On temporary and uncharacteristic bursts of optimism

On March 30, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Writing1 Comment

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I was entertained– this is genuine, I’m not trying to be passive-aggressive here– at how little attention my post about Sekiro got the other day. Clearly there isn’t a huge audience around here for wild technical musings about video games unless I’m complaining (complaining always gets attention). That said, we’re invoking the My Blog My Rules Goddammit covenant here, because my ass beat Genichiro Ashina earlier today, a feat that somehow only twenty-five percent of the players of this game have managed in the nine days since it came out, and I am damned proud of myself. So: booyah, motherfuckers.

ALSO! I have put new stuff on my Patreon twice in the last few days after ignoring it (and pausing charges to my Patrons; I don’t take your money if I don’t give you anything in return) for a couple of months. There have been two first chapters of old, abandoned projects put up– neither of those ever got finished, but if people like what they see in those first chapters, maybe I’ll revisit them. Remember, $2 a month gets you a whole book. We like books, right?

Today’s the first day of Spring Break, and while we don’t have any real plans for the week I have high hopes that I’ll get something done for the two conventions I’ll be going to this April– a new banner, at least, since the old ones are getting a little raggedy(*). I have been completely dry as far as writing fiction goes for all of 2019, basically, and dammit I’m gonna fix that this week. We’re gonna get something creative accomplished up in here if it kills me. And it’s not gonna kill me.

This is gonna be a big week, dammit. Big.

(*) ConGlomeration in Louisville, April 19-21, and LaffyCon in Lafayette on April 27 and 28. Are you near either of them? Come see me! I actually have some free tickets for LaffyCon, if anyone’s nearby and wants ’em.

Title!

On March 26, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Screen Shot 2019-03-26 at 7.00.49 PM This isn’t going to be a post about Avengers: Endgame— it’s not going to be a post about much of anything, to be completely honest– but I wanted to take a second and point out that Thor has two different colored eyes now, which I think is a nice touch. I had figured that Rocket giving him the prosthetic eye in Infinity War was a way to keep all of Chris Hemsworth’s(*) pretty face on screen at once and that they’d just decided not to worry about him losing an eye in Thor: Ragnarok, but apparently they haven’t completely forgotten about it.

I want lots of jokes from Rocket about stealing body parts in Endgame.

I haven’t mentioned it, but I’ve actually been on Sorta Spring Break for the last two days, the first two days of my son’s Spring Break, which I had to take off because as usual neither my wife nor I are very bright and we failed to secure alternate childcare. I’m back to work Wednesday through Friday and then I get my own Spring Break, and I’ll have him with me for all of that. Thus far, Spring Break 2019 has been … uninspiring. There’s been lots of The Amazing Adventures of Gumball and video games. We might go to the zoo a couple of times next week, which will be about as exciting as it gets. There will be reading; I haven’t read enough books in March so I need to get a good head start on April. Maybe even some writing if I get completely crazy, but don’t hold your breath.

There’s an actual post– with content! up on Patreon, for those of you for whom that is significant. Normally this is the part where I’d recommend you join us over there, but I haven’t been updating it much lately and frankly feel like I’ve been mistreating my Patrons. But there’s something new over there, and there will be at least two more posts before March is over. So if you’re already a Patron, go check that out, and maybe comment if the mood strikes you, and if you’re not … well, $2 a month still gets you a whole book. That’s not nothing, right?

(*) Whose name I originally rendered as “Hemingsworth,” because my brain’s a touch on the melty side at the moment, and which my spell checker caught and properly corrected. Which, honestly, weirds me out a bit.

In which I need to snap out of it (again)

On February 14, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

It is not, strictly speaking, especially necessary to take this post terribly seriously. This is one of those “get it out of my head and onto the page” things, and it’s not like I have the sense to make anything private, so y’all get to see it regardless.

I’ve been on a prolonged dry spell, fiction-wise, lately, and it has rolled through my head a few times in the last couple of weeks that it would literally take less than half an hour to utterly eliminate every trace of Luther Siler– remember, it’s a pseudonym– from the internet. It’s basically just a matter of deleting a bunch of social media accounts. I don’t think I’d be able to completely eliminate the books from Amazon since it would continue allowing used sales, but I could stop new sales.

And if I did that, I wouldn’t have to keep worrying about the goddamn sequel to Skylights, now, would I? Or feeling crap about the fact that I haven’t put anything useful on Patreon in weeks and those folks are sending me money.

Again, don’t take this seriously. The punch line is this shit isn’t even true– I wrote Skylights before I’d ever even imagined Luther Siler, and I’d been thinking about the fucking sequel for years before this blog even got started. So this goddamn thing is going to be hovering over my head until I write it or die, whichever comes first. I could 86 my Luther Siler identity tonight and I’d still be kvetching about this damn book in a month.

I dunno. This is how I work; I have prolonged periods of Nothing and then a switch in my brain will flip and I’ll write two books in three months. I was hoping that the pressure of the Patreon would get me better at reliably producing short fiction but apparently ha ha ha I’ll just take your money is winning instead. I mean, there’s a whole book on there, so it’s not like it’s a worthless investment, but I want regular new shit, and right now I’m not producing regular new shit.

Baaah. Need to kick this and get back on the horse. Just gotta figure out how.

