57 Hours Left for Vintage Worlds Kickstarter

The Kickstarter for Vintage Worlds 2 & 3 has a little over two days left. It is coming down to the wire as to whether it will fund or not. Cross your fingers, tentacles, pseudopods, or other equivalent appendages!

Vintage Worlds is a series of anthologies of retro-style sci-fi short stories. By retro sci-fi, I mean rockets and ray-guns, sword-fights by the light of the twin moons on the canal-banks of Mars, dangerous forays into the humid jungles of Venus teaming with ultra-tropical alien life, unscrupulous smugglers and pirates haunting the Asteroid Belt, and so on. That is to say, the Solar System as it should have been, as opposed to the one we actually got. It is a really interesting sub-genre of science fiction if you ask me -- and who wouldn't want to ask me?

Volume One of Vintage Worlds turned out really well, I thought. Help us bring Volumes Two and Three to life!

"The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" To Be Published in Vintage Worlds 2

Very exciting news! The long-awaited Kickstarter for Vintage Worlds volumes 2 and 3 has begun at last. My short story-- actually closer to novella length-- titled "The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" will appear in volume two. If you have read the first installment of VW, you may remember my story, "The Headless Skeletons of Mercury". Two characters from "Headless" appear in "Sarcastic," but it is not necessary to know the story of "Headless" in order to understand and enjoy "Sarcastic." I mention it only because if you liked plucky heroine D.J.'s Mercury shenanigans, you'll probably enjoy a much longer story seeing her get into trouble on a trip to Neptune.

And perhaps I am a vain person, but the awesome cover art of volume two could very well have been inspired by "The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" (which does contain a scene on a moon of Jupiter), although in my mind, D.J. doesn't look at all like that haha.

Tears of the Gods Chapter 9 Updated

Not that I expect many people care, but I made a large-ish addition to Part 9 of the Tears of the Gods. That is the first time I have gone back and made a major revision of a previously written chapter. This was needed to more properly introduce a character that plays an important part in chapters 10-12 at least, and possibly beyond, when and if further chapters ever get written.

Does that mean that Tears of the Gods is back on and will be someday finished? Maybe. I don't want to make any promises in that regard though because I have done that several times already just to let them slip, but I do really, really want to finish Tears. It is the only novel-length thing I have ever written, and while it has essentially zero chance of real publication, it is a story in my brain that wants to escape onto the page even so. Plus I think it would be cool to call myself a novelist as well as a short-story writer and poet.

Stay tuned!

Updates and Milestones: May 9, 2020

Just a few quick updates.

This past month, April, was another record month for Troy Stories, with 2,493 views. Wow! That's the first time we have had a 2k+ month in terms of page views. Needless to say, it was a huge improvement over the previous record of 1908.

Also, last week sometime, the Numenera 2 Character Generator itself passed a big milestone: 10,000 page views since publication, right now sitting at 10,192. For perspective, it was about this time last year that the generator passed the 2,000 cumulative page-view mark, and it was around this time in 2017 that the generator first saw the light of day. Pretty neat, eh?

Additionally, as mentioned yesterday, Love in the Ruins is now available for purchase.

And lastly, a PSA: the mask goes over your nose and mouth. Both nose and mouth. Yes, nose included! I know, I know... it's hot and uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as being intubated by a ventilator, if I had to guess. Also, if you pull the mask down to talk to someone, you are defeating the purpose of having the mask at all -- may as well just lick that person's eyeball while you're at it. A mask is not a magical talisman. It will not block your sputum getting on other people or their cooties getting on you if it isn't between you and them, capisce?

That's all for now. Don't let the 'rona getcha.

Love in the Ruins has been published

I'm officially a published poet now. Love in the Ruins came out a couple weeks ago, and a poem of mine is included in the anthology. Link is here:

Love in the Ruins at Founders' House Publishing

Blurb from the publisher:

"Many stories have been written already about the approaching end of industrial civilization:  about the great tragedies and the small triumphs, about struggles spread out across landscapes and struggles just as bitter within individual hearts, about the people who survive and the ones who don’t. One theme that's been unfairly neglected in deindustrial fiction is love. ... This anthology includes ten stories and three poems about love in the deindustrial future, by turns ethereal and earthy, traumatic and tender—but all of them ending with a promise of happily ever after."

