Category: Civil Blood

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In Which a Hepler Scores a Sweet Gig

Ashtaroth from Diablo IV holds flaming weapons.

If you check me out on social media, you may notice my Bluesky and Twitter aren’t particularly self-aggrandizing. When I found “chrishepler” taken on Twitter, I decided against calling myself “realchrishepler” and went entirely in the opposite direction. My wife, Jennifer Brandes Hepler, had recently gotten Internet famous for all the wrong reasons.

Some background, for those who don’t know the story:

Back in the day, Jennifer was a writer on Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2, and was active on the BioWare forums. This led to a notorious harassment campaign, basically a GamerGate kind of thing a few years before that movement ever happened.

Why? Well, she wrote a companion character for DA2 who was a) attracted to the player regardless of gender, b) made the first move in romances by hitting on the player, c) gave minor disapproval points if you turned him down, and d) was the best party healer. Some of these were decisions made in the writers’ room, some were systems and mechanics decisions that came together only in the final product. But the end result was, she got all the blame for writing The Gay Guy That the Game Forces You to Bang.

Jennifer got her own Reddit thread as “the cancer killing BioWare.” Doxing and death threats followed, along with a dissection of an old interview in which she said “you know, the part of the game industry I find hardest is putting enough time aside to play a lot of video games.” That, of course, became the evidence that she was Even Worse! Fake Geek Girl!

I think the one lighthearted moment in the whole mess was when an old acquaintance from our college science fiction club read the news. We’d grown apart from him, and neither of us were particularly friendly by the time we’d left Baltimore. But his reaction was “Fake geek? Jenny was writing Shadowrun LARPs with me when there were no Shadowrun LARPs. She founded JohnCon while these idiots were still in diapers. If she’s not a real geek, no one is.”

Anyway, to make a long story medium, the gaming press picked up on the harassment, and it made enough news that when she and I left BioWare, there were a few more articles written about her. And when I was picking out my social media handles, I knew that no one Googling “Hepler” was doing it to find me. So, I just called myself “theotherhepler.” Irony, yes — it’s my last name, she married into it. But she’s always been better at this writing thing than I have, and more famous for it.

Case in point:

A photo of Lilith from the Diablo franchise, with a caption reading "Welcome to Hell, Irvine," and Diablo IV's release date.
Kinda harsh on Irvine, don’t you think?

Jennifer Hepler is now Narrative Director on the Diablo Franchise

Fast forward to 2025, when the fine folks at Blizzard were looking for someone with lead-writer and writing-director chops. Jennifer’s been doing similar work at another company for a few years now, on an unannounced franchise with a similar vibe, so her work caught their attention. It also didn’t hurt that this year, a lot of Dragon Age fans were looking back and saying, “What made DA: Origins work so well?” Jennifer, who coined the phrase “dark heroic fantasy” that the Origins marketing team ran with, had answers prepared for questions like that.

I could go on all day about how competent my wife is. Since BioWare, she’s worked on Game of Thrones: Ascent (more darkness!), cranked out awesome choose-your-own-romances for the Choices visual novels, edited I don’t-know-how-many other writers, and spoken at GDC summits in which she broke down how she approaches the nuts and bolts of exposition. (She’s super analytical about story structure.) And yes, she’s great about researching the projects she’s on so she doesn’t screw up the essentials. If you’re going through Hell, she’s the writer you’d want plotting your way out.

And me?

I have some gigs, but they’re nowhere near as impressive as the news about Blizzard. I mean, Diablo IV alone was a megahit, to say nothing of Blizzard’s other massively successful online games. It’s one thing to know that intellectually and quite another to see a nine-foot Lilith statue on the company campus grounds.

Meanwhile, I’m working with an indie studio, Quintessence Games. As with the last two indie studios I helped out, our primary focus is to build what the industry calls a “vertical slice.” Basically, early in development you build a mini-level that showcases the kind of gameplay it will have, the kind of art style you want, and the general flow of how it’ll all come together. You then show that to higher-ups and investors, and if successful, you get your game off the ground.

