Eventually we’ll hook a hose up to it. Also I’ll run a better electrical line (extension cord) to it and tack it up out of the way.

So in that particular episode we had these guys (I think it was two? It was more than one) going around and robbing banks and they were shooting (and of course killing) people at the banks. They were using ‘HIGH POWERED WEAPONS’ (emphasis theirs) of some sort. I don’t remember if it was rifles (AR-15’s weren’t the boogie man back then) or pistols. I think it was pistols though, Magnums perhaps?

Anyway, cutting to the chase, we’ve got two officers ‘staking out’ the bank that they believe is going to be next and all they’ve got are their wimpy-wimpy-wimpy (emphasis theirs) .38 revolvers. Because everyone knows being shot by a .38 is no more dangerous than being shot by a B-B gun2!

So, before the ‘big shootout’ one officer comes up to the other and offers him a Special Bullet3. He tells the other ‘I thought maybe we should have a little something to even the odds’4

The other officer is of course duly horrified because this is NOT ‘regulation ammo’!

So what was this ‘special ammo’? Were they .375 magnum rounds? (which you might be able to shoot from some .38’s back then, if you could get them to fit, just once). Were they +P’s5? Oh no no no no no! They were (Dun dun DAAAA!)

HOLLOW POINTS!!!!

Yup, their first bullet in their revolver was a .38 hollow point.

When the robbers attack, oh the things that happen! One officer blows one of the robber’s heads Clean OFF!! Yes, that’s right! The dreaded hollow point is so powerful it took off the guy’s head! Completely!!! I don’t recall exactly what the other robber had happen, but I think it was a hole blown throw him you could see through.6

But wait! There’s More!7

All of the people in the bank describe how super and incredibly loud those first shots were, compared to the others!8

The remainder of the story is about the officers getting ass-chewed, etc for using such ‘deadly ammunition’9 Blah blah blah.

It’s obvious that the guy who wrote that episode and everyone involved in it, had never been around, much less fired, a .38 special. Hollow points do not sound like ‘A Jet Taking Off’ - which was how one of the witnesses described it10. The anti-gun left was very much opposed to hollow points, those Geneva Convention banned deadly evil war crime bullets. So much so that they devoted an entire episode of a very popular show to telling us just how incredibly over powered, dangerous, and yes, evil, those bullets were.

Lucky for them the internet hadn’t been invented yet!

I will admit, I still don’t know if that BS was written for propaganda purposes, or because the people writing it were just morons. I’m sure that everyone involved believed it. However, the only thing I remember of that show is that lie. I can’t even remember the title of the series (and it was a hit series).

These days? Yeah, a lie like that would kill you in the ratings overnight. Regardless of if you were making it to push your political agenda or just because you didn’t do your homework. Personally I’m against message fiction (which is why I stopped watching TV in the 90’s and avoided it in the 80’s). But regardless of your views on that, if you’re going to try and hinge your story on some point of how something works and how some folks are going to do something they’re not supposed to?

Get it right. Don’t just try and make it believable. Make sure it’s right. It’s like the whole ‘this pistol can shoot through the engine block of a car’. NO IT CAN’T. There isn’t a handgun out there that can shoot through an engine block11.

Say what you will about the internet, but it sure destroyed a lot of popular left-wing myths. Just be careful that it doesn’t destroy you because you didn’t do your research.

You don’t want to the one thing people remember about your book is that you were an idiot (or worse yet, a liar) who couldn’t be bothered to do the research. Especially if a lot of people know it’s bunk.

Dealer Room Hours of Operation

Friday: 2 pm – 7 pm

Saturday: 10 am – 6 pm

Sunday: 10 am – 3 pm

Now, we’ve been building a greenhouse and it’s mostly done. We need to install windows on two sides, build the roof and hang the door, then deal with a number of minor things. And yes, we did cut the sod out and put down rock (over last week).

A few pictures:

Except for the door, and some of the two shelves all of this came as pieces with lots of hardware to put it together (okay, the panels alone the bottom were pre-assembled, but they still had to be hung). The one white panel just needs the plastic peeled off.

