"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.

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.)

"Come Home Ere Falls the Night" To Be Published (And Other News)

I apologize for the recent lack of updates on the blog. Real-life has been quite full of turmoil lately. Have not had time to write anything for the handful of people who follow this site. Sorry 'bout that. =(

But, I do have some good news. The poem I submitted for consideration in the Love Among the Ruins project has been accepted and will appear in dead-tree form along with the other accepted submissions for that book. Here is the announcement of that happy fact (you will have to scroll down to the row of asterisks). Maybe not happy for the trees, but... y'know.

Not sure when I will have time to write a big update for the blog, but the occasional quick update should be doable. Again, I want to write more, I just don't have much time right now. Hopefully at some point real-life problems will settle down.

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.

A Ruinman's Villanelle

This poem will be (probably) my submission for the Love In the Ruins project (scroll down to the row of asterisks). This particular anthology is planned to include both prose and poetry. And since I am equally mediocre at both, I thought I'd give poetry a try this time around. Wish me luck. ;)

(Feel free to skip ahead to the poem itself if you don't want to read my navel-gazing introductory thoughts and thereby prejudice your first impression of the work. You won't be missing much.)

The "idea" of this poem is that it's a folk song that ruinmen (i.e. people who sift through the detritus of long-since collapsed industrial civilization seeking things to salvage and sell) might sit around a campfire and sing on a cold night, thinking of family and home, beneath the crumbling remains of a highway overpass stretching from one forgotten metropolis to another. (Although the poem seems to be disapproving of the work ruinmen do, I could see a song like this being popular among the more introspective of ruinmen, who no doubt feel some ambivalence toward their profession. And in any event, pretty much any working person has days when they'd rather be home.)

The form the poem takes is a villanelle, which technically isn't a true folk song form, but which is said to be inspired by country folk songs of the nineteenth century (an "imitation of peasant songs of an oral tradition", as Wikipedia puts it). I have tried to hew as close as I can to that aspect of the traditional villanelle by keeping the poem as simple and folksy as I am able to make it, while still (hopefully) being evocative and interesting as a poem. Did I succeed? That is, of course, not for me to decide.

(And yes, I know that "ruinman" is a coinage from Star's Reach and that the Love in the Ruins project is unrelated to the fictional universe of SR. But in any post-collapse setting, there is likely to be some equivalent to ruinmen. Where ruins and men coexist, there will be "ruinmen".)

***

Come Home Ere Falls the Night

My love, my love, d’you think you might
come back from the ruins where ivy grows?
Come home, come home, ere falls the night.

The lure of riches shining bright
cause men to dig up graves like crows.
My love, my love, d’you think it right?

At home love waits with hearth alight,
and fields are ripe in amber rows.
Come home, come home, ere falls the night.

The ancient men lie dead despite
the wonders ancient science knows.
My love, my love, d’you think you might

find aught to set the world aright?
Or truths profound your spade expose?
Come home, come home, ere falls the night.

Those shabby halls, they say once bright
are tombs for men whom no one knows.
My love, my love, d’you think you might
come home? Come home, ere falls the night.

Some Updates and What-Have-You

A few updates for the handful of people who follow the blog.

Tears of the Gods: The play-by-forum game this is based on is still ongoing, but there was a long hiatus over the holidays. Hoping the pace will pick back up this month. Regardless, I believe there's enough material already to fill out chapter 11, and I have started on it. I expect the next Tears installment will be ready before the end of the month.

Scrabble Two-Make-Three Words: Part Two of this is about half done, maybe a bit more than half. Probably it will be ready some time in the next couple of weeks. (I know no one cares about the Scrabble posts except me, but I care, and that's the important thing, right? Just be thankful I don't subject you to Esperanto posts, ĉar mi tute povas.) I'm estimating that there will ultimately be four total posts in that series (A-D, E-K, L-Q, and R-Z).

Character Creators: I do still want to add Flavors to the Cypher System character generator. Don't have an ETA on that, however. No plans (for the time being) to add any new features to the Numenera character generator.

Goodreads: I have an official author profile on Goodreads now. Does that mean I've "arrived" as a for-real, honest-to-goodness published author?

