Merger of Evil

ICON 48 Retrospective

2023-10-17T05:00:00Z

I got back from this year's ICON 48 in Cedar Rapids, and it was definitely an experience but not that much of an adventure this year. A lot of it was the result of the previous weekend, when we went up to the cabin, a lack of child watching (usually the children's grandmother watches them but she was exhausted), and Partner getting “peopled out.”

In the end, I tried to do too much and didn't really excel at most of them.

Dealer Hall

Like most years, I had a table in the dealer call for Typewriter Press. This year, I had eighteen books available, fifteen were on display (the others were a selection of erotic sci-fi/fantasy I've read during previous Late Night Erotic Reading sessions).

Sales were not good: I sold a single $5 book.

It was a nice table and I was happy with the result, there were just a few things that went wrong. For starters, ICON is still a relatively small circle of people (only a couple hundred), so most of them have seen most of my books already. The new ones, Flight of the Scions didn't draw folks in, nor did Shannon's Merger of Evil.

It was also one of ICON's low attendance years. I'm guessing less than a hundred people, which makes it hard to sell since those who do come are already dedicated to the convention and… have seen everything Shannon and I have to offer.

This was also a bummer because I thought my packing and setup was pretty good, though I didn't get a proper price sheet written out so I wrote one by hand. Maybe next time.

Panels

All of my panels were on Saturday and that is where things got a little scattered. Because of a production issue, I had limited time to set up on Friday. On Saturday, I brought Child.0 with me but the consuite and gaming rooms didn't open until 10:00 (usually they are open all night). Not to mention, this was Child.0's first “full” convention so I walked them through the various places and tried to get them situated.

This meant I completely forgot about my first panel and blew it off. Which is a major bummer because being late sets off my anxiety (third major trigger) and I don't like fulfilling my obligations. Not to mention, I really wanted to talk about Writing Space Epics because it is a topic I enjoy (though most of my readers know me for Fedran, not sci-fi writing).

The second panel was an author reading.

No one showed up.

Well, the other author did, but no one else. I spent an hour talking to Bob J. Koester about his audio books and podcasts, random topics, and basically chatting until the next authors showed up and I talked to them for a while (and realized I had to buy their books) before finding Child.0.

The third panel was the one that finally was successful. Character Development for Aspiring Authors was pretty good. I didn't realize I was moderator at first (they didn't have programs available and the Google Doc for the schedule didn't have those details) but I like moderating panels and did so. It was a lot of fun to talk about different ways to approach building characters and I had fun.

The fourth and final panel was Writing Collaboratively, which also went well. I've done a lot of commissioned writing, writing one-on-one adventures for games (some of which were novel length), and a variety of that. My experiences were much different than the other panelists but I thought it was fairly balanced and there were plenty of questions.

There could have been a fifth one, Late Night Erotic Reading, but since I dropped out of Facebook, the folks setting it up thought I had disappeared off the planet. I do like to find strange submissions (there is always a Tingler being read, not to mention silly and serious pieces), so I just have a lot of fun doing it. But, because I disappeared, I wasn't invited and I had a thirteen year old so… I had to skip it. Maybe next year?

I also still want to resurrect Mickey's writing workshop. She was a mentor for me, though she probably didn't think so, and helped me a lot with my writing and craft. It was also a fantastic two hours of doing a deep dive critique of stories and it helped me a lot. I can't cover the full range of experiences she had, but I feel that I can be helpful to others get to at least my level and maybe push them above me. I've been talking about it for a few years, but I need Mindbridge to help which means I need to actually talk to them long before the next convention.

Child.0

Instead of listening to snippets of porn, I ended up playing with Child.0's first Dungeons and Dragons game instead. It was a pick up game but I wanted their first attempt to not have me as a dungeon master. The fact it was a Minecraft-based adventure and the entire party was a pyromancer in some regard, it ended up being a game of “burn it all down” but there was also remarkably a large amount of peaceful options gone.

And apparently “let's walk the courtyard to get a lay of the land and make sure there are no surprised” was completely foreign to everyone. (In other words, everyone played their WIS attribute perfectly.)

It was a lot of fun and both Child.0 and Child.1 want to try it again.

Also, checking on Child.0 meant I abandoned my dealer table frequently which may have contributed to the lack of sales, but I have a pretty good priority system and Zero's care is higher than making a few bucks.

Child.1

On Sunday, Child.0 decided to sleep in, so I brought Child.1 (age eight). Now, One is a lot more effort to watch than Zero, so I wasn't really able pay attention to the table either. So, we played video games, checked out things, and bought way too much.

Also, because One takes a little longer to get going (and I had the dealer's table), I missed the benefactor's brunch and a chance to fan-squeal over the guests of honor.

Partner

At the middle of Sunday, Partner came and we got a few hours of strolling around and being together. It was nice, because they also helped tear down the table and get everything packed up, all for the price of five sushi trays.

Next Year

This year, I had conflicts of interest: my family, the panels, and capitalism. I don't like the conflict, but I was already committed to the dealer hall and the panels, but the children took priority.

