Slowly, the world turns, leading to more troubles and more triumphs. You may have read about the troubles in the last post: a double-hit of injury and unemployment. But pain doesn’t last forever, and, in my case, unemployment doesn’t either.
I lucked out in more than one respect — I managed to make it to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco, and networked my butt off. Not every meeting bore fruit, but one did — I met Y-Lan Boureau, the founder of a startup called ThrivePal. She was looking for nerdy writers, and I happened to be one. As of April 12th, I have some contract work with ThrivePal, so you may consider me gainfully employed as a writer once more.
That’s probably the biggest news, but as far as You the Gentle Reader are concerned, it may not make a vast, visible difference just yet. I can’t talk about the project, probably for a long time. So let me distract you with something that might entertain… a lovely bit of cover art!
Remember this one?
I still don’t know where the pink hair came from.
Like with Keen Edge of Valor, a character from one of my stories made the cover of the brand-spanking-new installment in the Libri Valoris (Books of Valor) series. Keen Edge up there has the Lady of the Lake on the left with King Arthur’s spear (the Rhongomyniad), as detailed in “The Torturer of Camelot.” Well, now we’ve got a new heroic trio, and I’m not talking about that movie with Michelle Yeoh. I’m talking about…
Warning: Contains an unsafe level of redheads.
All the Details, a.k.a. A Brief Commercial
Paladins of Valor is the fifth and last anthology in the Libri Valoris series, and it’s coming out April 19th, 2024. As I write this, it’s still in pre-orders, but by next week’s FantaSciCon, it’ll be available to all.
For Paladins, I wrote a story called “High Water Mark” in which a paladin, her apprentice, and a formerly enslaved camp follower serve the Union Army at the Battle of Gettysburg. The paladin, Seraphine, is pictured on the left with her armor and a Sharps rifle. (Yes, I know plate mail doesn’t stop Civil War-era rifle rounds. I took that into account in the story.) The apprentice, Miri, and her new friend, Jessie, are just as important, but you’ll have to read the piece to see how it all shakes out.
There’s 14 stories of paladins in the anthology, some of whom you may know from already-existing worlds printed by Chris Kennedy Publishing. The guy in the middle of the cover is Gavin, the bearer of Nuada’s Silver Hand in a story of the Milesian Accords universe by Jon R. Osborne. (The dog’s name is Zeus.) The legionnaire on the right is (I think) from the Roman-esque Chronicles of Hanuvar universe by Howard Andrew Jones, and he’s Killian Pullio Vicentius. I’m not 100% sure, because there’s also an appearance in the anthology from the legendary spear-wielding centurion Longinus. But that story takes place a long time after the Roman era, so either it’s not him or the artist just put him in armor because of the Rule of Cool.
What Other Books You Got?
If anthologies aren’t your speed, I don’t have any other new writing coming out, but I have been reading and reviewing books on the regular. A website called Shepherd.com asks authors for their three favorite reads of the last year so they can build a library of short and sweet reviews. Their landing page lists the most popular. They hit me up and I sent in my faves. It sort of defeats the point for me to repost them here, so here’s the link to my three — one traditionally published, two indie.
And What of That Fancy New Novel?
The short version: I’ve been focusing on getting a job and researching games at night. I’ve been almost completely stalled on Civil Blood’s sequel. Over the last two months, I’d guess I got about 5,000 words added. Not zero… but not good. Hopefully my life will get a little less complicated and I can make some real progress.
Hi, how have you been? Things were going pretty great for me two months ago, right? Oops, here comes the karma train, and it does not appear to be slowing down.
To start with, at the end of January I suffered what you might call a “sports injury.” I was stretching, because one of my goals was to regain a little of the flexibility I had when I was younger. One of the stretches was a front split. The stretch lets me do higher front kicks, and I like to be able to get my foot up to head height. I can’t really do “the splits” in the way people think of them — I can feel the limits of my hip sockets far before I get there, but I can usually get a nice hamstring stretch out of trying.
Usually.
This time, instead of doing the safe thing and kneeling on the rear knee while stretching the front leg forward, I tried to just slide into the split. I was in socks on carpet. But my rear leg twisted and somewhere between half or all of my weight was on it. And I dislocated my kneecap.
It popped back into place immediately, but the damage was done. I had excruciating pain and a leg that could bear no weight. I have a few canes in the house but no crutches, and canes were simply not good enough. My wife drove me to the ER. At about two in the morning, we got home with a leg immobilizer, crutches (which make all the mobility difference in the world) a bottle of 600-mg prescription ibuprofen, and some hydrocodone. For those who only know brand names, that’s tabs of Advil and Vicodin. I slept in my clothes (because taking off clothes was actively painful), and got up for work the next day with a story to tell.
Then, like dang near every other company in the games industry this year, Airship Syndicate decided it was time to do some layoffs.
To be clear, I don’t begrudge them the decisions they had to make. The upper management were pretty transparent about the source of the decision and cut their own pay in solidarity. They didn’t want to lose anyone.
It came as an unpleasant surprise, because I had been deliberately busting my butt for the previous month to hit deadlines. One of the things I’d learned in other jobs is that while management likes to say layoffs are not performance-related, when they make the decision of who the company can afford to lose, a proper manager will look at some kind of semi-objective metric. Who’s got a high-paying salary that will save us a good chunk of change? Who’s got bad performance reviews? Who’s got measurable accomplishments as represented by tasks checked off in the task tracking software?
