Harry Mang refers to himself as an unremarkable man.
He associates with hyper-powered champions of western Jeea. In his reckoning, he is a mere mortal among gods, rogue Dragons, and Weird Ones.
These very beings, these very friends, disagree with his self-assessment.
Harry is the Arms Master. The man who the God of Protection imbued with peerless ability to wield all weapons, simple and complex. He survived the War of No Hope in his younger days. More recently, he held the line against Corsis and Hekati’s horrors in Findenton during the events of The New Players.
The aftermath of that fight left his pilfered Grey Jack armor wrecked, so Vick Burnhelt gave him an upgrade of green-and-black armor. Self-contained and durable. Two attributes he will need in the days to come.
And he’ll need more than defensive gear. The weapons of the Victory Arsenal are his to claim. Both in a forgotten open grave in the Fire Well and in the Protector’s mountain stronghold.
But all of that will pale in his estimation when he crosses paths with an old flame. A woman he’d thought was long dead.
Avril Enzali.
Both of them will have words for each other. More than words.
I sometimes recall my utter deflated feeling during the Covid lockdown and social distancing a few years back. Coupled with the enduring hope that I’d be so thankful when I could get back in the world, see people again, and just enjoy.
Enjoy everything.
I’ll admit I don’t always clock that in my day-to-day comings and goings. But I definitely noticed it over the past couple of weeks when I went to the biggest city in South Dakota and days later the biggest city in Illinois.
My wife and I went out to Sioux Falls to crash an author fair at the downtown public library. I wasn’t able to participate in it due to a late submission on my part. But I was able to see my author friends, Emersyn Park, Chris Poore, and Scott Johnson. We had a fun dinner the night before with our significant others.
At the fair, I met Randy Faustino, a comic book writer who had a cool fantasy-horror comic, Kosmotrope, which I’ll discuss more in Recommendation Corner.
But a recommendation you don’t have to wait for is Pizano’s in Chicago. I went out to the Windy City for a work trip and was on the hunt for some local cuisine. As my Chicagoan coworkers told me: Deep dish is for tourists. If you want actual Chicago-style pizza, get the tavern-style thin-crust pizza. Much more crusty/crackery than New York-style thin crust. Good stuff!
And goodness abounds in my gratitude to experience all the new places and familiar haunts. I’m writing this missive the day before Thanksgiving in the US. And even though you’re reading this in a post-gobble-gobble, full-on holiday time o’ year, take a little time to be thankful for the positive things in your life. Big and small.
Things like meeting up with friends at an out-of-town destination. Or seeing a big @$$ building that the locals still call the Sears Tower, complete with a misty diffraction effect with its top lights.
And especially returning to a loving home.
Bookfest Omaha 2025- Saturday 12/13/25
Chris Poore and I will be selling our books at Bookfest Omaha 2025. It’s free to the public. Come out and visit us!
WHEN: Saturday, December 13, 2025, 9:00 am-3:00 pm
WHERE: IBEW Hall, 13306 Stevens St #101, Omaha, NE 68137 (near Millard Avenue and 133rd) Tap on the image above to find out more details on their website.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
One drawback of all my travels was a bit of a dip in my productivity on the second draft of Unseen Scars.
I’m up to page 94, which is definitely not nothing. It’s much easier to add setting and character descriptions, edit dialogue, and basically clean up all the metaphorical scaffolding with words that are already on the page.
The rewriting part of writing is just mentally smoother. Though the charge of creating something completely new, as frictional as it can be, always beckons to me. I’ll be glad to get outlining Book 6: Back to the Dark, hopefully inside of a year.
In 2026, I’m going to explore what’s needed to get a table at a regional comic con, or some other sci-fi fantasy con. I might also partner up with Junkstock, an Omaha-area craft show.
More as it develops.
Players of the Game Out Of Context Quote of the Month:
“Cienne. Been a few.” Frulgrath kept his body language casual, as he always did in her presence. Casual, but ready for trouble. Usually of the verbal variety, but not always.
“More than a few.” Cienne grinned at him, but it came nowhere near her eyes. “Hatchet Man, eh?”
“Picked up the nickname in Sufrinzon. It stuck.”
Recommendation Corner
Kosmotrope by Randy Faustino and Ashley Mortensen
This comic book from the Sioux Falls-based Bamboo Panel Studios would probably get categorized as an urban fantasy, even though half of it takes place in a forest park.