The building behind it is the detached garage and my shop. The wall is painted White (with that special heavy paint normally reserved for roofs) because in Texas, during the summer, they turn the Sun up to eleven in the afternoon. That wall was hitting the high 90’s to 100 in the summer, and while it’s insulated, the inside wall was almost hitting 100 in the summer and making the shop quite hot. Using that paint took a good 10+ degrees off of the heat.

This greenhouse needs water and power, hence building it against the shop. Also there’s less chance of the wind destroying it (we get some serious gale force winds through here about once a year). There’s already a few anchors holding this down, but I’ll be adding more after it’s done.

Part of this all is we’ve gone through so many trees trying to add trees to the place that we’re starting to buy cuttings (mulberry’s among other things) and we want to grow them up ourselves and save money. Also, we (or rather the other half) wants some lemon and lime trees and starting them in there, and moving them in there, during the winter will be easier than using the garage. When we lived in California, the only thing we had to worry about were the occasional overnight frosts. Here? It gets cold in the winter and even snows on occasion.

This is a nice greenhouse and it wasn’t cheap. If I wasn’t going to P-Con next weekend it would definitely be finished then.

Frameworks lets you build your own laptops, and upgrade them and do whatever you want. Now, every so often Frameworks does these ‘grab bag’ king of things. The sell motherboards in unknown condition, with maybe a few other things thrown in. The 13” are like $40, the 16” are $70 (new ones are of course significantly more expensive). The spouse got 3 of the 13” ones last year. One was bad, two were good. One’s now a laptop (more on that in a bit) the other is running as a standalone. My other half is heavy into IT and does all my IT stuff.

So I get told they’re doing it again, and do I want anything? They’re going to buy a 16”. These sell out in hours, if not minutes. So I got a 13” and a 16”. The 13” appears to be bad, but the 16”, which came with a bottom half of the laptop case and a display, was good.

So, I decided to build a laptop. This meant ordering all the other parts, buying memory and buying storage (SSD’s). Basically this came out to $900 in parts to build the rest of it out. As the board has a top level AMD processor (The spouse’s is one level lower and it works too), this was very much a deal.

Yesterday I put it all together and found a few things on that lower half of the case which had me scratching my head and then the last cosmetic piece wouldn’t fit in and I realized that the case was bent. It had been dropped and a few things had obviously broken when it was (and I found a crack as well - it’s a metal composite case). I’m guessing that what I got was from a replacement under warranty. Oh, and now the computer won’t work at all. So, take it all apart and notice on the back plane of that case there are some issues that I think were shorting out the board so it wouldn’t boot after I’d secured the board to it.

Thankfully the spouse’s lower case half was fine (theirs came with one as well). So I ordered a new one, which they’ll get and I used theirs and everything worked perfectly. But the second time around that I built it, I booted it up after each step of adding things (and found out the wifi card I had lying around won’t work with this laptop, so had to order a new one). I’ve also gotten really good at assembling Framework 16” laptops. I must admit I like their approach. Nearly every single fastener on it is a T5. They also use Magnets for a lot of stuff too. It uses a USB power supply (but only two of the 6 USB-C plugs will power it). All of the USB plugs you can buy a module to fit over to make them whatever you want. The case is set up for that, it’s a nice feature.

You can also change keyboard options easily. Even add a number pad. As memory is expensive I only went with 16G for now. I think I’m going to install win11 on it. I’m very tempted to go to a linux distro, but I’m worried about migration paths for a lot of the software I use for work. I’m also not at all used to the newer linux GUI’s, which are apparently a lot better than the older ones. I know at some point I’m going to have to bite the bullet and do the migration.

But I really needed a new work capable laptop. My old one is still running windows 7 and while I did migrate most of those tools to my desktop (win10) a while ago. Migrating to a new OS is a bit more involved.

Still, while there were a few frustrating moments (mostly because of that bad lower case) it was fun building one, and they put some thought into how this all works so you can mess with it yourself to your heart’s content.