Fiction(al) Projects: I want to contribute a story to Vintage Worlds 2. Deadline for that is July 30th, but the idea I have in mind may end up novella length (i.e. over 12,000 words), so I reckon I'd best not wait 'til the last minute. I'm considering also making an attempt to contribute something to Love in the Ruins. Deadline for that is May 1st. I may also do a post with tips for would-be contributors to Space Bats and Vintage Worlds-type projects, something I have long threatened to do.

Blog Milestone: Troy Stories has reached over 4,000 page views as of today. My thanks to the many bots and handful of real people who suffer through reading my trite chicken-scratchings.

Review of Merigan Tales

Back in October, a very positive review of Merigan Tales appeared on Resilience.org. Here's the bit we're most interested in around here:

In Troy Jones III’s exciting mystery “Tiny’s Legacy,” we meet a cabal of shady characters who will stop at nothing to learn the location of the fabled research facility we were introduced to in Star’s Reach, which they’re convinced holds the key to restoring the old world. The story’s lead character, Danna, is an impetuous, physically imposing young woman who can hold her own against most men in a fight. Employed as a “burner”—or one charged with incinerating the deceased and then safely disposing of their ashes—she one day happens upon the corpse of a suspicious out-of-towner. As she attempts to gather clues as to the man’s identity and the reason he turned up dead in her community, she becomes involved in a high-stakes clandestine operation. The result is a taut, intelligent thriller told from the viewpoint of a wonderfully fierce heroine.

Woo!

Tiny's Legacy to be published

I am happy to say that my story "Tiny's Legacy" was accepted to be published in the upcoming anthology Meriga Tales. For anyone that doesn't know, that will be a collection of short stories and novellas set in the universe of Star's Reach, John Michael Greer's novel of a long-since post-industrial America.

As with my previous published stories, I will leave "Tiny's Legacy" up for a while.

Tiny's Legacy

I want to say upfront I regret that we couldn’t do anything for Mister Raff. I have known him all my life, and he was just the sweetest, kindliest old man. He didn’t deserve to get caught up in any of this, and I am sorry we couldn’t save him. I am getting ahead of myself, I know, but I just wanted to say that first.

So, that said, I suppose I should begin at the beginning. The whole thing started when the fat dead man was brought in to us, whose real name I still don’t know even now. We figured the fat man had probably been a man of means in life, judging by his fancy clothes-- pinstriped pants, leather shoes, and a bright yellow oilcloth jacket, among other things. Usually when wealthy people die from foul play or go missing, some other wealthy person will kick up a stink demanding justice, or at least answers. In this case though, no one knew who the fat man had been-- or at least no one was willing to admit to knowing him-- and there was no obvious clue as to his identity among his possessions. So when the sherf grumbled he had better things to do than try to figure out how this out-of-towner “had got himself reborn” while clearly “doing something he hadn’t oughta,” out on the outskirts of town, no one batted an eyelid. If anyone was concerned there was a throat-slasher running around town, they weren’t concerned enough to complain too vocally about the sherf’s apathy. The victim clearly had not been from around here, after all, so who knows what he was up to? Who can say whether he deserved his gruesome fate? You just never know with strangers.

***

If you like this story, read the rest in Merigan Tales, now available from Founders' House Publishing...

Caretaker Poinciana to Be Published

I am happy to say that my story submitted to the "Space Bats" contest, Caretaker Poinciana, was accepted to be published in After Oil 4: The Future's Distant Shores. It will be my second published story.

In a few days, I will remove the original Caretaker Poinciana post, so anyone wishing to read it thenceforth will have to buy the book. I know; I'm so mean.

Congrats also to all the other winners. I did not read all of the submitted stories, but my favorites of the ones I did read all made it in.

Caretaker Poinciana

The story that formerly appeared here, "Caretaker Poinciana", has been accepted for publication in the upcoming anthology After Oil 4: The Future's Far Shores. More info about that at this link (scroll down towards the end of the post):

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/09/another-world-is-inevitable.html

All the stories in this anthology are set at least a thousand years into a future where fossil fuels are no longer an option to support our modern industrial society. I have read some of the other stories that will be included, and they are really good. I am excited to be a part of it!

I encourage anyone interested in reading my story to buy the book. I will post a link to it on this blog once it becomes available.

For Our Mushrooms

The story that formerly appeared here, "For Our Mushrooms" has been accepted to be published in the upcoming anthology, After Oil 3: The Years of Rebirth. Read it there!

More info about that:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2014/01/return-of-space-bats.html