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22: Sugarplum is a Lying Bastard

Ah, US Thanksgiving. The start of the You Will Love Christmas Forced Death March. If you own the proper sunglasses you can see that all the billboards are actually white, with messages in big black letters like BE JOLLY and CELEBRATE. Don’t wear the glasses too long, you’ll get a headache.

Today’s snippet is from “Heart of Coal,” a Christmas tale that will be on my short fiction bookstore next month.

They sent me to Wrapping, where I proved that I had failed art honestly. Bakery? Airborne flour makes me sneeze. The second time you snot a hundred-pound batch of sugar cookie dough, the head pastry chef gives you the boot. A kind boot, with love and support and a sincere hope for your magnificent future, plus an amazing thick-frosted cinnamon roll, but: the boot.

Logistics, Mechanical, Housekeeping. Fail fail fail. Everywhere I went I tried to fit in, to contribute, but—look, I was the only one in the whole damned place who knew how to swear.

As far as the reindeer groom gig went, I did not throw that first turd. Sugarplum is a lying bastard.

My parents didn’t name me Sack thinking I’d get fired from every role in the Workshop. But it was convenient.

I have another new Christmas short tale at tiltedwindmillpress.com right now, and a story in WMG’s Holiday Spectacular that you can still subscribe to–a story every day, Thanksgiving to New Years’.

It’s a great year for MWL Christmas tales. Which is a good thing, if orders to LOVE CANNED CRANBERRY SAUCE are not your thing.

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Penguicon fundraiser, featuring Orc-Cased Orcs

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.

21: The Man Will Be Wrong

I offered an orc baseball story as a stretch goal for last year’s two-book Prohibition Orcs kickstarter. I really need to get the dang thing done, so I’m trying to drag it to completion this week.

Dad spoke of men. Before they had gone to the first school, Dad had instructed them every day until Ivan and Oscar could both chant his orders perfectly. Even now that they were grown orcs, old enough to claim work or a wife or attend reading school, he invited them to chant with him. When a man shouts orc, do not meet his eyes. He will have you killed. One man you can flee, but a gang will call others. Follow his demands until you can leave. Do not show tusks, not even the Lesser. The man will be wrong. Do not argue. When the man finishes his babble, walk away slowly. If the man claims your life, claim theirs first.

Ivan hated that wisdom, but orcs who ignored it died. One man treated Dad as an equal, but that man’s own needs had driven him to it. For all other men, even Dad looked away.

Unless he intended to kill.

If you’re interested in the earlier orc books, you can get a bundle that includes the exclusive orc cookbook at tiltedwindmillpress.com.

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Why My Short Fiction Is Exclusively In My Store

You might have noticed that I’ve stopped publishing my shorter fiction on third-party bookstores like Amazon and Kobo and whatnot. If it’s not credibly a novel by historical standards1, it’s in my store. If you’re unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity when someone asks me about my business model, I make a lot of noise about the importance of having your work available on every platform. Why would I break my own rule? Because I’m okay with exclusivity, so long as it’s mine.

My short stories have a publication life cycle. The good ones I publish as stand-alone chapbooks. (The bad ones get thrown in the Pit, where the stronger devour the weaker. It’s not nice, but go ask David Attenborough how nature works.) When I have enough stories on a theme, I gather them into a collection, Kickstart it, and unpublish the chapbooks. Publishing a title on every retailer takes about four to five hours. Unpublishing takes about the same, because while unpublishing requires less information, interfaces optimized for offering something to the world are often anti-optimized for undoing that. I have to expect to make a few hundred bucks to be worth the time.

As I’ve discussed earlier, Amazon penalizes pricing books outside the $2.99-$9.99 range. I’ve been forced to price my short stories at $2.99, even though I think $1.99 is a more fair price. I carried that price across all platforms. For years people bought them at that price, until suddenly they stopped.

I had no idea why they stopped. It’s not like I can reach out to people who buy through Amazon.

But after this had gone on for a while, I asked a couple folks who signed up for my Patronizer program. (It’s Patreon, except you can use either Patreon proper or go direct with me.) Every one of them gave me the same answer: “I used to buy your stories, but now I send you money every month and get them for free.”

Obvious, really. I have successfully disintermediated many of my short fiction readers! Yay me!

That’s old readers, though. But what about discoverability? Having more work in a bookstore prioritizes you in their algorithm. My fiction career is not as strong as my nonfiction career, surely I need all the help I can get. Uh… have you looked at my fiction name over at Amazon? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Supposedly the more titles you have, the more likely it is that the Almighty Algorithm will bless you with virality. I do not chase algorithms, because The Algorithm giveth and The Algorithm taketh away. Yes, this business requires luck–but I prefer relying on the kind of luck that looks a lot like hard work, and relying on goals rather than dreams (a topic I discuss in unreasonable depth in Domesticate Your Badgers.)

Having short stories exclusively on my bookstore lets me price them at $1.99. I think that’s a fair price. After fees I make about $1.60 on each sale, which beats the heck out of Amazon’s ~$0.65 for a $1.99 tale. I no longer lose a full day on the publishing/unpublishing cycle. I’ll still publish full-length books everywhere that offers a reasonable contract, but the short stories will stay with me for now.

The new story’s on my bookstore. Imagine Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, but it’s weird modern fantasy. I have almost enough of these tales to Kickstart a collection, but many of them are sitting in various trad pub channels awaiting rejection.

