July 2025 – STELFIRE

Everything Avril Enzali has done. From enlisting Ashe Stelfire’s aid. To clawing her path back to the land of the living. To dueling her mother in the mountain city of Onno.

All of it has led to liberating this woman from the center of a maze of unbreakable ice.

Both women share the same shade of red hair and the forehead tattoo. But Celsis Kri is not like Avril. Her demeanor is sharp-edged. She seldom makes apologies for it. A tapestry of tattoos covers much of the Goddess of Conquest’s body. In the past, they granted her powers and weapons, but her chilled shackles now suppress such manifestations.

But her bonds cannot negate the ethereal glyphs’ defenses. They have protected her from torture and worse. The goddess’s crimson markings also allow her to explore other places within unseen realms of the mind.

And those also seen.

Using their common tattoo on both the goddess and her last follower’s foreheads, Celsis has tracked Avril’s progress, or lack thereof, through the events of Repenter and The Brigands. The imprisoned woman had to learn patience over these past sixteen centuries. Her captors have tormented her with promises of freedom if she would only renounce her rebellion against Starm, the Dragon God of the Holy Alliance. And away from the reptilian deity’s notice, enticement to rejoin the Game on Corsis’s side.

Celsis refused. And has continued to refuse. Her change of heart endures.

The horrors of the Eruption changed her perspective, reminding her of the Weird War from millennia earlier. The realization pierced through her very core. Everything Starm overtly put into motion and everything Corsis covertly orchestrated without the Dragon God’s knowledge, all of it continued the mad agenda the Weird Ones had attempted to inflict on the world. Reshape it into something outside of the natural order. Something twisted.

The cataclysm that created the Fire Well was only the beginning.

She had undone everything she’d fought to save in the Weird War. And so she rebelled against Starm and Corsis. The Dragon God captured and imprisoned her, while the Master of the Game has continued to whittle at her resolve from the shadows.

She bides her time and has recently let something dangerous creep into her mind. Hope that she might walk out of her frigid prison. If only Avril, Ashe, and a group of New Players can breach the cold dungeon. If only they can break her free.

Read more about the quest to liberate Celsis Kri in The Breakers.

Art by Ringasure.

Yo, yo!

I do believe most readers have a backlog. A stack of reading material that you intend to get to at some point. But if you’re like me, you end up stacking more on top of it. Not just books, but a manner of reading material like magazines. Or if you’re even more like me, comic books.

Months upon months of them.

I need to move them to the frontlog. Reduce the piles. Retake sanity. Okay, maybe not that last part. But catch up on things.

Honestly, part of why I’m writing about this is to force a little accountability for myself. I waste a decent chunk of time looking at YouTube videos about educational topics and tactics role-playing video games. None of it awful, but also none of it fantastic either. I know I’ll feel better about the stuff I put in my mind if I’m more deliberate about it.

And the stuff I put in other folks’ minds.

I’m also making the publication of Breakers part of my frontlog. Sometime in the first two weeks of August, likely on a Thursday. I don’t quite have a specific release date narrowed down, but it’s getting closer.

Fun stuff to add to your own aspirational reading pile.

Players of the Game Works in Progress

I had a few life curve balls and bouts of slogging through mental molasses this month. So my productivity is lower than I would have liked. I reached page 436 of Secret Fronts with 123,600 words. That’s 28 pages with 7600 words for this round. Better than last month, but I’ll strive to do more as the summer weeks tick away.

Also, as mentioned last time, I’ll be splitting this bonus novel in two. Book 5.5, which focuses on the fallout of the events of Book 5, will be called Unseen Scars. And Book 5.7, which focuses on other realms affected by the Game, will be called Secret Fronts.

I’m liking where the story is going, despite the manuscript mitosis. Plus there’s the above referenced August release of The Breakers, so that’s exciting too.

I shall keep walking the path.

Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:

“Brunch.” Ed shook his head. “This is what maturity feels like.”

Fernallus turned his attention away from his friend. “Simply horrifying, isn’t it?”

Recommendation Corner

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

I always enjoy the dark humor of Abercrombie’s grim-dark worlds. And this dark setting is brand new.

A lost princess who grew up as a scumbag con artist finds herself in the middle of a succession crisis as events conspire to murder her horribly as the politics of nations and the church also conspire to put her on the throne of a Constantinople analogue.

And she can’t stop being a conniving, opportunistic coward.

Luckily, or more accurately unluckily, she’s protected by a suicide squad team called the Chapel of the Holy Expediency, led by a very weary knight, a rogue with far too much experience, a weathered vampire, an arrogant necromancer, a low-key elf. And a filth-minded werewolf who can’t tell friend from foe in her wolf form. Only that she has to eat the “good meat.”

I’m only part way through it so far, but I’m enjoying it a bunch. Steven Pacey’s performance is top-notch with his wry delivery.

Good stuff.

Murderbot on Apple TV

If you’ve been reading my newsletters for any length of time, you’ll know that I love the Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries novella and novel series.

The Apple series does a fantastic job of bringing the violent and absurd world to life. The banal evil of the various intergalactic corporations. The inane researchers who are way too touchy feely in their interactions with each other. All of it seen through the eyes of an android who would much rather sit by itself and watch its TV shows. Especially the ludicrous Sanctuary Moon.

Alexander Skarsgard does a great job of portraying the introverted Sec Unit with the secret name of Murderbot in all the android’s awkward glory. And the writing is very similar to the novels’ not-quite-comedy action as the humans ignore Murderbot’s advice and it has to continuously save them.

I think I still like the books a little more. But this is still an A-tier adaptation.

Check it out.