I don’t know the decision process used at Airship. I do know that this time around I have no basis to wonder “was I not enough?” I was writing a lot of content, and my team and manager were pleased with my work. And because I’ve gone through this before, I’d been knocking out a lot of tasks and checking them off. But as several thousand highly experienced people in the game industry can tell you, sometimes it’s not just about being a valuable employee. Sometimes all you can do is say goodbye, update your resume, and start the application dance once more.
Out on the Streets, Into the Orthopedist’s
Of course, the main thing that occupied my mind was my new handicap. I’ve never broken a bone before, or anything on the scale of a dislocation. A visit to the orthopedist led to X-rays and a leg brace, which I actually managed to sleep in for a week or two. Then came an MRI, which revealed that I managed to bruise the end of my femur and break off a small amount of cartilage. I may need surgery to remove it, depending on how it heals. Apparently it feels like having a stone in your shoe, except it’s in your fricking knee.
Then there was physiotherapy. Two crutches gave way to one crutch, and then, as long as I don’t go super far, no crutches. Slowly my need for the leg brace has lessened, from sleeping in it to limping in it to going a whole day without it so long as I’m super careful. Vicodin was necessary for the first night or two, but after that, Advil was the way to go, sometimes for the pain but more often to try to reduce the swelling.
Next up came the applications. While waiting for any replies, I sat in bed, paid bills, prepped my taxes, and refreshed my memory on a bunch of relevant video games.
Lest you think that sounds like paradise, I’d like to introduce you to my wife. Jenny is working a full-time job, and now she had to feed me and strap me into the leg brace, while also picking up the slack of dishes, driving, cleaning the kitchen, trash, hauling laundry, and other things I was no longer capable of handling. We also had two blackouts (thanks, Pacific Gas and Electric!) and some strep throat going around the family. So while I got better, everybody else got measurably worse, and only a jerk would think that’s a good deal.
So Did Ya Write?
Well, I was laid up in bed with nothing to do but heal, so yes, a little.
Back in late January, I spotted a themed anthology and rewrote a short story to specifically target it, which took up all my personal writing time for a few weeks. My writers’ group queued the story up for review in four weeks, which was going to be when the submission window closed. I always want feedback before firing off a story, so I used the group’s rule of “if you review the most stories in a week, you can get your own bumped to the front of the line.” In other words, I burned my eyes and typing fingers out trying to write extensive, helpful critiques.
It worked, though — I got feedback in one week instead of four, and the story was submitted with time to spare. Whether or not it’ll be accepted is not up to me. It was bit of a sunk cost — I’d already spent time and effort on the rewrite by the time I busted my knee, and wanted to see it through. Future personal writing is a lot more dicey.
So, What Now?
So now I sweat in physiotherapy and make myself into the best potential employee I can be.
There’s a Sun Tzu quotation that goes “If you know everything about yourself, you will win 50 percent of the time. If you know everything about your opponent, you will win 50 percent of the time. If you know everything about yourself and your opponent, you will win 100 percent of the time.” I try to take this attitude into job interviews, but there are so many “opponents” who are potential employers that it becomes hard to predict where I might be the perfect fit.
When I think about returning to Civil Blood’s sequel, I think first of all the AAA-caliber games I missed out on playing because I had to master Wayfinder, and the mobile games I focused on for years before that, because I was working in the mobile space. That made sense for me at the time, but the next job I apply to might be for a mobile game, or it might not.
Worse, it’s a different landscape for hiring now — to get re-employed, I’m competing with hundreds of writers and narrative designers, many of whom have similar experience. So, I need every edge I can get, and game literacy is a big part of that.
So, I’m going to focus on games for all my available time for at least a week or two. After that, we shall see. Spending an hour or two per night on a personal project may feel like a waste, or after a long day of twitchy reflexes, it may be a much-needed mental release.
According to the Internet, Confucious was the one who said “the hunter who chases two rabbits catches neither,” and man, does that explain what happened to my blog this year. It’s been months since I updated it, because I was busy chasing three other rabbits: posting my progress on Twitter, Facebook, and now Bluesky.
The good news is that my updates are largely positive. It was a good second half of the year for me, and there’s progress on a number of writing-related fronts, so let’s focus on those.
First, There’s The Singing and the Deep-Fried Jello
Airship Syndicate, whom I work for, officially ended my contract this summer with an offer to be brought in-house. I took it, of course, and in September, we opened our game, Wayfinder, to early access players. While the other writers worked on the main story quest, I took point on the holiday event and as of December 15th, the event is on!
The downloadable patch is called Eventide, after the winter solstice holiday in Evenor. There’s new seasonal quest content, seasonal loot, seasonal bosses, pets, a snow-covered version of the Highlands and Skylight with lights all over it, craptons of citizen dialogue talking about the season, and some singing carolers. (Yes, I wrote the songs.) Lastly, there’s the goblin tradition of the Plunderfool, a world event where one unlucky goblin is given the most valuable gifts by the whole tribe, a chest to hold them in wrapped in colorful lights…
…and a running start.
Anyone who lures him out and catches the Plunderfool can beat the jingle bells out of him to get him to drop presents. Of course, he takes the traditional goblin painkillers and steroids, so he’s a tough nut, and it’s expected that you bring a few friends to help with the process. Whether or not he survives this mangling is not the point of the holiday, but it’s considered good luck if he lives. After all, next year you never know who the Plunderfool might be.
The Eventide event is live now, and is planned to end January 12th, 2024.
This little twerp doesn’t hold still for screenshots.
