Hey. Hi.
Summer is a bad time for me, always has been. This isn't an excuse, it's an explanation for why my mind turns to gravy: ambient heat impinging on someone who is extremely a beast of winter. But hey, at the very least: look forward to the next chapter of A Quick Death in Texas this weekend. Because that's in store.
2021-07-09 20:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostSometimes detective work is as simple as putting yourself in the right place to hear something you shouldn't.
Welcome to the next day. It’s time to kickstart a morning blessed by a trickster god. There’s a lot of moving parts in play, and what’s crucial is the order they move in. So, let’s do some refrigerator poetry:
Van's past incidents, Telin's family motorsports outings, and shared affection over Italian food: I swear these two hypercompetent idiots will realize they've quietly built a relationship some day.
Canine and Heelcutter
“So you lived in St. Joes how long, and we only just now run into each other?”
Telin kept sober when she was in the chair, for as much as she enjoyed her drink. ...
2021-05-18 19:07:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Please excuse him. He smiles like that by default.
2021-05-10 01:27:15 +0000 UTC View Post[vertically emerges from a murky, foggy swamp] OH HI, DIDN'T SEEYA THERE!
Been a while since I did one of these, and when I'm caught up in life as is, I like to do one to check in. I got a gig job that's helping out around the help, and working that into my life sorta threw my balance off. But I'm getting back in the saddle this week, which means you can probably expect Narratives of Disaster 3 sometimes this weekend, and then a return to your regularly scheduled Sec...
2021-05-05 20:50:37 +0000 UTC View Post
Tito is Just Standing There.
Hi. I'm doing one of these again now, too. Check back in a few days, it'll be done then.
2021-04-13 17:23:40 +0000 UTC View Post"Hi I'm here to flush a guy's head down the toilet, and kill everyone that tries to stop me. Anyone have objections?"
“How long have they been your neighbors?” asked Van.
“It’ll be 4 years, once we’re past this hot season,” Carillo said.
“Bein’ the reason why I’m havin’ trouble with all this,” Rooster spoke up stronger this time. “Been here an awful long time for any o’ this, y’ain’t think?”
“I was abducted when I w...
2021-04-13 17:21:00 +0000 UTC View Post"Hello, I'm here to make your bad situation
2021-04-13 17:15:53 +0000 UTC View Post"hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe."
Canine and Spooky
“So I guess the question is, which one of us gets to start?” said Van, after he’d exhaled his smoke. He kept his eyes to the horizon, scanning with his sensors for movement on the New Laredan range, even though his mind was starting to comfortably haze. Let the Canine do the work, this is what he...
2021-04-01 19:36:08 +0000 UTC View PostEver been punched so hard, you realize you're a sub?
His senses had failed from the blow, but at the last possibility, he’d caught himself from tripping the trigger of his secret sure-killer, his beloved Gator Jaw. This had saved him from what his former comrades in section 99 had warned him about, before they threw him off the team for their perception of his ‘antisocial behaviors:’ Namely, that he’d blow his own head off accidentally, from inside of his own...
2021-04-01 00:14:48 +0000 UTC View PostAs a steel giant does battle with a silver
2021-04-01 00:10:40 +0000 UTC View PostWELL THAT WAS QUICK.
[Welcome to Gator’s POV. We won’t be here long, because as we’ll rapidly discover, he’s equal parts miserable bastard and boring fuck. As he makes his way through the New Laredo starport, we come to understand the very minimalist way he understands the world: as cold data, except where he can find flaws to amuse himself about by being internally cruel and petty. His is the li...
2021-03-19 20:59:52 +0000 UTC View PostYou people wanted antagonists? Meet the death of inner life that is an interstellar CEO.
“Good timing, right after lunch,” Ellering said. “Talking with those people always makes me lose my appetite. Speaking of, there’s the matter of van Rooyen: what response have we had from our prospective new hires?”
Bekker sucked air through his teeth. “Some degree of difficulty there, sir.”
“Go on?” said Ellering.
“To be frank, we...
2021-03-11 19:58:59 +0000 UTC View PostHoly hell, that took a while. Worth it, tho
2021-03-11 19:54:58 +0000 UTC View PostDamn, what a title.
Hey hi, I've been meaning to do this for a while! Here's the second draft of A Good Man, revised down to the first break. Big things you'll probably notice: an overall lesser aggro dickishness to Van, now that we know a fair bit about why he is the way he is, and also, an overall feeling of control to him, he's not much of an exposed nerve at first. Further- better characterization of what it is Van's doing and how he intends to do it, as rather t...
2021-02-20 21:33:50 +0000 UTC View PostIt's time for a business plan. Of sorts.
It's about time to get things on track, to a degree. Let's start small: let's see A Good Man get onto a storefront. What am I doing to pursue this? Well, the second draft is early in the works, with an editor lined up. So that's exciting!
And then on top of that, I've got A Quick Death in Texas, which is progressing in a way I'm pretty pleased with. I can't lie and say I haven't bled a little momentum on my work here- re...
2021-02-15 21:28:32 +0000 UTC View PostThis is workable.
The thing about these articles is that sometimes I have something new and exciting to say in them. This time, I've got something old and exciting to say, which is that I'm still hard on the grind, with my heart behind it. A Quick Death in Texas is going to be good work, I can feel it, it's got me excited, and it's keeping me excited.
-G
2021-01-18 19:47:37 +0000 UTC View PostWelcome to me maintaining momentum in my posts by bringing you all the even-further-behind-the-scenes work I've been doing on A Quick Death in Texas. Today, I've got the framework for Chapter 4 for you all! Enjoy!
