Hello. Welcome to Sixty Seconds of WIP. I’m Michael Warren Lucas. Today is (11 June 2024). I’m in the last week of my anthology submission binge, working on a new Rats’ Man’s Lackey tale, but it’s going to trad pub so I can’t share tidbits. The Rats’ Man’s Lackey tales could be described as “Jason Bourne living in Supernatural Witness Protection.” Here’s a snippet from the first one, The Rats’ Man’s Lackey and the Half Gallon of Christmas Miracle.
Getting from my attic room to the boss’ sanctum meant lowering the ladder, avoiding Magrat the Mayhem Maid as she “cleaned” the third floor, taking either the narrow twisty servants’ staircase with its they’re-not-ghosts or the main stairs with the now-those-are-ghosts, through the gallery of I’m-telling-you-those-are-paintings-not-real-people, down the freakishly wide spiral staircase that escaped from a 1950s Hollywood spectacle, and crossing the main hall.
That marble floor’s tried to murder me twice.
The second time, with a knife.
Until recently, I didn’t believe in any of this tripe. Today, I didn’t want to bother with it.
A December morning sun poured over the oaks and maples surrounding the manor. It was just warm enough for this Northern boy to have the window cracked, but cool enough you might think winter would decide to fire a blizzard across Georgia just for funsies. A perfect day to climb down the trellis.
Episode 52? One year’s worth of this daftness? I suspect most podcasters come to their senses well before this. Is anyone actually listening to this drivel?
(This post went to Patronizers at the beginning of June, and the public at the beginning of July.)
“The deck is clear, projects are ready to go, I’m ready to WRITE!”
One lovely Friday night in May, She Who Must Be Obeyed finished teaching for the summer. The following Sunday, at five AM, she broke her leg.
You look alarmed, so I’ll say now: she will fully recover.
The next couple weeks were a blur. The third week, where she could take care of herself enough that I could do some work, are also a blur–but mostly because I was doing tech edits on Run Your Own Mail Server. The Kickstarter was scheduled to start on 20 May, and I had invested a bunch of energy in shilling it, so I didn’t want to push it back, but my stupid conscience demanded I have the book in copyedit before launching the Kickstarter. Why would I launch a Kickstarter on a book I’m not ready to deliver? I also had to finish writing two four-hour courses, one on email and one on TLS, for BSDCan. So, I launched the Kickstarter and got ready for BSDCan.
You remember my last Sausage post? Where I said I thought that the direct market for RYOMS was exhausted? I hoped I might gross seven, maybe ten thousand?
I was wrong.
So very wrong.
This is insane
And the dang thing isn’t over! I’m going to be shipping over 500 books. I might need to buy help doing that, particularly for the drop-shipped copies. Despite that complaint, you’d be helping me out if you’d share the campaign.
Part of the reason I set the Kickstarter to run over BSDCan was that I was teaching about email, and wanted to mention that the Kickstarter existed. I thought it might sell a couple more books. Also, I thought that if I was busy being the BSDCan con chair, I couldn’t spend my days obsessively reloading the Kickstarter page to see if anyone bid. The con chair role mainly consisted of pointing at volunteers and saying “You. You are empowered to make this Thing happen. Go. Do.” Plus, I’d deal with any last-minute disasters.
You ever start a week-long con exhausted? Because I sure did. It was a loooong week. Fortunately, SWMBO was more able to care for herself, so I was able to go at all. (If I hadn’t been chair, I would have canceled.)
So, yeah. Very few new words this month, and those all on polishing RYOMS. I hope to change that this month.
The eight hour drive home from BSDCan gave me time to ponder the world and my place in it. One thing I’ve been contemplating is my Patronizer rewards. The video hangout tier was popular during the covid lockdown. We still have covid, but we’re not in lockdown. I often start the video hangout and nobody shows up.
I’m contemplating dropping the monthly video hangout, replacing it with a quarterly all-Patronizer hangout: two in my morning, and two in my evening. That would give everyone a chance to show up.
I would replace the Monthly Video Hangout tier with a private chat. I would check the chat at least 2-3 times a week. The question is, what platform? Signal would be preferable, but its anonymity means it doesn’t integrate well with Patreon or Woocommerce. I’m familiar with Slack. Matrix and Discord annoy me. The catch would be, I’d demand that such a chat be family-friendly. Perhaps Addams Family friendly, but family friendly. That means moderation. I don’t know if I want to do that labor.
So, pondering. Video hangout subscribers, I’m open to your thoughts.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for RYOMS to return from copyedit. While books like SNMP Mastery covered complex material, that material could easily be chunked. It’s the most complex and interrelated book I’ve ever written. It does not break into chunks. Everything depends on everything. That meant painstaking interleaving of information, in a weird order that looks clunky but is the only way to approach the material. There’s reasons nobody else wrote this book. I have several outstanding anthology invitations, so I’m gonna break up my mental logjam and write some short fiction for a little bit. My brain is tired after the last few months.
