Jasphir Iniv stands out in his family of conniving and abhorrent Demonic royalty.
He’s a decent person.
Naturally, they want him dead for that alone.
His partnership with Ashe Stelfire and love affair with Nunaker only moved him to the very top of their hit list.
He’s a Human-like Sokenti who can see in all directions in his vicinity despite his race’s innate bleeding, eyeless sockets. He covers this horrible aspect of himself with a white blindfold and white leather armor that never get stained with his viscera, or that of others.
Despite his affability, Jasphir radiates menace. The assassin uses his panoramic natural sight to find weak points in the strongest of foes with his etherea-infused daggers.
But his many family members aren’t as easy to dispatch.
To paraphrase an Elmore Leonard quote: You know that part of the story that no one reads? Don’t write that part.
I’m currently working my way through a fantasy novel by a prolific writer, which I will not be featuring in Recommendation Corner. That said, it’s gotten most interesting.
Eventually.
This story, like many other stories set in fantasy settings, suffers from pages and pages of “throat clearing” in the form of prologues with characters from ages past who aren’t part of the actual story. Story elements that really only make sense if you complete the book and then revisit it. Some readers dig that.
I do not.
My philosophy on world building and history in a sci-fi fantasy world is to reveal it as the characters encounter it. Jump into it with a main character doing something interesting. Getting in a fight. Having a tense argument. Anything to engage the reader with something interesting.
And then lead them into the larger world, with its lore and history showing up as a part of natural story progression.
Do I always succeed in that? Probably not. But it’s something that’s always my north star.
To loosely quote another writer, Kurt Vonnegut, this time. Start a scene late and leave early.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
One minor problem with not numbering your chapters until later and not having page numbers in Scrivener means that it’s very easy to lose track of productivity from one month to the next.
My estimate is that I got through revising or rewriting 12 chapters since last month, but it might be a little less than that. It’s less than last month’s 19 chapters.
I had some life stuff hit me with some work stress events and the sudden loss of a friend to a brain stem tumor. Both made for a very blue first few weeks of November.
It’s my hope that December will be both full of happier life events, and also productivity.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
“Watch.” Corsis repeated his earlier command. “And hush.”
Recommendation Corner
Loki Season 2 on Disney+
I’m a little behind, and I still have one episode to go, so I hope this recommendation does not sour following the conclusion.
(Cough, Secret Invasion, Cough)
The big draw on this is Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson’s chemistry as work buddies in the TVA as the organization falls apart around them. Jonathan Majors does a good job playing a nerdy Kang variant.
Though, Marvel may just kill the whole Kang saga plan in light of the actor’s off screen behavior and the whole souring of interest in MCU phase 4 and early 5. Odds are at least even that we’ll be seeing less Marvel output and a soft or hard reboot at some point.
Either way, Loki is a bunch of fun with Miss Minutes and Ke Huy Khan’s Ouroboros as stand out characters.
I like it (but perhaps less if I don’t like how they land the last episode).
Vox Machina on Prime
I’m also behind on this anime-inspired show. I finished the 1st season, and still have to get to the 2nd at some point.
The Critical Role voice actors have created a fun D&D style show with all kinds of fantasy fun with dragons, vampires, dark magic, and even some steampunky artificing with an intense gun-wielding character.
But the tight writing, voice acting, and irreverent humor are the big draws of the show.
A certain montage where the characters go around the circle detailing the worst kill/victory they ever inflicted was hilarious, especially with the wood elf mage and the gnome bard character.
It’s been out a while. And it’s still tons of fun.
I’ve decided to dip my toe in other social media pools for my author interests.
And I figured Pinterest was an intriguing avenue since I like sharing artwork of my characters and covers. I wasn’t aware of this, but it’s more of a image search engine than a conversation/argument venue like X-Twitter.
So here’s a pin image I made for Repenter.
Clicking on the image will take you to my Pinterest page. I’ll be adding images on a bi-weekly or monthly cadence, so feel free to check it out as time goes on.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
I continue to plug away at The Game War’s second draft in Scrivener. This month yielded 19 revised chapters. Some needed to be completely rewritten. Others needed only some polishing.
I still don’t quite know how to measure productivity on this phase, but I’m getting words tappity-tapped, so I’ll claim victory on that basis alone.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
Benefactor: “I’ve spent millennia with Corsis’s foot on my throat. If I get toppled from power, I’m quite close to the ground.”