Next year, I need to remove at least one so I'm not going to do the dealer hall and just focus on the kids and panels because Zero and One are both at an age where I can leave them alone for an hour to do the panel but I can't leave them alone for six to man a table. Not to mention, it cost me $55 to make a profit of less than a dollar (after printing costs and royalties).

August in a Nutshell

2022-08-27T05:00:00Z

The last few weeks of August have been very busy, both in terms of obligations, deadlines, and events of note. Some of them are negative while others are positive, so give me a chance to tell how my month has been going.

The Trip

The month started with a trip to the family cabin. It was about ten days, mainly because Partner had things going on and was unable to attend (various reasons of their own, I don't force them to come to my family events). It ended up being ten days and fourteen hours of driving (I do not like driving long distance, period).

My younger brother did a lot to spruce up the cabin and he brought the results of his multi-year project: a boat he had been restoring that my father had helped build. It was cool and nice to see a slice of my childhood in the water again.

I didn't get on it. Not that I didn't want to, it just didn't work out. The younger cousins (my kids and his kids) were having fun with rafting and water skiing. That meant I was well suited for jumping into the water around the dock and occupying them as they took turns, helping guide the boat into position, and assisting in my kids (who don't know how to swim as well as his).

I still had a ball. I like visiting family, seeing my brother, and just remaining in contact since I'm really terrible at initiating conversation outside of those events.

Broadband

One of the projects I started in August of last year was trying to get broadband into the cabin. The city had a large-scale installation and we got free installation of fiber (about twice as fast as I have at home). It was pretty much installed a year to the week, which worked out because my company stopped providing an access point and my phone doesn't work that far north†.

Having that there means that there is a better chance I can have a “writing weekend” where I got up for a couple of days of writing and work since everything I do is remote. I just have to get a better monitor/keyboard set up there.

Still, when it comes to reducing the chaos in my life, this was something that was hanging over me as one more item in the entanglement.

† T-Mobile started saying “99% coverage of the population” which is a lot more accurate because 99% of 329.5 million is still missing out on 3.3 million people. As such, that is Verizon territory and my phone pretty much craps out the second I hit the interstate. (I won't buy non-GSM phones and Verizon screwed me over more than once because I hold onto phones for about a decade before buying a new one.)

Flood Five

Now, I wouldn't be mentioning the entanglement if there wasn't something that went wrong. When I came home and went into my basement office, I could smell moisture. That is rarely a good sign and something that is quickly triggering PTSD.

Apparently, there was a major rain while I was gone and the sump pump had died so the entire basement flooded. Every scrap of carpet, soaked drywall, and ruined boxes were laid out for me to manage. Today, I got all of the carpet and padding out and into the garage; I'm planning on getting a dumpster in late October to get rid of it along with the rotted wood from the shelves and furniture and everything else that needs to get tossed.

One thing I find fascinating is that of all the six floods I've had in the basement (first one didn't really count since that was the week I moved in), they have all had entire different sources:

Flood Zero: Water main cracked
Flood One: Derecho in 2020
Flood Two: Cracked pipe inside the slab
Flood Three: Refrigerator water line snapped
Flood Four: Mother's Day toilet explosion
Flood Five: Sump pump

Floods two through five have all happened in the last twelve months. The end result is that I used to have a finished basement. At this point, I think the entire thing has been gutted enough to consider it no longer finished.

With best estimates, I figured I'll get it back to speed in five to ten years. I'm still working in the basement, I just have everything on naked concrete.

Surgery

In 2020, I caught Covid. I suspect twice, once in February since I had all the symptoms and then in November where I had all the symptoms but even worse. During the first one, I coughed so hard I hurt myself but it was a minor hernia so the doctor's dismissed it (probably because I'm fat) until it became obvious that it was steadily getting worse.

Fast foward to July: that is when we can change our benefits at work. I switched from high-deductible to PPO and then got the doctor to look at it with something more than “well, that looks painful, so how is everything else?”

Next week, I get surgery to fix that and I have so much hopes that it will handle the nigh continuous pain I've been in for the last four months. Given that I'm hypersensitive to input, that has been a distraction for almost everything I do and prevented me from sleeping well.

Of course, I have to get through the pre-op exam, the pre-pre-op tests, the pre-op phone call, and the pre-op billing statement first.

This also put a knife edge on the deadline for the carpet removal from the flooding since I won't be able to pick up anything heavy for a while. Wet carpet is not… light. Nor is moving water-logged furniture.

Allegro

A while ago, I contributed to a fund-raiser to send some writers to Clarion. Call it a wish fulfillment since I won't be able to go myself. One of the rewards was having another author read a book (or a chance to play with an AI novel writing tool). I decided to go with the reading and that meant I needed to finish “something” before September.

Since I was stalled on Allegro, I committed to finishing that novel for September. Earlier this week, I got the first draft done and I'm so excited. For what is a glorified fan-fiction of Lindsey Sterling's Roundtable Rival set in Fedran, I'm pretty happy with a 105k word novel coming from a four minute music video.

It ended up being a much different story that Lindsey's video. It ties into Songbird in a Kitchen and the general build up of stories to Fedran's world war (it's a Phase One story). Regardless, I'm really happy with the results and I hope I can polish it up to make it my sixth published novel (Second-Hand Dresses will be my fifth and Nor Curse Be Found will probably be my seventh).

