
So– have I mentioned this?– I’m going to be at Kokomo-Con on October 14th, if any of you are nearby and feel like hitting up a convention. I have a new book coming out on September 26th. You knew about that part!
It would be cool, wouldn’t it, if the new book was available at the convention? Seriously, right? It would totally be cool.
Which is why I spent the entire evening yelling and screaming at Microsoft Word, again, and at CreateSpace’s stupid, stupid online file proofer that doesn’t actually seem to work right, and okay I think that there’s gonna be a print edition of the book available for purchase on Amazon right around day-and-date with the ebook and the book will be available at the convention. But holy crap am I gonna get my butt kicked on shipping.
$8.99 for the print edition, by the by. Cheaper at the convention, probably. And I’ll sign the book for free! Come see me!
And just $2.99! Out September 26 digitally, print date coming soon!