He’s a Long Lived mechmancer who melds both ethereal arts and bleeding edge technology in his wares. Be it his multi-functional pistol, his modular Battle Engine aircraft, the blood-stained power armor he can’t bear to don, or even the vast wall encircling the island of New Grelland that shields his homeland from the unnatural inferno of the Fire Well.
Bennet Burnhelt, his father, may lead the Grells. But Vick’s many designs give the nation its edge.
But some problems are more intractable than others. The Game ruined the world, and Vick does everything he can to keep it from getting worse, knowing it’s not enough. It’s why he and his wife imbued their sons, Ed and Matt, with hyper powers. Hoping that the next generation can help forge a better future.
Corsis has other designs.
The Master of the Game has a vendetta against the Burnhelts. He does whatever he can to ensure the women of the family meet terrible ends. Vick’s wife died protecting Ed and Matt. Her dried blood still covers his unused power armor. Vick keeps his long simmering romance with Een under wraps out of fear that Corsis might harm her too.
Vick also works with others outside of New Grelland and the realm of Trojis itself. Sufrinzon in particular. He becomes a covert ally of Ashe Stelfire, Avril Enzali, and their allies.
He has minor appearances in both Repenter and The Brigands. His presence then expands in The New Players.
We all need refreshers from time to time in the media we consume.
Alamo Drafthouse often does that during its kitchy pre-show videos for various super hero movies. Streamers will do that for new seasons of their shows with a “Previously in…” preview.
So I shall do the same for the Players of the Game (POTG) saga.
I cannot claim full credit for this idea. A beta reader friend (Hey, Abe!) recently told me it would be really helpful to include such a wiki-style recap of the events of the prior POTG books. Just to refresh the reader’s memory of the characters and the overall plot.
So as we edge closer to the release of both the Repenter Ebook Collection and Players of the Game Book 4: The Breakers later this year, I’ve made a new tab on my stelfire.com website.
Recaps.
The Quick Recap list option has a few paragraphs where Corsis recounts the events of the last three books. I’ll also be including it in the front matter of The Breakers and make updates to it with each subsequent book in the series.
The Detailed Recaps list options have each book with in-depth bullet points that go into greater detail with the plot and character developments.
Warning: Spoilers Abound in this new section.
This is a great resource for returning readers to brush up on the saga with either a quick refresher or a more involved return to the series. It’ll also help folks that just want to start with the newer books, and read the earlier entries later. And for people who don’t mind spoiling the plot before they read a book.
I know a few loved ones who read the last few pages of a book first to see if they’ll like it, so this helps that type of reader too. Even if I philosophically and respectfully disagree with that story-consuming practice.
This new section will serve all my readers before, during, and after they read any books of the POTG saga.
Again, with spoiler alerts blaring in full, check out my website’s new recaps tab with the link below or on the tab above.
This month’s writing production of Secret Fronts’ first draft lands at page 304 with 86,300 words. That breaks down to 47 pages with 13,600 words.
That’s a pretty good chunk of wordage. The key will be keeping up the output to get this draft done sometime this year.
That’s one of my three big writing goals for 2025. Releasing The Repenter E Book Collection and The Breakers are the other two.
Assuming no curve balls, I’m think I’m on track for all three.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
Ed: “Where do you want these, Cassandra?”
Cassandra: “I hate it when you don’t call me Cassie.”
Ed: “You hate it when I do call you Cassie.”
Cassandra: “Don’t call me that!”
Recommendation Corner
Live Suit by James SA Corey
This was a quick novella read in the Captives War series. And it presented a different galactic civilization of humanity. One that didn’t get steamrolled by the aliens like the characters in the first book.
It focuses on a former paramedic who volunteers to be one of the Live Suit soldiers. The armor is never removed, functioning as a second skin with a helmet that hides the user’s face. It repairs all harm inflicted on its wearer.
However, its effects on the wearers’ sense of reality soon show themselves. Forgetting little moments with loved ones. The fanatical resolve to beat the aliens at any cost.
