The Cold Caller

New week, more fresh Hells in store, I'm sure.

Thought to post this to get myself going. Tough luck for that kid to run across a pissed off Death. Anyway, nothing like dark comedy to jumpstart my day (and week).

2026 Calendar Update

All righty! Revisions and edits for Compline are now underway. I actually considered waiting till April for this, but with so many notes and with the ideas still fresh in my head, I figured now's much better than later. That'll free up more time in the second half of April (or sooner) for additional rounds of edits before I can finally send this baby out for distribution. 

An additional update is this:

This is my publishing calendar for 2026, which isn't the same as what I had on my Book News page for the last year. 

What's missing here is the cover art for The Bells of St. Mark's Eve, which was originally scheduled before Doppelgänger. And it's because I decided to pull the book and declare it dead. 

The reason for that is it follows too closely the same plot beats as Compline, and I didn't even realize it till yesterday, if you can believe it. It was also planned to be a contemporary story that's also a comedy, the polar opposite of Compline, but way too many elements in the current book are needed for the latter book to work. 

I'd rather not start from scratch and redo all my notes for The Bells of St. Mark's Eve. I already have so many planned books in the pipeline, and what'll happen is Camera Obscura will now be a part of my 2026 calendar. At least I can say with confidence that all the books after Compline are unique in plot, and none will echo another. I'd rather have my books be criticized as weird than cookie-cutter. 

To be fair, though, I do gravitate toward certain types when it comes to my MCs, but at least my plots don't give readers more of the same (and I hope they never will). I've updated the necessary pages of my site to reflect these changes.

'Deep Rooted' Animated Short

Since I'm loving the fact that an indie animated film using open source software and a comparatively minuscule budget left mainstream animation studios in the dust recently, I figured I'd go back to sharing some hidden gems (no longer hidden now) from my usual trawling over at Youtube. 

I love animated shorts. I love immersing myself in creativity and the arts in any form. Give me film, give me books, give me art, give me music. Just GIVE ME.

Anyway, here's a fun and really well-done short -- also made using Blender, the same open source software Gints Zilbalodis and his team used to make Flow:

This goes to show it's resources that impede creatives, whether or not it's funding or computers and whatever high-tech doohickies are part of them (no, I'm not technical by any stretch). If you have the talent, the vision, and the passion for something incredible and -- above all -- DIFFERENT and UNIQUE, a free software would get you going.   

I mean, hell, I've seen mind-blowing photorealistic illustrations by artists from disadvantaged backgrounds using only either a ballpoint pen or a simple pencil. 

In my recent visits to Tumblr, I also ran across this post that I just have to share here (text in boldface = my emphasis):

not to talk about flow again, but the thing is, a lot of people talk about independent film making and its importance etc, but it's hard to get more independent than flow this year

not only because it was made with a free and open source software anyone can use, not only because it beat competitors from major studios with an average of 3% of the budget they had, not only because it represented a country that had never won an oscar before, not only because it didn't have any star power involved, not only because it didn't come from a filmmaker with past history, not only because it was made by a small team...

but also because it's an animated movie

animators often get the short end of the stick in the entertainment industry and, for the past years, it was starting to look as if the only way to make an animated project happen was to sell your soul to a major studio and see your work transformed into what they need and how they want it marketed

especially for movies from outside the US, from non-English speaking countries, where insanely talented animators tend to be used as freelance cheap labor for major US studios or have to adapt as much as possible to fit into their market in order to find work

passion projects for animation seemed to only be reserved to the shorts category, or needed to be as high brow as humanly possible to be perceived as "high art" to be valued and, even in the spaces of the industry dedicated to the genre, the way in which awards are distributed are a poor reflection of the vast work animators do

it's major for this film to win awards, let alone the oscar, an award which is notably judged badly for animation and often prefers the marketable easy way out of voting rather than genuine interest

this movie used a resource that is open to anyone and, with good storytelling, made an oscar winning film

in a world in which art is constantly being attacked by capitalist greed, I'm happy that a movie with heart and little resources could do something like this, whether or not people care about the oscars anymore

And I'm so happy to hear Zilbalodis turn down suggestions for sequels to his film and also go on record about staying independent. THIS is what I've been hoping to hear about him moving forward after his success. To get sucked into the sequel mindset has corporate-executive-making-shareholders-jizz-in-their-underwear written all over it, and guess what. That's practically all we get from major American studios nowadays. I've already stopped watching Disney and Pixar* and never really got into Dreamworks stuff** (and I saw that The Wild Robot is getting a sequel, so...). 

