Fethelithers lurk in the darkness and strive to spread it.

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Players of the Game Creature Spotlight: Fethelither
From time to time I’ll be showcasing members of monster armies and demonic hordes that the Players of the Game protagonists must face throughout the series.  One such fiend is a Fethelither.  These are demons composed of solid shadows with pale white masks covering their faces.  They have dagger-like fingers and are among the assassins and light combat soldiers of the Holy Alliance’s Horrinshal, an organization that lurks in the dark places.  Fethelithers strive to spread that darkness.

James McGowan Reader Group- I Have a Nickname for this Decade

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Yeesh.

Let me open by saying I’m praying for peace in Ukraine and very much praying that things don’t escalate.  This situation is good for no one.  War is acid on stability and relationships among and between people within the conflicting countries.  Donate to relief charities if you are blessed enough to be in such a position.

A century ago, the nickname for its third decade was the “Roaring 20’s”.  After the first two years of this century’s third decade, I was wanting to it to ultimately become the “Boring 20’s”.  Sadly, between the pandemic, ludicrous political divisions in the US, and now a land war in eastern Europe, I’ve landed on a non-rhyming, but at least alliterative, moniker: The “Trying 20’s”. 

I was initially going to go with something more negative and flippant, but I think “trying” in two senses of the word aptly apply.  This decade has both called us to endeavor to be better and to endure through its adversity. The Trying 20’s are here, and we all must move through them as best we can.
Players of the Game Works in Progress
I’m starting a new section mostly to ensure that I keep up the momentum and productivity with my latest novel, the Game War. I’m up to page 105, right around 30,000 words.  Last time I was at page 56 with 15,500 words.  So I’ve added a reasonable chunk to this WIP.  Not awesome output, but not bad either.  As I’ve said in the past, I write carefully, not quickly.
Recommendation Corner
Chronophage by Tim Seeley and Ilias Kyriazis

I ordered this Humanoids graphic novel from my local comic shop without knowing a whole lot about it, save that I like lots of Tim Seeley’s other comic series, especially The Revival.  This was such an outstanding surprise.  It centers on a single mom named Chloe who meets an intriguing stranger named Heath, and they quickly click.  It’s then revealed that Heath is consuming parts of the past from Chole and the people around her, editing her personal history, seemingly for the better.  It’s a horror book, so there’s plenty of graphic scenes, well illustrated by Ilias Kyriazis.  A fantastic story that has a lot to say about how threads of our pasts overlap and some bigger questions about how all moments might exist at once.  Pick it up on Comixology or in print!

Valiant Hearts: The Great War on Steam or Switch

In light of the events in Ukraine, I’m calling out an older game that I played a few years back.  I bought Valiant Hearts on a Steam sale, but then never got around to it until my cousin (Hey, Nick!) recommended that I fire it up.  It focuses on a cast of characters on both sides of the Great War (WWI) from the beginning while it was mobile and its eventual descent into trench warfare.  It has puzzles to solve and you team up with a likable dog to help with them.  It also tricks you into learning about the Great War through the game’s events and factoids that pop up.  It does a great job of showing the tragedy of that conflict and all others like it.
Check Out the Players of the Game Series on Kindle and Paperback
That’s all for this time. Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim

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James McGowan Reader Group- There’s Goals In Them Thar Hills!

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Great Scott!  It’s February already.

We even managed to get the Christmas decorations down.  Granted, it was a just two days ago.  But we got ’em put away, by thunder.  Now, it is on to the, uh, cat days of winter?  That stretch of time where my part of the world usual gets a least one or two polar vortices of insanely cold air.  The year also usually starts to take shape with the various irons in my various fires.

My way of keeping all that proverbial metal hot involves a whole lot of to-do notes to myself.  In the case of the latest work in progress, The Game War, I just write a sticky note with the page number goal that I intend to reach by the beginning of the next week.  I’m sure I’ll falter during some weeks.  But so far, I’m doing pretty decent for my usual output.  I’m up to page 56 with about 15,500 words.  I’m sure others have more copious output, but these incremental weekly goals help me to keep my head in the game.