Recommendation Corner
The Killer
I watched this latest David Fincher movie in the theater before it goes exclusively to Netflix.
Michael Fassbender stars as the multi-alias Killer, a sociopathic assassin who goes to great lengths to kill his targets.
And even greater lengths to protect himself when things go wrong.
It’s a tight movie that keeps you engaged throughout. I didn’t like it as much as Gone Girl, Fight Club, and the Game, but it is definitely worth checking out on Netflix before it’s buried under other content.
Shardpunk Verminfall
Surprise. It’s another tactics indie game that I’m enjoying. I have my vices. And turn-based pixelated combat is one of them.
This one takes place on an earth-like world where swarms of intelligent mutant rats have overrun the capital city, and your group of fighters have to make your way through the ruins with a little spherical robot that might be able to turn the tables on the rats.
It’s a little bit Darkest Dungeon with fear damage and camping between missions, and a whole lot X-Com with the cover and overwatch mechanics.
But the rats will never stop. And you must ultimately flee or they will overrun you.
I hate rats. Rats make me crazy.
But that’s okay, because this game lets me kill so very many of them.
He’s been a member of Ashe Stelfire’s partnership for years. The money has been good. The team respects his talents with guns. His family heirloom, the Alterv Gun, fires burning bullets that can penetrate the advanced armor and the hard flesh of Demons. The revolver never runs out of ammo.
The same cannot be said of Ricardo’s nerve. With each horror he faces on the partnership’s fortune hunting raids, the more his nerve frays.
The latest incursion into an ancient and sentient forest portends nothing good. Especially the bipedal Lizard lurking within it.
Ricardo needs to retire. But he fears to consider a big question.
A few months back, I chronicled the glory of my bar trivia team, Beerpaw. This is not the only group that I’ve rejoined with the worst of the pandemic behind us. My pickup Ultimate Frisbee group again resumed its casual night.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Ultimate Frisbee, it’s kind of a mix of basketball where each defender covers someone, or plays zone defense against small passes of the offense, and American football where you can also throw the frisbee way down the field like a quarterback to a receiver in a rectangular end zone. You also do a “kick off” after each point where you either yell “Ulitimate!” and/or the score and throw it to the other team.
Or you just say 2-2, no matter what the score is. That’s an ongoing joke with one of my good friends. (Hi, Dave!)
I usually tell people it’s like playing frisbee with a dog and you’re the dog. I’m always drenched in sweat after I play, which is exactly what I want. It’s fantastic exercise.
I’ve been playing with this group since 2007. Originally, we played one night a week. However, it eventually proved popular enough to expand to a second night that gradually became for the people with kids and older/slower people sub-group.
I am firmly and proudly in the latter group.
And it contracted to just one night per week with the higher octane group for a few years during the worst of the pandemic. Until this past spring.
And how did I do after a 3 season gap?
Not terrible! Which is a win as far as I’m concerned. Minimal soreness and stiffness mixed with maximum fun.
I LOVE that we’ve been able to get back at the disc flinging.
I not only go for the cardio, but it’s also a great excuse to see a bunch of friends I wouldn’t get to see as often otherwise.
We stop on or around when we lose daylight saving time, so the season’s coming to an end.
But I have faith that the casual pickup Ultimate Frisbee group will return with all things green next spring.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
This past month had a longer than expected session of pasting the Game War’s first draft from Word into Scrivener. And something interesting took up a good deal of my time.
I discovered I needed to summarize the chapters in each chapter folder, which became a second, far more defined outline.
With that done, I’ve edited the first three chapters, and am working on a brand new fourth. Some of the formatting in Scrivener is hinky compared to Word, especially with tabs. Scrivener’s value is the ability to shuffle sections around, so my anticipation is that I’ll mainly use it for second and possibly third drafts.
As far as productivity tracking goes with the second draft, I’m going to try going with the total chapters edited or written. It’s a little more qualitative than quantitative, but I think it might work.
So 3.5 chapters for this month.
PLUS: I’ve started working with a third artist with the handle of Moonarc. They did the illustration of Ricardo Alterv, and I’ll be rotating their art on future newsletters. Check out their stuff on Deviantart. It’s nifty.
Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:
Hekati gestured to the circular opening. “Cheaters first.”