With a park ranger who is secretly a wearbear.
He’s called in by his colleagues to investigate the latest in a series of murders that have left the victims mutilated and twisted.
Meanwhile, a psychic doctor who can see ghostly images of his patients’ ailments also encounters other horribly transformed victims.
I anticipate that the ranger and the doctor’s paths will cross in future issues.
Randy told me that Kosmotrope and Bamboo Panel Studios are on Instagram, so check them out there if you’re interested in some fantasy-horroresque comics.
The Witcher Season 4
Is Liam Hemsworth a better Geralt than Henry Cavill? No. Is he worse? Also no.
I’m sure my opinion is not universally held, but I think Hemsworth has done a good job in the unenviable task of taking over the lead role.
This season takes place during the events of the Time of Contempt novel. Geralt, Siri, and Yennifer (love the character, hate the name) are all separated on their own adventures.
I’ll admit that I find Siri’s storyline with the Rats less engaging with her attempting to lie low as a brigand/bandit. It’s true to the plot line in the novel, and I wasn’t in love with that either. Yennifer’s assembly of the surviving magic users is more of a slow burn, but the interpersonal drama keeps her part of the story from dragging.
However, Geralt’s new friends: a sort-of Dryad, a group of Dwarves, a former Nilfgardian enemy knight, and a mysterious herbalist healer are the most engaging part of this season. And Jaskier/Dandelion is always fun.
Lawrence Fishburne is the standout this season as Regis. I liked the character in the book as well. Fishburne does a great job of capturing the character’s disquieting kindness and benevolent but unsettling assistance.
I like all things Witcher. Books, shows, comics, video games. And this season scratches the itch.
Lancelot deplores herself for many reasons. But she’ll never tell them to anyone. And that suits Corsis just fine.
He crafted her as a being of spite after all. His pretty, relentless killer.
Her hatred of Ashe Stelfire and Vick Burnhelt is hardwired into her mind. Though her motivations for that loathing are different for each man. Rivalry for the man called Repenter. Love and lust twisted by contempt for the Prime Mechmancer.
She has ample tools to enact that hatred. A jagged sword of unbreakable ice through which she channels frigid hydromancy hexes. Her white mask grants her vast strength and speed. Her many baubles allow her to shift her body into intangible spectral matter or grant her invisibility.
The kliost-cloned assassin has much knowledge in the ways of killing, but little experience. Which is why Balpors assigns a partner to her.
Frulgrath.
She dislikes the dispassionate, three-armed Demon immediately. But there’s nothing to be done for it. She’s stuck with the Hatchet Man.
Find out more about their partnership and their mission in The Breakers.
A few years back I wrote about returning to a couple of social activities following all the lockdown terribleness. An Ultimate Frisbee pickup group and a bar trivia team.
Things have ended and evolved, respectively.
The Frisbee group is still playing with a bunch of younger and/or more industrious acquaintances, but I decided it wasn’t worth the risk of injury and greater frequency of aches and pains. All of my good friends have also stopped playing. Bottom line: We got old.
I even updated my author bio earlier this year and redacted the mention of playing Ultimate Frisbee. The season of disc-tossing seasons has passed for me.
And that’s fine.
I still exercise with various weights and body-weight repetitions along with a high-intensity workout video on YouTube that I’m reasonably sure I’ve watched/followed greater than 1500 times. My wife and I also go for walks, though that’s tougher when it gets cold and dark as we get further into fall and winter.
The bar trivia isn’t necessarily tougher, but it also recently changed. Our taproom venue went out of business due to some decisions involving debt that didn’t work out for them. It also didn’t help that their beer was so-so at best, which is why I’m respectfully not naming the defunct company. I seldom partook of their products, though I was in the minority there.
Our trivia league still has a lot of other locations in the city, but it’s not quite the same without our usual table, our friendly bartender who often gave me free lemonade, and our misanthropic, prickly, troll-jokey, but also begrudgingly endearing host.
We might end up at another taproom with the same host, but that remains a hazy prospect. So for now, Team Beerpaw is slumming it at other bar and grill locations. It’s all fine, but not the same atmosphere. And the new venues remain good spots to hang out with friends and chat about all manner of inane and fun topics between the questions.
We shall adapt. And we shall prevail.
Luckily, none of this has affected my author endeavors. And I’ll talk about a few such fun items right now.