Flight of the Scions

Before the trip, I got the “release candidate” for Flight of the Scions done and sent to Ingram for a print version. It came while I was at the cabin. It looks beautiful and I'm really happy how the new covers turned out.

I also botched the layout (missed one page of padding so everything has the wrong margins), so I need to order a new one. That also means I have another chance to look for typos. My dad sent me a bunch, I found a few, I'm just going to work on them in September because of Allegro.

I think I'm on-track for the November 8th release of Flight of the Scions and I'm so excited. I will have early copies at ICON this year since I'll have a table in the merchant area along with Shannon Ryan's Merger of Evil.

For a novel I've been working off and on for almost two decades, having this out will be both a relief and a source of constant anxiety because it doesn't have my full evolution of writing (I couldn't rewrite it one more time, I just couldn't). It also means I need to get off my rear and start writing Pack Daughter, the second of four in the series.

Fedran Website

Of course, I want to show off since my books are available to read even before they are for sale. Unfortunately, the site generator that https://fedran.com/ uses, Gatsby JS, proved to be too fragile for how I use it. Plus it doesn't play well with my goal of getting my site on Gemini.

That means I need to get it migrated over to Nitride as soon as reasonable. Until then, the site is pretty much static until I can do that. It also means I can't start posting weekly chapters for Allergo until that comes out (even though everyone will be able to read the entire thing).

I just like having that weekly post. It makes me feel good to see that steady signal. I have no clue if I'm going to try again for three hundred consecutive weeks like before. In most regards, I just effectively took a year off from writing.

September

September is going to be a busy month for me. I have Allegro to get out, Flight to polish, and fix the little things that are needed to get the book out the door.

Using Nix

2021-11-30T06:00:00Z

Apparently, it's been a few months since I've blogged about anything. That isn't to say I wasn't thinking about it. I would find myself working on a little bit of code and think “this would be something interesting to talk about” or come up on a post about elitism that I want to respond. But then… it didn't happen.

The last four month have been probably one of the hardest I've had in a long time, even over the struggles of 2020's derecho and pandemic. It started with just a bit of stress at work, but then something got dumped on top of it. And then something on top of that, then on that, and then on that. At one point, for every time I took off my task list, two more were added.

A good example is while I was fixing Partner's toilet that wasn't flushing (just a simple stalk replacement) and our youngest comes up the stairs because the downstairs toilet basically exploded (water pouring out of the bottom, ruptured wax seal, no longer flushing, soaking the carpet). I've been trying to get around to it for almost two months and just removed the carpet today to find out how much drywall damage was done.

There was a lot more, but going through them just turns into a story like Willard (2003) where the main character starts off in the dump, for a brief moment sees hope, and then plunges even further into the hole. Since I try to keep my blog posts positive, let's just go with that.

One of those bright points was getting Merger of Evil published. Shannon has always been a fantastic author and I'm glad I got to see the sequel to Minion of Evil in print. Plus, the cover is fantastic (even if I didn't do it).

My brother says my life is frequently a “that's good, that's bad” game. while I was able to do my part in getting Merger of Evil out, I was unable to finish Second-Hand Dresses or Flight of the Scions out this year, which I wanted to. The reasons are worth of a different post, but basically I had to scoop things off my pile to avoid drowning.

Working on Merger of Evil hit a couple of technical annoyances. A few months ago, I started using asdf to let me switch environments more fluidly. The project for Merger seemed like a great place to use that, but somewhere in that time, there were some updates to Node and various packages that turned a minor maintenance task into something far more complicated simply because I couldn't get into the right head space.

As a side note, when I was forced from my apartment in 2008 because of the flood in Cedar Rapids, I had a few months of high stress that also made things difficult to function. Much like the the last few months, minor problems became complicated when there were dozens of other things competition for my time and attention. When I got back to my apartment, I found that my old life didn't quite fit anymore. My daily ritual of going through 20-30 web comics and sites then seemed pointless so I purged my RSS feed, I stopped playing Kingdom of Loathing, and basically had to review what “sparked joy” in my life.

Those technical annoyances got me to thinking about improvements. Yeah, I had a bunch of other things demanding my attention, but optimizing a process is one of the ways I reduce stress (along with rewriting problems) and I desperately needed that distraction. As things were, someone on my social feed started talking about migrating from asdf to Nix. Nix is a lot like the old GNU Stow but had a much better package management and, more importantly, allowed me to have seamless transitions to different versions. Nix also is more of a holistic approach since one could use flakes to wrap everything including specific Node, Python, and C# packages into a single unified whole.

After a few weeks of using Nix, I can say that it definitely solves the little nits and scratches that asdf had plus handles my need for reproducible/consistent builds. I'm sure there are other problems with it, starting with the complexity of the setup files and the fact the featuers I want are still in beta, but I think I'm going to stay with it and see if it works out.

Things are still in flux and life is still heaping up on my shoulders, which means there is only one thing I can do: break apart the problems as much as I can and then focus on one thing at a time.