Second, There’s Been Vampires on the Campaign Trail
At my last update, I was 38,000 words into Civil Blood’s sequel. I am happy to report that I was able to focus pretty well over National Novel Writing Month, and though progress has been slow, I am now up to about 75,000 words. That’s nowhere near the end: Civil Blood was 129,000, and I’m shooting for approximately the same size. But progress is progress.
Incidentally, during the holiday season, I’m making Civil Blood on Kindles on sale until December 25th. 99 cents for a 400-page book on Kindle ain’t a bad bargain, so if you’ve ever wondered if I’m any good at this novel writing business, this is the time to stock up for less than your average parking meter fee.
And Third Come the Paladins
I revisited the FantaSci writing contest this year, the contest I won back in 2022 with “The Torturer of Camelot” in Keen Edge of Valor. Like that year, this year the top four short fiction entries will be published in their new themed anthology, Paladins of Valor in 2024. If past is prologue, there will be around 15 stories in the anthology, all about paladins in various forms, oaths, and eras.
My short story was one of the four selected. Though I don’t think I can say much about it, it’s called “High Water Mark,” and if you’re a student of history, you might be able to put together where and when it’s set. I did a fair bit of research for it, which always gets me psyched. It’s great to have more fiction coming out, and I’m really curious to see the other stories that got chosen. Heck, I want to see the ones that didn’t make the cut, too, because the editor, Rob, says the talent this year was on full display!
Catch Me On Bluesky!
I’m trying to make the transition off Twitter, so now I’ve got a presence on Bluesky. In case you’re on there too, I’m now @theotherhepler.bsky.social.
And that’s all he wrote!
The darkest, most metal of the Eventide carols, coming up!
It’s been another long dearth of posts, but I assure you, it’s for a good reason. When we last left our intrepid writer, he was modifying Civil Blood‘s sequel to match up with real-world molecular biology. What’s been going on since then?
Writing. Lots of it. By day, I’m working away on Wayfinder for Airship Syndicate. I recently graduated from contract writer to full-time senior writer, and the game is closing in on its Early Access date. Therefore, for the first time in a few years, you might be able to play a game and see my dialogue and text, out in the wild.
By evening, I’m writing the second installment of the Skia Project, the technical name for the world of Civil Blood. I’m not a fast writer, but I’ve gotten up to about 38,000 words, with a target goal of 100,000 to 130,000. That’s about the same size as Civil Blood, which clocked in around 129,000 and fit into just under 400 pages. Naturally, just because I reach the end of the novel doesn’t mean I click on Amazon’s buttons and hit “upload” right away. I put Civil Blood through about ten drafts before I felt it had the punch it needed: pacing, stakes, beautiful turns of phrase. The sequel might not take quite as many drafts, but I don’t want to skimp on quality. The “too long, didn’t read” here is that I’m making good progress, and I’m committed to it.
But oh, are there other projects percolating in my brain. I’ve had not one, but two dreams — literal dreams — about Shadowrun projects that made me wake up and say, “Huh. Could I write that?” It turns out independent authors have been invited to contribute to the game’s universe with a profit-sharing deal, and the temptation is strong. I will probably focus on my own universe for the foreseeable future… but never say never.
And then there’s my daily shot glass of nostalgia. This year has hit me hard with good memories of tabletop roleplaying games. Let me break down just how much TTRPGs have meant to me this year:
1) I play an MMO in which I run into TTRPG gamers all the time. On the Everlasting server in City of Heroes: Homecoming I met up with the players who play Vampire: The Masquerade and Legend of the Five Rings characters. This got me telling stories of the best V:TM tabletop campaign I was ever in, and I thought, “You know, that’d make for an okay series of blog posts, both to amuse the players and help Storytellers with some basic principles.” So I’m posting that ASAP.
2) The Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves movie came out, and it was everything I wanted the 2000s D&D movie to be. I wish it had been more profitable, but I’ll take what I can get.
3) I ended up following some topics on Quora, Reddit and Twitter, and the trifecta means I end up reading conversations about the TTRPG scene, which I haven’t been in for a long time. Doesn’t matter that most of the talk is about D&D and not my preferred games, I still grok the language, and have nothing against the big dog.
4) My son is getting to be an age where his friends are starting to play. We had a boffer-stick LARP birthday party for him, and it was highly successful — no crying, no excluded kids, the teams were even, a generally great experience. Our family tried Werewolf: The Apocalypse during the pandemic quarantine as a way to pass the time without interacting with other kids, but that’s a distant memory now. He’s going to try D&D later this summer.
5) Some of the Bioware fans have found me on Twitter and they ping me with Codex questions and the like, so I’m not escaping that world any time soon, either.
6) Wayfinder is a fantasy RPG that reminds me of some of the high school AD&D games I used to play in. One of the main writers is Keith Baker of Eberron fame, so fantasy RPGs are in the DNA of everything we do.
So, with all that said, I’m going to walk down memory lane with the Shot Glass of Nostalgia page. Because while I have new stories to tell, there is value in the old ones. And to all those who have never heard them… perhaps they will smile as well.
We will start with a vampire buffalo. Or, at least, a would-be vampire buffalo, and why my wife was Prince of a city and never got deposed.
It’s time for a sequel update! While many, many things have been coming at me (COVID, house problems, new car!), I have indeed been making time for Civil Blood‘s sequel. Of course, I’ve also been de-stressing with my favorite game, City of Heroes. But in a strange coincidence, both converged, in an unexpected and delightful way.
