8 min read Newsletter

You blink, then it's October

I was a big fan of Friends* back in the day. One of my favorite jokes is when Ross is attracted to his cousin he hasn’t seen since childhood. He tries to kiss her, and when she yells, “What the hell are you doing?” Ross freezes, and the audience hears his internal monologue: Say something clever…OK doesn’t have to be clever but it has to be words, say some words…. ANY WORDS WILL DO…Oh my God, this is the longest that anyone has not talked, ever….There is nothing you can say to make this worse, so just say something!**

This is how I feel** when I haven’t posted a newsletter or podcast in a while. NOTHING STANDS OUT MORE THAN THIS SILENCE. Which makes me more reluctant to post something and the cycle continues.

But I’m getting over myself and on we go.

*Please don’t @ me: I acknowledge that Friends was, among other crappy things, super white, homophobic and transphobic, and Ross is the poster boy for why “nice guy” is not a compliment. (Say what you will about Joey sleeping with anything that moves; when someone told him “no,” he shrugged and moved on instead of obsessing.)

**Ross ends the silence by saying “I haven’t had sex in a very long time” which of course makes the situation worse. The awkward cousin incest part of the story doesn’t apply to my point.

Chaos Terminal launches in a week and a half!

Another beautiful cover from Will Stahle!

One thing I didn’t expect was book 2 of a series to receive so many reviews from publications! I got starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist, and a positive review from Publishers Weekly!

“The follow-up to Station Eternity is just as complex and engaging as its predecessor. Lafferty’s skill with dialogue and emotional arcs make the story equally character and action driven.” Library Journal, starred review.

And this one!

The wonderfully inventive, delightfully wacky, and cleverly complex Midsolar Murders sf-mystery series is off and running again, this time exploring more of Mallory's background while maintaining the delicious humor and intricate mystery prevalent in the first book.” Booklist, starred review.

Upcoming Chaos Terminal events:

The latest news:

I did achieve book finishing in 2 months, but it broke my brain. Soon after that, I went home for a wedding and then to New York Comic Con and then to Boston to see my kid. I blinked and now October is almost over, I’ve done nothing to prepare for Halloween or our milestone anniversary coming up, and I haven’t made anything neat for y’all! I’m working on all of those things, though.

  • The book I turned in (rough draft), Midsolar Murders 3, has a title and kind of release date! The title is INFINITE ARCHIVE and tentative release is fall, 2024!
  • My kid turned 21! We celebrated with sushi and they ordered plum wine and were totally not carded. Oh well. I guess they don’t have a lot of kids using a sushi dinner with older people as their cover to buy alcohol.
  • New York Comic Con was great. I got to meet my Ace editor in person, and have lunch with my agent, and had a panel with an author I greatly admire, Claudia Gray! Signings went pretty well, and I didn’t get con crud or covid! Wins all around.
  • I’m making changes to my Patreon soon, but they won’t affect many current subscribers.

You Are Such a Hugo Loser, Good for You!

Last weekend, the Worldcon happened in Chengdu, China, and Escape Pod lost another Hugo. I played the song “Loser” and moved on.

(Loser by Garfunkel & Oates, not Beck.)

BUT Travis Baldree, author of Legends and Lattes, won the Astounding Award, and my friend Ursula Vernon won the BEST NOVEL Hugo for Nettle and Bone (as T Kingfisher)! I am so thrilled for my friends! It was kind of a bummer not to attend the ceremony, but Ursula and I did get up early and have a zoom call, and then Valerie and Eric Valdes (both semiprozine nominees as well) joined us. Then Travis came in to chat with us briefly, so we were able to celebrate with friends, a little.

We couldn’t get the ceremony to stream so we were watching social media for the updates. This meant I got to interrupt Ursula talking at length about poisons and their antidotes that contained rooster excrement to tell her, “Uh, I think you just won best novel.”

Podcasts for Oct/Nov.

As I clean up my podcasts (if you want to know why I haven’t posted things, read the beginning of this letter again. It ain’t pretty but it’s true) I am also scheduling some for the future. I’m very excited to say I’ll be hosting Valerie Valdes again today on I Should Be Writing, 3pm EDT on Twitch. Travis Baldree joins me for a special ISBW on Monday, Nov. 6 to celebrate our books coming out that Tuesday.

Matt’s work has been super stressful lately, so Ditch Diggers is still on hiatus.

In November I’m doing a daily NaNoWriMo podcast for my supporters, but releasing it at the end of the day for regular folks. Yeah, it’s ambitious, but I am intending on starting soon and getting ahead of myself.

What I’m playing: We bought a new XBox. Not exactly FOR Starfield, but we needed a new one AND Starfield had just come out, so it seemed the right time.

But.