I’ve got high hopes for our project. It is not, however, a good time to be in video games unless you’re sitting on a megahit. More of the companies that can afford writers have been laying off their staff, sometimes by the thousands, in an effort to goose their stock prices. Short-term gain is the only gain in town.

Indie companies have been scooping up some of these writers and focusing on creating games, but in 2024 there were literally thousands of indie games released onto Steam. It is impossible to play all the games released in one year, and difficult to even play a representative selection of a given game’s genre. Standing out from the crowd is a Herculean task, and so working for indies is best done part-time or while lining up future opportunities for employment potential when the contract is done. In other words, my job is work all day, search and plan all night, just in case.

As for spare time… sometimes I have been playing prominent video games that I should’ve played long ago.

A couple of times I took a moment to protest the current political climate (that’s a pile of posts on its own).

I caught up on Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which I’ve never read before.

And, because I’m considering expanding my day job options, I’ve tried a little training for extra skills such as working in the Unreal Editor and copywriting.

Some of these activities felt like a chore — others were comfort food in a world that is becoming defined by its complete lack of comfort.

That means Civil Blood‘s sequel, once again, has been delayed. I hit the milestone of 100,000 words, but the velocity has been at a snail’s pace and the plot is demanding many more scenes than the outline anticipated. Being a political novel about vampires, everything that happens on the news makes me reconsider how I want to explore the themes.

I don’t expect the rough draft to be finished by the end of the year, but I am hopeful. I’m going to do my best to avoid writing The Winds of Winter II: Lady Stoneheart’s Boogaloo — we shall see.

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing what Hell holds.

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In Which I Share Regrets and a Parable About Blessings

New Year’s is the time of the obligatory retrospectives, and I am not immune to the call of tradition. My writer friends are posting lists of the short stories they sold, or the final page of their manuscript’s rough draft, and other celebratory milestones. It makes me take stock and think about how much I’ve done… and also, how little.

Last year at this time, I was riding high with 75,000 words of my manuscript in the can, and a goal of 130,000 or so. But when 2024 ended, I counted it up and found I only reached the 93,000 mark. Honestly, as writers go, that’s not a lot of improvement. Sure, some of it required research, and it’d be hard to write a novel about a presidential campaign without seeing the new political landscape determined by November 5th’s election, but it made me ask, what happened? Was I just, as Brian Michael Bendis put it in Fortune and Glory, “the suckiest suck-ass in the history of sucking?”

On New Year’s Eve, I spent some time with the accomplished Whitney Beltran and a few other luminaries in the TTRPG space. Rather than just making up a sentence or two for resolutions, she had us fill out a party activity/personal growth booklet called YearCompass. It’s like 15 pages of conversational material about what you accomplished and what you didn’t, and it opened my eyes enough for an in-depth retrospective.

So Where DID the Time Go?

Part 1: Health

Well, I came closer to being the subject of a meme than I ever wanted, even before the term “brainrot” was a thing…

In January I had the double-header of dislocating my knee and getting laid off. My priorities had to be getting out of my leg brace so I could resume being able to drive, and then later, walk unassisted. Though I was able to get around without a crutch by the time of the Game Developer’s Convention in March, I still had an 11mm chunk of cartilage floating around in my knee. I got it removed via surgery June 5th or so. I lucked out and didn’t need donor cartilage. My surgery recovery was a lot shorter than expected, but still, the knee didn’t hold weight for a few weeks and it took a bit out of me. The rest of the family didn’t get off scot-free, either: besides having to help out with the things I couldn’t do, we also had a broken foot and some illnesses in the mix.

Part 2: Doing Those Adult Things

In case you haven’t been following the state of the video game industry right now, it’s at about a 20% unemployment rate. The Great Depression, at its height in 1933, was 24.9%, so while it’s not the literal worst it could be, it’s comparable. The least common positions to be hired? Game Designer and Narrative Writer. So believe me when I say when I got laid off from Airship, I didn’t know if I was going to get a gig in weeks, months or years.