A little background: one of my characters is Amir al-Madani, also known as the Milk Sheik. He made an appearance in Unidentified Funny Objects 8 (shameless plug!), but before that he was just a character I fooled around with on the live servers. In his biography window, I mention that he’s a microbiologist from the United Arab Emirates, who got his regenerative powers through radiation and can heal any injury as long as he gets to drink milk, sort of like Popeye and his spinach but less macho.
One night I was hanging out before a raid, and a player called “Pulsar Kitty” pinged me and essentially said, “Hey, I read your bio. Are you a molecular biologist in real life?”
I replied “No, I just write a lot and have some friends who are doctors,” and so forth. But what she said next surprised me: “Drat. I’m actually a microbiologist, and I work on viruses all the time, and I was hoping to find someone to talk to.”
“Oh.” I said, my interest piqued. It was time to converse with the catgirl! “Well, I wrote a novel involving a vampire virus, and I’m always willing to blab about it.” I figured since she was playing a superhero MMORPG she’d be cool with fantasy and science fiction.
It turned out, not only had she read about vampire viruses, she’d read a Shadowrun novel featuring HMHVV, the Human-Metahuman Vampiric Virus, which of course I knew about because of my time writing Shadowrun. (Long story there.) So we even had a common point of reference. I e-mailed her a copy of Civil Blood, and we got started discussing the sequel. Particularly the worldbuilding surrounding qi-positive European Bat Lyssavirus-4, the cause of Virally Induced Hematophagic Predation Syndrome. Because it’s similar to, but emphatically not HMHVV.
Some writers would just say “it’s magic, it works how I want it to.” That’s their prerogative. But it’s not how I like to do things. So I started kicking the tires on my world and asking the questions I needed to ask. Questions like:
How long would it be before a vampire who had to feed once every 10-14 days or so and had a practically guaranteed infection each time managed to contaminate a serious chunk of the population?
Can a virus provide amazing benefits like super strength and healing to the human body without being tailored to do so? If so, how could it naturally occur?
How could a virus this infective not shape human history in an obvious way, if it existed before qi (magic) was proven to exist?
Is it possible for an accident to release this virus on the world, or does it need some kind of retconned conspiracy and nefarious motives just to be plausible?
Well, Dr. Kitty went to town on the manuscript. And I was pleased to find out that my story held up okay. I thought I’d share some of the answers here, because, well, they’re neat.
Question 1: How Fast is the Vampocalypse?
As some of my beta readers pointed out, in a straight-up 100% rate of infection every 10 days, the numbers create a lot of doubling. First one vampire bites another, then two have to feed in the next 10 days, then four, then eight. You end up in the billions after about 32 weeks. It’s even worse if there are some vipes addicted to blood who become superspreaders.
Nope. Not doing this. For lots of reasons.
Fortunately, the situation in Civil Blood allows for a slower pandemic. There are several factors at play.
Imprecise Numbers: Infinity got about eleven days off of one notable bite in Civil Blood, and she might have lasted two full weeks if she pushed it. There’s also a line in the chapter where she reads BRHI’s experimental notes that say “subject went torpid after thirty-two days without blood” indicating that a vipe could survive more than twice as long in extremes, though they would probably be miserable doing so. While that would not be the norm, every day counts in a massive population boom like this.
Bullets: After a month or so (only 4-8 infections) , someone at the Benjamin Rush Health Initiative did the math and started putting together the Forced Protection team to stop the spread. Somewhere around 16-32 vipes, they started nipping them in the bud, first with capture and restraints, then with targeted killings. Though this started in the D.C. area, it expanded eventually to other cities. BRHI has made a lot of bodies by the end of the first novel. Ranath is said to have “dropped the hammer more times than John Henry.”
When the media break the story four years after Patient Zero, police start being able to recognize vipes for what they are and imprison or kill them. Citizens form vigilante gangs for self-protection, which may cut down on feeding or lower the vipes’ numbers through straight-up murder. A very small percentage of vipes might be lost to cases of individual victims defending themselves. An equally small number might be lost to attrition if they take their cues from popular culture, think they’re immortal, and try to survive a jump off a bridge or some similarly stupid stunt. Again, every vipe taken off the board counts.
Psychology: Many vipes feed first on those closest to them when they lose control, and this can be incredibly traumatizing if the victim is a family member or friend. Some vipes will refuse to drink blood again, instinct be damned. This means they might go comatose and starve to death, or commit suicide. I don’t know exact numbers, but the number of people who’d take themselves out would be much higher than the general population, more on par with active shooters or incarcerated felons.
Jessica’sOld Multi-Bite Trick: Jessica introduces Infinity and Morgan to a technique for vipes feeding off of one another. Sure, it has diminishing returns, but it helps greatly. When Infinity came home after feeding, she could lose blood enough to feed about six other vipes without permanent damage. Since they drank from her wound and not a fresh victim, this slows the number of new infections. Morgan and Jessica, who maintained contact with networks of vipes, no doubt publicized this method in the hopes of minimizing harm.
Question 2: Viruses With Benefits
So, can a virus, with a little magical boost, naturally cause bone ossification and muscle growth so a vipe is strong like a human-sized chimpanzee? “Well, heck,” says Dr. Kitty, “Why don’t we take a look at HERV-K?”
