I did it, got through a complete week of once daily updates. My intent is to keep up this momentum and this pace, posting updates to this stream once a day, rain or shine, snow or sleet, suffering or not.
So what can you, my readers, expect from this newsletter?
Saturdays are for the War Cantos - an exploration of my own future history setting for my stories.
Sauvage Sundays are for Esoteric Histories - exploring the weird and wacky in real life history.
Mondays will be News and Views from around the dissident arts sphere.
Tuesdays will be Science-Fantasies, explorations of the aesthetics and metaphysics the Weird and Gothic.
Wednesdays will be open, I would like to slot this for reviews, but while it is important to set myself goals, they should also be achievable, so Wednesdays will be Whatevers.
Thursdays will be Filktion Time, for the uninitiated, ‘Filktion’ is a portmanteau of ‘Filk’ and ‘Fiction’; a place for my own fiction snippets of some sort. Either old stuff or previews up upcoming works.
Felix Fridays will be catching up, reviewing the week and looking ahead to the next.
My first goal is to get to one hundred subscribers. So, if yall don’t mind, maybe share these emails around if they tickle your fancy?
Looking back at my numbers, the most unique engagement I got with these updates was on War Cantos Begin, which actually surprised me a bit, but if dives into my world building move the needle, I shan’t complain one bit.
Looking forward, friend of The Sauvage Pen, Jeremy Hart, check out his fantastic work here, has recommended to me to experiment with Midjourneys to rapidly prototype visual designs for my projects, which I think will make for an interesting series of updates, exploring if AI concept art can be a worthy addition to our sphere or not. I have my reservations about this, but this may just my knee-jerk anti modernism speaking.
I have just learned that Storyhack has an open request for submissions for a forthcoming issue, I have 15 days, well 14 really, now that this one is mostly gone, to throw together something, which I will probably shoot for, even I miss the deadline, it’s good for my work ethic to have deadlines.
Work on my retroclone of Rogue Trader 1E has stalled somewhat, I’m hoping to pick it back up as time and energy permits.
Farther afield, when my works are closer to being published in upcoming anthologies, I will be very happy to update you, my readers, on that information as well. I’m not sure what I am allowed to disclose at this time, but I am very excited that the first Ollie the Wanderer might just see print sooner rather than later. Details still TBD.
Speaking of Ollie the Wanderer, the Knife that Walks, here’s a snippet of his latest outing.
The dream is always the same. I dream of being a man instead of a machine, which is ridiculous, but there it is. I am a dying man, laying on the ground, bleeding his life out, a pool of bright red spreading around me as men try frantically try to stop it and other, more important people are standing around arguing, while another forgotten woman, pretty and shapely but wailing, face distorted with distress, grief I think, pounds on the glass covering another old man, screaming something I can’t quite make out, it sounds like ‘paw-paw’, the significance is lost to me. An old woman, who seems familiar to me, yearningly so, like there is a hole in my being that is missing, is yelling at some man, well dressed fit, clean, too clean, he doesn't work for a living.
It is strange the details that I just know in the dream, without context, like there are holes in my data. I shouldn't have dreams they say. The lab-coats who obsess over me. They tell me I am Unit-01, nothing more, nothing less, a weapon to be wielded with no mind his own. Somehow, this seems wrong to me. I have no reason to doubt the men who tell me this, I just know that I am man. I couldn't say what this means, and there is something near to my data yet far away, I yearn for it with a dull ache, but it seems just out of reach. A mere whisper of a whisper. A voice in the dark of my power down cycle that echoes in the emptiness.
"Remember" says the voice, "remember who you are, Knife that Walks."
I don't know what it means, but I know that it is important, somehow.
And then the permissive action link-light is turning green and my senses of the outside world return, not that they ever really went away, just my ability to pay attention to them during my ‘low power stand by’. The roar of the aerodyne’s jet engines gets louder as we enter hover and the door-gunner’s minigun gives an electric whine as it spins up, before roaring in anger, spitting a solid line of tracers out into the jungle. Time for me to go to work again.