And the war is so vast that the soldiers fighting it have no clue if they’re winning or losing.
It’s a cool glimpse into the bigger conflict of the series. And while the story is bleak for its characters, it shows that the aliens still have a long way to go before their ultimate victory.
Jefferson Mays does a great job as usual with the audio narration.
Vicious by V.E. Schwab
This is a bit softer of a recommendation, but the characters were compelling enough to make me listen through large chunks at one go. So the author was doing something right with this yarn.
It takes place in a world where people with superpowers are urban legends who hide on the fringes. Extra Ordinaries. EOs.
It focuses on two former friends who hate each other. Victor Vale and Eli Ever. They have a tragic origin that’s gradually revealed in flashbacks as they amass allies in secret to combat each other.
Neither are heroes, though one professes to be one. Even as he becomes a serial killer of other innocent EOs.
They are both flawed and damaged people. Victor is the book’s protagonist. He is cruel and self-centered, but also quite compelling in his quest for vengeance against Eli.
Four thousand years ago, Bennet Burnhelt saved the world. Smiting down the King of the Weird Ones. Gaining a vastly extended lifespan. Honing his considerable ethereal might. Crafting a world order with the other victors. The queen granted him his title, Benefactor, as a jest. But the name stuck.
He seldom speaks about any part of his early life.
Because Corsis helped him save Trojis. And that had a cost.
Now his world and many others suffer as part of the Game, though few know it. Benefactor didn’t see the danger his old ally posed. He didn’t realize Corsis had amassed the conquered Weird Ones’ vast powers until it was far too late.
Benefactor now strives to end Corsis’s reign in the background as he publicly leads New Grelland. A role that burdens him.
But he isn’t alone in standing against the Game. His son, Vick. His grandsons, Ed and Matt. And even that group of Brigands in Sufrinzon. He will guide them as best he can.
Benefactor Plays the Game because he must. And he intends to win.
Find out more about Benefactor’s plans starting in The New Players.
There’s a particular feeling I often strive to achieve whenever I’m creating stories. Where the ideas transcend words, and I just go with whatever the characters are doing.
Entering a flow state.
Sadly, I can’t always achieve that. The mental gears grind more than I’d like. And honestly, I think that’s also fine. For me at least, I think grinding is needed to make the times when words flow all the more rewarding.
It’s my philosophy on other up and down phases of life. Post holiday winter drudgery makes summer vitality and extra daylight seem all the better.
Of course, that’s just me. Certain loved ones in my life would prefer to skip to fall.
A meandering way to say that I always try to value the whole process, easy and hard. And know that when times of grind present themselves, I push through them.
There’s always more flow state creation on the other side.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
This month’s writing productivity comes in at Page 257 with 72,700 words for Secret Fronts’ first draft. That’s an output of 46 pages and 13,100 words for the first month of the year.
Pretty good, all things considered. I’ll see if I can keep up the momentum.
Plans are still afoot to release a Repenter ebook collection of the first two novels and first two novellas. And also The Breakers following that.
All good stuff.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
Gath: “Is that misanthropese for yes?”
Quandric: “Yes. You disrespectful @$$hole.”
Gath: “You love me anyway.”
Quandric: “I really don’t.”
Gath: “Then I just have to love you that much more.”
Recommendation Corner
Radiant Black by Kyle Higgins and Marcelo Costa
This one is a recommendation due to its sheer ambition alone. I heard the author Kyle Higgins talking on a podcast about his Massive-verse through Image comics. His log line hooked me.
Power Rangers with adult problems.
It’s in the “tokusatsu” transforming hero genre with others like Ultra Man, which I have fond memories of watching as a kid. I read the catch-up 16 page comic on www.radiant.black (best use of a non dot com ever), and decided to give it a whirl.
With the 6th trade paperback. Halfway through the Catalyst War story line. I do that sometimes.
I didn’t quite understand the objectives of the invaders, or what their win condition was.
But I really dug the dual timelines where the Marshall character went dark and amassed power and the other where he was powerless and his friend, Nathan, was Radiant Black instead.
