It’s been a busy month. We received 315 submissions for the inaugural issue of Elegant Lich! https://elegantlich.com We’re nearly ready to issue acceptances.
As usual, the newsletter is primarily my posts about writing. I wrote about a few other things during the past month too.
I’m enjoying retirement. It still doesn’t feel like there’s enough time, but there is definitely less stress.
See you next month!
Totemo and Lambda Save the World
People who follow me on social media are already familiar with my characters Totemo Isogashii and Lambda. Lambda, of course, is a NeoBoxer.
I write about them pretty often. I’ve just finished a new novelette that features them and, since I’ve been thinking about them a lot, I thought I might offer a little background for fans.
Note: The picture is of my son’s boxer dog Tanuki. For some reason, the description of Lamba is nearly identical.
Three years ago, when I was writing Better Angels: Tour de Force, I wanted to write a story about Tau that was inspired by Lady and the Tramp, I called it The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau. Tau has learned that a girl NeoBoxer, Lambda, has come to the Truck Stop, but he’s depressed because she says she’s too busy to go on a date. The Better Angels and their allies wage a campaign to keep her partner, Totemo Isogashii, occupied for long enough for Tau to put the moves on Lambda. It’s the sort of fluff that led me to call the Better Angels stories fluffy military space opera.
In the years since I wrote that silly little story about Totemo Isogashii and Lambda, I’ve written dozens — maybe a hundred — little bits of microfiction about them. Here’s one example:
“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Totemo said. She and Lambda were laying on the floor in a sunbeam.
Lamba lay on her back with her muppies splayed out. She wuffed, softly.
“I can’t relax,” Totemo said. “I’ve got so much to do and, instead, I’m just laying around here.”
Lambda had persuaded Totemo to sign up for a day-long cat-guided* rest day. Their facilitator was Tama, a fluffy, white cat with blue eyes.
After going out at dawn to hunt voles, they had spent hours just laying in the sun, moving periodically as the light moved across the floor.
Someone rang a triangle in the other room. Tama sprang to her feet and ran toward the sound.
“I hope it’s lunch!” Totemo said.
They arrived in the kitchen where three bowls were set on the floor. Tama was already eating out of one. Lambda took the second.
Totemo considered her options.
*Note: this was inspired by seeing an ad for a “cat-guided field trip” where people would pay money to go follow a cat around in the forest. Really.
Totemo and Lambda also show up in my novelette Bearly Believable, which is scheduled to appear in Hexfiled this month. As I’ve learned more about the characters, I decided to finally write the story of how they meet. It’s set, appropriately enough, on the planet Holufinia, the origin world of NeoBoxers.
I originally wrote about NeoBoxers in the same time frame as some of my very earliest SFF writing, more than twenty years ago. The first working title was “Happiness is a Warm Puppy.” As I was writing Better Angels, I pulled out that old manuscript and reworked it as a Truck Stop story. I added some stuff and cut a lot of stuff, and retitled it Hope is a Cloned Puppy. From that manuscript, here is my earliest description of a NeoBoxer:
Tawny, with a black face, Beta was the NeoBoxer that had been provided to assist the crew. Beta was a dog, but not just any dog. NeoBoxers were the product of hundreds of years of selective breeding and not a small amount of genetic engineering. Created to lend their keen noses and stout hearts to any adventure, they also sought to forge strong bonds of loyalty among the crew. Beta gamboled among the crew members nudging them with his muzzle to encourage bonding.
Pascal admired his ability to work with both sides of the crew and his single-minded focus when he found a problem that was within his range of capacities. Beta could sense that there was division in the crew and he worked tirelessly to bring both sides together into a single pack with a common purpose.
The setting, Holufinia, is a distant world in the galaxy that got cut off after a disastrous civil war took down their advanced technology and the wormhole that connected them with galactic civilization. In Hope is a Cloned Puppy, we learn how the planet gets reconnected to the larger galactic civilization, we’re introduced to NeoBoxers, and we learn the origin of Tau, the NeoBoxer that lives on the Truck Stop.
I offered the manuscript as a story for the Truck Stop. But, after Better Angels came out, the publisher seemed to abandon the Truck Stop universe. I don’t believe any story has come out since. He never explained to me why. I was disappointed because I thought the shared universe idea was fun and wrote several other stories for it, including at least three more Better Angels stories.
The working title of my new story was “Totemo and Lambda Save the World.” The finished title is You Can’t Change Just One Thing. I would classify the story as Hopepunk. The book is primarily about the ecology of Holufinia. The title is a riff on Garrett Hardin’s Iron Law of Ecology, “You can never do just one thing.” Anything you do in an ecosystem touches everything else. We also learn how Totemo and Lambda meet, and the ways that meeting changes Totemo’s life.
I really love the characters. Totemo is an earnest, take-charge scientist. She’s abrasive and hard-driving, always working harder and smarter than anyone else. Lambda is the one with a sense of humor. She’s equally smart and capable, but she is always looking out for her human partner and not above using subterfuge to get her to take better care of herself and attend to her own needs. And she’s happy to have a little fun while doing it.