The Council Bluffs Library Book Fair
Here are some pics of me at the Council Bluffs Library Book Fair from October 19th, 2025.
One photo of me at my table. And two more of me on a panel with my author friend, Chris Poore, and another author named Tim (I missed his last name, but a real fascinating guy).
The pictures were courtesy of my wife and our other author friend, Emersyn Park.
I sold a bunch of books with my in-person 7-books-for-$20 bargain bundle that I sell for marketing purposes. Including five sets to a couple who wanted to use them with a start-up indie bookstore. I haven’t heard back from them about it yet, but either way, the books are out there.
And hello to all the new subscribers who signed up for my author group newsletters at the book fair! I hope you enjoy.
Getting out and seeing readers is quite fun. I’ll be doing it again in December.
Read on!
Bookfest Omaha 2025- Saturday 12/13/25
Chris Poore and I will also be selling our books at Bookfest Omaha 2025. It’s free to the public. Come out and visit us!
WHEN: Saturday, December 13, 2025, 9:00 am-3:00 pm WHERE: IBEW Hall, 13306 Stevens St #101, Omaha, NE 68137 (near Millard Avenue and 133rd)
Tap on the image above to find out more details on their website.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
The ends and beginnings theme for this month’s missive continues for my writing as well.
All of it good.
I finished going through the edits of The Game War and then ran it through ProWritingAid. So Players of the Game Book 5 is in the hopper along with Book 4.5. I’ll release the bonus novel sometime in 2026. And the main novel in 2027. As long as I can keep far enough ahead on the writing, I hope to release a main novel or bonus novel each year.
A few other items of note this month.
I tried out ElevenLabs. And I largely liked it, though it has a little ways to go before I’ll devote time to loading my series on audio books. The version 3 alpha doesn’t yet allow for inserted pauses. Which you wouldn’t think is a big deal, but totally is. Paragraphs run together if you can’t craft them with pauses.
However, version 3 is what I want because it allows you to give more direction to the digital narrators. I picked out a male and female digital narrator that I’ll plan to use for male and female POV scenes respectively. I’ll share more on all of that as things develop.
And I’ve just started the second draft of The Game War: Unseen Scars bonus novel. I use “YY” notes for myself as I’m writing the first draft to track down all the spots that need attention. And they’re everywhere. Which is typical. As I’ve said before, a first draft is always a drooling, sloppy mess.
Now it’s cleanup time.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
Hekati then clasped his wrist with her mad gaze fixed on Corsis. “All the Burnhelts. Celsis Kri. Tamona of Muné. Everyone they love. I want their heads on jagged lances.”
Recommendation Corner
Peacemaker Season 2
John Cena continues to provide evidence that he’s a national treasure. I’m not really a wrestling guy, but I’ve liked everything I’ve seen him in. He can pull off comedy and dramatic pathos with equal poise.
Peacemaker’s latest misadventures lean into a bunch of background tech from last season that now takes the forefront. Chris Smith and the rest of the 11th Street Kids engage in dimension hopping where things turned out differently for Peacemaker’s family and the world.
And Chris isn’t so sure his world is the one he wants to live in. Especially after he accidentally kills his alternate self.
Fun fact I didn’t know until recently. Comedian from Watchmen is an homage to Peacemaker. Chris Smith was originally a Charlton character from the 60s before DC bought the company in the late 70s. Alan Moore switched to analogues early in the crafting of the Watchmen story. Blue Beetle with Nite Owl and Question with Rorschach had always been the higher profile characters to me. No longer. I think it’s safe to say that Peacemaker with Comedian has now surpassed them.
Interesting factoid. To me at least.
Tim Meadows’s character was also most amusing with his “bird blindness” disability. His reference to Eagley as a parrot was comic gold.
Violent and over the top. But also earnest and genuine. I enjoyed it.
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
This sci-fi yarn focuses on two women of a far-future, space-faring civilization’s “special projects team.” Both are highly motivated to not be put back on ice in cryogenic storage and prove their continued worth.
This all goes horribly wrong when an accident forces them to crash-land a rover pod on Shroud, an Earth-sized moon of a gas giant. Its incredibly thick atmosphere possesses the pressure of Venus and the global temperature of Antarctica.
They have to figure out a way off the moon and endure lethal misunderstandings of the shell-covered, slow-moving alien life that has no visual senses. But all have an acute sense of sound and radio waves.
