Tag: click

It begins, pt. 18

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Because capitalism, let me begin by reminding you of two things: that I have a new book out and that my YouTube channel is going strong and could use some more subscribers. The game we’re in now, A Plague Tale: Innocence, is particularly narratively strong and I think would probably be quite a bit of fun to watch. It’s a game where you’re occasionally called upon to feed Inquisition soldiers to rats! You’ll love it.

(Why “Pt. 18,” in the headline there? This is year eighteen of teaching. Eighteen fucking years. Madness.)

School has not started yet, and won’t for nearly two weeks (two weeks from yesterday, I think, is the kids’ first day) but my rosters showed up today when I went looking for them, and I was greeted with smaller classes than I thought I was going to have (alarmingly small, honestly; I can imagine a world where if some of these kids don’t show up they collapse a section on us) and an organizational change that will make grading and record-keeping a lot easier, at least once I get done redoing the planning that was predicated on things working like they did last year. I am fighting off the urge to go to Target tonight to do a touch of supply shopping for stuff I know I’m going to need, and I will be in my classroom for the first time this school year tomorrow. I likely won’t be there much longer than an hour or so– long enough to take a quick inventory of what I want to do with the classroom now that I’m actually decorating it (remember, I’m in the same room I was in last year, but I never really decorated last year) and figure out what I might need to buy over the weekend.

I will be in my classroom Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week doing setup, Thursday and Friday are all-day meetings downtown, Monday the week after I’ll be in my room, then Tuesday is the first day for the teachers and the kids are back Wednesday. So this is the last weekday of summer, basically, since I’ll have Job Stuff every weekday from here on out.

So, yeah: here we go.

Let’s see, what else? I have a Family Thing this weekend; not one as extensive as last time, just for a day– but it’s for my wife’s side of the family, and I don’t know any of them especially well. Unlike my own family, I’m also not a hundred percent sure I can trust the vaccine status of everyone who will be there, a lot of whom I won’t know at all, and while I like my wife’s cousin and her kids, her cousin’s husband is still … I’ll say a potential danger spot in terms of his and my mutual ability to get along with each other. I have, as of yet, no concrete reason to distrust the guy beyond vibes, but we haven’t seen each other in a couple of years for obvious reasons and in general the people I might be interested in staying away from seem to have gotten worse at hiding their bullshit since this all started. I will do my damnedest to be a good guest– or, at the very least, I will make damned sure that while we’re driving home angry after leaving early, it won’t be because I was the asshole.

This is where my life would be easier if I was capable of talking about sports, by the way. Sports is a great thing for men to talk about when they don’t want to talk about other things. That said, talking about sports right now is pretty much talking about politics anyway, so even that refuge may be gone. Hopefully what happened last time will happen again– that the teenagers will decide to hang out with me, and I will thus immunize myself (heh) of any accusations of refusing to socialize while still insulating myself against stumbling into a Don’t Want None Won’t Be None situation with anyone else.

It’ll be fine, but cross your fingers for me anyway.

Hey, my book’s out!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Yes, I know, you’ve seen that image on this page an awful lot lately, but the fact is that other than irregularly mentioning it here I’ve done nothing to let people know that Click was coming out, and the fact that I’m too lazy to market my own books probably isn’t a great sign? Unsurprisingly, presale numbers reflect my lack of effort. At any rate, it’s available now, so feel free to go grab it if you want to and, for some reason, haven’t yet.

This is my last week of summer vacation, effectively, since I need to kick shit into gear starting August 1st and the kids are back on the 11th, and other than getting the boy back and forth from camp every day I don’t have a single Goddamn thing to do. Not an appointment, not a job responsibility, nothing. It’s video games, lounging about (I just got out of the pool) and cleaning for the next six days, and I am super psyched about it.

After that, I get busy fast, and this year’s gonna be a hell of a ride no matter what happens. But this week, I’m not stressing about anything at all unless I absolutely have to.

Six days until Click!

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

Pre-orders are still available for my novel Click for another few days, until the official launch on July 26. You can use this link (see what I did there, avoiding using the name of the book?) to get in on the action early if you like. Remember, this is my wife’s favorite of my books, so you should absolutely be spending your money based on her preferences. 🙂

In other self-promotion news, lutherplaysgames.com is a thing now, and redirects to my YouTube channel, but if you’re going to click on one of the links in this post, do the first one. The YT is gonna be around for a minute, but the preorders are only available for another six days!

Yum

On By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

Pictured on this table: Lebanese salad, tahini, beef shawarma, fried eggplant, homemade hummus, homemade baba ghanoush, fried chicken, hand-cut French fries, and Lebanese rice, along with pita bread, both homemade and store-bought garlic spread (made for the chicken, but also delicious with the fries,) fresh parsley, pickles, tomatoes and a homemade tomato sauce to go with the eggplant. Not pictured: a thousand deserts, including about thirty different varieties of baklava and nammoura, which I had never had before this weekend and oh my God.

I don’t know if I made this clear, but my cousin married a Lebanese woman, and for this and a whole lot of other reasons it is very clear that marrying her was the best decision he ever made. And this was only one meal. Like, these folks don’t cook, they COOK, and trying to claim you were full was just not going to work. I can think of three-day periods where I have eaten better in my life– work trips to Nashville and Raleigh come to mind– but I have never come close to eating this well for three days in a row when literally everything in front of me was home-cooked, and she (well, not just her; my cousin definitely pitched in, but it was clear who was in charge) didn’t break a sweat doing it, either.

