Tuesday, December 17th

The Daily Report

I went ahead and pledged $1 to Zach Weinersmith of SMBC today... I need some way of seeing what the patron feed looks like from the outside for someone who is a sponsor, and since he introduced me to the service and he's the only person I know of on Patreon whose works I'm already consuming, so it just seemed like a natural fit. Later on I might browse through the people on Patreon to find people I don't know about but would like to.

Perk fulfillment news! Today I'm picking up the holiday cards that were promised to those who selected that. They might not all arrive by Christmas, but I'm confident they'll make it during what we would broadly construe as the holiday season. We've just had terrible luck with ice and snow being dumped on us on the weekends.

I've been re-cultivating the ability to just sit down anywhere and write, and as a result, I've been doing a lot more random bits of writing lately, some of which may turn into Actual Things farther down the line. On a related note, I plan on resuming The One Called Wander after the holidays... that was a very promising project that was mainly derailed by the moving back and forth that made it hard to work into a daily routine.

The State of the Me

Went to bed at a reasonable hour and slept very heavily, complete with weird dreams about a traveling circus with steampunk cyborg mermaids.

Plans For Today

Today's the major writing day for the next chapter of Tales of MU, and other than that my goals for the day are pretty modest, since we're going to be taking advantage of an opportunity to do a bunch of necessary errands that were put off due to weather on the weekend.

New Short Story On Sale

My Patreon sponsors and the newsletter subscribers have already had a crack at this, but my new short story, "The Lands of Passing Through", is now on sale.

Get it for Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HDKFSHK
Buy a multi-format bundle directly from me: https://sellfy.com/p/Pbm4/ (HTML, PDF, EPUB, and MOBI included).

As usual, both options are completely DRM-free. Two of the formats in the indie bundle (HTML and PDF) are readable without any special aps or devices; the HTML will open up right in your browser. MOBI works with Kindle apps and devices, and EPUB is the standard for most other e-book devices.

This is a fantasy story. Being a short, I can't say much about what it's about without giving away the game, so instead I'll tell you about what inspired it.

A few years ago, I was traveling with my family from the area of Omaha, Nebraska to a resort town in Colorado for the wedding of one of my cousins. Along the way, we stopped at a Holiday Inn or similar establishment in the western Nebraska town of North Platte for the night.

The next morning, as I was riding the elevator down to the lobby for breakfast with one of my siblings, a bleary-eyed man in business attire looked over at us and, attempting to make conversation, said, "So, where are you folks heading to?"

And I looked him back and said, "What makes you think we weren't heading here?"

He laughed.

The number one response I get when I tell people I've moved to Maryland from Omaha or Nebraska is "Oh, I've driven through there." Even for people who live in "flyover country", though, some places were made for passing through.