What kind of techniques do you use to keep on task?  Or if procrastinating is your thing, what’s your favorite way of wasting time?  Mine is watching educational Youtube videos or playing indie video games.  All things in moderation, right? Right?
Recommendation Corner
Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive By Philipp Dettmer

This book is thoroughly interesting.  It goes in detail, but not too much detail, on the inner workings of the immune system from the innate system (first responders), the complement systems (a bunch of bio chemicals that get activated like a security system), and the adaptive system (the parts that either studies the infection and puts together a tailored immune response with antibodies, or gets a massive assist from a vaccine doing all of the hard work first).  Most everyone has heard of the spleen, but how about the thymus?  It’s the organ in your chest that makes T cells, among many other things, and slowly withers as you age, which is why elderly folks are more prone to disease.  This book really illustrates the unbelievable complexity of how a bunch of mindless immune system cells act quite smart in concert.  I didn’t even touch on how stuff can go wrong with parasites, cancers, bacteria, and viruses.  Highly recommended.

Spider-Man: No Way Home

My wife and I braved the theater a few weeks back to catch the new Spidey flick after the crowds had thinned a bit.  I won’t spoil anything on this, but this had everything I hoped to see, and few surprises too.  It’s the best Spidey movie so far, even better than Into the Spider Verse.  Totally catch it in the theater if that’s right for you.  And for the record: Dr. Strange was right.
Check Out the Players of the Game Series on Kindle and Paperback
That’s all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim

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Dire Mistakes Loom in Quar Iniv’s Future

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Quar Iniv is one of the primary antagonists of the first couple of Players of the Game novels. He is a Human-looking Demon with perpetually bleeding eye sockets, though he possesses enhanced vision that allows him to see 360 degrees all around him. He is cruel, greedy, and quite willing to antagonize his wife, Nirva Iniv. That is dire mistake. He makes even worse ones when it comes to Avril Enzali and Ashe Stelfire.

James McGowan Reader Group- A Season of Finishes and Starts

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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.

Check Out the Players of the Game Series on Kindle and Paperback
That’s all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim

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Suso will not abide death by the hand of another.

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Suso is a death goddess who aligns against Corsis and Nirva in the first two books of the series.  She is old friends with ViRauni and Welt, though she met each of them under different circumstances.  She strives to keep the Mosul Flute out of Nirva’s hands, which would grant the would-be empress the power to control the dead.  A turn of events that she will not abide.

James McGowan Reader Group- Editing Editing Everywhere And Not a Drop to Drink

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“Everyone makes mistakes, that’s why they put erasers on pencils.” 

The sage Lenny once said this on a memorable Simpsons episode with Frank Grimes.

And oh, my.  When one writes hundreds of thousands of words in a series of novels, the mistakes will add up.  I swear I know the difference between their, there, and they’re.  But the wrong words, the wrong grammar, and the wrong style will indeed sneak in.

I usually make several edit runs through my novels as I write them.  I read them in a weekly writers workshop group on Zoom, which is totally great because you can share your screen while you’re reading aloud.  Additionally, I make use of an editor for my novels who finds all kinds of oops items.  (Hi, Sarah.) 

And just this past week, also I bought an editing program called Pro Writing Aid.  It’s caught a lot of errors that hid in plain sight and that I flat out made the wrong choice without knowing it.  I’m absolutely sure that errors will make it into my works, which isn’t ideal, but by no means immutable.  That’s the glory of indie publishing with ebooks and print on demand.  If you find mistakes, you just correct them, and upload an updated version.

The ultimate aim is to get it right the first time, but like the pencil in Lenny’s quote, editing is the eraser to fix that mistake.
Recommendation Corner
Wheel of Time on Amazon Prime:

I had read the first five books in Robert Jordan’s magnum opus about 25 years ago.  I liked them a great deal, and I know they influenced my storytelling, but I decided I wanted to wait until Jordan finally finished them.  When Brandon Sanderson took them over and finished them, my brother and a couple cousins told me it was all quite good, but I just didn’t have the motivation to dive into them again.  I do now.  The new streaming series is most engaging after the choppy first episode.  It’s like Game of Thrones, except magic is much more of a thing and friendship is valued more than political maneuvers, at least initially.  I didn’t care for a particular character’s actions that deviated from the books, but it’s a minor quibble.  I’m enjoying it so far.

