We finally meet Hal's much-dreaded boss:
Just when the calculus was getting exciting and they were about to prove to me that trig functions were infinitely differentiable, which I'd been worrying about since I was a little bastard, Breit came in. The top of his head was a slightly different shade of brick red because he'd been out in the sun. He looked way too fucking cheerful.
Megan said, "Too big to be a space station, Luke," and I looked down for a second because she'd nearly made me crack up, and if she had, he'd've insisted on having us explain the joke, because no matter what Breit claimed, he had no sense of humor about himself at all.
Behind his thick hornrims, John Breit had baggy eyes that wouldn't have been out of place on a basset hound, and his face was covered with big brown freckles all the way up to that brick-red patch of scalp nested in his messy gray hair. His squidgy, fleshy nose flowed almost down to his thick liver lips. A row of proto-chins hung from his usually-sorta-shaved jaw. He must have had some serious muscle once -- biceps, triceps, and quads stuck out of all that lard—but nowadays his high pants made him look like a cinched-in beach ball.
If you haven't been following it and think you might like to start, it starts here.
By way of apology, I normally try to get something up for you all on Monday, but as it happens, this week I find I keep thinking about it and it keeps getting longer; for whatever reason, here at Approachably Reclusive, I find I like to say some things that I don't think I've seen said quite that way before, and sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what I mean to say.
There's also a boatload of other stuff to get done, including a fairly hot streak on The Last President, which is the now-getting-painfully-late third Directive 51 book.
Also I'm finishing up the lastest edition of the newsletter, and will be posting that to the subscribers within a few days. For those of you who haven't seen this announcement before: if you'd like to receive my irregular newsletter, which contains
1) barefaced self-promotion,
2) blatant attempts to sell you stuff,
3) a certain amount of gossipish chatter about my personal life, which unfortunately is so dull that dishwater and oatmeal both sneer at it, and
4) an essay not published elsewhere -- this one discusses some of my "lost" short stories and why most of them will stay lost
5) occasional spiffy deals on Barnesian merchandise,
then drop me a note via the "Email me" thingie in the sidebar, and tell me you'd like to be added to the mailing list.
So a big thoughty blog is coming along pretty soon, the newsletter is coming along about as soon, and The Last President is at least coming along. As always, watch this space.
If you haven't been following it and think you might like to start, it starts here.
By way of apology, I normally try to get something up for you all on Monday, but as it happens, this week I find I keep thinking about it and it keeps getting longer; for whatever reason, here at Approachably Reclusive, I find I like to say some things that I don't think I've seen said quite that way before, and sometimes it takes me a while to figure out what I mean to say.
There's also a boatload of other stuff to get done, including a fairly hot streak on The Last President, which is the now-getting-painfully-late third Directive 51 book.
Also I'm finishing up the lastest edition of the newsletter, and will be posting that to the subscribers within a few days. For those of you who haven't seen this announcement before: if you'd like to receive my irregular newsletter, which contains
1) barefaced self-promotion,
2) blatant attempts to sell you stuff,
3) a certain amount of gossipish chatter about my personal life, which unfortunately is so dull that dishwater and oatmeal both sneer at it, and
4) an essay not published elsewhere -- this one discusses some of my "lost" short stories and why most of them will stay lost
5) occasional spiffy deals on Barnesian merchandise,
then drop me a note via the "Email me" thingie in the sidebar, and tell me you'd like to be added to the mailing list.
So a big thoughty blog is coming along pretty soon, the newsletter is coming along about as soon, and The Last President is at least coming along. As always, watch this space.
