Category: fiction

My short story “The Rats’ Man’s Lackey and the Bringer of Leaves” is in issue #33 of Pulphouse Magazine. I’m sharing the issue with folks like Kevin J. Anderson and Nina Kiriki Hoffman.

I’ve missed a couple episodes of “60 Seconds of WIP” because of the Kickstarter fulfillment, which is only a problem as I’ve fallen behind on my reading practice. So I recorded the opening of my story.

To save the sanity of us all, I learned how to capture a single frame of a video and make Youtube use it as a thumbnail. Otherwise, merely clicking on the link would show you my stupid face.

Grab Pulphouse #33 at your favorite bookstore.

There’s a brand new Fantasy Steampunk bundle, available only for another 11 days. It’s not only a really good deal, but it features the Prohibition Orcs novel Frozen Talons in the lowest tier!

This bundle is full of great stuff. Gleason, Pope, and Carriger and titans of steampunk. I read Kilgore and Sawyer quite regularly. Rusch’s magnificent Fey series is early steampunk. The other authors and editors, well, given by the company they’re in, I have high expectations for them all.

I’m gonna be egotistical and share a brand-new reader review on Frozen Talons:

If Tolkien’s elves went West to America, then eventually, the orcs would follow.

Michael takes that silly idea and weaves a sometimes funny, sometimes touching tale of how those poor orcs could survive in Detroit of the 1920s.

Being big and strong, they get manual labor jobs. Dirty work that nobody else wants to do.

And, given half a chance, they become what the Purple Gang only dreamed about- the best rum-runners in the mid-west.

The plots get complex. Unlike most fantasy stories, these orcs have real motivations, consistent behavior, and rich lives as they adapt to a world they never imagined.

And the orcs are likeable characters. Maybe not your first choice for a dinner companion, but characters you fall in love with and want to see succeed.

And they do succeed, but not the way you expect.

A couple folks have told me that Prohibition Orcs is not steampunk, but dieselpunk. They’re too early for dieselpunk. They’re too late for steampunk. There won’t be a ProhibitionPunk, however, because anyone who understands punk knows that Prohibition was arguably the most punk era of American history. The system failed people, so they did it themselves. There’s literal steam in the orc books, what with boilers and repurposed steam locomotives powering factories, along with giant mechanical systems and the general cleverness of steampunk, so I’m going to say they belong in steampunk as much as they belong anywhere. Perhaps with a bit more emphasis on the punk than the steam, however.

So grab the Storybundle while you can. A chunk of your purchase goes to help Girls On The Run.

The Prohibition Orcs Kickstarter offered a stretch goal of “I will write an orc baseball story.” The story went to backers at the end of December, and now I’m releasing it to the public. As with all my standalone short fiction, it’s exclusive to my store.

“Fair Balls” contains baseball! Found Meat! Pure orcish wisdom, shared beneath the Sun. All in the name of that darkest of arts: “reading.”

What’s a novelette? Too long to be a story, too short to be a novella. The weird midrange crap that trad publishers sneer at.

I’ve gotten half a dozen messages on various forums declaring that the xz backdoor is eerily reminiscent of a major plot element of $ git commit murder.

I’ve been a sysadmin for decades, and hanging around with operating system developers nearly as long. I came up with a plan for a “difficult but achievable” hack. I checked with various actual developers to see if it was realistic, and adjusted the hack based on their feedback.

Target a userland tool. Hook it into the operating system core. Proceed from there. The plan is easy, the execution fiercely difficult, the coincidence unsurprising.

I can say that if Dale had developed this hack, it would not have damaged the host’s ability to serve SSH requests. He would have caught that and fixed it before deployment.

I feel compelled to acknowledge this similarity, however. Coupon code xzhack gets you 50% off $ git commit murder and $ git sync murder at my store. This expires 8 April 2024.

To all the sysadmins who are having a bad weekend because of this hack, I offer my sincere condolences. Just because the blast missed me this time doesn’t mean I don’t feel your pain, or that I won’t be caught next time.

To the author of the hack I would like to say: you are a dick.

Did you miss the Prohibition Orcs Kickstarter–specifically, the orc-leather-cased exclusive omnibuses? I know many of you did. You told me about it. Bitterly and at length.

Orc leather? If you didn’t know — when an orc dies, their final gift to their clan is their remains. The clan uses every scrap, including the hide.

Penguicon, like all cons, is struggling to resurrect itself after the pandemic. That means money. They’re holding an auction to raise seed money. While their registration fees will cover the con expenses, that money arrives late. Hotel deposits must be paid early.

One of the items they’re auctioning off is that orc-leather-cased omnibus, complete with orcish tattoos.

I have a handful of these, which I ordered to cover shipping losses. They will appear on the market in charity auctions. Not before 2025, however. Probably not before 2026, when I (vaguely expect to) release the next Prohibition Orcs collection. That handful will be doled out over the rest of my misbegotten misspent life, wherever I think they can have the most impact.

