perfidy

Part six of the Veil War went live today and is now terrorizing its neighborhood, Frankenstein-style. Take a gander over here. One nice thing about this whole novel writing project is that I now have a good excuse to both post on perfidy, and not post on perfidy. Best of both worlds, baby!

And a gentle nudge: for all my readers who have blogs - and I know that a few of you do: the time has come for all of you to link to the Veil War. (cough... Naked Villainy, Murdoc, Rocket Jones, AW1 Tim, Aretae... cough) Just saying. I will ruthlessly mention you on perfidy until you comply.

I've been surprised by the amount of traffic that veilwar.com has been getting from perfidy. It's been a steady flow of refers - not so great a flood as Blackfive's generous linkage generated a couple weeks ago - but significant. I haven't had any sort of stats functionality here on perfidy.org for a good long while now, because a) I don't care that much and b) if I knew, I might be depressed. But I'm thinking that the residual traffic left over from our glory days must be greater than I imagined/feared.

If you will forgive a little bit of me-time, I am very pleased with how things are going. Blackfive sent about 300 readers my way, right before the third installment went up. As of part five, the last installment for which we have full statistics, there were over a hundred reades. I think that's a pretty good stick rate, and not bad considering its only been a few weeks since the whole thing started. And I see from followers and commenters that I am just edging into second order readers - people who are being referred by the first wave. So that's cool. And once I get the ebook ready for sale on Amazon, there will be several new avenues for promotion.

Thanks to everyone who has read, and linked, liked, friended, followed and shared the Veil War. It really is appreciated.

I am sure that all perfidy readers are upstanding, law-abiding and courteous citizens of whatever community, state or nation in which they reside. Therefore, they would never feel the need to use BitTorrent technology to download movies, music or other information over the internet, and therefore would never have any desire to use the sort of anonymizing technologies and services that could protect them from the unwelcome attention of noble and selfless industry associations and their enforcement arms, the bandwidth throttling of internet providers, or indeed the various tentacles of federal, state and local governments.

XKCD is my hero. Today, more than ever:

Maybe the problem of stagnation in our space program over the last 40 years is not government mismanagement, lack of vision, underfunding, red tape or any of that. Maybe...

<whispers>

We just ran out of Nazis

To go read the Veil War, and then tell all your friends. I've got 9000 words up, and plenty more where that came from.

I was flipping through some old notebooks today. Amidst the dross and deranged scribbling, this, verbatim:

Outline for Autobiography

1. Confused from the outset (birth to 1985)
2. Working at apathy (1985-1988)
3. An opportunity for future nostalgia (1988-1991)
4. A legacy of poor personal investments (1991-1996)
5. A moment of clarity (1996)
6. The moment passes (1996-1999)
7. A leap into the unknown, or running with futility (1999-2000)

CHAPTER ONE

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was dark. And it was stormy. It was also Friday the 13th, which Bulwer-Lytton hadn't the wit to include. Somewhere in the Midwest below an unseen full moon, I was born. The nurses in the maternity ward were joking about Rosemary's Baby, which was either ironic or eerily prophetic depending on whose side you take.

At this point, my parents had been married for seven years and I guess this was their shit or get off the pot moment. Three years later, they got off the pot and separated. They had met at one of the thousands of fully interchangeable liberal arts colleges that can be found interrupting the otherwise scenic beauty of Ohio with their faux-gothic halls and industrial brutalist dorms and cafeterias.

Dad was in Columbus, pursuing an advanced degree in Russian history, getting a pilot's license starting a classic car collection and generally hooting it up in a very subdued academic way. My mom worked for an insurance company and got very politely angry.

I began my career with failure. My purpose in life was to bring order and comity to my parents marriage. For a time, it seemed that this ploy might actually work - in this brief sojourn in the sunlit uplands of marital happiness that surrounded my birth by about six months on either side, life was good. My parents were distracted from selfishness on the one hand and passive-aggressiveness on the other by the immediate demands of pre- and post natal care.

But I could only maintain that level of effort for so long. Inexorably, I became more self-sufficient and less time consuming and I could not hold my parents together. Having failed to provide for my family, I went on wild spree of campus protests, martial law and tear gas. This was brought to an end by Governor Rhodes' ill-fated and ill-considered attempt to be tough like Ronald Reagan in California, the end result of which was the Kent State shootings.

My early career in rabble-rousing was thus strangled in its crib by the sudden onset of the seventies, just as I was getting going. I decided to retreat and formulate a new plan.

***

"Praise not the day until night has come."

That's as far as I got. My best estimate is that I wrote that sometime in the Spring of 2000.

Your weekly reminder that today you can go over to Veilwar dot com and read the next gripping installment of the Veil War.

Lewis blocked two handed with his rifle, and the sword chopped into his rifle, right through the rail and into the receiver. The goblin growled in rage when Lewis twisted the rifle, tearing the sword from his grasp. Lewis threw the ruined rifle and attached sword to the side and reached for his sidearm, backpedaling.

The monster was fast; unbelievably fast. He jumped and low tackled Lewis to the ground. Lewis’ head smacked the ground and his vision narrowed. All he could see was the green-hued snarling face in front of him. He couldn’t find the grip of his .45, and the goblin had his hands on his throat.

I have to say I'm slipping into the full time writer thing with shocking ease. It's going to be painful to go back to work. Cranked out over 5000 words yesterday, and looking to top that today.

Me=Happy.  

I think I could really dig being a professional novelist.

Granted, this is not at all surprising. I am a professional writer already. I work at home most of the week. I had a pretty good idea. There is nevertheless a big attitudinal difference between writing boring crap for a large corporate entity and writing ripping yarns.

Yesterday I did over 4000 words. The day before was only a little over a 1000, but I had to take the whole fricken family to the dentist, which killed half the day; plus errands and whatnot. Today my goal is north of 5000 words and finish part two of the Veil War. If I maintain that pace through the end of my two weeks, I should clear over 50000 words, which would be a nanowrimo in a fortnight. Nanowrifrt.

Since the completion of an actual novel length chunk of prose is now a goal that is much less airy dreaming and more a reasonable near-term prospect the next thing is just to get to the point where I can get people to buy it and therefore enable me to do it forever.

1. Write novel
2. ???
3. Profit!

Today, my grandfather would have turned 100. He didn't make it here. Pancreatic cancer got him two decades back. But I've been thinking about him all day, today, every time I see the 11-11. My grandfather had a thing about numbers. There were good numbers, and there were bad numbers. He'd have my dad get him license plates from the other side of the state because the license plate numbers issued in NW Ohio were better than the ones in NE Ohio. One time, my dad pranked him, though. Told him he'd gotten a license plate XQ-5381. "Oh, no." He liked numbers that had patterns, or were in some subtle way harmonious. I like to think that that all started because of his birthday, which like today was 11-11-11. He also liked writing on things. He annotated his physical world. When I was five, he took me down to his cabin in Tennessee. We went hiking over to Cumberland Gap, and he made me a walking stick, just my size. He whittled a handle for me, but he didn't stop there. He took a pen and wrote

Cumberland Gap, Tennessee 8-26-1974

I may have the date wrong. My mom sent me a picture today. There was a beautiful tree on the hill behind the farm house he retired to. Grandpa posted this warning: I miss Grandpa.  I wish he could have lived long enough to meet his great-grandchildren.

Installment two of the novel is now up over at The Veil War. Be the first kid on your block to have one. The other kids will be oh, so, jealous.

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