These aliens are kind of similar to Rocky from Project Hail Mary, except they’re more ant-like with a collective intelligence that fades the farther they get from their communities.
I’m about halfway through and I’ll be interested to discover if and how the humans and the aliens ever figure out a way to communicate.
Frulgrath looks like something out of a nightmare. A description he might even self-apply.
A lanky demon with dried-out, dingy tan skin and needle-width pointed teeth. Armed with hand-axes that can penetrate energy shields, armor, and the flesh of dragons. He also uses trinkets and various oils to render himself invisible or to add additional potency to his attacks, depending on the foe he fights. His insides are full of dust, and he can heal from nearly any form of harm.
But not all harm. His own axes are just as dangerous to him. Frulgrath once had four arms. He lost one when Ashe Stelfire lopped it off with the Demon’s own axe during the climax of The Brigands. He remains exceedingly deadly with his remaining three. And he craves payback against Ashe for the maiming.
Payback he aims to collect.
He has another name that Thebes gave him as a joke back when they were on the same side in Repenter. But it’s since become far more serious to anyone who encounters him.
Hatchet Man.
He has served as Corsis’s agent throughout the ages. He kills with ruthless efficiency, but he doesn’t revel in it. Frulgrath is pragmatic and possesses a keen sense of what is realistic. He also has a dry sense of humor, which Corsis enjoys.
Frulgrath is one of the few people who can speak bluntly to the Master of the Game. Corsis will even sometimes listen to him. But not always.
And Corsis has a new job for Frulgrath. One that he’ll relay to the Hatchet Man through Balpors. Find out about Frulgrath’s latest assignment in The Breakers.
There’s a sketch on Tenacious D’s first album called “One Note Song” where Jack Black impresses himself by coming up with a song with one note plus a “little bendy thing” with the guitar string. And in self-deluded grandeur proclaims that he’s ready to move on.
“Next song! Next song! NEXT!”
Well, that’s where I’m at now. The Breakers is out in the world. I went to the Get Lit Conference a few weeks back and sold some bundles to folks. Including Jeff Koterba, a local “Omaha-famous” cartoonist and DJ for an Omaha classical radio station. He bought my books for his grandson, because he’s also into “Brando Sando” (Brandon Sanderson), which aligns very much with my audience. Jeff’s presentation was by far the best part of the conference.
Here’s a pic of me at my Git Lit table with my books, including The Breakers, and my “on Jim McGowan brand” wild shirt with tropical AT-ATs.
Pretty rad, in my humble opinion.
But now, with hopefully less self-delusion, it’s time to move to the next thing. Next thing!
NEXT!
I’ll be going to the Local Author Fair in a few weeks at Council Bluffs. I’ll go into the details in its own section below.
I think I’ll also do a Bookfest event in Omaha in December too.
And there’s all the writing projects, also in their own section.
Plenty o’ fun for the near future. And because we must obey the rule of threes, the following all-caps proclamation is inevitable:
I’ll be at the Council Bluffs Public Library Local Author Fair on Sunday, October 19, 2025 from 2pm-4pm.
If you’re in the Omaha area, come and say hi.
Tap the link above for more info on the Council Bluffs Public Library’s website.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
I went through the edits to The Game War and agreed with most of them. I plan to keep using this new editor, Lori with First Editing. She’s quite good.
I’ll be doing another pass with ProWritingAid and maybe try out their AI Beta Reader to see if it has any valid feedback.
Following that, I’ve made the judgment call. I’m going to try out ElevenLabs for digital narration. If I like it, I’ll release Repenter through whatever outlets that allow it, and depending on how it goes, the other books too. Sadly, Audible only allows their own inferior digital narration product, so it won’t be available there for now.
For those who aren’t fans of AI digital narration, or AI in general. I totally get it. Much of it was built on scraped training data.
I just ask for your grace as I try this out.
These products are not going away. I can’t afford $5-10k for a professional human narrator. If I don’t have my novels in audiobook format, I am missing half or more of the market. My books have almost certainly been scraped as well. And I’m frankly fine with it.
I’m leaning in to being human and dipping my toes in to being an AI artisan author, to steal Joanna Penn’s term. I don’t use AI for the actual writing, because that’s not fulfilling to me, and AI-generated text will not replicate my authorial voice even if I did use it. But my literal voice is not up to the task of reading hours upon hours of my stories. I’m prone to laryngitis, and I’m not looking to strain my vocal chords with a whole lot of talking.
