Tag: black friday

Come see me tomorrow at @StarbaseIndy!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek, Uncategorized4 Comments

I should be packing right now; I’m spending the next three days at the Wyndham Indianapolis West in, uh, Indianapolis at the Starbase Indy science fiction/ Star Trek convention.  I will, hopefully, both have a really good time and sell an insane number of books.

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It goes without saying that I think if you’re in Indianapolis or within reasonable driving range that you should come see me.  At least, it should go without saying, even though technically I just said it twice.

“But, Luther!” you cry.  “Who shall post roughly every four to five hours while you are awake?  How could we go a weekend without you? Isn’t it true that it’s been a year since you missed a day?”

First of all, no, not quite; the last time I missed a day was December 23, 2014.  So it’s been almost a year.  Second, as of right now my next six posts are set up, taking care of the blog through Monday morning.  You’ve got two from me (well, one’s a Station Identification) and four guest posts coming from four very capable writers, at least one of which genuinely deserves to go even more viral than the Syria post (35,456 hits and counting) did.  You’ll know it when you see it.  There’s also an announcement coming Monday morning!  Your hint is that it’ll be on Cyber Monday.  Let your brain run wild.

Anyway.  Don’t spend too much money in the big boxes this weekend, kids.  The sales aren’t that good anyway.  Support local and independent retailers and all that.  And come see me!

Last day for the sale!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

Remember, both of my books are cheaper than usual at Amazon, or if you’re partial to Smashwords you can have Benevolence Archives for free or Skylights for literally any amount you care to pay.  Check ’em out!

SKYLIGHTS gets a well-timed new #review

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

…and once again, I’m finding that my four-star reviewers tend to seem like they liked the book more than my five-star reviews.  Have I mentioned Skylights is on sale?  Check out the review and the book here.

Luther Siler Thanksgiving Weekend Sale: LIVE!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

(NOTE:  I’m leaving this pinned to the top of the page during the sale.  Scroll down a touch for new posts.)

Starting NOW RIGHT NOW and going until I get bored with it, the following AMAZING DEALS are available to you:

At Amazon:

At Smashwords:

  • The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is… free.  Still.  And you should really be getting it from Smashwords and not from Amazon, unless you really really want to send me money or you’re not sure how to load files onto your Kindle.  You can download the Kindle version of the file from Smashwords, remember.
  • Skylights has set-your-own pricing.  Which means that you can have it for a penny if you want.  You can have it for nothing if you want.  Or if you’ve been reading me for a long time and you have way more money than you know what to do with you can pay a thousand dollars for it.  I will cheerfully take any percentage of All Your Money, from 0 to 100.  It’s up to you!

I have a brief Thanksgiving post that is planned but not yet written; other than that and a reminder or two of the sale, expect tomorrow to be quiet.  Enjoy your holiday, folks.

Announcements! Cool announcements!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

skylightscover02FIRST:  In what, surprisingly, counts as my first actual sale as a writer outside of self-publishing, my short story “Culaqan” is being published in December by the brand new literary anthology known as the 2014 World Unknown Review, edited by blogbuddy L.S. Engler.  The story has been on the site for a bit, so some of you may have read it before, but I’ve pulled it until some time after the anthology comes out.  If you’re interested, though, the very short stories “Crossroads” and “Confession” are set in the same universe.  Sort of.  I think.

I’m super excited about this, and expect to hear more about it as more details about the anthology are released and we get closer to release date, which I believe will be sometime in December.

bacover3dSECOND:  Just because I don’t plan on shopping on Black Friday doesn’t mean I’m not going to encourage other people to do so.  Both of my books are going to go on sale sometime late Wednesday night and will stay on sale at least through Friday night, and possibly for the entire weekend depending on how things go. Because of the way the different online retailers work, the sales are going to be slightly different depending on where you like to get your books from:

At Amazon:

At Smashwords:

  • The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 will remain free, because it’s free now (like literally right now.  You can click on that link and go download it, in a wide variety of ebook formats, right now.)
  • Skylights will be, and I’m really interested in seeing how this goes, set-your-own pricing.  Which means that you can have it for a penny if you want (and I think they’ll let you have it for free) or if you’ve been reading me for a long time and you have way more money than you know what to do with you can pay a thousand dollars for it.  Consider it a Christmas present for your favorite blogger.  Or just pay a penny.  I’m good either way, so long as some more folks read the damn thing.

Main thing?  Amazon won’t let me make stuff free if I’m not a member of Kindle Select, which I’ve opted out of, so I’ve got to set it at $0.99.  I’ve tried to price-match Benevolence Archives with Smashwords half a dozen times and it doesn’t work.  Do keep in mind that you can get Kindle editions of everything through Smashwords, as well as versions for any other ebook reader, but you may have to do some sort of rigamarole to get your file onto your device since it won’t do it for you.

Where should you get your books from?  Wherever you want, although I’ll admit I’m really curious about what will happen with the choose-your-own-adventure pricing at Smashwords.  Skylights hasn’t sold terribly well, even compared to the watermark Benevolence Archives has set, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens with it.

Expect the volume of promotional stuff to increase a bit around here through the weekend, of course.  I’ll try and find some other way to be entertaining along the way, though.

