ericdontigney

Update: Dragon Con Post Mortem

So, I finally got home yesterday evening, lasted long enough to unpack my car, and sat down on the couch. That was all she wrote. The next thing I knew, it was morning.

All in all, my publisher seemed happy with the results of Dragon Con, so I'm calling it a win. Not gonna lie, I did a lot of fake it 'til you make it during the convention. I honestly think I spoke out loud more in those five days than I did the entire previous year.

There were upsides. I got to meet a few people ...

DragonCon Update

Yesterday was a long day. I wandered through PART of ONE of the buildings hosting the vendor halls. The sheer volume of nerdy, geeky, niche stuff is enough to stun a rhino. I kid you not. I also spent a couple hours hanging out at my publisher's table signing books and making it look like I have the extrovert gene. I grabbed some food with new friends.

Then, it was off to the Hyatt for the Fantasy Gather. It was a less formal meet-and-greet situation. I think I talked almost non-stop f...

DragonCon

So…life happened. The apartment move ran up hard against the deadline to leave for DragonCon. How hard? I quite literally turned in the keys for my old apartment right before I loaded my car and headed for Atlanta. There are also piles of unpacked boxes littering the new apartment. It was what you might call less than ideal.

I did manage to get to Atlanta and checked into my hotel without incident. After which I almost immediately fell asleep. Nine hours of driving takes it out of yo...

Unintended Cultivator V10: Chapter 3 – Grandmother Zhan

Sen managed to impose one day of not being bothered with anything by anybody. It was a decision that would normally get a lot of resistance from all those people who were vying for attention and approval. In what seemed a spectacularly odd turn of events to him, Sua Xing Xing and Long Jia Wei put up a united front against everyone clamoring for just a few minutes of his time. It was surprisingly effective as discouragements went. Sen unofficially knew that Long Jia Wei had a rep...

Unintended Cultivator V10: Chapter 2 – Displacement

Even getting the displace villagers into temporary shelter turned out to be a monumental and time-consuming task. There was a lot of, to Sen’s thinking, needless confrontation about that temporary housing. Granted, it was little more than a warehouse that might be used to store grain. It was short on luxury, but it was protection from the elements and well-stocked with food. Plus, all that complaining happened after Sen and Cao Kai-Ming explained, repeatedly and at length, tha...

Unintended Cultivator V10: Chapter 1 – Dancing Cloud

“What is that?” Sen asked as he peered skyward.

“That’s my big bird, Papa!” exclaimed Ai from her perch on his arm.

“Well,” said Sen thoughtfully, “it certainly is big.”

He kept starting up at and trying to make sense of the thing. It didn’t look like a bird so much as a hodgepodge of animal parts that were thrown together into the general shape of a bird. He was pretty sure he saw some kind of shell on its back. If I didn’t know any better, 2024-08-22 04:09:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Update: Unintended Cultivator Volume 10 Starts Tomorrow

After a hiccup or seven (as per usual), my internet service has been successfully moved to my new apartment. My new office is 90% of the way there, although that 90% is only as of 5 minutes ago when I booted up my desktop and successfully got online with it. I had intended to get Volume 10 started today, but it was only today that I was able to put the period on the furniture assembly stage of moving.

I assembled a dresser (one star, do not recommend) to replace the first one I assembl...

Update: The Next Few Days

Okay, so I've got a few things to throw at you guys. The furniture assembly phase is not complete, despite my best efforts. Shipping delays have slowed that, but it is mostly done. Done enough that I've started moving stuff. I will eventually do a post with pictures so everyone can see what this has all been about.

My internet service is due to be transferred tomorrow, the 19th, but that's pretty hazy. That means that service at my old apartment may turn off at midnight t...

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 66 – If the Army Comes Here

“What happened to you?” asked Analina as Terry approached his house.

Terry stared at the Adventurer’s Guild admin and thought, Oh, dear god, why is she here? I don’t have the energy to deal with anyone that chipper today.

Heaving a world-weary sigh, Terry looked at the woman, tossed aside the notion of an internal monologue, and said, “Dear god, why are you here? I don’t have the energy to deal with anyone as chipper as you today.”...

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 65 – Unavoidably Present and Visible

At first, Terry just had to focus on doing what he could to heal up. That meant dragging himself far enough away to find some dire wolves there weren’t frozen straight through. It wasn’t really that far, maybe a hundred feet, but it felt like ten miles to Terry on his injured leg. Slipping and falling three times did nothing to help that. Once he found something other than wolfsicles, he went digging for cores. He even found a few and, mercifully, he was able to absorb them. That seemed t...

Chapter 64 – Do I Look Like a Cheerleader to You?