Here’s one:

This one is from several days after, after clean up had started. He didn’t take it. I doubt the high-res version will make it through to substack. But we’ll see what makes it through I guess.

Never Forget. Sadly too many New Yorkers have, as the current Mayor supports what was done on 9/11

And as always this one’s powered by spite! :-)

Copyright 2026

I’ve Seen This Movie Before

“Hey, Josh! Your lawyer’s here!” Coach Hodges called out while Joshua was go…

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(Oh, and I’m still writing this out of spite! )

Copyright 2026

Now What?

School work was light for the next two days, as everyone wa…

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Folks, when AI is programmed with your song, or your book (and it is PROGRAMMING, it is not TEACHING - get that straight - claiming anything else is a lie). It takes what it is given and organizes it, by breaking it up into pieces, which are called ‘tokens’ and those tokens are then organized on a ‘Neural Network’, which is really, in it’s most basic, a relational database. The nodes of the network are given weights, and some other relational tables are built as well (I’m sure) and while it’s fancy, it’s really still just If/Then statements when you get down to brass tacks.

Now too many people, like judges, who haven’t a single F’in clue about computers, programs, or databases (I once wrote a relational database from scratch - it ain’t rocket science folks!) think that because the data’s format has been changed that the original data is no longer there!

Obviously these idiots never used a zip file.

Folks, the data is all there. The data is always there. Everything that was programmed in, can be easily extracted out. That’s how it works after all! What makes it even clearer that they know they’re plagiarizing other peoples’ works is that they had to put in ‘copyright routines’.

Let’s say that again: In order for the AI (LLMs) to not violate the copyrights of the stuff they’re stealing and plagiarizing, they had to add specific algorithms which work by cutting down the size of the stuff the program is putting out. It brute forces by not allowing too much of any work to come out at a time, to simplify the description. I’m sure somewhere somebody looked up ‘how many words in a row have to be the same to violate a copyright’ and that piece of code uses that length, minus one.

Whenever something is programmed into data, it never goes away.

Never.

Just because you used an algorithm to alter it, doesn’t mean you can’t reverse that algorithm to alter it back to what it once was. That is after all what a computer does when it stores data. Now will something get lost in the restoration? Possibly. But not enough that it still won’t violate copyright and the people who are making these programs Know This. When they claim otherwise, they’re lying.

There is nothing intelligent about current ‘AI’. But everything about it is ‘Artificial’. Including it’s ability to create without ripping off the authors and songwriters it was programmed with. There is no thought, no inspiration, no creativity, no forgetting or misremembering - only people can do that.

For those using it as a tool to help with their own work, yeah, that’s fine. You’re using it to drive your creativity. I think this works best with art, but it can also work quite well with analyzing stuff you’ve created to look for redundancies or (hopefully) glaring errors (though remember, if you rely too much on a tool, you become the tool and nothing more).

For those entering a prompt, no mater how long and claiming ‘I made that’ - no, you didn’t. A machine just helped you rip off dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of people who came before you, using their stuff word for word. It will not ‘improvise a new saying’ from having ‘learned’. Because it can’t learn it can only be programmed.

And for all those people who are going to come here and tell me how wrong I am?

FUCK OFF. You either have no idea, or you’re lying. It’s a mathematical machine. It does not think. It does not reason. It can not create.

Copyright, 2026

Familiar Matters

“Viv! Great to see you!” Joshua said, giving her a hug. Letting go of her, and still smiling, he stepped over to Tory, who …

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But that did lead me to a question. I know there are a lot of folks who aren’t into the military aspects of the scifi / space opera stuff. I know sometimes I am, and sometimes I’m not. But I did put a fair amount of it in book 3 of Valley of Fire, because that was always the story arc.

So what did you, the readers think? Was it too much, not enough, or just right? Do you like a lot of military stuff in these stories or not so much?

I don’t get to touch base with you guys (and gals) as much as I used to, so I’m just looking for feedback to try and get a feel for where everyone’s at nowadays.

Thanks!

