Everything still sucks

Went to urgent care this afternoon, to be greeted with more or less nothing more than a shrug; they’r calling in an antibiotic but I’ve been told to not expect much from it as, unsurprisingly, this is probably viral. My lungs are clear, at least, so it’s not pneumonia, which I pretty much already knew anyway. Adding to the fun is that my right ear is suddenly clogged as hell and I’m about to move to the “pour hydrogen peroxide directly in there” stage, which is always fun. I’ve used my ear wash thingy twice this afternoon and it hasn’t done any good.

I read the book pictured above, which did not suck, but I don’t have the energy to do a full review of it; needless to say there is very little chance that I’m not going to enjoy reading a pop-science account of why colonizing outer space is probably going to be a shitton more expensive and complicated than we think it is. I’d prefer the authors came to different conclusions, but them’s the breaks, and I think they’ve supported their opinions more than sufficiently for my expectations.

Oh, and the Pope’s gonna die, it looks like, and I’ve spent most of the day when I wasn’t coughing my larynx out or struggling to breathe contemplating political violence. Which probably isn’t super smart for me to write about but I’ve been shooting my mouth off on BlueSky anyway.

I’m gonna go to bed now, I guess, and I hope to hell I’m at least halfway human tomorrow.

Oh, by the way

Skylights is free today, in case you haven’t picked it up yet.  Go.  GO NOW!

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August 15, 2022: the Tycho, the most advanced interplanetary craft ever designed by the human race, launches from Earth on an expedition to Mars. The Tycho carries four passengers, soon to be the most famous people in human history. 

February 19, 2023: The Tycho loses all communication with Earth while orbiting Mars. After weeks of determined attempts to reestablish contact, the Tycho is declared lost. 

2027: Journalist Gabriel Southern receives a message from a mysterious caller: “Mars.” Ezekiel ben Zahav isn’t talking, but he wants Southern to accompany him for something– and he’s dangling enough money under his nose to make any amount of hardship worth it.  

SKYLIGHTS is the story of the second human expedition to Mars. Their mission: to find out what happened to the first.

#SilerSaturday: SKYLIGHTS again!

Hoping to capitalize a bit on the (hopefully) runaway success of a certain Mars-themed movie, we’re making SKYLIGHTS free again, today and tomorrow!  I promise to be a bit less noisy around here about it, because I figure a lot of the people who see the blog have had plenty of chances to download it, but feel free to spread the word however you like.

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August 15, 2022: the Tycho, the most advanced interplanetary craft ever designed by the human race, launches from Earth on an expedition to Mars. The Tycho carries four passengers, soon to be the most famous people in human history. 

February 19, 2023: The Tycho loses all communication with Earth while orbiting Mars. After weeks of determined attempts to reestablish contact, the Tycho is declared lost. 

2027: Journalist Gabriel Southern receives a message from a mysterious caller: “Mars.” Ezekiel ben Zahav isn’t talking, but he wants Southern to accompany him for something– and he’s dangling enough money under his nose to make any amount of hardship worth it.  

SKYLIGHTS is the story of the second human expedition to Mars. Their mission: to find out what happened to the first.

Music Monday

Because I don’t seem to have blogs in me again today.  Enjoy some music.

In which I’ve been keeping secrets

Screen Shot 2015-01-12 at 22.14.14Periodically I do an experiment with book prices somewhere and don’t overly publicize it just to see what happens.  As it happens, Skylights has been on sale at Amazon for 40% off for close to a week now, and sometime late tonight before I go to bed I’ll roll it back to its regular $4.95 price.

But until then, if you haven’t picked it up yet, and a $2.99 price point appeals to you?  Go for it.

SKYLIGHTS gets a well-timed new #review

…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.

SKYLIGHTS: the inspiration

marte40_03Take a look at these two pictures.  Those are actual photographs from the surface of Mars of some curious features, dubbed the “seven sisters” or the “skylights.”

They are real.  They were discovered in 2007.  Six of the seven are so deep that we cannot see what is inside them at all.  The top picture was taken by a much higher-resolution camera, and ought to be clickable, and you will note that the inside of the skylight is black as hell.  There’s no light coming out of it at all, meaning two things: one, the inside is wider than the pit itself, and two, it’s so deep that no meaningful amount of light is bouncing in and then bouncing back out again so that we can see it.

sevensisters_stripThese features were discovered in 2007.  I found out about them through Warren Ellis, who posted them to his website, or maybe to his mailing list, and spent a moment musing that it would be a really cool story if someone wrote about what was inside of them.

Yeah, that’s a great idea, I thought, and waited for Warren to write it.  After all, science fiction is his thing, or one of them at least, and he’s one of my favorite writers.  Surely he’d come up with something really cool.

And I kept waiting.

And I kept waiting.

And he didn’t write the story.  And then my story for NaNoWriMo in 2008 fell apart at the last minute and the first chapter of Skylights just kind of wrote itself.

The skylights are real, guys.  The thing that I hide in them in Skylights is probably not real, but the inspiration for the story itself?  They’re still sitting there, out on Mars, so deep and so dark that no instrument we have– including the cameras we have orbiting the planet— can see inside them.

And I think that’s amazing.

And I hope you’ll like the book I wrote about what’s hiding in there.

SKYLIGHTS is available at Amazon here for $4.99.  Read the prologue in its entirety here.

On going blind for my art

So Skylights may, or may not, actually be available at this exact second on at least two major online retailers.  However, I’m going to be faintly ridiculous and ask anyone who was planning on buying it right away (hundreds of you, surely) to hold off until tomorrow– I’m in the “upload, download, look, find one more thing wrong, resubmit” phase of the damn book at the moment.  It will be perfectly clean by tomorrow morning and I think the latest version I’ve uploaded actually does qualify as up to my standards– but I can’t be sure until it publishes and I update the version on my Kindle.

I will post links early tomorrow morning to everything that’s live; I’m expecting Amazon and Smashwords, with the Smashwords-affiliated sites showing up once Smashwords completes its ridiculous vetting process.  I’ll link up to those as they appear.

(And, once those links do show up, I will love you forever if you share the hell out of them. But not quite yet.)

It’s interesting, this story.  I love the hell out of it, but I’m not sure it’s going to get the uniformly positive reaction that Benevolence Archives did.  I think reviews are going to be a little bit more mixed.  I’m really looking forward to seeing what people think about it.

But not until tomorrow.  🙂