While the burning pain in his leg did diminish over time, giving credence to the healing theory, it was also sapping his energy in a frankly alarming way. He supposed that was to be expected. Pain and healing were both fatiguing things in his old world, so it only followed that would hold annoyingly true in this new world. Of all the damn things, though, thought Terry. Why couldn’t that be the thing that wasn’t the same? He wanted to see it as another personal <...

Update: Moving, Isekai Terry, and Unintended Cultivator

Okay. We're rolling up on the middle of the month, which is when I tentatively guessed that I'd be starting the next Unintended Cultivator book. So, I'd venture that a lot of people are rather impatiently waiting for me to say something about it. Bear with me, and I will do just that.

Right now, I'm about in the middle of assembling furniture. It's a slow process. The days of getting assembled furniture delivered is largely a thing of a bygone era, unless you happen to be buying antique...

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 63 – At Least This Isn’t a Swarm Trope

Okay, self, let’s not fight pack predators in the future, thought Terry. Because this fucking sucks. He pressed a hand against his leg where one of the dire wolves had almost taken a piece out of him. He’d avoided that grisly outcome, but he still had a bunch of unbelievably painful puncture wounds in his leg where the damnable thing had bitten down. He also couldn’t tell if the intense burning in those punctures was some poisonous byproduct of the bi...

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 62 – Hunted

Terry’s jian had already taken on that ominous red glow that, he belatedly acknowledged to himself, he should have asked other-Terry about two seconds after the first time it happened. That blade seemed to give the dire wolves pause. Terry found that hilarious, which stuck him as a little inappropriate. Given that every single one of those wolves out massed and towered over him, though, that wariness just struck him funny. The pause did let other-Terry lob out his first piece of advice. 2024-08-11 14:30:40 +0000 UTC View Post

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 61 – Things in the Forest

The next few hours were an exercise in frustration for Terry. While his intentions had been good, his skills at forest craft were somewhat subpar. He’d spent enough time in that forest while fleeing the church that he’d started to get a sense of what to watch out for, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing as being even an adequate tracker. He found plenty of tracks of various things, but he didn’t know what they were when he saw then. He felt like he was in a mystery show, except he ...

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 60 – That’s Not Funny

“What do you people do with your time when you’re at home?” asked Terry as they sat around the table and ate breakfast.

Jaban looked over at him with a curious expression and said, “The usual stuff. Read. Eat. Spend time with family. Sometimes, I train. I guess it depends on how long I’m there.”

“He’s not wrong,” said Ekori, “although not everyone is as lazy as he is.”

“Hey, I’m not lazy,” said Jaban before Ekori lifted an eyebrow at him. “Well,...

Update: Moving Time!

Okay, so in an unusual turn of events, things happened faster than I expected. I got the keys to my new place yesterday. On the whole, that's a good thing. It means that furniture and appliances I ordered will show up to a place that I can 100% get into. Hurray! Of course, it also meant that I could start doing things like moving some of my stuff in...which I did. Interesting fact: you discover exactly how out of shape you are by moving.

In other news, I do still intend to keep writing...

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 59 – Once You’re in the Box

Terry had half-expected some kind of fallout for dismissing that contract from that random lord. When nothing terrible had happened after a few days, though, he started to relax a smidge but only a smidge. That comment that Analina had made about the property being cursed had stuck with him. Not that he really believed in curses, as such, but he’d learned not to underestimate how petty Chinese Period Drama Hell could be when trying to screw him over. He wouldn’t put it past the place to s...

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 58 – Celery

Terry stood by the stove and stirred the stew occasionally while Analina gave him the scant few details she had about the contract. He could boil it down to one, very uninspiring sentence. A really dangerous bad thing is doing bad thing stuff, and we’d like that to stop. Naturally, no one knew exactly what the bad thing was, or where it was, or how to find it. Terry stirred the stew again. It didn’t really need the extra stirring aside from his vague fear that the stew would burn...

Adventures in Moving

So, last night was an adventure. I had a bit of plumbing problem that involved a lot of water all over the floor. The problem itself wasn't that hard to fix, but it was also something that couldn't wait for two days for a maintenance ticket. So, I got to do that. The real hassle was dealing with the clean-up process, which was long winded. By the time everything was dried, it was like 5 in the morning. At which point I was tired, sweaty, grumpy, and in need of a shower. Hence, no chapter. 2024-08-05 06:58:24 +0000 UTC View Post

Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 57 – Harmless

It turned out that making a house that hasn’t been occupied for a while actually livable was more work than it looked like on the surface. Terry had assumed that it would just need a sweep and maybe a quick trip to the market to get whatever he needed. Oh, how wrong he was. The quick sweep turned into hours of scrubbing the floors to dislodge long-settled dust and dirt. Then waiting around for it dry to see if he’d missed any spots. I literally changed worlds, and did I get v...