Now, Money. This is one of those topics people get all shy about. Like say when talking to their boss, their company, somebody they have a contract with, other employees, etc.

Folks it is YOUR MONEY. You can talk about it all you want and never ever be afraid to talk to the people paying you. It’s not their money once you’ve done the work. It’s your money. And never ever ever let whoever it is hold on to your money, for any reason for any length of time past payday. Always get paid ASAP. You do NOT trust other people with your money unless they’re licensed by the FDIC (and whatever group handles credit unions).

This includes accountants, agents, men in dark alleys. Never sign away your rights on managing your money. YOU always are the one who signs EVERYTHING. Or you’ll be scammed. If you work at a company that isn’t paying you? WALK. Their excuses are lies. They’re not doing without, trust me.

Next - Now that you’ve got it, What are you going to DO with YOUR MONEY?

Do you know? Do you? Do you have any kind of financial planning? Anything?

I’ll admit upfront that for years my financial planning sucked. I spent a fortune on drinking, women, fast cars, fast motorcycles, other recreation ‘items’, - the rest I wasted (old joke). But for all the money I’ve made, and I’ve made a lot mind you, I should be in a better financial place than I am now.

And yet, I’m in a good financial place now. Because it’s never too late to learn.

About (mumble mumble) decades ago, I got an accountant, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) who handles my taxes and gives financial advice in regards to tax liabilities. Not exactly cheap, but I used to spend two weeks a year doing my taxes (I always read the current revised tax code when doing this - my finances have always been complicated being a consultant / contractor). So hiring her was worth every penny, and then some. That was my first step towards being fiscally more responsible.

So you should have one too. Don’t say ‘I can’t afford it’. That’s a lie. You can’t NOT afford it. Accountants make you money and help protect you from stupid shit.

As an author, I have, as of this writing, sold over two million copies of my works. This is over a little more than a decade. So while it sounds good, and has brought in some good paydays, when you spread that out, there have been some great years, and some okay years. Having an accountant meant I got to keep the legal maximum of my money.

But then what? I know authors who have sold a LOT more than I have, and who are barely getting by. I’ve heard of some who still lost everything. It’s because they didn’t have an accountant, because they didn’t have a plan, they didn’t invest. Because they got bit by tax liabilities. The government always gets their share, no matter what.

I also know a few authors who have been so literally brilliant with investing their income that they’re making more money from their investments then from their writing. The took their money and made it work for them, and are set for life and set quite well.

This behavior, the good and the bad, plays out in all of the creative pursuits. You get a big paycheck and rather than bank any of it or pay off your debts, you go out and spend it all on hookers and blow. I’m not kidding. How many times have YOU, on receiving a suddenly windfall, partied with all of that money? More than once I’m sure. We’ve all been there.

I see people who have a hit, get a big payday and immediately go out and buy a huge house with a large mortgage. Or something else that eats all of that money up. Instead of say, buying a reasonable house with no mortgage. Let me tell you right now, there is no more important thing in your entire life than having a roof over your head. Nothing else comes close. You got that, you can get everything. You don’t got that? You may never get off the street. Always protect the place you live, not having one isn’t something you ever want to experience. Trust me - been there, it sucked.

And remember this: when you’re in the entertainment business, it WILL MOVE ON. Your success is NOT guaranteed to continue and will most likely NOT. I’ve made insane amounts of money as an Author. But I knew it would not continue. Especially as I’m getting old and doing a book a month takes it out of you after a few years.

So I invested my money into things I knew would make my life easier and less expensive to maintain. Yeah, maybe I should have gotten a money manager / investment advisor. Might have been a better move, but I’m doing okay and I’m now set for life. Sure I won’t be living in amazing wealth, but I’ll be comfortable (it doesn’t take a lot for me to be happy these days). I’ll never have to worry about having a roof over my head again (barring some huge natural disaster or a war).

But the point I’m getting at is this: Do you know what to do with your money?