(Have I paid for my overindulgence today? Maybe a little, yeah. Worth. It.)

Click is still very much available for pre-order, and to go even deeper into asking my audience for things it would be super duper if a handful of those of you who have already read it would review it over on the Amazonmachine. Currently available for just under five of your American moneydollars, and launching f’real f’real on July 26.

CLICK now available for pre-order!

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

And you can click– no pun intended– right here to make my latest book a part of your life. Release date is July 26, but why would you wait that long to buy it when you can make an impulse decision right now? This is my wife’s favorite of my books, so you should absolutely listen to her and go order it immediately.

I will be out of town all weekend, so updates are gonna be kinda sparse, but there’s already video content uploaded and waiting over at the yootoobz and nothing can keep me off of Twitter, so the dozens of you who plan your lives around my social media update schedule should be just fine. I will return Sunday, by which time I expect my body to be approximately 50% baklava and shawarma by weight. It’s gonna be a fine few days.

High-pressure sales tactics

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

I said it was happening, and yep, it’s happening: My novel Click is even as we speak being approved by Amazon’s fooferall machines and will be available for humans to buy in the very near future. Official release date is July 26, but it’ll be available for preorder soon, and as soon as the fooferall process concludes I will actually have a link you can click on to order it.

This isn’t even the official announcement post, really, because if it was there would be a link. This is like that card you get before a wedding announcement, that tells you there’s a wedding announcement coming and to hold a date, but somehow is not, itself, either the announcement or the invitation. This is just the announcement that there’s gonna be a book and that you should be prepared to buy it, if you like.

In other news, my YouTube channel is still out there and I’m still having fun with it, so you should go look at that and hit Subscribe as quickly as possible. Am I talking about it too much? Yes, absolutely– but if I don’t, no one will know about the great fun we’re having with Chicory: A Colorful Tale over there. And that one doesn’t even cost you any money! Go do it.

In other other news, the prophesied Second Child has entered the house, and I’m realizing as I’m typing this that I don’t currently hear any screaming, so either the children are both dead or they have gone somewhere without my knowledge, which seems like it could possibly be an alarming development. I don’t know where my wife is either, though, so maybe she’s with them.

(Thudding in the hallway)

Okay, I guess it’s fine now.

My sleep study has been canceled, because, I shit you not, my insurance company has deemed me “not sick enough” to require one, which … man, that’s a whole entire rant, right there, and I’m going to not bother writing the majority of it because the fact is I don’t think I have sleep apnea and not having to spend Thursday night in a hospital makes the rest of my week easier. Instead, at some as-yet-undetermined point in the future I have to do a home sleep study, and if you happen to know what the hell that might involve, let me know, because I haven’t gotten around to Googling it yet. Fact is I have got shit to do, and taking an entire night in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and pretending to sleep off my plate makes the chances that all the other stuff will actually get done a lot higher. Tomorrow’s tasks involve finding presents for my cousin’s two children, one of whom I’ve never met, and getting all of my video recording for the entire weekend done and out of the way. None of that can really start until the extra child is out of the house, and there may be a trip to the county fair in there sometime as well. I’m bringing my laptop to Michigan with me so I can keep up with bloggery, but if there’s anybody out there thinking hey, I would really love to write a piece to promote something for infinitefreetime on, like, no notice at all, let me know.

An announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

You may recall that I have written books in the past.

My novel Click has been an exclusive for Patreon subscribers and people who buy it from me at conventions since its publication. It has struck me recently (and has been true for some time) that this no longer really makes any sense; my Patreon rapidly grew to sixteen followers and froze there– I don’t think I’ve added a single follower since the first month I was on the site– and I haven’t updated it in forever. Similarly, Covid has made cons impossible. So this means that this book, more or less by definition, is just sitting there, not doing me any good.

I’m going to continue to offer it as an initial reward to new Patreon people, but it’s losing its exclusivity in the very near future, as I’m going to make the ebook version at least available on Amazon. Right now the print version is being handled through someone other than KDP, and I need to figure out if they can play nice with each other, and the actual file (not the text, the file) needs some slight revision, so I don’t have a release date just yet– but probably in the next few weeks. I will, of course, let everyone know immediately once I have a date; there will likely be a short pre-order period before the book actually launches, but I’ve got to get the leg work done first. I’m telling you now mostly to force myself into accountability, honestly.

Holiday weekend Patreon promotion

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

Because I’m in “throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks” mode…

Anyone joining my Patreon at $2/month or above or any current Patron increasing their pledge by literally any amount will be sent a free, signed print copy of Click.  This deal is good through bedtime– mine, not yours– Monday night.  

C’mon.  You know you want in.

Click.

Mike Schafer, a grad student and aspiring writer, finds himself immersed in a strange world of barbarians and monsters after buying a metal puzzle in a local antique store. But are Midrodhel and Gunnbjorn the Bold of his own creation, or is something else going on? As this new world begins to terrifyingly intersect with his own, Mike and his girlfriend Ali must find a way to help Gunnbjorn and his niece Graeslyn the Mighty thwart the Sorceress-Queen Montega in her quest to own all of Midrodhel’s magic and conquer the worlds beyond.