Corsis winked at her. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Recommendation Corner
The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North
Of the three Claire North sci-fi fantasy books I’ve read thus far, this one is the most melancholic and tragic.
The main character, Hope, has a condition that makes everyone she encounters to forget her after she departs from sight and sound. Kind of an inverse Memento where everyone is like Guy Pierce when they interact with her.
This includes her parents when she was a teenager. The scenes depicting this were both subtle and heartbreaking.
Hope becomes a thief because much of any legitimate career requires other people to remember her. To build trust. In the absence of trust, she’s able to steal valuables with impunity.
Jewels in particular.
And following a theft royal jewelry at a posh party, this brings her into the crosshairs of the host organization, a company behind a dystopian app called Perfection that encourages people to become more “perfect”. A company that will go to great lengths to silence those who don’t agree with their shallow definition of the term.
Including a thief no one can remember.
Compelling stuff.
Arcadian Atlas
I do love me a good tactics video game.
And this one pushes many of my buttons.
It’s a pretty standard JRPG style game where there’s political intrigue that soon gets side tracked by magical forces that are unleashed by short-sighted warring factions. The main characters get caught up in the middle of it, and find that no side can be trusted.
I’ll admit that the user interface could have used a few more layers of paint. The inability to rotate the screen to click on a character that’s clumped up with a bunch of other characters is vexing.
However, the Final Fantasy Tactics vibe with the character designs, the strangely chill jazz music, and Poncho the racoon make it fun for me.
All media is improved by the inclusion of a racoon. It is immutable fact.
A hidden body of water lurks 20 trecs below the surface of eastern Jeea.
The Shallow Sea is only a thousand feet deep within its sparkling, luminescent cavern. The immense pressure of the deep tributaries is negated by the cataclyze crystals that were created millennia earlier.
So much so, that air fills the topmost portion of the subterranean sea’s cavern. The enclosed water and air maintain oxygenation due to the ambient etherea generated by the crystals.
The nation of Yintu thrives within its depths, peopled by the bipedal, dolphin-like Cetari. They are masters of submersible technology with vessels that can stand the crushing straits that connect the Shallow Seas to the oceans of the surface.
The Yintunese are reclusive. Distrustful. And with good reason. Their above-ground neighbors, the Holy Alliance, would invade them without hesitation if that dark empire ever learned of Yintu’s existence.
Still, this hidden nation has ambitions.
Ambitions that might ensnare the Breakers if they don’t take care in navigating the Shallow Sea’s waters.
During my summer of revising and rephrasing, I’ve realized two things.
One: The preceding sentence had far too many “re” words.
And two: I needed to make a few new maps for novels and novellas that are in the hopper, like The Breakers, Jagged Pieces, and The Game War. I also need maps for plotting and outlining purposes as I figure out the story beats of the next swath of novels. The Players of the Game saga will expand beyond Trojis and Sufrinzon.
I’ll detail the process of making one map that will be showing up in the fourth main novel. I fully admit the method I used was on the ridiculous side.
I magnified and printed a section of the existing map of Jeea, the main super continent of Trojis. I laid it on top of a glass coffee table, placed a blank sheet of paper over it, the shined a maglite underneath it, and traced the land masses, seas, and rivers with a pencil. Then I scanned it and added all the proper noun names in Photoshop.
My wife found the flashlight part most amusing.
It reminded me of my childhood days of watching teachers present things on overhead projectors.
The other maps were way easier, as I just needed to make them up from scratch. However, all of them will need a whole lot digital beautifying by my graphic designer brother. (Hey, Tony!)
It shows an atypical, non-text component of my creative process.
And it’s a sneak peak into things to come in Book 4: The Breakers.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
The great ProWritingAid edit-o-rama has reached its end. Penciled maps are made.
The next big thing begins.
The second draft of The Game War is in progress.
To start, I’m pasting the chapters from Word into Scrivener with summary descriptions. Once that’s finished, I’ll start the revising the prose, cutting out parts, adding others, and rearranging their order.
I’ll need to determine a better way to track productivity stats than the word/page count I used on the first draft. Maybe how many chapters I revise. Maybe something else.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
This book has an interesting premise. A small minority of people actually live their lives over and over in cycles. They die and are born again in the same year and their memories of the past lives emerge around age 3 or 4.