So I’m starting this ElevenLabs experiment. We’ll see where it goes.
I also tried out Google’s Notebook LM again and reloaded the POTG novels as text files instead of PDFs, and that worked much better. It’s now at an 85-90% accuracy rate, which is fine for what I need it for.
I actually used it for this newsletter. I couldn’t remember if Thebes first called Frulgrath as Hatchet Man in Repenter or The Brigands. Yes, I could have done a find-search in both books, but it was handy to just use Notebook LM to track down the info.
The faux podcast thing is still kinda spotty with its accuracy and more of a gimmick, but asking the text portion to tell me about characters and story events yields decent results. I shall add this to my writer’s tool belt.
I’ll get back to Unseen Scars and start on its second draft after I do the audiobook thing.
ABC: Always be creating.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
Vurg to Vick: “Yes, I fortified our defenses. But they failed. That’s the hard lesson of the Weird War’s aftermath, lad. Sometimes, to protect, you must attack.”
Recommendation Corner
Blood Squad Seven by Joe Casey and Paul Fry
This is a very “inside baseball, except it’s comics” recommendation. So I realize this might not be for everyone.
This series is based on analogue characters from a team of superhero celebrities who were big in the 90s. And now some of the original characters are back to try it again with other younger characters who are either their kids or some other legacy aspect.
In real life, the team from the 90s was called Youngblood originally published by Image, but lots of legal madness over the ensuing decades has made that basically impossible to publish it with the original characters and that name. So we have a retconned team called Blood Squad Seven with analogues. Kind of similar to what Watchmen did with the old Charlton characters.
The hook of the series is that it’s both a modern look at how superheroes would absolutely be celebrities in the modern era. And they have a legacy to older characters from the 90s, not unlike how some of the JLA (Justice League of America) members in the 60s were legacy characters to the original versions in the JSA (Justice Society of America) from the 40s.
I like the tense dialogue, and I like the art style as well. Very esoteric and not for everyone, but I dig it.
One Battle After Another
And it’s another recommendation on which I’m guessing others’ opinions might diverge.
It’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie set over a 16-year span of time with a Weather Underground-esque group that’s doing revolutionary/terrorist attacks and liberation missions of immigrant detention centers.
Not diving into the culture war aspect of this stuff, but honestly, that’s more of the background to the movie.
Without spoiling too much. It’s more about a family that’s dealing with the fallout of a lot of violently unwise or lustfully unwise decisions that were made in the past, and come back to haunt them when a certain child reaches her 16th year.
Leonardo DiCaprio does a great job of conveying a former revolutionary who flames out and is doing a so-so job of raising his daughter. A daughter who Sean Penn’s relentless, unhinged, and also pathetic army colonel will stop at nothing to capture. It also has a lot of cool long-take action shots amid riots and desolate car chases. The score was noticeably well done too.
I run hot and cold on PTA movies. I despised Magnolia. But I enjoyed Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood. This is a movie that’s still sticking with me after I saw it. So it must have done something right. For me at least.
Give it a try if you’re feeling like something challenging and unique.
Czar Balpors rules the Holy Alliance with infamous cruelty.
He and Starm, the Dragon God of Power, came out on top following the cataclysmic upheaval of the Eruption centuries ago. Their empire gradually spread across the eastern half of the supercontinent of Jeea.
And now they want the west. All at once.
They have upgraded their armed forces with improved weapons. Their Dragons are among the most powerful combatants in existence.
Balpors intends to take back Findenton from the Free Jeea Coalition as a matter of pride. And pride is costly.
He is more than willing to have others on both sides pay that bloody price. The geopolitics and conquest are secondary to him. Balpors may lead the foremost world power on the planet of Trojis. He may be a Dragon in the guise of a Human ruler wearing impregnable stone armor. He may pretend to serve Starm. But his true motivations serve another. The one with whom he shares a mind.
Corsis.
He is a drone of flesh controlled by the Master of the Game, but with his own bellicose and misanthropic impulses.
Everything he does serves to keep the Game in a state of constant turmoil. A role he loathes more and more with each passing year.
But he can never stop because he cannot help himself. His will is not his own. And he vents his frustration with his lot in life on all he encounters.