I keep coming back to NeoBoxers. When my oldest son was in first grade, he had an assignment to write every day. And after he’d written something, he was allowed to illustrate it with a picture. The first day, he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY!” and provided an illustration of a boxer dog wearing a cape. The next day he wrote, “SUPER DOG SAVES THE DAY AGAIN!” and drew a similar picture. He did the same for every day that followed. Like father like son, I guess.
Anyway, I’m very pleased with the story and will shortly start submitting it for publication. I’m hopeful it will find a home soon and I will be able to share it with you.
The Island of Misfit Toys
Community is important for writers. Today, Cory Doctorow talked about the need for writer community in Critique and Writing. Especially for new writers, “[b]eing part of a group of writers who expect you to regularly turn in new work adds a very useful bit of external motivation that augments your still nascent self-discipline.” So it was with me.
I struggled largely in isolation until I found a publisher that was interested in my work. Perhaps as important for my growth as a writer, was a bi-weekly Zoom meeting where authors with the publisher got together to talk about what they were doing. They just called it the “Virtual Writing Group” but I called it the Island of Misfit Toys. We were all so different. And odd. And we each brought different strengths and weakness to the group. It was very helpful as I struggled to get my feet under me as a new writer.
For four years, we met regularly to discuss things. We talked about writing and publishing. We planned for upcoming conventions. We shared triumphs and sorrows. It felt like a helpful, supportive community to me.
Then, suddenly — without announcement or discussion — after the Seattle Worldcon in August of 2025, the publisher abruptly cancelled the meetings. We haven’t met since.
As I had described, I had a mixed experience at that Worldcon due to an unfortunate interaction with another author. Did that event contribute to the collapse of the writing group? No one has ever told me.
From my early days as an author, my writing community has broadened considerably. I belong to several writing communities now in SFWA and Straw Dog Writers Guild. I started attending the SFWA Writing Date. Then I started my own group, Straw Dog Writes. Most recently, I was invited to join the Procrastinating (aka Bearded) Writers Group.
For the past year, I left the recurring event for the Virtual Writing Group in my calendar wondering if it would start back up again. Every couple of weeks it’s reminded me of the community of people that I once belonged to. In August, I watched the anniversary of the last meeting come and go. But tonight decided it was time.
Tonight, I removed the recurring event for the Virtual Writing Group from my calendar. I don’t understand what happened. But it’s time to quit dwelling in the past and look forward.
Bearly Believable and the debut of the Butter Angels
My hopepunky space-opera novelette Bearly Believable is now available at Hexfiled. When the Volpex Picnic Park ranger and his owl companion need a biological android to offer a fire-safety program, it’s gotta be a bear, right? Enjoy!
I wrote a bit about it when it was accepted for publication. I’m really excited that it’s finally coming out! But I wanted to share a few more details of how it fits into the other stories I’ve written about the setting. And some of the other characters that appear in the story.
Bearly Believable is set on Volpex, a planet that was first introduced in The Better Angels and the Very Scary Halloween. That story was originally released in 2022 as a Halloween promotion for the Truck Stop at the Center of the Galaxy and subsequently included in Better Angels: Tour de Force. It’s a terraformed world that has a single developed continent with the rest of the world left fallow to provide ecological services and replicator feedstock harvesting.
I’ve written more about the ecology of terraformed worlds in You Can’t Change Just One Thing that features my characters Totemo Isogashii and the NeoBoxer Lambda. They first appeared in The Better Angels and Lambda and Tau, in Better Angels: Tour de Force, but they also appear in Bearly Believable also where they play a small, but crucial role.
In 2023, I wrote a story about a group of girls who run a cooking show on Volpex called The Butter Angels. The humor of them getting mixed up with The Better Angels is played for laughs a time or two, but it was the beginning of several ideas I’ve explored over several stories. The Butter Angels also appear briefly at the beginning of Bearly Believable, so this is their public debut.
The Mayor was just arriving in a SkyStretch with a large police escort. The SkyStretch landed while the police vehicles orbited the site.
When the door opened, a bodyguard exited first, carrying a compact railgun, then the Mayor, and then they were followed by a crowd of young women wearing some kind of costume.
The young women were all matching: cute red tops with long, open sleeves; short, checked skirts; and patterned bandanas to tie back their hair. Plus each had a pink ribbon tied crosswise to hold back their sleeves. They chattered cheerfully among themselves, self-evidently excited to have gotten a ride in the Mayor’s luxurious SkyStretch.
The Mayor led them forward to the ribbon where attendants handed each a pair of scissors. The crowd caught sight of the women and someone yelled, “It’s the Butter Angels!” A huge chorus of shrieks and cheers erupted from the crowd. The Angels offered broad smiles and waved to their fans.
I wrote the original story about the Butter Angels that I had hoped would be published as part of a Truck Stop anthology and, when the publisher proposed doing another Halloween promotion, I wrote a little piece of flash fiction to go along with it. It was around that time that the publisher stopped developing the Truck Stop series and so the stories were never published. I set them aside and turned my attention to other things.
Since it doesn’t appear the Truck Stop is coming back, I’ve started shopping some of these stories around to other outlets. But the Halloween promotion story doesn’t seem like it would ever fit anywhere else, so — since it’s almost Halloween anyway, I’ve posted it separately on my blog: An Anomalous Aggregation of Angels.
I hope you enjoy the stories. I look forward to sharing more stories from Volpex in the coming months and years.