Deindustrial, in case you are wondering, basically means after industrial civilization has been brought low, usually due to running out of oil. One may consider deindustrial fiction to be a sub-sub-genre of post-apocalyptic fiction (itself a sub-genre of science fiction), but deindustrial generally posits a slow decline instead of the fast collapse more typically envisioned in post-apocalypse stories. (And if you are wondering what a civilization's slow decline looks like, have a look out your window.)

Updates and Milestones: April 1, 2020

Hello, I'm still alive. The 'rona ain't got me yet, and I ain't even April Foolin'.

It is heartening to see that the blog gets a lot of use still. I know I say that every time I post, but what can I say? It feels good to be of service, in whatever capacity I can be. And March, interestingly enough, set another record for the blog with 1,908 views, a substantial increase over the previous record, which was 1,716 views, set in December. (Since I didn't do a February or March update, I guess I should mention that January had 1,487 views, and February saw quite a big drop-off, with 1,178 views, which was the lowest since June of 2019.)

I guess folks are stuck at home spending their time rolling up Numenera characters. No judgment -- I do the same sometimes (which is, in fact, why I went to the trouble to set up that character generator). And as usual, a bit less than half of this last month's traffic went to... drumroll... the Numenera character maker. The old Cypher System character maker and the Revised edition Cypher System character maker nearly tied for second place last month though, which is a slight change from how things normally are. Those three pages together account for about three quarters of the site's traffic. In a very distant fourth place is the printer-friendly Numenera character sheets index, with a whopping 36 views in March. No other page or post cracked 20 views for the month.

Other news: if you recall my poem "Come Home Ere Falls the Night" and the Love in the Ruins anthology project it is a part of, that seems to be moving forward at last. The publisher has sent out contracts to the various authors, so hopefully that book will see print at some point. (No doubt the 'rona will delay the timetable on that, as it has everything else.) Not sure what the status is of Vintage Worlds II, but hopefully that will get off the ground this year too.

That's all for now. Don't let the 'rona getcha -- as the Good Book says, "wash your hands, you sinners".

Updates and Milestones: January 3, 2020

Just a few quick notes I wanted to make. I'm still here keeping an eye on things. At some point I would like to make more content for the blog-- on my agenda in particular are a first-edition version of the Numenera character creator and the final installment of the two-make-three Scrabble words guide. Those are fairly low-hanging fruit and should be doable when I have some time.

Blog Milestones: December was another big month for the blog with 1716 page views, just edging out November's record of 1701. And as far as looking back at the year overall, Blogger doesn't keep yearly stats, but luckily I did do an update post last January. According to last-year me, Troy Stories passed the 4,000 all-time page views mark on January 7th of last year. (Important to note that that is cumulative all-time views, not just views for 2018-- the 4000 figure includes at least several hundred views from 2014-2017.) This year? The blog passed the 17,000 all-time page views mark yesterday (January 2), meaning the site had ~13,000 views in 2019 (after subtracting the 4,000 pre-2019 views from the total all-time views), on average more than a thousand a month. Any year in which a site more than triples its traffic is a good year, I would say.

And of course, needless to say, most of that traffic went to the Numenera 2 character creator, and second place is awarded to the old (i.e., first-edition) Cypher System character creator. No other page on the site came close to the numbers for those two pages. Since Blogger doesn't keep yearly stats I am not 100% sure whom to award the bronze medal to, but I believe the Numenera printer-friendly character sheets index did better on the year overall, even though the brand new second edition Cypher System character creator did much better for the month of December. And as far as the next tier down is concerned, the only other pages with more than a handful of hits for the year were the poem A Ruinman's Villanelle, aka "Come Home Ere Falls the Night," and the City of Heroes Monitor Window tip, interestingly. The latter two posts both had a bit over a hundred views each on the year, much more than is typical for one of my regular blog posts, which don't normally even hit double digits, let alone triple.

Anyway, that's all for now. Happy New Year, everyone.