There's a part of the book where I mention, in a throwaway sort of line, the Warlizard Gaming Forums. I do this for a few reasons - one, Warlizard is a friend of mine. Two, it's always fun to tweak Reddit's nose a little. Three, it would have been fucking hilarious if Warlizard got my book pinned on him.

It didn't survive the edit.

It wasn't organic anymore, and it's in a section where the character who mentions it does some unlikeable things. As nobody likes that character, and I needed to make him more relatable, it had to go. It also burns a lot of runtime. I've so far eliminated about 100k words from the book (or, fully double what those NaNoNiNies write in a month) and that whole beat didn't count anymore.

But it was more than that. Eighteen months ago, when I first wrote the passage, being a part of that Reddit mess was kinda fun, kind of a part of my identity, kind of something I felt a need to pay lip service to. It's not anymore.

Reddit is no longer something I want a piece of. The team running things are the guys who bailed back when it was working, whose ideas led to the catastrophe that's in place now. In the public consciousness, Reddit is now what 4chan would have been if they knew what it was. You bring up /b/ and people always say "but that's not 4chan, there are all these other boards where people talk about stuff" but really, it's /b/. And yeah - there are big swaths of Reddit that aren't teenaged boys hating on black people because it's cool but really, the majority of Reddit is every bit as useless and hateful as the press makes it out to be.

I haven't even logged in in a week.

Anyway. Felt like sharing. The novel is 2/3rds edited, I'm on the home stretch, and it's going to be a tidy 83k words or so when it's done. Will it be any good? The phrase I used to my mentor was "hackneyed piece of shit" and he disagreed. But then, praise is free. Money talks and nobody has paid me for the current iteration of this chunk of shit yet.

Other news - apparently demo has been completed on our space and they've cleared off one of the pole signs, which is big enough that it's grandfathered in to the municipal code. We'll have a sign bigger than two 4x8 sheets of plywood facing a street with somewhere between 40k and 60k cars a day (last traffic count was in 1998). And having been told by Wells Fargo to fuck off about our loan, we're finalizing 4x as much financing as we'll ever need with a medical startup financier that's offering us three full points better than Wells was going to give us on a HELOC.

So... this thing is actually going to happen, maybe.