Fun fact: there are viruses in your DNA. Yes, yours. Right now. At various points in human evolution, viruses infected us and used something called reverse transcriptase to insert their RNA into the DNA of our genome. But if they don’t kill the host, and they don’t impair them enough to prevent reproduction, and also if the body can’t stop the infection, sometimes the virus gets integrated into us, like a rude guest who gets adopted. This has happened so often throughout human history that about 8% of our genome is virus code. Like HERV-K.
HERV stands for Human Endogenous Retrovirus — the “K” is a label for which one, since there are a lot of them. “Endogenous” means it’s a part of us now. It entered our genome when we were primates about 30 million years ago, before we were even Homo sapiens. In some cells, if HERV-K turns active, it’s very dangerous and can cause problems like testicular cancer. But during reproduction, if it’s working right, it allows a woman to safely grow a placenta. This is naturally occurring… well, natural as of 30 million years ago. It was selected for. No nefarious genius with a laboratory needed.
So… do you think viruses can have complex benefits? Because one made you possible.
Question 3: How Come We Haven’t Seen EBL-4/VIHPS Before?
This was a thorny one, because the world of Civil Blood is not like the tabletop RPG Shadowrun. There is no great cycle of magic that infuses the world, disappears, and comes back. Qi, in Civil Blood, is a supernatural science that had a breakthrough and though it has always been there, humans can now measure it and manipulate it clearly. But… there’s a way for the virus to be old and yet new at the same time.
In prehistory, EBL developed a super-infective strain. But just because something is super-infective doesn’t mean it’s going to spread all around the world. It could have appeared in isolated communities, or spread like wildfire and then burned out, because it comes with a limitation — a vipe needs to drink blood fresh from the wound of another living, squirming human. If they don’t, they get aggressive after a couple of weeks and then their body starts to suffer. By 14 to 32 days, they start getting lethargic and comatose. (Ask me about unstable antitoxins and stable toxins in selfish genetic sequences. G’wan, I dare you.)
So if they don’t have a food supply, the epidemic is going to fizzle out. And in a time period before cities, highways, and even the domestication of horses, a lot of vipes are going to keel over before they find enough prey to keep the cycle going. It’s much more of a supercharged pandemic in the modern day. In prehistory? It might not even show up in the fossil record.
Question 4: So How Did Ulan Release the Plague?
Horseshoe bat (Credit: Marie Jullion)
So it’s possible the progenitor to EBL got into humans, and over time, adapted to them. One strain could have mutated into a less infective version but stayed in the human germline, giving resistance to the nastier version until the vipes all died out. With no selective pressure to change, the virus would stay in humans until some could have transferred over to European bats, some of whom could eat trash covered in human saliva. The bats are where Dr. Ulan found European Bat Lyssavirus-4, and she could have, in the process of collecting data on the virus and taking out portions with targeted bombardments of yin qi, recreated the original sequence.
Recreating the original sequence is bad.
Bang. Super-infective qi-positive EBL-4 is back, and the clock starts with her as Patient Zero.
So When’s the Novel Coming Out?
That’s a question I don’t think I’ll answer. There’s going to be a lot more to the sequel than this, but it’s been a long time since I gave a substantive Civil Blood update. Here’s hoping I whetted your appetites.
I once flipped through a dictionary (Merriam-Webster Collegiate, I think) and found that in the back, they had a super-cool list of foreign words and phrases that are or were popular. You know, like the Latin “finis coronat opus,” which translates to “the end crowns the work.” If you ever want to whip out the snotty literary criticism, throw that baby in and sound like a scholar, when all you’re really saying is “a story needs to stick the landing, or it doesn’t add up to much.”
I think my favorite, though, is “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus,” which is “Mountains will go into labor, and a silly little mouse will be born.” That one’s about overpromising and underdelivering. You know, like the game that’s been delayed ten years that better be the Second Coming of Almighty Zeus when it comes out, or else all that expense and hard work will be met with a resounding “meh.” (It’s kind of telling that there’s a few games out there this could apply to.)
Me, I try not to overpromise. But it has been a long time since I posted, so I hope you weren’t betting on me giving birth to a mountain. There’s been good news and bad news in my life, my career, and my personal writing. So let’s take a tour.
I Got (More) Political This Year
As I posted in 2020’s “In Which I Give Worried Introverts Something to Do,” I decided to use a not-insignificant amount of my spare time to volunteer for a get-out-the-vote campaign. This year, I started earlier than I did in 2020 because historically Democrats don’t turn out in midterms, and if past was prologue, they were going to get pasted.
I wrote 20 letters a week to get voters to turn out in Texas, Georgia, Florida, Nevada and Pennsylvania. By the time of the big send-off in late October, I finished 580 letters, about 100 more than I managed in 2020 if you include the Georgia runoff. It would have been nice to do an even 600, but in that last week I was crunching at work and totally out of brain fuel. Then, the next week, when it became clear Georgia was going to another runoff for its Senate seat, I burned all my free time and got an additional 100 letters out.
I don’t regret the time spent — the Democrats snatched a stalemate from the jaws of defeat and broke a pattern 20+ years long of getting routed in midterm elections. However, I am quite happy campaign season is over for the moment. I have a little more time on the weekends, and the ability to find other topics to talk about on Twitter.
I Tried To Be an Involved Dad
Just a minor note here from a proud pops: I helped teach my daughter how to drive and I wrangled my son through a frustrating season of soccer. Both kids’ grades are pretty great, and they seem to be thriving. Couldn’t be happier with them.