The Orc-cased Orc Book is already listed, and other items are being added daily. The auction begins 28 November at 12AM, and runs until the 11:45 PM on 1 December. The con chair has donated handicrafts, there are cookies, there’s Etsy gift cards, books, all sorts of stuff.

Register early.

Bid orcishly.

Available exclusively on my bookstore for a paltry two bucks. Or free, if you’re a Patronizer.

“Someone in our household is practicing Christmas, and we will all be dead by midnight.”

Discover demons are real and, if you survive long enough, you might find supernatural Witness Protection. Stay alive by abandoning your life and your name and following Whackadoo Manor’s rules: no Vienna sausage, no Internet, no Bruce Willis movies or Swedish Modern furniture, and—no matter what—no holidays.

Even the strangest rules have reasons.

Reasons writ in blood.

Sometimes on gingerbread.

(I read a tidbit of this for 60 Minutes of WIP episode 13: The Only Right We Have.)

If someone had told me decades ago that there was a big market for “weird-ass Christmas tales,” my career would be entirely different.

I’m not running any Kickstarters right now, but I’m in two of them.

First off, there’s the inimitable ZZ Claybourne’s Breath, Warmth, and Dream campaign. Full disclosure: Zigs is a dear friend. We get barbecue, solve the world’s problems, and watch Star Trek. He’s also written several well-reviewed books. His new book is the best of them all. It’s a fantasy, complete in one book! I hesitate to call it a cozy, or low stakes, but this book makes one village the world and that world is in peril. A witch heroine as memorable as Granny Weatherwax or Baba Yaga, in a book with the sensibilities of the Seven Samurai.

But–at the next stretch goal, I have to do actual (ugh) work.

If you want to get a good book, and improve the odds of inconveniencing me, back ZZ’s campaign.

Then there’s the 2023 WMG Holiday Spectacular. I sold a story to the Hardboiled Holidays collection. It’s steeped in the bleak dystopia of December 1988, when the former head of the CIA won the US Presidency. $25 gets you a daily story, Thanksgiving through New Years’ Day, and next summer you’ll get a giant ebook collection of the whole thing. I’ll have a taste of my tale on the next 60 Seconds of WIP.

One of the fun things about the Holiday Spectacular is the mix of things you get. Romantic tales, fantasies, crime, whatever. Rusch’s editorial sensibilities lean heavily towards tales that end with “it was all worthwhile,” which isn’t quite the same as “it ends happily” but it’s a damn sight more comfortable than some of the “everybody dies and the holidays should be executed” holiday noir out there.

So, yeah. Throw these people some dough. You might even inconvenience me.

The Apocalypse Moi paperbacks for signing have arrived!

Hardcovers are being printed as I write this. According to the printer, that is. I have no independent verification.

If you chose the “All the Fiction” option, either in print or ebook, you have MORE ebooks. They’re waiting for you on BookFunnel. Go to my.bookfunnel.com and log in with the email address you provided in your survey. If you don’t have an account already, it will ask you to create one.

Why use Bookfunnel, rather than just send you ebook files? They can help you get files on your ereader, no matter what sort of weird device you have. They will keep the files for you, so when your computer catches fire you can recover them. Bookfunnel does not store any of your personal information; they make their money from me. (If you are one of those especially privacy-sensitive folks that doesn’t want accounts anywhere, I can send you a zip file of your ebooks on the condition that one–you don’t ask me to explain sideloading, and two–you back them up yourself.)

Thanks everyone. You will have books soon. I’m delighted so many folks supported this charming little apocalypse-laden book.

The official release date for Apocalypse Moi is 26 September 2023. If you want to get it from one of the big bookstores, you’ll have to wait. (I’ve been accused of hiding the big point, so: this collection contains a previously unpublished Prohibition Orcs tale.)

It’s already available at my ebookstore, though. If you believe that I’m deploying a sophisticated, subtle strategy to steer people to buying direct from me rather than via Amazon, you would be incorrect. It is neither sophisticated nor subtle.

Also, The Full Michael and the All The Novels and Collections bundles have been updated. The price of All the Novels and Collections has not changed: you now get four books free. The Full Michael has actually decreased in price, because buying Apocalypse Moi is less expensive than buying the chapbooks.

Some poor bastard who shall remain nameless bought The Full Michael five days ago, right before this came out. I sent him a copy of Apocalypse Moi because I’m not a monster. Okay, I’m not that kind of monster.

I’ve unpublished the assimilated chapbooks everywhere, reducing my maintenance load. Huzzah! The anthologies the other stories come from will remain in print, but maintaining them is not my dang problem so that’s fine.

And for the record, the branding on The Full Michael will remain until it ceases to amuse me.