{"id":1869,"date":"2026-08-12T08:39:04","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T13:39:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/?p=1869"},"modified":"2026-08-12T08:44:30","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T13:44:30","slug":"tech-support-noir-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/tech-support-noir-updates\/","title":{"rendered":"Tech Support Noir + Updates"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Wow, another 6 months has flown by! And my focus has completely shifted. It went from <em>I&#8217;m doing serious long-form content for other people and maybe I&#8217;ll fit in some short stories somewhere<\/em> to <em><strong>Full steam ahead on my own fiction!<\/strong><\/em> We only get one life and damn it, I&#8217;m determined to spend the rest of mine being guided by my heart, not by fear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">First, my most recent work for <a href=\"https:\/\/thedailywtf.com\">The Daily WTF<\/a>: a series of articles I&#8217;ve been calling my <strong>Tech Support Noir<\/strong>. Sometimes dark, sometimes funny, incorporating 4 user-submitted work horror stories and many true events from my own corporate tenure. Very much a space in which I processed those experiences alongside my grief over my ex-FIL&#8217;s passing this April. RIP, Bob! You treated me like a daughter for 17 years, and I&#8217;m getting teary-eyed even as I type this. And yeah, I am divorced as of 2021, which adds another layer of difficulty. That&#8217;s one of the things that happened while I was gone. But that&#8217;s a mile-long rabbit hole I wanna side-step for now. It&#8217;s not a painful topic, I promise, just a long one! I&#8217;m trying to stay on-point here! LOL<br><br>I put a noir spin on these articles because it&#8217;s a much-beloved genre of mine, both literature and film. This is my first official crack at a gritty noir protagonist, but you can see a little of that attitude in Dame Jessamine&#8217;s narration from my <a href=\"https:\/\/swordandstarship.com\/\">Sword and Starship<\/a> books (more on that in a minute). <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Here are the parts of <strong>Tech Support Noir<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/thedailywtf.com\/articles\/the-c-level-ticket\">The C-Level Ticket<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/thedailywtf.com\/articles\/the-ghost-cursor\">The Ghost Cursor<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/thedailywtf.com\/articles\/the-hot-fix\">The Hot Fix<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/thedailywtf.com\/articles\/the-easy-no\">The Easy No<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/thedailywtf.com\/articles\/the-hard-goodbye\">The Hard Goodbye<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/thedailywtf.com\/articles\/the-crossroads\">The Crossroads<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My goal is to one day smash them together into a novella; I&#8217;ve already gotten the OK from Alex, the website&#8217;s owner. It will mean a good deal of re-editing, <em>hopefully<\/em> with an editor&#8217;s help, but we&#8217;ll see. I&#8217;m very open to expanding this story, turning it into something completely different, whatever strikes me as the right thing to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But first, I have some other business I want to attend to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Believe it or not, amid the tumult of the past few years, I had completely forgotten what was in my two <strong>Sword and Starship<\/strong> novels. The longer I went without looking at them, the more I convinced myself they were cringingly bad, forget about them, move on. This year I said, <em>Let me read a few pages here and there, just to see if there&#8217;s anything I can work from or salvage. It&#8217;ll take me a few months, but that&#8217;s fine, no rush.<\/em><br><br>I finished reading the damn things in one weekend. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m back in. I want to write Book 3. And it&#8217;s probably gonna be completely different from the Book 3 I tried to write before. I&#8217;ve gone through so much that I&#8217;m a different person in a lot of ways\u2014and thank goodness for that! Back then I lacked the perspective, wisdom, and skill that I&#8217;m gonna need to do this properly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m pulling myself all the way out of the grave! Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m up to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Reestablishing a social media presence. <\/strong>OK I <em>haaate<\/em> social media, so I&#8217;ve promised myself I&#8217;ll just pick one platform and stick with it for now. That platform is Bluesky. <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/ellismorning.bsky.social\">Here is my profile!<\/a> If you&#8217;re there, too, follow me and say hi if you like! <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Rebuilding a newsletter.<\/strong> I deleted my old Mailchimp newsletter a long time ago, but now I&#8217;m in the process of setting up a new one with a different provider. I&#8217;m hoping to do it better this time around! I&#8217;d love to build some community with those who most like my work. Before I tell everyone to sign up, I want to have something great to offer in return. So that&#8217;s my current top project &#8230;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Writing a Sword and Starship prequel. <\/strong>Yup! It&#8217;ll be brand-new, something no one&#8217;s ever read before. I&#8217;m hoping that it will be fun for people completely new to the series and for people who&#8217;ve already read the books. I think of it as a &#8220;short story&#8221; in my head, but knowing me, it&#8217;ll probably be more novella-length. We&#8217;ll see! I&#8217;ve spent several weeks plotting and outlining, and I just started drafting this week. I&#8217;m really excited about it. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I would like for the prequel to be properly edited and have a beautiful front cover. I&#8217;m hoping I can get the same artist I used for the books! My wonderful editor has moved onto other projects, and I haven&#8217;t been in touch with her for years. I&#8217;m hoping she might be able to point me to someone new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I hope it goes without saying, but I will NEVER use AI for ANYTHING. Not for writing, research, outlining, not a damn thing! And I will work with real humans for things like beta-reading, editing, proofreading, and cover art\/design (or do it myself, as yours truly was once pretty savvy with things like drawing and gimp and just never has time anymore).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When the prequel&#8217;s ready, that&#8217;s when I&#8217;ll announce my newsletter. Keep your eyes peeled! I&#8217;ll be posting brief updates on Bluesky with the occasional blog post to let me expand past 300 characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If you&#8217;re excited, comment and let me know :) Thanks for all your support!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wow, another 6 months has flown by! And my focus has completely shifted. It went from I&#8217;m doing serious long-form content for other people and maybe I&#8217;ll fit in some short stories somewhere to Full steam ahead on my own fiction! We only get one life and damn it, I&#8217;m determined to spend the rest of mine being guided by my heart, not by fear. First, my most recent work for The Daily WTF: a series of articles I&#8217;ve been&#8230;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"><a class=\"btn btn-default\" href=\"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/tech-support-noir-updates\/\"> Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">  Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26,27,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-noir","category-sword-and-starship"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1869"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1873,"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869\/revisions\/1873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ellismorning.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}