[Van’s dreaming again. This time, it’s not the inner terror he has over himself and his own world on display, but rather the other half of bad dreams and depression: the dream where you’ve got something to do, ...
2021-01-18 19:45:55 +0000 UTC View PostThis was what I needed
Yesterday I wrote LAMF, and it felt good. I hadn't peeled out on a stretch of fiction like that in forever, it felt like I was finally moving on sharpened skates again. Maybe it was the prospect of getting to uncork the violence on A Quick Death in Texas, which sounds just terrible, but catharsis is catharsis. Like, y'all folks know how satisfying a well-executed Chekov's Gun is in fiction is? Well, I didn't write anything like that in chapter ...
2021-01-11 18:10:47 +0000 UTC View Post"You know, those first two chapters, those felt like they were Section 99 storytelling, but I gotta ask, where was all the blood- OH HERE IT IS, HERE'S THE BLOOD!"
The farmstead fell quiet, and the regulators laid in a low prone behind a foliaged dirt berm. Seconds passed since the last round barked out of the kitchen hab, a big roar of plasma that had scattered over range and turned a three foot patch of terraformed earth into dirty...
2021-01-11 17:45:45 +0000 UTC View Post"Family" can be biological. It can also be the people that'll support you, even if what you're doing is drastic.
Van had good confidence in therapy. He didn’t have the sort of schedule where he could keep up with regular sessions, but Dr. Rama in St. Joe’s always had a way of working him in when he needed to get something out of his head. She saw him as a man that needed a stable foundation to stand himself on, strong on his own, but imbalanced. The simplest advi...
2020-12-22 00:12:57 +0000 UTC View PostHe wasn't a Maguffin. He's a bit frustrated about being mistaken as such.
“What about you, who’s the inner circle?” Van asked.
Taino gave him the slightest roll of his eyes, he knew what he was actually asking. “Tadji, his sister and their cousins. They’re rolling with me dressed as engineers and galley cooks. Their idea, not mine.”
“Good to hear,” Van let his hand slip. He wasn’t hearing his ... 2020-12-18 21:46:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Seriously, he is.
Point of it all was, he wasn’t a wrack in a pen or some superpowered pig in a battlesuit any more. Whatever he saw in himself now, whatever conflict of self assuredness and anger that made him feel like a perpetually half-finished project, it wasn’t anything so pathetic or hateable. Even if he couldn’t shake the feeling he was walking a road that didn’t have a way back for him, he at least had a choice in an outfit for the trip. 2020-12-15 19:24:44 +0000 UTC View Post
Yes, yes it is.
So now that I'm actually up and moving on This Thing, I'd like to actually use this little semi-regular blog thing that really should be more regular now as a means of putting in my little footnotes on the stuff that's showing up in the story. In that spirit, then:
“At this point, I just have to ask all of you, forthright and honestly: what do any of us benefit from keeping Van Parker on his leash?”
‘Granny’ Janila Sendra, spry at 62, fiercely beloved by the clan she was matriarch of, let her open question hang in the room. Not all present were present in body; some flickered on omnidirectional sprite-screens, their image and voice broadcast lo-def across light-centuries by FTL relays. Others sa...
2020-11-24 00:33:55 +0000 UTC View PostLet's get back on track.
Okay, that was a period of weeks, wasn't it? Now that we can now sorta unhitch ourselves from a feeling of looming destruction and instead warm our hands on the embers of a fascist regime that insists on burning down in the funniest ways imaginable, I intend to actually get properly back focused on writing. This means A Quick Death in Texas? Get ready, stuff is coming this week.
-G
2020-11-17 16:46:24 +0000 UTC View PostNow, for a little writing practice.
Today was a day spent derusting my actual ability to write prose, specifically, prose in action scenes. To do that, I wrote a little short about an incident that happened the day Van moved to Port of St. Joseph. The jist: this man has no chill, for the cause of the common and downtrodden. Always has, always will, and no regrets. Enjoy!
---
When each syllable of the phrase ‘we had a verbal agreement’ is ac...
2020-11-01 03:21:53 +0000 UTC View PostWhat started out as a quick introduction to the collectives sorta, snowballed. You'll see.
Heya, I'm back, and I'm near about ready to get going on this juggernaut. I feel adequately prepped and ready now, and with the exception of sketching out the character of a few of the residence, I now not only have a really good idea of what sort of a place New Laredo is, but what sort of a place the Freelands is, and how it all works. So here's what I took from this last litt...
2020-10-23 20:52:09 +0000 UTC View PostHey, welcome back. Now, we're properly set to explore the place A Quick Death in Texas is going to take place in, first from an orbital view, then from a quick drive through the place itself. The goal of this writing? Create a feel for a tangible place that has both weight and nature, rather than being a backdrop for space adventures to start exploding on. I didn't want to make another ass-end-of-the-galaxy planet that more edgy science fiction likes to trope up for funsies, because one, ...
2020-10-12 22:17:12 +0000 UTC View PostFirst, the former. Then, the latter.
Okay, so: Here's a bunch of stuff about a place in space called New Laredo, as well as the planet it's perched on. I hope you'll find it a place worth fighting for, because that's what I'm getting at with it. I promise I won't scuff it up too bad with what's coming.
Then after that? Hey guess what, it's podcast time. More on that, later.
-G
2020-10-12 21:40:15 +0000 UTC View Post