Some other obstacles came our way: my daughter got COVID for about 10 days. She was vaxxed and wasn’t in much danger, but it hit her like a truck. The rest of the family masked up and sanitized religiously and all somehow avoided it, even including a 3-hour car trip (shout-out to my wife for doing the driving, windows down the whole way).
I Kept Submitting Stories
I wrote and rewrote a few more short stories, but they have yet to find a home anywhere. As with martial arts, where you are only as good as your next move, a writer can have great experience and skill and still, the story may not resonate with whoever’s at the editing desk. So that was disappointing and consumed a bit of time.
Then There’s Civil Blood‘s Sequel
When I last posted about the sequel, I was reviewing its outline, trying to turn it into the book I really wanted to read. Rather than write by the seat of my pants, I spent a month or so planning it out and adding notes for a direction in which to take a third book. This all took time, but I’ve managed to get started on the manuscript itself. As of this writing, I have one chapter down and a pretty good grip on the second, so I really want to make this happen sooner rather than later. It’s been “later” long enough.
I Crunched Like the Captain
This one is kind of bittersweet. After months of work that sucked up weekends and evenings, my job with Mattel163 came to a close. The project is in soft launch now (it’s not in the US or China yet) and the prognosis is good for it being able to ship. I’ll tell you all about it when it goes wide, but right now I need to set my sights elsewhere.
…and We Lost Some Good Ones
Lastly, some things happened on a vastly more serious note. Some of my life had to be put on hold to grieve.
Since I last posted, three people I knew died. The first, Jerome Joaquin Mabrey, was a gamer I met at San Diego Comic Con in 2012. He was on the first team to beat the Mass Effect multiplayer’s fancy new Platinum difficulty, he ran a great Facebook group called Nerd Alert, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of space opera. The second was Kevin Barrett, who was director of design at BioWare and was responsible for giving myself and my wife our most significant video game industry job. We used to love arguing with him in a BioWare dev book club. We disagreed all the freaking time, but we never had a negative experience with him. The third was Ferret Baudoin, who worked with my wife on Dragon Age, ran a killer Roman-themed D&D campaign for us, and after the BioWare diaspora, wound up at Bethesda. I had mad respect for all three of these men, and the world is smaller for not having them in it.
…and that’s all, he wrote.
So, all told, this summer and fall were pretty busy. I don’t have a lot to show you just yet, but I hope you’ll understand that sometimes, life isn’t a performance, or all about your next gig. Quite often, it’s day-to-day progress, or even just holding the line when that progress tries to disappear.
Festina lente. (In English idiom, “More haste, less speed.”)
Longtime readers may remember my novel Civil Blood, and particularly attentive readers may remember the reasons I hadn’t started working on a sequel yet. Long story short, I promised my family I’d only begin work once I had accumulated a nest egg big enough to pay for a cover and editor(s), assuming costs in the same neighborhood as my previous self-publishing venture. The catch was, this nest egg would solely be financed by my other personal writing, and my path to that was A) novel sales, and B) short story sales. Since I have little in the way of advertising budget and thus a very meagre novel-based income, I ended up relying on “B.”
Well… with a final anthology sale coming out in 2022, approach “B” has finally put the numbers over the top. So now I have a little news: I’m finally working on a sequel to Civil Blood. Here’s what I can say:
I am currently in the outlining stage. It will take me a few months before I start the rough draft. I should warn the reader that it takes me years to write a novel.
I have tentatively titled it with another blood-related Shakespearian phrase (again, with echoes of the play, but the specific title may give away some of the parallelism in the plot, so I’ll be mum on that for now).
The story will deal with an American presidential election in the time of VIHPS. Though I hesitate to use the word “pandemic,” the vampire virus is the top issue on the minds of the electorate. It is not, however, the only issue, and part of the political dealings is that Infinity and Ranath will have to choose whom to support despite the candidates not matching up with their every ideal.
The main characters of Civil Blood will be the main characters in this story as well. There will be many familiar faces, and a few names only hinted at in Civil Blood will have some stage time in this one.
I might be able to make this story comprehensible if you haven’t read Civil Blood, but I’m not betting on it. As I work on the outline, I realize that trying to sum up why a character is not only a doctor but also a hitman and also has his hands on potentially world-changing research that he didn’t actually do just stretches credulity. I may have to highlight that it’s “The Skia Project, Book 2” and just roll with that.
Ideally it will not have a cliffhanger ending, because at this moment I don’t know the chances of making a third installment. Also, I like books to have enough of a satisfying thematic resolution that they can stand on their own. So, less The Empire Strikes Back and more Terminator 2.
To all the fans of CB that have stuck with me this far… thank you. I hope to make you happy once more.
One of the “problems” with my writing career trajectory is that I’m not a specialist. If you really want to be a household name as a writer, you create a series and you get fans devoted to it. There are a lot of examples I could pick from, but let’s go with Agatha Christie.
“Why?” you ask? Because according to the Guinness Book of World Records, Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time. She’s sold more than two billion (with a “b”) books. Her name is synonymous with detective mysteries, having written 66 of the things. She wrote a few plays, some of them record-breakingly popular in their own right — they were mysteries, too. And her branding was helped by the fact that when she wrote a handful of non-detective novels, she did so under a pen name. She specialized, and it paid off.
Me? I’m the opposite. You never know what the hell I’m writing next, and sometimes neither do I. Since my last blog post about My Loft, I’ve been working on:
1) A visual novel (romance genre). It is now complete but not public yet. 2) Lore for a fantasy RPG video game. It’s in pre-production, totally not public. 3) A metric ton of writing tests for various companies. 4) Submitting short stories to various online magazines, some in the Civil Blood universe, some humorous superhero stories, and one cli-fi piece.