I’m looking at the RYOMS Kickstarter and thinking I should do that revision of Networking for System Administrators I’ve been pondering. The cover art will need mushrooms, however.
Before then, though, I’ll launch Dear Abyss. Which might make two grand, if I’m very lucky. A collection of previously published honest advice columns is of much less interest than running a mail server. Even if “honest” means “bitter and cynical.” We’re talking sysadmin stuff, after all.
Sorry for the dearth of news, but it’s been a crap month. Do let me know what you think about the chat thing, however.
I’m working on a new Aidan Redding story, but can’t share any of it yet. Contract terms, y’know. I can say it’s a Class D universe tale, however, which I haven’t done before. I needed to skim some of Aidan’s earlier adventures, so here’s a snippet from Drinking Heavy Water.
The engulfing darkness made every sound more obvious. Chevy’s breath wasn’t loud, but I could tell it was deep and thorough. “Your President wants to stop selling tritium to Texas. We need that energy. If I can stop this, I must.”
I said, “Even if Soviet Texas did okay without it, Kendall has thirty other countries on this list. Someone’s going to react badly.”
Gunfire said, “I’m sure Nirvana is on it.”
“Them. Seattle Sacred. Fearless.” Any nation on Kendall’s list might respond with nukes, or bioweapons, or nanotech. Everybody knew how to build doomsday weapons. Maybe they’d strike Montague facilities across the world, or long-loathed neighbors. Civilization only endures if everyone has equal access to it. We all fly together, or a handful soar until they crash.
The “We Get Letters” column of the FreeBSD Journal is my opportunity to subtweet the Sysadmin Discourse of the Day. There’s far more than one Discourse between issues but let’s be real, most of the discourse isn’t worthy of discussion.
Anyway, I talk configuration management in the newest issue. My column appears first in the magazine, which I’m certain means something. Probably that the editor has been kidnapped and he’s asking his friends to rescue him, but that specifically excludes me so it’s not my problem.
If you like the column, you might grab the Letters to Ed(1) collection, containing the first three years of these columns. It will go out of print soon, because I’ll be publishing the Dear Abyss collection of years 1-6. But hey! Letters to Ed(1) will become a collectors item!
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.
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.
I’m fighting with the Kickstarter web interface to fulfill the Run Your Own Mail Server campaign and trying to get Dear Abyss ready for launch, so here’s a chunk of an advice column.
All three regular readers of this column appear to be drawn by the pleasure of watching my childish behavior when confronted with the tedious duty of writing said column. While “you insulted me in the first three words of your greeting” is a feeble justification for breaking into your systems and converting them to global-warming-accelerating SkunkCoin miners, I’m willing to make it work.
Because that’s what’s sysadmins do. We make things work.
Even bad things.
Software vendors insist on developing new bad things and cramming them down gullets already obscenely bloated with horrendous badness. Systems administrators stagger through the endless hours of their brief years struggling to live beneath tremendous loads of badness smelted from software like arsenic from arsenopyrite. The inherent insecurity of absolutely everything enhances this burden like a beached, deceased whale enhances an oil spill.
The urge to retreat into malaise is a natural human reaction.
I’m mostly resting this week because I’m taking vacation after BSDCan and the Kickstarter of WTF. Not sure which was more exhausting. The new Steampunk Fantasy Storybundle just launched, though, and it includes my Prohibition Orcs novel Frozen Talons, so here’s a sweet little old lady forging a weapon out of her dead husband’s bones.
The grooms’ quarters was too cramped for bone-melding, but Mha made it work. Bone-melding should be done beneath the open sky. It should be done at a roaring fire built up from entire trees torn from the soil and the bones of slain enemies, witnessed by the clan. She had a tiny stove heated until it gleamed in her night-sight even through the sunlight drifting through the high narrow windows.
And all the orcs she knew witnessed from gleaming eye sockets.
She had feared she had forgotten the rites, but her ragged voice recalled the words and her age-bent hands remembered the motions, the gestures, the twist of bone against bone until they caught one another and bound harder than iron. The comforting smells of scorched bone and burned blood and viscous sweat filled the air.
That orc’s thighbones were not long enough, so she added the shin bones. The smaller calf bones went on the side, to give the shaft a sharper shape so her feeble hands wouldn’t slip. Not that a properly bone-melded shaft could slip in its maker’s grip. The kneecaps, worn to smoothness by decades of joyful life, nestled together perfectly on the bottom as a base.