I also have Baldur’s Gate 3 for the PS5. And I can’t tear myself away from those tortured, mind flayer incubating, sexy af characters.

@keirasakuraMore #astarion lines because I can't get enough ^.^ #baldursgate3 #bg3 #astarionsimp #astarionisms #larianstudios #neilnewbon #vampiredaddy #vampire #romance #degenerates

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I was at a party on Saturday where I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in 22 years. We started talking about BG3 because we had played a lot of BG1 co-op back in The Day. But I forgot part of our experience until he reminded me.

In BG1, if you just use your bare hands, you can only knock someone out, not kill them.* You could also go to a pub and get drunk, which messed with your to-hit skills. To make it easier to hit people, we removed armor. So we would strip down to our smallclothes, drink beer in taverns, and then punch the hell out of each other until someone fell down. My friend had me crying with laughter as I remembered us having naked** drunken bar fights. Ah, youth.

*Do not try this in BG3. A monk can totally kill your ass with her bare hands.

**Naked means no armor in BG1. Naked in BG3 means everything, and I mean everything; you can choose your genitals during character creation. And there are more choices than two. Big difference.

On the PS5, I am playing a bard, and this song is the only reason. (CW- swearing)

I’m having a lot of fun with my bard, but Vicious Mockery doesn’t do the damage that it does in the video. Then again I’ve never rolled a natural 20 on that spell.

Maybe I just need to yell, “Everybody says, ‘Look how f-n short that guy is,’ and it stops you from forming meaningful relationships!”

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What I’m watching: We just finished Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher. There are aspects about it that I think some won’t like, namely each episode is named for a Poe story and the plotline roughly follows that story. So there were very few surprises, if you know Poe. However, as we all know with romance novels, even if you know the end, you don’t know how they get there, and that is the beauty of it.

I’m not a critic, and perhaps critics can identify what makes something really scary, but I didn’t find it scary at all. It’s gory for sure, gruesome in places, needs CW galore, has a few jump scares, but it wasn’t *scary.* Still, the story was compelling and we really enjoyed it.

(Look up the content warnings if you feel you need to. It’s hard to use content warnings with things like horror, because sometimes what you’re warning will reveal the end of the story, which is, by design, supposed to be the most horrific. But I will say without spoilers that The Black Cat has animal harm, so be forewarned.)

When we’ve had our fill of gruesome, we turn to The Devil’s Plan on Netflix, a Korean reality show. It’s like Squid Game without the murder and class warfare. There’s a big hotel-like place complete with double rooms, kitchen, common room, oh, and a jail. The players do a challenges, then send two underperforming people to jail, and then do another challenge to increase the pot of money. There are lots of agreements and politics, and after a dirty plan succeeds, people cry.

I mean, I would too, but then again I wouldn’t go on a game like that BECAUSE I am so bad at politics. Come on, y’all, if you’re going to betray, at least own it.

It’s a lot of fun, but I will warn you- we are about halfway through, and the first episode remains by far the best one. They play a very complex game like Mafia or Werewolf, with many roles and much wheeling and dealing. I realized I don’t like playing those games, but I sure like watching them.

What I’m reading: I just finished The Undertakings of Hart and Mercy by Megan Bannen, which was described to me as “You’ve Got Mail” with zombies. This is accurate. Hart is a zombie hunter, Mercy is an undertaker. They hate each other but fall in love through letters anyway. (spice content: high)

I also just read A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny, recommended by my Patreon community as an excellent October read. And boy were they right. It’s told from the POV of a dog who aids his master in finding things for a specific spell, keeping the trapped magical beings magically trapped, and talking to other players’ familiars about what they’re up to. Among the other characters are the Count, the Good Doctor, the Witch, the Vicar, and the Great Detective. It’s a very fun book, the POV of the animals make the lack of exposition acceptable (what exactly are the humans preparing for?) I know some people traditionally read it throughout October, reading each entry on the day it corresponds with, but I just devoured it in a couple of sittings while traveling.

I just started Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones, which I’ve never read, but I’m reading to a theme here, more or less. Like movie-Sophie, I feel book-Sophie is not fleshed out enough, since she accepts her curse blithely, “Huh, I’m old. How do old people act? Here we go.” I feel it lacks emotional depth since I just don’t buy her motivations. But Diana Wynne Jones’ narrative is gorgeous, and I’m enjoying the story anyway.

People have told me it’s very different from the movie, but I’m about 6 or 7 chapters in and it’s been just like the movie thus far.

Upcoming Appearances

I have several appearances this fall! Here’s where I’ll be:

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Evergreen- find me at murverse.com, I Should Be Writing turned 18 years old this year, you can support my work either here or at Patreon, Station Eternity is out now, and Chaos Terminal is available for pre-order! But don’t take my word for it….

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Mur Lafferty

Mur Lafferty