Wait, hold up. Another post? Really? (Well…yes.)

I’ve been working, this month. I’m almost a third of the way through first draft of Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 4: Meals On Wheels, and while I mostly know what’s going on and why, Meg keeps getting thrown curve balls. Some nasty, some not quite so bad. They’re definitely startling to her, and they’re coming at me out of nowhere, too. I’m going to probably blow past my month’s goal of 20K words on this one before the end of tomorrow. I’m already at 18K, and I’ve still got about two more hours kid-free to write.

I’ve also been ambushed a couple of times with short stories…about 13K words worth of short stories. I’ll write ’em as they come, and see if there’s a set I can put out next year as a themed collection, like I did with Normalcy Bias, The Dragon’s in the Details (now available in audio book with Virtual Voice reader), and Faerie Gifts (coming in April–up for pre-order now). Right now, it looks like it’s science fiction escapism.

I’m actually a little humbled by how well one of my side projects that ambushed me has done–Fixing Up Love seems to be really well-liked. If another similar piece ambushes me, I’ll try to not resist it. I’m absolutely not going to say “I don’t write [insert random genre]” because the story-telling part of my brain appears to take it as a challenge.

I’ve got Certified Public Assassin back from another beta reader, two more have it, and I’ve got one more volunteer who wants it next week. I’m planning on that sometime in August or September, and might put Dogfather out this year, should I get it edited and beta-read. I’ve got it done, after all.

Future projects include another short story collection that’s in progress, the current Liquid Diet installment (probably due out in January), and Cold Fey Fire, a sort of coming-of-age/self-discovery story that’s been percolating for a while. I have no idea what else might pop up between now and then. But it’ll likely be on the shorter side, like Love and Dogfather were.

An author’s note:

There’s a downright pathological anti-birth attitude prevalent in the United States. Women go on birth control as soon as they come of biological age to have babies and only come off it grudgingly to have one, or maybe two, children. Part of that is a reaction to welfare queens that breed on purpose to get more money, then ignore all of the children. But part of it is a cultural pressure to just…not have children. 

It extends to pets. There’s an enormous pressure to have animals fixed as soon as possible–before they enter their first heat for females, and as soon as the balls drop for males.*

I grew up on a farm. We had cats. Barn cats, garage cats, cats living up close to the house. The cats were a necessary working part of the farm–without them, more chicken feed and goat feed was eaten by rodents than the animals the feed was intended for. 

Cats breed almost as fast as rodents. One of our cats had three litters per year, like clockwork. January, April or May, then August or September. That particular cat was an utterly gorgeous, seal point Siamese. Half of her litters looked like her (and were given away as fast as they were ready to go), one would be either tuxedo or cow-print, and the rest would be jet black. My grandmother picked her up at a yard sale with her first litter from idiots that bought her to breed, but didn’t know that females bred early, and assumed that a mixed litter would devalue every following litter. I’m not sure if that was correct, but that wasn’t why Grandma wanted her. She was absolutely hell on wheels on rats, and we had a rat problem. She was the healthiest cat we ever had, mostly because she didn’t come from an inbred litter.  

Most of our cats, though, had about two litters per year, because their backgrounds were different. We picked them up as kittens from a neighbor who let her cats get really badly inbred. Most of them were mostly okay, but some of them had some serious health issues, from allergies to serious mental defects. 

It only takes about five generations–cat generations–to get to that point. 

And then, the litters get smaller…and then the kittens don’t survive more than a few weeks. 

Call it maybe ten, fifteen years before there’s no more kittens. 

This was in the back of my head when I wrote Heisenberg’s Point of Observation. One breeding pair of cats went into the shelter at the end of Cataclysm. Only one. Yes, other people took their pets down, but those pets had been fixed. And there were more important things to the people setting the shelters up than ensuring a healthy pet population: namely, ensuring a healthy human one. 

When Tom Beadle sent his cats down, all he was thinking of was saving his cats. And saving a pregnant woman. He wasn’t thinking any further than that. 

And within about twenty years–fifty, at most–the last cat would have died off. Because cat generations are on a shorter time-span than human. And because inbreeding hits them harder and faster, and kills the population off sooner. Thomas Sutton would have never seen a cat in person. Hell, he may have never seen an animal at all until he started working with the biologists working to feed everyone on a few protein sources. 

When I wrote those books, my knowledge of cat generations, of inbreeding, and how it affected cat populations was in the back of my mind. I assumed my knowledge was common knowledge. I didn’t realize it wasn’t until my readers complained in the reviews about the cats in the first book vanishing entirely in the second. 

Mea culpa.

*One of the things that strikes me as absolutely wrong on toast about the current push to let pre-pubescent children have puberty blockers and surgery to pretend they’re the opposite gender is this: we’re fixing them, like we do our pets. Children have no idea what they’re setting themselves up for, and have no idea about the long-term repercussions. Their brain development is not at the point where they see future repercussions as happening to them. They’re not capable of making that connection until they hit somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-five, when the last bit of brain development finalizes.

Gray day.

I am trying to do better about posting updates. It’s still a little hard to find motivation, but now it’s also hard to find time because the words are rolling out. 

January was…good for output, despite the early event that knocked my emotional feet out from under me. I ended up writing an entirely new story, which clocked in at 16K words, and wrote a further 15K words to finish Dogfather, the short story I’d started and intended to put in Faerie Gifts (Gifts is available for pre-order, and will be available KU on April 8), but which took a hard right turn into short-novel territory. Right now, it’s finished, but only first-draft finished. I’ll pick it up and revise it in a couple of months. Then send it out for beta readers to eyeball, possibly late this summer, or early fall. Mostly because I’m working on other things at the moment.

The new story, the one that jumped the queue, and postponed me finishing Dogfather? It’s a romance, not urban fantasy, and not sci-fi. Name is Fixing Up Love, and it’s available for sale or Kindle Unlimited borrowing. It ended up really cute. Yeah, I still kinda want to thump the protagonist in the beginning, but that’s not unusual for me–I typically do want to thump people who willfully avoid self-reflection. She does figure out that she won’t catch fire from self-reflection and does better fairly quickly. 

Certified Public Assassin is in the hands of two of my beta readers right now, and I’m about to contact the other two. I’m planning on that one coming out sometime in August or so. 

I’ve picked up and started writing the fourth book in the Liquid Diet Chronicles (book three is here), and I got the entire first chapter out last night before bed. The title of this one is Meals on Wheels, and yes, I know exactly what’s going on, and why. Meg is bitching unmercifully. Watch for it in January of ’25. 

That’s it for the things I’ve got firm information on. But there’s always more stories swirling around, and I don’t have anything resembling full creative control over anything. Nor yet over the timing of anything except hitting the publishing button.