Learn more about the harm Balpors inflicts in The Breakers.
The Breakers: Players of the Game Book 4 is available on ebook and paperback.
The stakes have risen. Ashe Stelfire and Avril Enzali have come out of the events of Repenter (Book 1) and The Brigands (Book 2) in one piece. But the cost of their struggles lingers on their spirits. The loss of those who died still weighs on them.
But they navigate that emotional damage as best they can. They are at last in Trojis. Ready to liberate Avril’s goddess, Celsis Kri, from an extra-dimensional prison of unbreakable ice. Their hard experiences also taught them something else.
They will need help.
Which is fortunate, because others also have business in the ice dungeon. Emerging from the events of The New Players (Book 3), Ed Burnhelt and his friends have only just fended off the threat of Corsis’s mind-warped, body-twisted horrors in the frontier city of Findenton.
Celsis Kri is not the only one trapped in the ice dungeon. The Titan hero from another age. The Skin Bot spy. The Taurus Man mercenary. The secretive Keeper Captain. And the corpse of another goddess who might one day rise again. All of them yearn for freedom.
And Ed’s cohort must liberate them.
Lending help goes both ways.
And it will start where it recently ended. In Findenton. Where the flashpoint of war reignites.
“An electrifying blend of high fantasy and futuristic warfare… Ambitious, gritty, and emotionally charged.”The Prairies Book Review “Wielding sharp, varied battle scenes, political plots that fit together with intent, and characters whose choices resist simple labels of right and wrong, James McGowan has created a layered war where every alliance comes with a cost and every victory changes the game board.”IndependentBookReview.com
I’ll be at the Get Lit Conference September 12th and 13th
I’ll have a table at the Get Lit Conference with copies of all my Players of the Game books. Including The Breakers.
If you’re in the Omaha area, check out the Get Lit Conference site below and buy yourself a ticket for September 12th and 13th.
Swing by my table and say hi. I’ll have some fun stuff to give away too.
Starting with The Breakers or Need a Refresher? I Have You Covered.
Want to know the score fast? Select Quick Recap, and Corsis will detail all his jerky skullduggery in just a few minutes.
Want to know the nitty gritty? Select Detailed Recaps to jump in with both feet and learn all the big events and character moments of the Players of the Game saga.
So, on top of all The Breakers excitement, I finished the first draft of The Game War’s combined bonus novels of Unseen Scars and Secret Fronts.
Huzzah and exultations!
The book that became two books’ first draft final numbers came in at 499 pages with 144,400 words.
Next, I’ll be going over the editor’s draft of The Game War. I’ll either jump into the second drafts of Unseen Scars and Secret Fronts from there. Or I might kick the tires on directing an AI-narrated audiobook version of Repenter. That subject is very squishy on multiple fronts, so we’ll see where that goes.
And since this month has both the launch of The Breakers and the completion of the double bonus books, I’m going to supply a reading order of the POTG series existing books and upcoming books, rather than a WIP out-of-context quote.
Players of the Game Saga Reading Order
Book 1: Repenter
Book 1.5: Repenter: The Hidden Chapters
Book 2: The Brigands
Book 2.5: The Brigands: The Favor
Book 3: The New Players
Book 3.5: The New Players: Origins
Book 4: The Breakers
Book 4.5: The Breakers: Jagged Pieces – Coming Soon
Book 5: The Game War – Coming Later
Book 5.5: The Game War: Unseen Scars – Coming Later
Book 5.7: The Game War: Secret Fronts – Coming Later
Book 6: Back to the Dark – Coming Later
I plan on writing ten main novels and ten to twelve bonus books. So I’m about 40% there with the published books, and about 55% there with the various WIP drafts.
I have a high-level outline for Back to the Dark, but that one is still baking in my mind. It will undoubtedly take years to complete. And then there’s the rest of the series, on which I have even rougher outlines and thoughts. It will emerge from the ether in time.
I’m in it for the long haul, folks.
Marathons, not sprints.
Recommendation Corner
Triangle Strategy
A tactics video game. Recommended by me. Shocking, I know.
This one is a slow-burn gem with very strong Final Fantasy Tactics vibes. Which makes sense, as Square Enix is the publisher.