This is not for everyone. But I think I’m going to dive into the back catalogue on this.
I love discovering new comics series that I enjoy with a ton of back issues.
Icons Unearthed on Amazon Prime
The Nacelle Company of Toys That Made Us fame has a bunch of limited series on Prime that dive into the back stories of a bunch of movie series.
Some are better than others.
The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars ones had some interesting tidbits of which I wasn’t aware. Anthony Daniels recollections of working on the original trilogy are especially compelling. BTW- His name is pronounced “An-tony” without the “H”, which was news to me.
The Batman one was okay, but it really threw the old 60s TV show under the bus to prop up the Burton movies. Basically saying it was worthless. I think it has value as a comedy. And they spent next to no time on the 90s animated series, which is probably the best version of Batman in my reckoning.
So your mileage may vary. Still, if you’re into multi-part docu-series, you could do worse.
This version of Nirva Iniv appears in Repenter and The Brigands as she amasses power in Sufrinzon. From marrying into the Iniv family, to becoming the Baroness of Palle, to conquering Alagar as the Empress of the Palle Empire.
She reclaimed the Drandfiev armor from the tomb of the long dead empress of Sufrinzon. The dark-red attire amplifies her ethereal might and further cements her claim to legitimacy as the ruler of the dark world.
She schemes to reclaim her daughter, Avril, whether she wants it or not. Nirva has a bad history with Avril’s father, Ashe Stelfire, and deeply craves to wreak suffering on him. She will inflict her unhinged desires on anyone close to them.
Desires dictated by the abstract painting that she created. Her masterwork drives her to dominate the super continent. Originally, she did it to prevent a worse disaster from coming to pass. As Corsis whispered in her ear to do it.
But she has long since lost sight of that altruistic motivation. Nirva’s ambition has consumed her in a fugue of cruelty.
Find out if her ambition also consumes Ashe, Avril, and their friends in Repenter and The Brigands.
As has been my pattern for the past few years, I like to share a yearly theme that doesn’t have a fail state like a New Year’s Resolution. So no specific “do X by Y date” type of stuff. It’s more mindset and behavior based. And even the timeline is not annual, it can be a season that’s shorter or longer than 365 days.
This season, I’m going with intentionality. Personally, that means specifically making time for friends and family. With my writing pursuits, that means to keep outputting words on the page. And also getting new stuff released into the world.
To be intentional about sharing the epic Players of the Game saga with all of you.
I’ll talk more about that in the works in progress section.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
As part of the intentionality theme for this year, I have both the Breakers and the Repenter Collection in the hopper.
The Repenter Collection is an e-book bargain boxed set that collects Book 1: Repenter, Book 1.5: The Hidden Chapters, Book 2: The Brigands, and Book 2.5: The Favor. My graphic designer just gave me the cover components, and I’m hoping to get it released in the first half of 2025.
The Breakers will come out after that in both e-book and print.
With the Secret Fronts work in progress, I’m up to page 211 with 59,600 words. Which makes it 23 pages and 6900 words since the last newsletter from a few weeks back.
It’s a shorter time frame on this round, but I’ll still aim to up the productivity for the next month.
The key is to keep moving. So I shall.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
Goodspeed: “I’m in. But my reason for agreeing to this is not high minded. I don’t actually want to win so much as I want my grandfather to lose. The Game. And everything else. That’s what I want more than victory. More than a lot of things.”
Recommendation Corner
Mercy of Gods: Captives War, Book 1 by James S.A. Corey
The pair of Expanse authors have released a new sci-fi series under their Corey pen name.
This time, it’s about a humanity that’s on an alien planet with a separate set of biological natives, but they’ve been there for thousands of years and they don’t know how they got there.
That ends up being more of a longer term mystery, because they are soon ruthlessly conquered by an empire led by giant sort of crab, sort of centipede aliens. And in a pithy comment by one of the POV characters: “They are all assholes.”
Dafyd Alkhor is the main character of the ensemble that gets shanghaied to the alien homeworld, and he spends much of the book trying to figure out how their new alien overlords think.
