Part 2 of No Man's Land is out!!!

 

Part 2 of the gigantic novel dropped yesterday!*  Go!  Grab the first volume (if you haven't) here, then get this one!  

The third part will be out in the first full week of October--yes, that does mean it's finished.  No this isn't an unfinished work (looking at Patrick Rothfuss as much as George R.R. Martin).  Yes, there will be more books in this world, but this one is finished. 

And I know this is in volumes, but it is the same book.  It's broken in three parts because if it'd been an all-in-one, it would have broken its own spine...or had print so small you'd need a magnifying glass to read it.  

That said, the author is gracious, and awesome, and has had mercy on us by splitting it into thirds.  

Go!  If you haven't bought the first, go do--then buy the second.  Pre-order the third.  

You really won't be sorry.



*I spent yesterday sitting at a dealership while they looked my car over, and clean forgot to make the announcement.  Doesn't help that I'm coming down with a respiratory bug.  Again.  

"Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Those were the words of Henry II, referring to Thomas Beckett, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Two knights, freshly back from the Crusades, heard the king, and took it as an order to kill Beckett.  The king denied all fault in the matter, loading all the blame onto the knights.

Don't let the media dump the blame on anyone.  They've been screaming about turbulent not-really-a-journalist journalists on the right for as long as I can remember.  

They did this.  Oh, they didn't hold the gun themselves, but they did this.

Pray for Charlie Kirk, his family, and our nation.  He wasn't a firebrand.  Not like some.  Anyone who steps up after this is going to be more of an extremist.  

It's out, it's out, it's out!!!!

Sarah Hoyt's first volume of No Man's Land has dropped live!  

What are you waiting for???  Go get it!  

Oh.  You want the back cover text/description?  Can do!   (seriously--go get it.  It's truly excellent.)

 

 Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

  

Fuck "efficiency," I want things that WORK.

Do y'all remember the days of running five loads of laundry in a day?  Flushing once, and not having to flush again to get the rest?  A dishwasher that was loud as fuck, but cleaned the damn dishes?  

I do.  And I'm pissed as hell that those days have gone.  

I hate high-efficiency fittings and appliances.  I do.  They don't do their fucking jobs, and they waste time, electricity, money, and my tolerance for enviro-weenie bullshit.  

When my pixie was a toddler (she's going to be fifteen in December!!!), I had to let my second-hand '80s Maytag washer go.  I was really sad to see it go: it'd been an excellent washer from the time my in-laws gave it to us, and we'd had it repaired until the repair guy said, "I can't get parts to fix this anymore."  

It took twenty minutes to run a wash cycle. Used a full tub of water, didn't lock the lid unless it was spinning so that I could rinse the cup, and got the smells out of everything.  

When we replaced it, we got a Maytag.  A Bravos.  Did you know that the first load, three quarters of the clothes were bone dry at the end?  And that it took three and a half fucking hours to run said "washed" load?

That was on normal.  That is not normal.  Normal was filling the fucking tub, agitating the fuck out of the clothes, building up a huge amount of suds from agitation, then draining, rinsing (with more water, agitation, and a hard spin to get the soapy water out instead of sucking it down through the clothes and re-depositing the residue).  Done in 20 minutes or so.  Half an hour, if the load was really dirty; an hour if I soaked first.     

"Deep water wash" doesn't fill the tub all the way.  Just barely covers the clothes, but they're at least all wet and floating.  Takes three and a half hours, but the clothes get clean.  Ish.  The tub lacks an agitator.  Which...does make a difference.  I've been using that for years, and the enviroweenies can fuck themselves with a cholla for making two loads of laundry take ALL FUCKING DAY.  Even the PowerWash setting takes two and a half hours.  

Don't even get me started on the dishwashers.  I have had dishwashers that ran in under an hour, sprayed water HARD, and pressure washed the damn dishes.  Things got clean even without the phosphates in the detergent.  My current one?  There's a lot of time where nothing's spraying, even in the "express 60 minute" setting, and nothing's draining.  It's silent.  I just opened it after a cycle, and the first and last of a set of three dirty bowls are still dirty.   I haven't looked at anything else yet, but I can tell you that there were three spoons that got left in from the last load, and a leftovers-for-lunch dish that didn't get clean.  

I cannot hand-wash things before I put them in the dishwasher.  I got the dishwasher because I do not have the energy to hand wash everything I use every day.  I don't have the energy to do it, and I can't replenish the energy I spend by eating or by sitting and resting.  

What's more, I refuse to wash dishes before I wash the goddamn dishes.  I want a fucking dishwasher that WASHES THE FUCKING DISHES.  With phosphates in the goddamn soap to make sure it fucking rinses CLEAN.  

Toilets.  Toilets are fucking terrible.  "Oh, you'll use less water when you flush!  It's cheaper!"  

Okay, first: yes, you use less water per flush.  Both toilets use less than a gallon.  Both toilets routinely clog, because this house and its septic were designed for a 3.5 to 5 gallon per flush toilet.  I fucking hate the spit-of-water to try to push SOLIDS out of the pipes.  

Second, on the whole "cheaper" bullshit.  

Bitch, I've got a well.  I don't pay for water (just electricity, and I have rants there, too).  

"But can't you just...I dunno...flush more than once?"  

It takes fucking time to refill the tank.  By the time I can flush again...the solids have lodged and ain't moving with a bare spit of water.   

I want a 3.5 gallon-per-flush toilet.  And I'm being told "oh, you'll have clogs!  The new ones are better tech that work better!"  Yeah, the nay-sayers can go fuck themselves.  Again, with a cholla, that has been dipped in a freshly flushed low-flow toilet.  The toilets that can get the waste into the pipe, but not all the way to the septic tank.  Which...is the fucking problem.  

 Damn it, I want things that fucking WORK.  Not things that promise "efficiency" but aren't at all efficient.