The first two are both gigs that ended recently, which meant I had to throw myself into #3 with a vengeance. #3 and #4 were the most discouraging, as my hit-to-miss ratio is typical of freelance writers — in other words, there were a lot of rejections. But, as of today, things are looking up.
I have been so fortunate as to accept a position with Mattel163, a mobile game developer and subsidiary of the famous toy company. I am working on an unannounced project as a full-time employee, and I want to make it sing.
What does that mean for you, the audience? I don’t know yet. All indications are that I will be up late at night on this job, since many of my co-workers are in Shanghai, 15 time zones away from me. On the other hand, a lot of my mental energy was taxed during my job hunt, so I may end up feeling happier and healthier, with a little security in my life once more.
That means I could end up able to do more personal writing, and submit more stories to more outlets.
One question that has come up regards Amazon’s Kindle Vella. In case you haven’t heard, Kindle Vella is essentially a platform for monetizing short stories and serial works on a Kindle, which naturally made my ears perk up. As always, a little more personal writing income means I can afford a second indie-publishing venture — a full-fledged sequel to Civil Blood. There’s two drawbacks to Kindle Vella: the first is that it’s got a limit of 6,000 words per installment, which is a little short for my taste. The more difficult hurdle for me to get over is that you have to build your brand — it takes a lot of 99-cent stories to add up to a single traditionally-published short story in a magazine, which could net $500 or so. That’s the reality. I’m working on building an e-mail list, an important step in the whole author ecosystem, but I don’t have any illusions about indie-pub sales.
So, will I die before my dream goal is achieved and leave you all in the lurch? Well, I’m happy to say I’m fully vaccinated as of today. It’s not proof against being hit by a bus, but as Bill Murray said, “I got that going for me, which is nice.”
“Behind the judge’s bench stands an American flag, a Virginian flag and, on the wall, the state seal. A woman with a spear, a helmet, and an unbound breast is trampling a man beneath her, with Latin words meaning ‘thus ever to tyrants.’ John Wilkes Booth said that phrase when he pulled the trigger. Aidan Lawrence echoed those words when he detonated a vest filled with fishing weights and Semtex in the Supreme Court. And yet here the words stay, suggesting bloodshed is not only part of legal proceedings but somehow can give them a blessing.”
—Civil Blood: The Vampire Rights Case That Changed a Nation
Note: This post contains spoilers for Civil Blood‘s ending.
When you have a novel with only a handful of reviews, you have the luxury of reading and thinking about each one. Civil Blood is still in that magical period where nobody who really hates it has given it a review on Amazon, so the people who really love it give it five stars and the people who have reservations go for four stars. Naturally, I’ve mulled over the points of the criticism, because I think it’s good and healthy for a book when its discussion goes beyond “I liked it” vs. “this is trash” and readers spend some time on the ideas presented in the story.
Recently, I read a review that didn’t care for the ending, which made the reader disturbed that all the good guys appear to be bad guys, and the bad guys appear to be good guys. So let’s talk about that!
Civil Blood has a lot of ideas in it, and hopefully they are comprehensible to an audience without me explicating the intention of the text. But since this website allows me to be as self-indulgent as humanly possible, and since no literary critics are beating down my door for an interview, I thought it might be interesting to the reader to illuminate the theme of the novel, which, really, is the road to political violence in the United States.
“Whoa,” you may be saying. “It’s just a novel about vampires.”
Yes, and no. It’s even a little farther afield than that. It’s a novel about a future America with magic and vampires in it. Whenever one creates a vision of the future, it tends to invite comparisons and analysis with the present. I gave it the nonspecific time period of “a generation from now” because I didn’t want the story to be obsolete too quickly. I did use a calendar for a specific date far in the future to get the days of the week straight, but that is not explicitly called out in the text. (First person to name the year gets a gold star.) The idea is, the future is slightly darker than it is now, but the U.S. is, as the back cover copy states, “still recognizable as our own.”
The political system has changed, to be sure. At some point in this future history, the Democratic and Republican parties imploded at the same time. At that point, the first-past-the-post system of counting electoral votes was chucked, allowing for more proportionate representation in Presidential elections. I think this is the only way you’d get new, viable parties, because currently the hyper-partisanship means if either party has a substantial defection to a third party, the opposing party gets rewarded with electoral victory. And the reason they both imploded is because they started using violence to get what they want. In my imaginary world, this was a bridge too far, and both the red and blue parties paid at the ballot box, spawning the Solar Citizens party (liberals with an emphasis on environmentalism) and the Great Nation party (conservatives who embraced big government).
But the world-building bits aren’t quite as important as the theme expressed through the characters, that “civil blood makes civil hands unclean.” Violence, or the threat of violence, underpins our system of laws. If you violate the law, you have reason to fear that the state will punish you. If you resist sufficiently, the state will use violence to ensure the punishment is enacted. We’re supposed to elect our politicians with the consent of the governed, but unsurprisingly, we don’t trust them much any more. Conditioned by movies, games, and books as well as our preferred brand of political propaganda, we want a leader who is not just a civil servant, but a hero.
The book offers up many point-of-view characters who are the hero of their own story. But to others, they aren’t. And this is where the reviewer didn’t really like the way I executed the climax and resolution. Most of the characters are morally gray — there is, in fact, something to dislike in all of them. There’s plenty of bloody hands to go around.
