Woman is the n****r of the world

John Lennon wrote those words a long time ago.

Nothing has changed.

The best qualified woman, the smartest person in the room, with a thirty-year of history of hard work, applied for a job. A drunken boor literally walked in off the street... and they gave the job to him.

In the end, the best woman was still worse than the worst man.

The Republicans paid no price for breaking our democratic traditions. No candidate will ever again release their taxes. No candidate will put his assets in a blind trust; the Presidency will be viewed as a vehicle for making money. No candidate will worry about fact checking - Trump stood up and lied to thousands about a video they could literally have checked on their phones and they didn't care. No candidate will worry about Constitutional rights of the citizenry: calling for police monitoring of religious groups will be just another campaign promise.

So many traditions were smashed tonight, in a way that Bush at his worst never dreamed of. This was not a partisan election; this was not between Republican policies and Democratic principles. This was either a revolt against the norms of democracy, or an act of negligent homicide.

Either way, the people said they wanted change; well, they'll get it.

Judgment at Verdant Court review & give-away

Publisher's Weekly gave me a very nice review:

Fast-paced…. Planck’s writing is as straightforward and clever as his protagonist. Fans will enjoy diving headlong into the action.

And Pyr is running a give-away on Goodreads:

 https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/205734-judgment-at-verdant-court

Woot!

Sword of the Bright Lady on sale

Barnes & Noble selected my book as part of their "start a new series" promotion, and since everything is electronic these days, Amazon price-matched the ebook.

So now you can buy Sword of the Bright Lady for $2.99. (Oddly, for $2.99 AU in Australia, too, despite the exchange rate).

It only lasts for a week, so start clicking!

In other news: Judgment at Verdant Court will be out Dec 9, and I am 40K words into Verdict on Crimson Fields. Planning on having it finished by Dec, but that means I need to stop watching "BrainDead" every night.

And I heard a great clatter, as if all the irony meters in the galaxy were silenced...

Mike Pence slams Obama for name calling.

“I don’t think name calling has any place in public life.” 

Nietzsche was wrong. It's not God who died, but irony.

Trump was on Twitter while Pence was uttering these words, emitting his usual stream of name-calling such as "Little Mike Bloomberg" and "Crooked Hillary."

Baghdad Bob has come home.

It Happend One Doomsday

Got a copy of It Happened One Doomsday by Laurence MacNaughton in the mail today. It's a fun, fast read about the Apocalypse being delivered in demonic muscle cars. Urban fantasy isn't my usual fare, but I liked this one, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Filling in the Drake equation

Yes, there have been aliens

The odds that we are the first and last technological civilization seem to be irrational, as the article says, now that we know how many planets exist that could support life.

Which, in it is way, is depressing; because it implies that the controlling factor of the Drake equation is "how long a technological civilization lives," and that factor must be very, very small.

The Kindle Revolution's dark underbelly

Magician of the first category is #923 in Paid Kindle store right now. It's a self-published book by a Russian author. For all I know it's a great story; but as a book it is a total failure. Here is some actual text from the first page:

"What we are all potential war criminals and we cry a military tribunal. Therefore, the only way for us to remain silent in a rag, and pretend to be rags. This manual arguments. On our side, n rivodilis following arguments. In the first place, but we are on the drum."

Dropping foreign texts into Google translate does not count as publishing, self- or otherwise. This kind of nonsense clogs the channel; it's like turning on a faucet and getting muddy water. It just puts people off the whole reading thing. The fact that this book is higher on the Paid Kindle list than any of my books ever have or will be is, I think, a sign that there is something seriously wrong with the ranking system. I mean, say what you will about my writing, but at least it's in English.