‘Spend it’ isn’t the right answer. Pay your mortgage off, if you can. If you have one with a huge payment, refi it down if you can’t pay it off. The people who tell you that ‘oh, that’s an low interest loan! Don’t pay it off, use the money for something else!’ ? Yeah, those people are either idiots, or they have a guaranteed income stream and it’s for a lot more than you have. Remember, as a writer your income stream IS NOT ‘guaranteed’. It’s also a lot easier to write when you don’t have to worry about a roof over your head. Or being able to eat.

Cash flow is something you only talk about when you have guaranteed assets. (And even then you have to manage those assets).

So again, what are you doing with your money? To recap:

1. Be wise with your money - have a plan

2. Pay off your bills - get into the habit of paying cash and NOT taking out loans. Suddenly you’ll find you have a lot more money than you used to. Always pay off your credit card ASAP.

3. Get an accountant (CPA - nothing less will work if you’re a writer / self employed)

4. Pay your taxes first

5. Get investment counseling, maybe even an advisor - but check references and such on said advisor, and don’t go with one the bank advises, unless they’re willing to sign a document that they guarantee said investor and will pay if he’s a con artist (banks are easy to con for some reason).

I’ve seen far too many people who suddenly came into a fair deal of cash, and a few years later had nothing to show for it. I personally know a person who went from 10+ million dollars to losing everything and owing the government millions of dollars and couldn’t work for 6 years because every dime he made, the IRS took it. Not some of his income, ALL of his income. Because he took financial advice from his lover who turned out to be a moron.

And again, never give anyone else control of your money. Because then it’s not yours anymore, it’s theirs, and you will never get it back!

Chapt2

What Free Time?

Come Sunday morning, they didn’t let him out of bed until after twelve. Then again, they hadn’t let him get to sleep until after two! Patricia had…

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I get several of these a day. Hell, I got an email, claiming to be from MY publisher, showing an interest in talking to me, bases on a book I’d written. Which MY publisher had published!

These are mass mailing scams. A robot or an AI scans Amazon, finds names, sends out emails. I get dozens to hundreds of these a day. Most go to my spam filter now, but understand, these people are there to ROB YOU. To STEAL YOUR MONEY.

Agents don’t go contacting people. Not the real ones, the real ones got so many people contacting them, that they’re swamped.

So no, NO LITERARY Agent is contacting you. It’s a scam.

NO PUBLISHER is contacting you from some big press. It’s a scam.

Especially if you’re getting the email with a gmail address. All the scammers use it.

Chapt1

Shifting Perspectives

Joshua fell back as he started the count and took the long snap. They were in the second half of the first round playoff game. It had been a hard game—they were only up by three—but their opponent…

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Okay, yes - that’s Toni. I know her, because:

She’s the one who bought and published Summer’s End.

That’s right, some yahoo who can’t even be bothered to check who the publisher is, sent AI spam mail, to me, pretending to be interested in a book, that was published by the very person they’re pretending to be.

(Oh, notice the email ‘beanbookpub’ at gmail, they spelled Baen wrong, and Baen has its own email server).

Yes, I already forwarded it to Toni.

What’s funny is I just started to write the third book in the Seasons of Change series, which is what Summer’s End is now the first book of.

First off, I don’t think I want to dump two plus millions words (actually, it’s probably more like 3+ million? - I haven’t added it all up in a while) into an AI. Definitely not one that’s at all connected to the internet (I’m still waiting on my Anthropic settlement after they took 20 of my novels, and dumped them into THEIR AI - funny I still get pirated more than damn near anybody else, isn’t it?)

And to be honest, I’m not at all interested in what an LLM thinks of my writing. Are there things I’m doing that it’ll point out to me that I don’t already know? Not at this point.

As I have said, more than once in other places, I have an issue with people using tools, especially AI, when they’re new to writing in the fiction arena. The major issues are:

• 1st, you becoming dependent on the tool, because tools are limiting - it’s why you use them.

• 2nd, it stunts your growth and makes it harder for you to find your voice, your style.