It is not perfect. I nearly stopped playing it with the literal first hour of world-building cut scenes. But I gave it another chance, and the gameplay and characters ultimately engaged me. The geopolitics of salt are interesting in a pre-industrial world where the compound is rare. And the voice acting for the characters is pretty decent as well, especially for Benedict, the pragmatic and cold-blooded strategist and advisor to Serenoa, the young lord main character.
The characters are locked into their jobs, so you can’t customize that aspect of them. But you can focus on what powers and abilities they use, and also customize your deployment of units for any given battle.
I don’t often replay games, but I did so with this one because there’s a lot of diverging story paths that lead to entirely different battles and character interactions.
Either skip the cut scenes at the beginning or just grab some popcorn. It’s a stellar tactics game for gamers like me who love the niche.
Lucky Devils by Charles Soule and Ryan Browne
The guys who made the Curse Words and Eight Billion Genies comic book series are back with another absurdist comedy with dark undertones.
A nurse and a schoolteacher are stuck in terrible careers and life situations. They keep doing the ethical thing, and get nowhere for it.
They have a pair of unseen devils on their shoulders, Collar and Rake, who both decide to reveal themselves to the hapless humans.
Silly good intentions paving ensues.
And the two devils think the whole hell underworld where they live when they’re off shift needs to be upended too. They have ambitions. And they’ll likely run afoul of many worse denizens as the series progresses.
It’s on hold for right now because the artist, Ryan Browne, recently suffered a minor stroke, so he’s focusing on recovery.
I wish him the best. And hope they’re able to finish the story at some point.
Ashe Stelfire started out as a selfish and cruel person. The worst person for the job of helping Avril Enzali, his long-lost daughter, to save her goddess from eternal imprisonment in an extra-dimensional dungeon of unbreakable ice.
Things did not go as planned.
Avril and Ashe both suffered great harm. The daughter far worse than the father. All at the whims of Corsis, who toyed with them from the periphery of a dark empire’s rise to power. Before he could embark on the quest to free his daughter’s goddess, Ashe had to fight through a hellish world war to reclaim the means to heal Avril’s wounds.
Ashe changed along the way.
He lost his innate pyromancy, transformed himself with a transfusion of silver blood, and claimed the legendary Retributor axe. And he donned the monstrous bronze mask fashioned from the face of his old mentor. Of far greater significance, he put aside his greed for fortune hunting as he learned of the magnitude of Corsis’s threat. He strove to be better.
To repent.
He and his allies achieved a bitter victory in the final battle, where the means to heal Avril was at last recovered. Although they triumphed in that smaller goal, they still lost the war against the dark empire backed by Corsis. Ashe, Avril, and several of their friends fled to another world in the aftermath. A brighter world.
A world with the entrance to a certain ice maze.
Ashe and Avril will at last embark on the quest to break out the imprisoned goddess. One they had originally intended to perform by themselves. But the past hard years have imparted another hard lesson.
When it comes to the Game and all the things it touches, going it alone is folly.
LOTS of news this month, so I’m going to jump right in with the style of a 90s-era Marvel Bullpen Bulletin that they’d use as in-house newsletters.
I loved seeing the all-caps ITEM subheadings in the middle of a random Spider-Man or New Warriors comic, so I shall shamelessly copy that format now.
ITEM: The Breakers is Available for Pre Order on Kindle Now!
That’s right!
The Breakers is releasing on Thursday, September 4, 2025. And if you’re so inclined, you can pre-order it on Kindle now with the button below.
Do you prefer paperbacks or another ebook service besides Amazon?
Fear not!
The Breakers will be available for paperback purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org. And other ebook versions will be available on Apple, BN, Kobo, and many others. They will go live on the actual 9/4/2025 date.
But if you are a Kindle reader, go right ahead and use the button below to get in line.
In the past, I had a paltry presence on Goodreads, as I found its user interface too annoying.
I’ve changed my stance. Its UI is… fine.
And more importantly, it’s one of the best places to learn what actual readers think about their favorite books.
I’ve also linked my blog from Stelfire.com to it, so it already has a robust selection of entries. Many of which will be familiar to long-time reader group members.
So, if Goodreads is your bag, please follow me on that platform with the link below.
New to the Players of the Game Saga or need a refresh before you jump into The Breakers? I’ve got you covered!
Check out the Recaps tab on Stelfire.com with the link below or the tab above.
Want to know the score fast? Select Quick Recap, and Corsis will detail all his jerky skullduggery in just a few minutes.