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New Christmas story: “The Rats’ Man’s Lackey and the Forbidden Tinsel”

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.

20: The More Obscure Additional Protocols of the Geneva Convention

Trying to get this dang book done, so pushing forward.

If I receive another email from a particular recruiting firm offering me the magnificent opportunity of a position as an entry level help desk flunky I will violate several state laws, many national ones, and a few of the more obscure Additional Protocols of the Geneva Convention. I would prefer to avoid spending my so-called “retirement” “savings” on a criminal defense attorney desperate enough to take my case, so prudence suggests I avoid the entire problem and block their email at the MTA level.

Blocking email is tricky. You can block by domain, but domains are cheap and forgeable. You can dig into SPF records, but they’re even less expensive to alter. You can scour mail headers for items to block on, but that’s all ephemeral. Still, some days it’s a choice between making the attempt and accumulating legal bills.

I can see the end from here, so if you felt like sponsoring you should do so soon.

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My new “FreeBSD Journal” column has escaped

Once again, the FreeBSD Journal requested that I discuss the ports and packages system. While this is a FreeBSD-specific publication, my comments are true of any BSD. Or Linux. Or operating system.

I’d advise you to avoid the cooties, but if you’re reading this it’s almost certainly too late.

If you want to hear me read a specific part of this, you’re out of luck. Unless you want the one minute’s worth that previously appeared in my podcast.

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October’s Ornery Sausage

(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of October, and the public at the beginning of November.)

If you’re in a country that has Halloween, you need to read A Night In The Lonesome October. It has thirty-one chapters, one for each day of October, and that’s how you’re supposed to read it. If you’re starting late you can catch up, but after that? One chapter a day. This isn’t a recommendation, it’s full-on necessary.

Anyway. Writing.

Run Your Own Mail Server grinds on. I’m digging through decades of recommendations and worst practices disguised as wisdom and general daftness as people fought to keep email useful despite the spammers. The problem is, email runs as default permit. On the list of Dumbest Ideas In Computer Security from twenty years ago, default permit was number one. Stopping spam relies on enumerating badness, which is number two on that same list. Really, we need to educate our users on spam–no, wait, “educating users” is number three on the list.

Yet the world is built on email. Could we design better? Sure. Are we going to? No. Eventually the Email Empire will declare supremacy and lock everyone else out. Stray email servers will become like the Fediverse, cool but for a limited userbase.

But not today. Not in the next decade.

But I’ve progressed to writing about SPF, which will let me get on DKIM and DMARC, so that’s good.

In other news, the Writing Chariot has been surpassed. Posting the pictures led a couple folks to point out Arkon mounting brackets. These are ridiculously heavy-duty devices used in manufacturing and industrial environments, when your devices absolutely must not slip. I’ve wound up with this.

My hands don’t quite hang at my sides. They’re slightly forward. But it’s close to what I want. Writing this post, I realize that what I need are a couple of adapters to swing them a little further out from the desk and let me adjust the angle slightly. I ran off to order them and will post updated pics next month.

I got the Apocalypse Moi print proofs in the mail. Of all the stock art covers I have designed for my fiction, this is the first one I am pleased with. Cover design is a subtle art. The difference between “yeah okay” and “hell yes” is subtle, and I do not yet understand the subtlety. But every cover I design teaches me a little more.

I got an invite to submit to a couple of seasonal anthologies, which is cool. I’ll have at least two holiday stories out this year. If I had known twenty years ago that there was a market for grimdark Christmas my career would look very different, but whatever.

My experimental podcast, 60 Seconds of WIP, seems to be gathering traction. I’ve gotten it on Spotify and Apple. I’ve gotten it tweaked down to the point where recording each episode takes less than fifteen minutes. As should have been blatantly obvious but I completely failed to predict, the most common feedback I get is “where can I buy this?” I’m wondering if I should start a “60 Seconds of Book” podcast where I read a chunk of one of my books that folks can buy. Not sure if it’s worthwhile or if it’s mere arrogance. All marketing is arrogance, but not all arrogance is marketing. Figuring out where each arrogance fits in, now that’s the trick.

And that is why I loathe marketing. When you have even three or four people who keep telling they love your work, it’s easy to lose your humility. And I must always remember, I’m just a little shmuck writing little books that affect a tiny number of people, and that I’m lucky to have this gig.

Feeling overloaded these days. Opportunities are everywhere. My only limit is my ability to produce words, which is sadly limited by my 56-year-old meatsuit and the realities of living in a country whose guiding philosophies have grown disconnected from basic principles like gravity and the nitrogen cycle and the greenhouse effect. But I’ll keep plugging away as best I can.

Onward!

19: Accidental Deployments

I’ve been trying to focus on Run Your Own Mail Server throughout October, and making some progress.

Greylisting is a divisive technique. The first time a site mails your server, greylisting delays messages from ten minutes to a couple hours. If people in your organization insist that email is instantaneous despite all evidence to the contrary, that’s a problem. If some web site uses email to send authentication codes that are valid for only ten minutes, that’s an problem. (The problem is that the web site is delivering ephemeral data via an unsuitable protocol but still, you must cope with it.) Some domains use large server farms of MTAs, and resend attempts almost never come from the same IP address. That’s definitely a problem.

One fun thing about greylisting is that you might accidentally deploy it. Postscreen’s deep inspection functions are not deliberate greylisting, but the effects are indistinguishable from greylisting.

I’m still offering sponsorships for RYOMS. But I’ll be offering them next week also. There’s no rush.