So I'm wishing all the up-and-coming artists struggling in the bloated shadows of major studios all the best of luck. I hope Flow's win inspires you or keeps those creative passion fires lit. I know I'm not the only one who's cheering you on. 

* I'm only one person, of course, out of billions world wide.

** Ditto. 

'The Cecilian Blue-Collar Chronicles' and the Space Everyman

This book is an omnibus containing four novellas I originally released individually via a small press. I wanted to try my hand at writing sci-fi but not hard sci-fi because I'm really one of the least technical / scientifically inclined people on Earth even though science fascinates me. I also grew up watching (of course!) Star Trek, Star Wars, and a number of other sci-fi shows on TV back in the 1970s like UFO, Battlestar Galactica, and Sapphire and Steel (the last one on the list being my favorite). 

I mean you gotta balance all the ghost / gothic / horror anthology shows with sci-fi, right? That was my childhood.

One short-lived series I really, REALLY loved watching as a kid was Quark. It's a sci-fi comedy that spoofs a lot of the heavyweights like Star Trek and 2001: Space Odyssey, and it follows a crew of a space sanitation service.

That's right: an honest to God space trash collector. Who wouldn't love this premise???

So my memories of that show were my foundation for The Cecilian Blue-Collar Chronicles, and this time, we're following the daily misadventures of a young cab driver (but sci-fi!) who's a few generations from the original settlers of the planet Cecilia. The Earthlings (former Earthlings, that is) are actually refugees from Earth following a global catastrophe, and evolution dictated by their new environment changed their appearance by way of color, so colonists walk around looking like a 1960s acid trip.

I did try to stick to pure sci-fi, plot-wise, doing my own spoof of sci-fi tropes like aliens and the rough environment of a planet. 

However, there were elements in the plot that wouldn't work as sci-fi but were needed for the story to make sense, so I had to turn the series into a hybrid of sci-fi and fantasy. So all the characters coming from Yuli's world are fantasy-based while everything else above ground is sci-fi in its wonkiest form. Yes, there are space ships and astro-cabs and ray guns, but Earthlings are Earthlings, and the original refugees brought whatever knowledge they had from Earth to Cecilia, so buildings, food, etc., are adapted versions of old Earth stuff -- but forced to work with a wilder terrain and so on and with questionable results. 

All in all this series was incredibly fun to write though it also only grounded home my limitations as a sci-fi writer. I'd happily watch my favorite sci-fi shows again for the nostalgia and will just have to live vicariously through them as a writer.

The Cecilian Blue-Collar Chronicles is currently 50% off through the end of March. You can go to Smashwords or Kobo for a copy, and for other online stores, check out the book page on Books2Read.

'Compline': Done!

One more book to scratch off my list, booyah! Compline is now done in first draft form, and there's a lot of revision work to come. I did ease up on the preliminary word count as there are a good number of things I need to add to the material still, and that requires more room than usual. Given the way I struggled getting this book off the ground and pausing midway through so I could add Lukas's chapters into the mix, I honestly didn't think I was going to get this story done.

So! As per my tradition whenever a new WiP crosses the finish line, I'm indulging in a celebratory music video courtesy of my childhood soundtrack. 

I also changed my site's background into a lighter and more cheerful design, but I might end up tweaking things some more, so be prepared for another cycle of an evolving look whenever you visit this place. Apologies in advance for the mindfuck. 

But yay, new book! Yay!

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Okay, never mind. Went back to the darker blue background and will stick with it. I've grown so used to it (plus blue comes second to green as my favorite color, so yeah) so that anything brighter or lighter than that doesn't sit well with me now. At least it's a subtler design than the previous blue background I used.