Remember, you’re writing for people, not a machine, it doesn’t matter what the machine thinks, it’s what the readers think. The machine will pick what the machine will pick for reasons known only to the machine. It will not help you write better stories for people.

Readers will pick stories for reasons that they will tell you, and that you, as another person, another reader, a writer, will understand. You will connect with their observations because you can understand their observations. You can look at them and say ‘I agree with this’ or ‘I don’t agree with this’. You can say ‘this one gets what I’m saying’ or ‘this one doesn’t get it at all - how do I do a better job at reaching them?’

Their observations will also tell you what the things are that people notice. A machine notices everything. It comments on those things it’s been programmed to comment on. While a human being will notice those things that are important to human beings, and will comment on the things that people not machines find of interest or of value.

This is a part of learning your craft, of finding your voice, of becoming a writer. Learning how to connect with your audience, write for your audience. Everyone has their own journey along this road, and for all that each of us seems to make many of the same stops on that road, each of our paths along it is unique. Tools can stunt that. AI tools will strangle it dead. Because the AI tool is going to give everyone the same answer. Because that’s what tools do: uniformity.

Everyone likes AI tools because it makes their job ‘easier’. Well there is no path to being a craftsman that involves ‘easier’. Easier holds you back. Easier doesn’t let you grow. Easier doesn’t give you those intuitive jumps where you go ‘Ah HA! Now I get it!’ and you take that step that elevates your abilities.

It’s why I tell people not to use grammarly, which has a grammar level of a 6th grader, barely. It won’t make you a better writer; it’ll make you a more boring one.

• The Map is not the Territory.

• The Tool is not the Craftsman.

• AI will not help you improve - it can’t, it doesn’t think and it’s not your audience.

Remember, you’re writing for people, and a machine will never be able to tell you how to do that.

Now I don’t mind writing series, as long as they have an end (POI is an exception to that - it will have an end, probably after I die. I do need to write that one of these days - for when that comes to pass). I hate series that don’t finish. That I wrote book 3 of Days of Future Past is proof of that. Unfortunately, well I’ve learned better after I did that and all the people who promised to read the trilogy once it was done never fucking did.

Side note: People who say they won’t read a trilogy until it’s done are (mostly) liars. They never come back when it is done, if the writer is masochistic enough to finish it.

The thing is, I don’t like writing the same story over and over and over and over and over again. I know authors who do this. Every book is pretty much the same plot with just some things changed. THAT’S FINE!!! And I am 100 percent AOK with that. So are a lot of readers out there as some of those folks are making serious bank. It’s just not something I can do.

When I finished Valens Legacy, I was done. I wrote Dan’s Inferno for obvious reasons. There’s even a joke in there about hating Reno. The only reason I wrote Valens Heritage was because a lot of people wouldn’t stop bugging me about it. Also, y’all will notice I did something quite different. Originally I had three separate story lines with three different heroes. Yeah, I cut it back down to two pretty quickly. I also broke a few of my own rules with Mihalis, because I really just wanted to have fun.

(Oh, is Valens Heritage Post-Harem now? Valens Legacy is now Pre-Harem (Or so I’ve been told) and as Mihalis breaks ALL of the ‘Harem’ rules (but one) there’s no way that can be Harem now! Mind you, I didn’t create those rules, a bunch of ‘recent’ fans of the genre have created them and boy do they get LOUD if you break em! :-D )

But I digress...

Ghost Warrior was an attempt to do something new, something that is very much Post-Harem. It didn’t go over well, sadly (and not for the reasons I expected, either!). Book 3 of that is pretty much done. I could wrap it up in a week. But I don’t know if I will. I doubt I’ll ever publish it. The people who wanted to see it read it on my subscriber pages, and there honestly weren’t all that many.

How to Be a you-know-what had some different style elements in it. Some of those were set ups for the longer story, but too many people got too upset up front that the hero was having affairs with a couple of married women (he’s 18 for cryin-out-loud, and he just found out he’s a monster! Give him a little slack!). Just FYI, the setups were 1) so he’d end up stealing his enemy’s wife and 2) realizing that he needed to be ‘true’ to his women and end those affairs. But apparently that was a bit too much? Oh well. I like to do character arcs and I like to have people learn and grow.