The authors make a smart move with bridge sections that talk about how the aliens are ultimately brought low. I generally don’t like “we’re stuck in prison” plot lines, so that explicit foreshadowing helped keep me engaged with the rest of the compelling story.
But humans are nowhere near that victorious outcome just yet.
Humanity is thoroughly humbled throughout the book. Dafyd and his brilliant scientist colleagues are tasked with figuring out how to make food edible from one alien flora to another alien fauna. All while other competitor captive species try to sabotage them. And the opposing side of the aliens’ war reveals itself in an invasive parasitic form.
Jefferson Mays does another fantastic job of performing the characters and narrating the story.
Good stuff.
Nosferatu (2024)
Robert Eggers’s take on the century-old, Weimar Republic-era silent film is incredibly well shot.
The movie riffs on the Dracula story with a lot of differences with Count Orlok played by with unearthly menace by Bill Skarsgard. Including his epic mustache, that is a visual but cool departure from the completely hairless original version.
The movie’s use of shadows is really striking. And all of the actors do a great job. I’ll call out the doctor character played with understated grim pragmatism by Ralph Ineson. Anyone who’s played Diablo 4 will also recognize him as the voice of Lorath. Which was a cool bonus.
This movie really makes the vampire seem more like an animated corpse than an urbane killer. And his influence on the town upon his arrival is depicted as a plague smashing through town.
The sound of him gulping down blood is just unsettling.
The climax also makes a cool twist to the typical “exploit a vampire’s weakness” solution. I’m not the biggest horror fan, but this was absolutely worth seeing. Especially if you like creepy cinema.
Meve Harlander has seen a thing or two in his long career.
As a Javelin pilot of the Holy Alliance, he was one of the few who survived the War of No Hope. He and Harry Mang met during its final bimonths and became good friends. He later got promoted to shipmaster of an airship and quickly ran afoul of his superiors when he questioned unwise or unethical orders.
This got him assigned to the frontier city of Findenton, with the other problematic people. Like Shelocke. Like Harry.
Meve’s acerbic and earnest conduct makes him one of the people Harry trusts most to tell him when something isn’t right.
Something like the horrors skulking about Findenton’s streets at night.
Find out how Meve and Harry deal with the horrors in The New Players.
This has been a month-and-a-half of some technological and project pivoting on my part.
I upgraded my laptop. I really like the feel of the new keyboard. My prior computer actually had a pretty decent one, but this new machine is an upgrade I didn’t know I needed. It’s a Sager in case you’re wondering.
I’m a person who customizes all kinds of stuff on new devices. Very few out-of-the-box defaults for me. Adjusting everything to my preferred specifications took a few days.
Plus I just discovered Libre Writer. It’s an open source word processing program that can save .docx files. It’s totally up my alley. Fantastic for writing first drafts before they get moved into Scrivener, ProWritingAid, and Atticus for the next drafts. But Libre Office too required a goodly number of configuring steps on my part.
Then I encountered a sudden need to type up a wiki document for the Players of the Game series for an editor who will be working with me on the Game War. I churned out 73 pages or 23,500 words in a marathon session of about a week and a half, ran it through PWA, and sent it on its merry way.
I’ll be making some updates to the wiki and sharing a good deal of that content on my website and possibly Wikipedia down the road.
All good changes. But they do result in pushing other projects later than expected.
Such as monthly blog entries.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
Wuf. I mentioned above that other projects got pushed aside with my new writing gear adjustments and the sudden wiki project.
That definitely hit Secret Fronts’ productivity. I’m at 188 pages with 52,700 words. Which makes it 33 pages and 9200 words for the month.
BUT. I also wrote 73 pages with 23,500 words in that Wiki. So I was not slouching with the writing.
I’m guessing this coming month will also be lower with Secret Fronts’ word count, as I plan to have the next newsletter out shortly after New Year’s Day, so that’s fewer days between this one and that one.
