the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
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NEWS AND VIEWS - MAY 2025
I started writing a new Signalverse novel this month -- Signal Solutions, a story about a hero-for-hire business in Signal City. (The eleventh Signalverse novel was originally supposed to be Special Squad E, but I decided I liked this story idea better.) I'm about 20,000 words into it, and I expect it to run about 40,000-60,000 words, so I've already got a pretty good bite on it here. 
I was planning on stepping away from the Signalverse for a few years after finishing City of Strange Gods, partly because I liked how that book ended, and partly because this series has never been all that successful (I thought I might have better luck in another genre). I even thought about retiring the series. But then I started writing all these short stories for my Patreon, and I slowly found myself getting drawn back into this world. I also needed a writing project to work on this summer, and of all my various story ideas, Signal Solutions was the only one that really appealed to me. What can I say? I like the Signalverse. It may not be very popular, but it's special to me, and I do enjoy working on it. So I've been working on that this month. I also put together an ebook containing several of my old snarky movie reviews (available on my Patreon) and started writing yet another short story set in the Signalverse, called "War Stories" or possibly "The Ghosts of F.A.N.G.", which is a Silver Shot mystery set in the late 1960's. Several retired World War II-era heroes appear in this one for the first time, including Radium Man and the Spirit of the Revolution. I'm sure you're all anxious to meet these characters, lol. A while back Amazon invited me to use their AI voice thing to make audiobooks out of my books, so I tested it out with Playground Noir. Unfortunately none of the AI voices sounded quite right to me -- they were very stiff and robotic -- so I decided not to bother with it. I then attempted to make my own Playground Noir audiobook, using my own voice, but that didn't work out, either. I think my hard-boiled delivery is okay (maybe a little too whispery), but I find it hard to do "voices" to indicate that other characters are speaking. Here's a sample, if you're interested. Other than that, not much going on with me. Been doing a lot of writing, obviously. Started watching a couple new Korean shows (Undercover High School and The Witch, both of which I'm enjoying), started playing a couple of older video games (Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, from 2008, and Treasure Hunter G, from 1996), and started reading a bunch of books, including After 1177 BC by Eric Kline, Marty Makary's Blind Spots, and an old Xanth book, Demons Don't Dream, which I think was the sixteenth in the series. I used to really like the Xanth books when I was a teenager, but I lost interest in the series after the puns totally took over. By the time Anthony wrote Demons Don't Dream, the characters and the stories had become almost superfluous, existing only to take the reader from one silly pun to the next. It was a nice little nostalgia trip, I guess, but also a reminder of why I stopped reading these books. |