Morgan expects the justice system to save him: it does not. It is flawed, and the vipes resort to criminal means in their attempt to rescue him. In the process, Infinity and the gang are, to varying degrees, willing to use violence. While the average reader may think Infinity is justified in striking back against a corrupt system, and is heroic for standing up to the forces that murder vipes, she is a protagonist, not a paragon. And I don’t mean this in a 2016-era “you shouldn’t punch Nazis or you’re as bad as them” way. Infinity’s tools include heist-like tricks to get her inside the BRHI facility, but they also include Cass, who covers the vipes by gunning down private security and committing suicide by cop.
“So,” one might ask… “are you portraying that as permissible, or not?” A lot of the language in the climax shows that Infinity is growing into her role as a hero. However, the picture is much more complex than “evil megacorporation = bad, heroes who break the law and shoot them = good.” I was not interested in making a vampiric superhero with an upstanding moral code, as there are plenty of those already available at the local bookstore or theater.
Infinity performs at least one heroic action. When she’s getting Morgan out of the facility and has a clear path to freedom, she chooses to run back into danger, armed only with a disguise, to save Ranath’s life. She sees this as necessary to redeem herself from her habit of running from trouble. Even so, she and her friends don’t succeed in their rescue mission the way they intend. Three out of five of the vipes pay the ultimate price, leaving Morgan and Ferrero grief-stricken. Infinity is numbed by the human cost as well, but her heroism has left her with a direct, tangible accomplishment: Ranath is present to console her, and he gives her a little hope. So despite her early protestations that she is not a hero, she has some reasons to call herself that at the end. Ranath would probably call her that too.
But one of the reasons I went with multiple first-person points of view is to show that when it comes to the events of the climax — the incarceration and murder of vipes and the bloody shootout that exposes it to the world — you can’t just look at just one character. Pretty much everyone tries to do what they perceive as right and it leads to an unholy mess.
Cass thinks that because he’s just shooting hardasses with guns, he’s more like a soldier and less like a maniac with a high-capacity magazine.
Jessica and Ferrero try to avoid violence personally, but they are in on the plan.
Kern thinks because he can “cure more diseases than penicillin” with VIHPS, incarcerating and murdering vipes is worth it in the final analysis.
Morgan abhors violence, but realizes he can’t escape without it and raises a hand in an attempt to save Jessica.
Deborah takes it one step further, using a pistol only in a gambit to become a martyr rather than face capture.
This last was important to me because it’s easy for an action writer to get caught up in the bloodshed and portray noncombatants as timid, or ineffective, or dependent upon the violent types to effect meaningful change for the people they care about. The most important blow against BRHI is Deborah’s, bringing out the truth and harming its public status as a savior. In this way, I wanted to return the reader’s perception of the future not as one that is unremittingly dark, but one that ranges back and forth with victories and losses as does our political system in the real world.
As for the idea that Kern is a hero because he wants to cure VIHPS and get stinking rich by alleviating untold suffering — no. Kern is directly responsible for the F-prot program, which is kidnapping, killing, and experimenting on vipes. He set up a system to glean as much biological data as he can out of the vipes because “they’re going to die anyway,” which is only true because he’s laid the groundwork to make it true.
Besides violating the Hippocratic Oath, Kern’s excuses were based on the justifications Nazi doctors used for their experiments in concentration camps — data that was then largely thrown out by the Americans because it was always done with a political agenda in mind, making for bad science. He’s literally got a plasma furnace to cremate rooms full of bodies en masse, echoing the extermination camps. Also, he ordered a hit on Ranath when he was afraid Ranath might talk to the law, so he’s not particularly loyal to his friends, either. He shows no mercy to anyone who is perceived to be an enemy, and the simple act of getting infected makes you an instant enemy. (This “othering” occurs in our political process, albeit more slowly, as we come to think of our political opponents as villains, a process that will lead to violence if left unchecked.)
So yes, he’s an antagonist with a compelling motivation and a set of ideals — but everybody has ideals. What he’s done, rather than what he’s said, sets him in the villain camp, despite all the good that a vaccine or modified VIHPS strain could do. Illustrating this, Ranath takes his work and literally gives it to someone else less compromised, the Centers for Disease Control.
I could probably go on about this theme for a long time — it’s something I intend to explore in future stories, and America’s relationship with violence can fill quite a few shelves. But I think for the moment, I will stop here. There’s only so much illumination you can give before the light starts to get annoying.
I’m happy to announce that my work with Seasun Comics has at last gone to press with Mythkillers, the urban fantasy comic I’ve been working on for the last year. Mythkillers is the story of a teenage demigoddess, her clay golem best friend, a snarky Zulu fairy and an immortal Greek warrior teaming up to stop a dark god from wrecking the afterlife in his bid for power.
We’ve had Mythkillers #1printed for a while, but now all six issues are up on Amazon Kindle. Here’s the link.
“But wait,” you may say, “What’s going on with your other projects?”
(Narrator: No one says that.)
The Civil Blood universe is still kicking, and I’m still revising “Infection in Everything,” a short story involving Infinity and her jiujutsu teacher. And I’m still submitting “Stopping the Bleeding” (a post-Civil Blood story about a new character) and the original humorous piece “The 10:40 Appointment at the NYC Department of Superhero Registration.” To make a long story short, there are a whole lot of short story markets out there and they’re all closed to submissions for the immediate future.
Okay, not all. But seriously, it’s a thing.
That’s the latest. I’ll post more when I know more.