But getting back to the initial thought, I like to write different stories and I like to jump around a bit. That’s how you got Wolfhounds, a series I’d wanted to write almost a decade ago. When I started writing ‘Men’s Fiction’ I did it because no one else was. No one. Not a soul. It was out of vogue and you couldn’t get it published. So I wrote it and well, I couldn’t get it published, so I sat on it. Until self-publishing came along and I put it all out and it sold, and people liked it.

Hammer Commission, the first book, was plotted out in the year 2000. Thirteen years before I published it. Oh, for those keeping score, it was the first book out there with an active ‘Harem’ in it, in men’s fiction (best I can tell, and it was a best seller) and definitely the first one with ‘Monster Girls’. I followed that up with Portals to Infinity, which had been written in 2003 / 2004 put wasn’t published until 2013, because I honestly thought no one would buy it. I was shocked when several years later I see all of these new ‘Harem’ fan sites (for Japanese ‘harem’ anime) are telling everyone about it and pushing it (and pirating it sadly).

For some reason, no one every pinged on the ‘harem’ aspects of Hammer Commission and the following books. But everyone pinged on them in Portals of Infinity. Go check out the 1 and 2 star reviews, which I’m sure are still there. I got a lot of hate on that! Wow! But I wrote that stuff because it was fun and I was writing for ME and ME alone at that point. When I put them out and they sold? Wow. When I found out that people were very into the idea of a hero with more than one girl friend? That was when the second guy who was supposed to be in Days of Future Past died before he was even created (Poor guy!)

So after Days of Future Past died, I took Shadow, created a pen name (Jan Stryvant) and published it. Shadow was also a book that had been written a few years earlier - mainly as an exercise. It did so well that I sat down and wrote Valens Legacy, and well the rest is history (series sold over a million books, btw).

After that lawsuit, wherein I spent a lot of money and had a lot of agita for the year plus that it ran (and again, thanks to the folks who contributed - you were gold!) I got an offer from Toni at Baen to write HARD-SciFi again (my first love *sniff*) and of course I jumped at it (and need to get BACK to it) and in that process Wolfhounds was also (finally) born.

I have plans for two more books in the Seasons of Change (Summer’s End series name) I also have plans for some more books in that world. I do hope to start on all of that in a few weeks. I also have plans for another Wolfhounds series and a follow on book to Valley of Fire - that will be sort of a stand alone.

There will be no more Jan Stryvant books. Apparently what I write there is no longer interesting and also I’m just out of touch on what a good ‘harem’ series is. (If Valens Legacy is ‘pre’ and Valens Heritage is ‘post’, where does that leave poor Dan’s Inferno?)

I mean, I’ll probably write one or two at some point over the coming years, I just won’t publish them. Hell, I’ve got one novel where the hero is pretty much flying around in space with a traveling bordello! But when I showed it to a friend he told me that I’d by crucified by a lot of the ‘harem’ fans because he’s ‘letting other men sleep with his women!’ - well duh, traveling bordello! :-D

Hell I got a YA book that’s like 30K words finished that I decided not to put out. Maybe one day I’ll finish it and publish?

The thing is, I can’t write ‘formula’ very well. Yes some of you may have noticed that there is a certain theme that I like to go with, I’ve done it several times and it was because I’m good at it and I do enjoy the ‘heroes journey’. I also remember all the shit that I went though when I went off on my own as a young man. Though I can’t understand the people who are always upset that rather than running off and seeking immediate revenge when something bad happens to the hero, my heroes tend to bide their time.

These folks either have poor impulse control, or have just never been in a situation where doing that will at best, put you in jail, at worse, put you in the ground. Guy I went to high school with is still doing life in prison (convicted at age 19) for doing just that. I’ve had some very nasty things happen to me in my life, and if I’d gone out and just ‘gotten my revenge’ at that moment, I too would still be in prison.