Jonathan Hickman did something similar with Moria MacTaggert in X-Men when he retconned her into a secret mutant a few years back.
In this book, Harry August continues to be born again and again in 1918 and usually lives to the 1990s or so. But not always.
There is peril.
A way exists to kill these immortals. Other time-looping immortals can kill their parents before they’re born.
And someone starts doing just that as the course of history starts to change. Advanced tech starts coming decades too early, and the accompanying environmental problems come with it.
Harry determines that it’s another time-looping immortal, and he must do something to stop it. In this life or the next.
Very well written and Peter Kenny did a great job narrating it.
Oppenheimer
This is one of my new favorite Christopher Nolan movies. I put it up there with Memento, Dark Knight, and Inception.
Chronology is again played with, but I think it works well with the three focal points of the Strauss Senate hearing in the late 50s, Oppenheimer’s infamous security clearance meeting in the mid-50s, and the buildup to Los Alamos and Trinity in the 30s and 40s.
Cillian Murphy shows Oppenheimer as a flawed man who’s a genius, but also a reckless womanizer. Everyone does a fantastic job. I didn’t even realize Robert Downey Jr. was Strauss until the credits rolled.
Really heavy stuff with the implications of theory colliding with reality at the advent of the atomic age. Highly recommended.
(And I did get my Barbenheimer bingo card checked a week later when I saw Barbie.
It was a fun and silly movie, but a bit preachy at times. Still, America Ferrera’s monologue in the third act was good fodder for discussion with my wife. Yes, women do feel everything she described.
I’m wide open. And almost certainly a rebel without a clue, but never mind that.
The Players of the Game saga is now wide on Ebook format, not just on Kindle. So if you prefer to read on Nook, Kobo, Apple, Smashwords, or Scribd, I have you covered.
I’ll be expanding paperbacks to wide distribution in the coming months as well.
In the meantime, if you didn’t want to use “the smile” in favor of alternative eBook marketplaces, please check out the books below.
And as always, you can get the Repenter and the Hidden Chapters on the house through my Book Funnel links.
I’m still engaged in the great ProWritingAid edit-o-rama.
I have finished my way through The Breakers and will move on to the Jagged Pieces novella next. Then I shall leverage Scrivener to re-arrange all the rough draft components of The Game War and get on with the second draft.
The editing machete is sharpened, and it shall be time to cut and edit all kinds of affronts to man and Vurg.
Players of the Game Rephrase Quote of the Month:
Frulgrath and Xax:
Frulgrath’s shoulders tightened. Xax sensed something. He sensed the trap.
“Well, that’s just–” Xax whirled around and punched the hidden Shulinkarv in his beaked face with a fierce crack. “Ducky!”
It started off a bit slow, but I love the paranoia this series emulated from the comic series.
It’s much more of a spy thriller than a behind-the-eight-ball fight against aliens, but it’s well done. Samuel L. Jackson’s Fury is great and weather worn. I won’t spoil any twist here, but I’m pleasantly surprised on this one.
Give it a try.
The Forged by Greg Rucka and Eric Trautmann
I generally don’t like magazine-sized comics, but this one just hit all my buttons.
It’s a little bit Warhammer 40k and a little bit Inhumanoids (a lesser known Sunbow cartoon and toy series from the 80’s).
It focuses on a squad of super tough women soldiers in power armor who have to deal with clones of their empress and an agenda that involves Cthulhu-esque aliens that really, really want all of humanity to expire.
Admiral Dell Marrs commands the Crush. The flagship of the Union Cities.
He is a Red Chromatic, a Post Human species that emerged following the Eruption centuries earlier.
Marrs is never far from coffee, which he prefers burnt and borderline non-potable.
While not completely aligned with the Grells and the Chan’la, he is a reliable ally within Lan Thedin, the largest megalopolis of the urban confederacy.
Decades ago, Marrs worked with the Forever Guard during the War of No Hope. And many of the Forever Guard consider him a friend. Een, in particular, finds his gruff good humor most endearing.
More often than not, the Grells call him Stick Man, due to his lanky frame. He uses a multitude of nicknames for them. Eeny Meany being his favorite for Een.
His city soon finds itself in need of his old allies when Hekati’s horrors emerge from its lower reaches.
Stick Man has nicknames for those as well. None of them pleasant.
Buy the Players of the Game Series on eBook and Print!