In which I ask the hivemind

On December 7, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

I need some more conventions, y’all. Right now I think the next con I’m actually signed up to attend is the next Indy Pop Con in June. I’m registered for Kokomo-Con again. And … I think that’s it? I’ve had a little bit of a run of being turned down by juried cons (I tried to get into both ConFusion in Detroit this January and a February comic convention) and I’ve decided to not apply to the Fort Wayne PopCon in between Christmas and New Year’s, mostly because … well, it’s between Christmas and New Year’s, and it’s a first-year con, and that strikes me as vaguely insane. I hope they’re successful, don’t get me wrong, and if they are I’ll be there next year, but they’re charging PopCon prices for what I’m pretty certain isn’t gonna be close to PopCon attendance and right now it’s not worth the risk.

Plus, well, check the posts at the end of December around here for any of the last six years. The weather tends to not lend itself to long road trips.

So. Anyway. If you happen to know of any science fiction conventions, comic book shows, or genre/author events in the next six months within, say, a three- or four- hour drive of northern Indiana, let me know. I’m looking at one in Louisville over Easter weekend, too, but it’s over Easter, which has its own set of complications to it.

I’ve finished a story over at Patreon, called The Caretaker, and I’m really fond of it. The story is posted in five parts and in first-draft form (I literally wrote it straight into the Patreon website; it’s not copy-pasted) and it will be posted again in .mobi and .epub form once it’s cleaned up a touch, but I like it and I think you will too. Just $1 a month gets you access to a bunch of microfictions and three or four short stories, and $2 a month gets you an entire exclusive novel. Next Patron is #15! That’s a great number! Join us!

Two weeks to winter break, y’all. There will be Christmas shopping this weekend. I can do this.

In which I read locally

On December 1, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

It’s kinda always the same booth picture, at this point; only the number of books I have on display changes. I decided not to bring Searching for Malumba with me for this one, because despite the fact that every kid mentioned in the book is college-aged now (and I don’t use anyone’s real name) I still feel like keeping it from spreading too far out in the town I live and work in isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And I sold more than enough books to make a nice little profit on 3 hours of sitting in my free booth.

I can stand to do more free author events, frankly.

An interesting fact: after a couple of years of doing sci-fi and comic book cons, my last two events have both been specifically author events, and at both of them I’ve had more titles available than anyone in the room. It was especially apparent at this one– there was no one else there who I saw who had more than three, and most people there had only one or two books. The really weird part to me was the number of people who, upon being told that my first book came out in 2014, expressed surprise at how I’d been able to write so fast as to have all those books out already.

And it’s like, damn, folks, I am slow. I regularly go weeks without writing a word of fiction, because for whatever reason shit has to be straight in my head before it gets set down on paper. How long have I been saying that the Skylights sequel is my next book, for God’s sake? Hell, how many entire other books have I written while telling people that the Skylights sequel was next? And yet I’m sitting there with twice as many books in front of me as anyone in the room, and I’m visibly one of the younger authors there, too.

Things I need to do before my next show: I need some sort of thick cardstock-printed price placards to put in each of the front-facing books, preferably with some sort of “Like Lovecraft? You’ll love Balremesh!” or “Like Scalzi? You’ll love Skylights!” text on them. I also need a new banner or two, preferably something that folds down into its own stand, because my Skylights banner is starting to lean in a way that I don’t understand and can’t fix. And my front-of-table banner (not used at this show) can probably stand to be updated, too. No one knows what Prostetnic Publications is anyway so I need something other than just the logo. I’m gonna have a lot to do over winter break, I think.

I’ve got some time to worry about it, because right now I’m not signed up for anything else until next summer. I tried to get into ConFusion, which is in January in Detroit, which was a communication clusterfuck so bad that by the time they told me I hadn’t passed the jury stage of things I didn’t even want to go any longer, and I found out about the Northwest Indiana Comic-Con, which is a one-day thing in February, but they were closed by the time I got to them too. So if you hear about anything in the next couple of months, let me know, ‘k? I don’t wanna wait six months until my next show.

I’ve picked up three new Patrons over the last week or so, and just added a $100 goal to the site. I’m getting close enough to the $50/month target that I can sorta see it from where we are, so I feel like a little more pushing and we might hit that, especially since I seem to be on a bit of a roll lately. Remember, anyone pledging more than $2/month gets a new novel immediately, and I’m adding new content all the time– I’ve been working on a new short story over there, The Caretaker, that I ought to be finishing this weekend sometime. It’s becoming a better deal all the time! Join us!

Holiday weekend Patreon promotion

On November 24, 2018 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.

CLICK finally exists on Goodreads!

On November 4, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

Click ebook cover I finally got off my rather exceptionally lazy butt and created a Goodreads page for CLICK, which you might recall is my most recent novel. If you’ve read it, and you’re inclined to add it to some bookshelves or (please? PLEASE?) review it, now you have somewhere to do that!

If you want to read it, there are two ways to get ahold of a copy– the first way is to support me on Patreon at the $2/month tier or higher, which gets you an ebook version, and the second way is to buy it directly from me at a convention or author event. Have I mentioned where I’ll be next weekend?

CLICK WILL be at KOKOMO-CON!

On October 5, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Click print cover con exclusive

I have thrown both caution and financial security to the wind– screw it, I got me a decent-paying job now, I can do that once in a while– and paid through the nose for both rush printing and rush shipping, but: barring an act of God or nature, I will have copies of CLICK available for purchase at Kokomo-Con next Saturday. I just got my booth, too– I’ll be in Booth #44, which looks like a pretty good spot, on a corner not far from the main entrance.

Remember, there are only two ways to buy CLICK right now: first, by buying it directly from me at a convention, or second, by supporting me on Patreon at the $2 a month tier (“Grond’s Chess Buddies”) or higher. Kokomo-Con was a blast last year; it’s a smaller, one-day con and probably one of my favorite convention experiences I’ve had so far. Come out and see me!