So yes, I like to push boundaries and explore new ideas, I like characters who tend to think first and don’t throw tantrums, and I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again. I want to explore new ideas and new stories. Like the authors I once adored (and still do in many cases) I don’t want to write just ONE thing. I want to write ALL the things. I know there are people out there who don’t like that, and that’s fine. You do you, you read what you enjoy. But if you come along and start telling me I have to follow ‘rules’, well... that ain’t gonna happen. Especially when said rule teller starts off with ‘I’ve never read anything you’ve written’.

:-D

Who knows, maybe I’ll publish the flying bordello story one of these days anyways. I’ll just put a huge ‘Not Harem’ label on it.

For now? I’m going back to scifi once I get POI12 finished (yeah, I’ve been gone from that too long, so it’s been a bit rough). Just understand that I’ve always written, and I’ll always be writing. Because I do it for ME. Whether or not I’m publishing it? Some of it’s pretty edgy. Some things are probably considered ‘porn’ nowadays (when did we get so touchy about sex again?) though they really aren’t. And some of it is definitely guilty of skewering sacred cows.

But if I can make you smile, possibly even giggle or laugh, then it’s all worth it in the end.

So first I switched gears and dug up the front lawn faucet, which was 14 feet away. Turned out that wasn’t the leak (did that yesterday). Today I started back in the pit, following the pipe towards the faucet. Now, I don’t know if they were using 10’ sticks, 20’ sticks, or scraps. But if they’re using ten foot, well, I should be getting there soon.

So today I dug up 2 feet, then another 2 feet. As I was digging I started to see purple stains on the pipe. Dead giveaway that the union is near and that the whoever put it in, wasn’t very good. Sloppy work means it’s probably a bad joint. Spilling cleaner everywhere means sloppy work.

The picture below (or maybe it’ll be above) has a red circle around the union and a blue line showing the leak. It’s very much a ‘pinhole’ leak and it was obviously a bad union the second I cleaned it all off and took a step back and looked at it. Anyone with plumbing experience will see it instantly as well (Probably even in as bad a picture as this one).

What is wrong with this picture? The pipe isn’t straight coming out of the union/coupler.

This was probably leaking before they even threw dirt over it. If it wasn’t, it was leaking soon enough after. That leak has been there since creation and it explains a whole bunch of other issues we’ve seen over the years.

Tomorrow or Monday I’ll splice in a new section. I’ve got like eight feet of pipe exposed now. I’ll probably take a regular coupler, grind the ring out of the inside so I can slide it up and down the pipe, so I can fit it in without having to try and bend the pipe (which would probably break it, and would give a crap joint if it didn’t).

Oh, and this is why you twist the joint, or the pipe, when you put it on. To make sure it’s fully seated and to make sure that there aren’t any air passages or weak areas in the glue that will leak. This entire issue is because the installer did a shit job and couldn’t be bothered to check his work, or fix it if he saw it was leaking.

In any case, I think my water bill just dropped by 50 to 100 dollars a month.

GET A LAWYER.

If they’re a major publisher?

GET A FUCKING LAWYER NOW!

I’m dealing with a very large publisher right now. The contract originally proposed was not a good one for the author. Lots a gotcha’s in it. This did not please me, but I have a lawyer for contracts for this very reason. An IP lawyer. Worth what he charges me, because he makes me money. You can not afford to not have a lawyer.

Well, said company was just discovered selling the very thing we’re still in negotiations over. That’s right. We haven’t signed a contract yet, but they’re out there making money. My lawyer is dealing with this as we speak. Will I still sign the contract? Maybe. There are good fiscal incentives to do so.

However my trust in this company has been eroded to almost nothing.

This is why you MUST have a lawyer when dealing with publishers these days. Sure they may be big, sure they may have been around for a 100 years or more. That however doesn’t mean a thing. Many many years ago I got to sit in on a conversation with the VP of Capitol Records (mid 70’s - yes I’m old) and I learned a lot about contracts and business practices by major publishers. There is no trust. There is never any trust. You always always always have a lawyer.