The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie:

I do love this series despite all the terrible things that happen to some characters and the worse things that others inflict.  The Great Change sweeps in a revolution that starts like the American one, then devolves into something worse than the French one. King Orso continues to be my favorite character with his fatalistic good humor.  Rikke is also a strong character in this installment.  She makes a lot of right choices that still lead to pain.  The narration by Steven Pacey is varied for all of the characters on the audio book version.  As long as Abercrombie keeps up this level of excellence, I will continue to recommend all the books in this series.  Fantastic yarns, one and all.
Check Out the Players of the Game Series on Kindle and Paperback
That’s all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim

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Vex Ramansa at Your Peril

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Ramansa is a Sphinx who starts off wary of Ashe Stelfire, but ultimately becomes a close friend. She expects excellence from all those with whom she works, especially her daughter. Very few can match her mastery of ethereal arts. Those who try soon learn that it’s most unwise to vex a Sphinx.

James McGowan Reader Group- Outlinery

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Hey hey!

Several months ago I listened to a Hello Internet podcast where one of the hosts, Grey, spoke of something called “brain crack”, a phenomenon where you imagine how you would handle a personal/public/national/world problem with such competence and imagination that you get addicted to the daydream, rather than taking action toward solving the actual problems, or anything else in your life that needs doing.

This trait is not always useful for dealing with day-to-day life, but it is absolutely critical when I’m outlining out a novel.  That brain-crack journey is how I feel out a story before I write it.  How I figure out the plot beats and character interactions. 

I used to write it down in a spiral note book, but I’ve since started using a free program called yWriter that has a fantastic chapter-by-chapter outlining function.  It also allows for writing the actual novel using its application, but I can’t break away from Word, nor do I really want to.  More than that, yWriter is the place where I feel more comfortable letting the daydreams of the plot flow through my mind.  Sometimes, I’ll go minutes on end with out typing anything, yet feeling very productive with the mental exercise.

And that productivity is bearing out an outline of Players of the Game Book 5.  Right now, I think it’s going to be called The Game War, though that may change.  The story will likely change substantially from the outline, and that’s totally fine.  Having a map makes for a better journey, especially if you try out a few detours.
Recommendation Corner
Dune

I recently caught the new movie on HBO Max, and might even venture into the theater to watch it on the big screen.  I enjoyed it a great deal.  The more I thought about it, the more I liked it, which is my favorite outcome of any media I consume.  The effects, the cinematography, direction, writing, and acting are all top notch.  It is a bit dense, so it’s not for everyone.  I will also say that it is truly odd to see Jason Momoa without a beard.  I finally pulled out the book and am working my way through the it as well.  The movie is pretty faithful to the book, but I think the dialogue in the movie is a bit better.  Sacrilege!  Give it a watch if you are wanting something that’s a little bit House of Cards and a little bit Fellowship of the Ring.

Recursion by Blake Crouch

This novel is trippy in the best way.  It starts with a cop investigating a suicide of someone who was suffering from false memories from a life she did not live.  She is not the only one.  There are many others suffering from the same false memory syndrome.  Imagine the end of Back to the Future, but instead of everyone being fine with the new timeline, everyone also remembers how things were in the original timeline as well as the new timeline.  Things spiral out of control from there.  Both audio book readers, Jon Lindstrom and Abby Craden, do a great job of handling the duties between the two main characters.  Good stuff.
Check Out the Players of the Game Series on Kindle and Paperback
That’s all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim

Click here to view the original format.

ViRauni cannot touch you with her skin. Her sword is another matter.

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ViRauni is a major character in the Players of the Game series. She has been featured before on a bonus content book cover. She is a former queen who fell into a dark place. Her past choices haunt her. She is constantly reminded of them with the cursed armor that she wears, and the cursed sword she wields. The magic affliction renders her skin unable to touch anything living, passing through it like a phantom. Corsis took much from her. She strives to take it all back.