Want to know the nitty gritty? Select Detailed Recaps to jump in with both feet and learn all the big events and character moments of the Players of the Game saga.
Well, that’s not true at all, as the rest of the post below will confirm.
But we shall now return to the typical topics I cover in these reader group emails.
Translation: I gots ta share my usual artwork, WIP status reports, and geeky things I like. Starting with an image of Ashe Stelfire above that many of you have seen, but I wanted to share anew.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this earlier. But The Breakers is available on September 4th, 2025. I could have sworn I had talked about that topic somewhere.
Kidding aside, I’m excited to get it out in the world. But I shan’t be resting on my laurels.
I’m creeping toward the end of the first drafts for Book 5.5: Unseen Scars and Book 5.7: Secret Fronts. The initial combined draft sits at 137,600 words with 482 pages. That’s 14,000 words with 46 pages this time around. It didn’t feel like I did better this month, but that’s double last month’s so-so output, so I take the W.
Once I’m done with the combined draft, I’ll take a look at The Game War’s edits from my editor, and run it through ProWritingAid again. Then on to slicing and dicing books 5.5 and 5.7.
And maybe make use of Eleven Labs to see how AI narration sounds. I’ve been kicking around using that where I’d direct the performance of a virtual voice. Sadly, I cannot afford a voice actor for an audio book. So it’s either AI-narrated audio or no audio. I’m still determining what I want to do there.
A quandary for a later time.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month
Corsis and Frulgrath:
Corsis considered Frulgrath, maybe with an eyebrow raised from behind his mask, maybe not. Finally, he said, “Self-delusion sneaks up on the best of us.”
Frulgrath stood away from the wall, still unsure if Corsis leveraged only intuition or something more invasive. He supposed it didn’t matter either way. “Hrh. You gotta be you. And I gotta be me.”
Recommendation Corner
Superman (2025)
I adored this movie.
Superman is so easy to get wrong. But this felt like picking up a random issue and jumping in with both feet. Some folks won’t like the “toss into the deep end” approach to reintroducing him.
I am not among them.
It’s the best comic book movie I’ve seen in years.
The pacing is fantastic. There was no part of this movie that felt slow. Luckily I had an empty bladder, as there were no slow-pace expository/transitional scenes where it felt like a good time to step out. I’ve seen it twice, and I remained impressed by its story structure.
Mr. Terrific, Lex, Lois, and of course, Krypto, were the other standouts. I teared up at the father-son scene between Clark and Pa Kent.
Its take on the original John Williams score was very hummable, which is job one of any movie score in my reckoning.
A very positive and earnest movie. Highest possible recommendation.
Fantastic Four: First Steps
The best cinematic adaptation of Fantastic Four. Not as good as Superman. But the more I pondered the movie, the more I liked it.
I was initially on the fence with whether I’d be on board (pun partially intended) with the Silver Surfer swap from Norrin Radd to Shalla Bal. But the angle they took with it worked for me. This interpretation of the Surfer made her and Johnny Storm sort of love interests. They sort of flirted with tentative curiosity about each other. It turned tragic as Johnny figured out a cipher for her language while Reed, Sue, and Ben were busy with figuring out a way to beat Galactus.
Speaking of which, I love how they leveraged Reed’s brains and Sue and Ben’s hearts as part of their drive to not sacrifice Franklin to Galactus’s designs. Dare I say it? I thought it worked better than the comics’ Ultimate Nullifier macguffin in the original story.
Sue’s drive to keep Franklin safe was very relatable. Vanessa Kirby really excelled in showing her strength when she confronted a crowd of haters. The Invisible Woman is rightly up there with Storm and Wonder Woman as an exemplar of a female super hero.
And Pedro Pascal did a good portrayal of Reed Richards, but (nerd quibble alert) he wasn’t stretchy enough. All the others’ powers were spot on.
Some people had an issue with Ben Grimm not having a gravelly voice. But I liked his soft-spoken, understated, pensive demeanor. I also like that they dialed into his Jewish background.
Herbie and the Fantasticar were also spot on with the retro-future aesthetic.
And this score is up there with Superman and the Avengers. Especially the verbal part. I’ve been singing “FANTASTIC FOUR!!!!” to my wife for days. It’s a fun earworm and I get to tease her. A true double threat.
Also recommended. Like I said earlier, Superman is better. But FF: FS is totally worth seeing in the theater too.