In which I am full of contradictions

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews12 Comments

2ee9ed34a79f594acf89e040d8ef8b76976c1c72c2cf9295ef124a59c2b65ed9So I discovered today that I can’t handle Costco.  I’ve never been in one before, and one just opened nearby, and my mom and wife wanted to go, so I tagged along.  I’ve never in my life had such a visceral negative reaction to a store before.  I hated the place– from the fact that there aren’t any damn signs anywhere (even the bathrooms aren’t labeled) to the fact that the place where you walk in is nowhere near any registers to the utter fucking randomness of the layout– within a 15-foot radius you could find housewares, fresh seafood on ice, liquor, and piles of leather jackets, an item that should never be in a pile. I’d had enough after five minutes and told Bek and my mom that I’d be in the car; I had my phone with me to keep me entertained so they could take as long as they wanted.

On the way back to my car, it hit me just how much the place is like a casino.  No signs, no markers, everything is set up to disorient you and keep you lost and wandering.  And the $50 a year fee for the right to shop there as the icing on the cake.  No thanks; I’ve had enough naked capitalism lately and this place, despite having a stellar reputation for how they treat their employees, is one of the most grotesquely capitalist places I’ve ever had the misfortune of entering.  And I’m not even generally that down on capitalism, although it does get worse this time of year; it should be noted that the very next thing I did after leaving Costco was go to Best Buy and buy a new iPad.  But, still… guh.  If a store is going to try and manipulate my behavior I’d prefer it if it wasn’t so goddamned obvious.  I don’t give a damn how cheap their diapers are, I’d rather go to fucking Wal-Mart, and I have literally never before in my life said the words “I’d rather go to Wal-Mart.”

Actually, that’s not true, because I still won’t be going to Wal-Mart.  But walking into a Wal-Mart doesn’t immediately give me the creeping screamers the way Costco did.  And note that all this is before we get to the fact that it was the second Saturday the place had been open and it was crammed full of filthy, stinking humanity.  I’d have hated it empty; the people had nothing to do with it.

So.  I’m crabby today, is the point.  How’re you?

Is that a plank in my eye?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, Parenting, Politics3 Comments

20131129-104132.jpgSo here’s a novel way to have Thanksgiving: don’t have any turkey, because your oven betrays you again and the turkey doesn’t even come out of the goddamn oven until everything else is on the table and cooling, and then you find out (because you didn’t make the turkey, and you’ve never made a turkey, and you didn’t know this) that a turkey has to “rest” for half a goddamn hour after coming out of the oven and therefore everything else is going to be well and truly goddamned eaten before the turkey is even ready.

S’fun. You should do it. We call it Side Dish Thanksgiving. My mother did some sort of corn casserole thing that was basically just corn and sautéed onions and bloody cream cheese, of all things. It was delicious. We did Thug Kitchen’s stuffing recipe (needed a teensy bit more liquid, but otherwise great) and Albert Burneko’s mashed potatoes with roasted garlic, because we can’t cook a meal around here anymore without referencing either Thug Kitchen or Foodspin and really why would you even want to cook without using recipes from one of the two anyway. And green bean casserole and crescent rolls and a multitude of pies (which is the proper collective for pie) and two different kinds of deviled eggs, because have you ever made deviled eggs with sriracha? Holy God.

I am not going to be shopping today.

I’m getting more conflicted about holidays as I get older. I boycotted Christmas entirely last year; I made it clear to everyone that I wasn’t buying any presents for anyone and they were not to buy anything for me either; I really want to raise the boy in a way that he grows up substantially less materialistic than I am and one of the main ways to do that, I think, is to cut the emphasis on getting stuff around holidays.

Sounds great, right? All principled and shit, until I get to the part where I tell you that I ordered a PS3 (not a typo; 3) from Amazon yesterday so that I didn’t have to go stand in line at Gamestop at midnight to fight for one of the eight exactly-identically-ridiculous PS3 packages that they have in-store. A 250 GB PS3, which can’t be had for $199 by itself, plus two games, one of which is the entire reason I want a PS3, for $199, plus Saturday shipping for less than tax would have been. It’ll show up tomorrow sometime.

Which is as far as my “no materialism/no shopping on Thanksgiving/no shopping on Black Friday” thing gets me: I spent $200 on an electronic doohickey that I don’t actually need, on Thanksgiving, so that a low-wage Amazon employee can package it and mail it on Black Friday so that somebody else can scramble to get it to me on a Saturday by 8:00. Which should be about when I’m getting home from work. So, yeah, I’m all big and bad and principled and won’t go shopping on Black Friday… because I ordered my shit online on Thanksgiving.

Maybe I work on my own materialism before I try reprogramming the boy.

It begins

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

The good news:  It is 9:34 AM on Thanksgiving morning, and I am awake, dressed, showered, breakfasted, and ready to regulate.  One of my oldest friends is already here and we have six more people coming over later today.

The bad news:  my lovely wife, who is lovely and I love dearly, has only just now discovered that our roasting pan is insufficient for our turkey-roasting needs.  So I have to go get one.  And salt.

We somehow do not have salt.

I had the idea at one point that I was going to try to not spend money this weekend; I may as well go wait in line and buy a PS4 tonight.  Because this will not be the only thing.

Enjoy your holiday, y’all.  🙂