| Happy New Year One and All! I hope the holiday season has gone as well as it can. This one was little choppy for me and my family. It wasn’t all turbulence thankfully, so I’ll count my blessings where I can. On the smoother end of the spectrum, I finished the latest draft of Players of the Game Book 4.5: The Breakers: Jagged Pieces. It was originally a novella, but it ended up expanding into a full sized bonus novel. I’ve started writing Book 5: The Game War. The blank page didn’t really bug me on this one. I pretty much jumped right in. I also did a deep dive on the series’s timeline with a codex I put together on an Excel sheet. I tweaked a few minor details and fleshed out more details that I intentionally kept a bit hazy. I’ll likely put some version of the timeline up on the stelfire.com website at some point. And I plan to release Book 3.5 The New Players: Origins sometime in the first half of the year. More to details to come in future emails. |
| Recommendation Corner |
| Billy Summers by Stephen King: This was much more of a thriller than a horror novel. the title character, Billy, is a highly skilled assassin who specializes in sniper kill shots. He plays dumb in order to keep the people with whom he works at arms length. It also allows him to repeatedly indicate that he only kills bad people. When he embeds in a community with a novel writing cover story, he starts to wonder if this job is as simple as his crime family handlers would have him believe. Things complicate from there. It’s a very compelling read and even has a few little call backs to the Shining in parts of it. The Witcher Season 2 on Netflix: Last time I recommended the Wheel of Time series. And while that was quite good, the Witcher is better. I think the story is tighter and the characters are little more fleshed out. Geralt and Ciri’s relationship is very endearing as a surrogate father and daughter. Yennifer’s own struggles with losing her magic is also well done (though I really dislike that name). And Jaskier/Dandelion has another good song where he laments his falling out with Geralt from last season. Give it a watch if you enjoy grim-dark fantasy. |
| That’s all for this time. Stay smart. Stay safe. Jim |
