Friday, February 1, 2019

Updates and Milestones: February 1, 2019

Some updates pertaining to Tears of the Gods, blog milestones, Vintage Worlds, and Love in the Ruins. Feel free to ignore the bits you don't care about.

The Tears of the Gods

I am sad to report that the GM of the Tears of the Gods PbF game has discontinued it, and doesn't anticipate ever restarting, due to personal real-life problems he is having. I am hoping to get a summary of what he had planned for the remainder of the adventure so that I might finish the Tears story, but that may or may not happen. In any event, for now, with the game on hiatus, the Tears story updates are on an indefinite hiatus as well.

(And, yes, I did say in the last update that there's probably enough material for another chapter, but the point at which the game stopped is not a natural stopping point for a chapter, let alone the story as a whole, so I am not working on chapter 11 of Tears for now either. I may make an effort to finish it at some point, with or without the GM's notes, but for now I am waiting for the GM to decide whether to part with the rest of his adventure notes.)

Blog Milestones

January was another record-setting month for the blog, with 528 page-views. That's only the second time the blog has topped 500 views in a given calendar month, the previous time being September of last year, with its 506 views. Since August of last year the blog has not fallen below 200 views in any given month.

Much of that traffic is the Numenera 2 Character Generator, of course, which is up over 900 views now (total over its lifetime), well over a fifth of this site's total traffic (about 4300 views total since the blog started in 2014).

Unfortunately though, historically, a lot of the traffic to the Numenera Character Generator has come from a forum post I left on hub.cyphercast.net, the CypherCast online forum, which has been down now for a week or two. And, while it has been a long time since there's been any non-spam activity on CypherCast Hub, it was still ranked pretty high in search engine results, so people were still going there looking for information, sometimes finding the link to my character creator, and coming here. (And presumably they looked for and perhaps found other information on that forum as well.) But, sadly, the owners/moderators of CypherCast Hub seemingly abandoned it for the last couple of years, allowing it to be overrun by spammers advertising everything from basketball video games to industrial equipment, and now it's down altogether, so I am not exactly holding my breath for it to come back. With it gone, the only way people will discover my character creator now is through organic search engine results. This blog's position in a Google search is decent when searching for, e.g. "numenera character generator", usually around the sixth result or so, but we are ranked much lower on Bing, Ecosia, and other search engines. (Though people do find us occasionally via those search engines.)

I could probably drive a good bit more traffic to the character generator by posting the link elsewhere, but I have an intense, visceral hatred for spam, and I am very reluctant to undertake actions that may come across as spammy to other people. Besides that, it's not like I make money from folks using the character creator (or looking at anything else on this blog). It is purely a labor of love. I don't want to sully my love with anything so crass as spam!

Vintage Worlds

Speaking of spam, it's been a while since I have shamelessly shilled this book that I had a small hand in creating, namely Vintage Worlds: Tales from the Old Solar System. The story I wrote for it, "The Headless Skeletons of Mercury", is, in my opinion, my strongest short story to date (though "Tiny's Legacy" from Merigan Tales is a close second).

Since VW has been out for a while now, I guess it's as good a time as any to give my overall thoughts on it. Vintage Worlds, honestly, has a solid ratio of good stories to mediocre ones. That may sound back-handed, but for me it is high praise. I read quite a lot of short fiction-- I have since I was a kid-- and I'm a pretty harsh critic of stories that don't meet my standards. But Vintage Worlds exceeded my expectations-- not counting my own story, there were seven pieces I loved, four that I liked pretty well, and five that didn't really grab me. That is a better good-to-mediocre ratio for me than any anthology of amateur writers I can remember reading (and yes, I am saying it is better than Merigan Tales, in my opinion). Does VW compare to, say, The Best of Leigh Brackett or to any given year of Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction? No, not really. But, a few of VW's stories are worthy of such comparisons, or nearly so. In my opinion, the book is well worth the price if you like short fiction at all.

Also in Vintage World news, the call has gone out for submissions for a second volume of VW, owing to the success of the first volume's kickstarter. If you are an aspiring writer, short fiction is a great place to start, and a decently good short story is honestly not hard to get published in something like this. They want short stories (2500-7500 words), novelettes (7501-12500 words), and have space for, at most, one novella (12501 words or more). Volume One of VW also had a poem, so they are probably willing to consider poetry for Volume Two as well. All tales should pertain to the "Old Solar System": think ray-guns and rockets, Martian canals, Venusian jungles, Asteroid Belt pirates, etc.

Love in the Ruins

And, speaking of calls for submissions, the Love in the Ruins project looks interesting too (you'll need to scroll down to the long row of asterisks to see the announcement). For this one, the editor is looking for about fifteen short stories, a novelette or two, and four to six poems, preferably of a traditional form (e.g. sonnets). Tales for this work should be love stories set in the "deindustrial future", i.e. after the disappearance of industrial civilization (whether due to peak oil, climate change, the natural geopolitical decline of the U.S.A., or some combination of these or other factors), though not necessarily "dystopian" in the sense that that word is normally understood. So basically it's another "Space Bats" / After Oil type of project, but with a love and romance theme this time.

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