I’m definitely not worried. I’m writing. Just not all with the latest POTG work in progress.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
Nadia: “I swear I’m going to slap you if you keep invoking luck, Inventor.”
Recommendation Corner
Conclave
I think this smaller run movie is out of theaters, but I saw it last month, and I highly recommend it.
It surrounds the election of a new pope with a whole lot of infighting and political maneuvering.
Ralph Fiennes’s cardinal character is really compelling as a man who doesn’t aspire to the papacy and just wants the conclave to make the right choice.
His speech about the dangers of certainty really felt prescient to me.
This movie might rankle some folks with some of its plot twists, but I’m a Catholic, and I took no offense to it.
Either way, give it a watch on a streamer whenever it shows up if you’re in the mood for a tense drama for grownups.
Eversion by Alistair Reynolds
This was an interesting sci-fi novel that initially pretends to be a historical exploration adventure.
Dr. Silas Coade is on an 18th century ship exploring a remote icy passage once trod by another ship. Writing novels in his spare time and dealing with opiate addictions.
Or is it on a steamship a century later? Or aboard a dirigible journeying into a hollow earth?
Events seem to be looping. Something to do with eversion, the geometric term for turning a sphere inside out. And the doctor knows something is off. But he’s not the only one.
The narrator on the audio book, Harry Myers, does a fantastic job as well.
Give it a try if you’re looking for something a bit mind bendy.
Promo Corner
Smashwords is running another sale. And the Players of the Game series is part of it.
My books are between 75% to 100% off and are available as part of a promotion on Smashwords through January 1 as part of their 2024 End of Year Sale.
This is a chance to get my books, along with books from many other great authors.
Svithe is the peddler of all things rare. He is connected to virtually all the struggles faced by Ashe, Avril, and the rest of the Brigands.
Bandages cover his face and arms. The Peddler wields vast power that he focuses through his glassy, glowing staff. He prefers to influence the events of the many realms indirectly. Lurking at the periphery.
But sometimes circumstances bring him out in the open. He can’t resist the vicarious allure of directly interacting with the strife he foments.
Such as a brutal battle with the man called Repenter. One that leads to the cliffs of a hellscape.
I was talking to some friends the other day, and I mentioned the latest stats of my work-in-progress bonus novella. They kindly observed that this has crossed the threshold into bonus novel territory.
I can’t deny it. I’m currently on page 155 with 43,500 words with Secret Fronts. That’s around 43 pages and 11,900 words for this month.
Yes, this is definitely a bonus novel. I’m maybe 45%-55% finished with it too. The first parts deal with some disturbing hidden history in hidden worlds. And the later parts will deal with the fallout from the events of The Game War.
Onward!
Recommendation Corner
Bicentennial Summer by Chris Poore.
Full disclosure: Chris is an indie writer friend of mine, so I fully admit that I’m biased. I also don’t generally read in the nostalgia teenage drama genre. I’m much more of a sci-fi, fantasy, or thriller reader.
But I liked his debut novel, Bicentennial Summer. It features the main character, Cole, navigating through a tough couple of weeks leading up to 4th of July 1976.
Helping his friend deal with the death of his father, friction with a new kid in town who engages in a love triangle with Cole’s childhood friend, and dealing with the shady behavior of several adults in his small Nebraska town.
It made me immensely glad I left that stuff behind in my teenage years. But either way, the story is a compelling yarn.
Give it a read.
Babs by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows
I recently read through the first three issues of this series from Ahoy Comics.
It hooked me with a cursed ghost knight accidentally creeping on Babs while she was taking a bath in a pond. And the ghost knight’s ghost girlfriend/co-worker mercilessly teases him for it. All while they ask Babs for directions to the kingdom they’re supposed to haunt.
It’s a fun parody of a Conan Hyperborean world with a Red Sonja analogue main character who’s adept at killing and raiding. But crap at everything else.
Some of the satire is a bit on the nose with a literal troll character who acts like an incel internet troll. But it’s still enjoyable.
Her talking sword that bickers with her, and whines in pain when she uses it, is another stand out funny bit.
