Come gather ’round the campfire.
Let me tell you a story.
Several small ones, in fact!
It started a month or two ago, when I had a bunch of hits on “Our Better Angels” via the ‘ol analytics. Now, I’ve been running this little business for half a decade – so out of neurotic perfectionism, I went and re-read the damn short story myself. AND I FOUND A TYPO! Two mistakes in the damn thing total!
I was aghast, my perfectionist streak involving my ADHD hyperfocus set… Ablaze!
Thus began the last month – rewriting and re-editing every single Central Universe short on this stupid fucking website, in case there were other fuck-ups.
Now, like forty or fifty hours later, here we all are.
Yep.
Now, the pragmatic side of me is well aware that my Magic Content and Poetry are the heavy hitters in terms of viewcounts. My non-fiction series The Pickup Truck Diaries can get dark and philosophical, and thus only really gets views if my disowned psycho birth mother is currently stalking me. My Science Fiction books have reviewed pretty well – the two dozen people who have read the damn things across the various iterations from First Person to Deep Perspective. But surprisingly, the Central Universe shorts don’t get many reads, despite being free little “mini versions” of the Central books.
(Which seems strange, why do people buy my books if they can have the shorts for free? My inane “my art should be free” philosophy rages at such things!)
Long story short, if you’re a fan of my poetry who hates prose, or some Magic The Gathering player who found this post by fucking accident, now is the best chance to read some Science Fiction Shorts set in Central Universe, as they’re all spiffy now. I mean, aside from the new errors I probably added in with the odd brainfart, like doubling words by accident and the like.
I’m sure I’ll get some e-mails about them, like that fucking sociopath that anonymously sent a 4000-word close-reading-style takedown e-mail of The Marionette Man, back when I self-published it after Oghma dropped me (after their long periods of unprofessional silence.) It’s really funny to me too in hindsight, because The Marionette Man has gotta actually be one of the most over-edited books of all history I bet, changing even the tense a bunch of fucking times!
So go practice your literacy, some? I write pretty “hard” sci fi in a few different ways, as they say. You have to be either pretty well-read, or openly willing to use Dictionary.com a lot. (You might even learn something!)
I figure if you’re the people who come to the site for the stuff that does sell – my Teaching Resources, My Dungeons & Dragons Resources, or even the various poetry and prose books, you’d also like a sample – “try before you buy” and all that. I don’t like suckering people in the first place, and despise shilling myself anyways, so I can at least cleanse my internal ethical dilemmas by ensuring people are well-informed on my writing style before they actually give me and Papa Bezos some coinage.
Hell, I hate oligarchs so goddamn much. So yeah. Just read the free shit, okay? I don’t actually care all that much either way, as long as even one motherfucker out there is entertained with some pulpy sci fi.
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here!
-McRae