Fortunately, I shmoozed to the best of my ability at GDC, and got a 13-week contract, writing for an adorable little New York startup called ThrivePal. I worked on a game that has yet to be announced… and then my contract was up. Back I went into the mix, and wound up at Eram Games, a Jordanian company working on another largely-unannounced project. As of now, my duty there is done and I’m back out on the streets.

Simultaneous with all of this was the discovery of mold in our house. Not only could we not live in it while it was being stripped and reconstructed, my wife found a new place that came on the market that fit a lot of our criteria. We could do a down payment, get a loan, put the old house on the market, and because it had appreciated in value (other than the mold), we could pay down the new place enough so that the mortgage was back to a sane level. Provided the old place sold. Right?

Actually… yes.

I was scared out of my damn mind with what we call “provider panic.” I thought the old house wouldn’t sell, or not at a level that the numbers would work, but they did. Was that the end of our crazy ride? No, not by a long shot. This year my son had a bar mitzvah in the middle of all this, and my daughter graduated high school, got her first summer job, and went off to college.

Part 3: Electioneering

As I wrote a few times this year, I was also hell-bent on writing literally hundreds of letters to eligible voters and tried my hand at recruiting new ones in person. I went to a local mall to register voters and took a bus trip to a nearby swing state to knock on doors. And, come November 5th, all of it was for nothing.

Well, not quite. I kept at it after the election, doing ballot curing by phone. In some incredibly tight races, we helped swing a Senate seat. So that’s not nothing, exactly, particularly if the other side has any infighting during their votes over the next two years. And, of course, this all meant I had a clearer view of a presidential campaign, which is the subject of Civil Blood’s sequel.

Part 4: Personal Writing

During the election, there was a part of me that had another gut check, because the tone of my novel could seriously need to change one way or the other. I’m trying to avoid writing something ripped from today’s headlines, because I’m aiming for the feel of a future time rather than five minutes ago. So some of my procrastinating was because I wanted to see how November 5th turned out.

I also got distracted by the chance to sell some short fiction. I wrote, revised, and polished two short stories, “Prisoner of the Freest World” and “A Jones For Your Affection,” each targeted to separate small-press anthologies. And will you be seeing them?

No.

No, you will not.

After writing, getting feedback, rewriting, and submitting the stories before the deadlines, neither anthology got enough quality submissions to launch. It’s theoretically possible that some magazine might like the material, but I’ve done a lot better with anthologies than I have with magazines that don’t specify what exactly they want.

So in many ways, this year hit me, over and over again. But I’m gonna take the “growth mindset” option here and count what blessings I do have, because my life could be a lot worse.

So What Was That Parable?

Chantal and Zelda’s homily is nice, but I was always partial to the story of Thor, Loki, and the giants who tested him.

For those that don’t recall, Thor and his pals journey to Jotunheim and meet Utgard-Loki, the king of the giants. Utgard-Loki asks Thor to wrestle his decrepit old grandmother, drink from their mead-horn, and try to move the giants’ sleeping cat. The thunder god who has no equal struggles to do each, and only afterwards finds out he was tricked by the giants’ illusion magic. He was actually wrestling Old Age, drinking the sea, and trying to move the coil of the Midgard Serpent.

The lesson here is that though you may beat yourself up for a lack of success, you might not be considering the reality of how difficult your struggles might be.

In trying to summarize my last year to Whitney and her friends, I mentioned I was feeling down because of how little I accomplished. Part of the YearCompass asked “What are you most proud of?” And I wasn’t sure.

Then Beth, one of the participants, said something to the effect of, “Well, if I were you, I’d put down ‘resilience.'”

So, I haven’t succeeded as much as I’d like to have, but I’ve been someone my family can rely on while we got hit with a few crises. I needed help with physical damage, but at least I held it together emotionally. And if you did, too, remember that in a year like 2024, that wasn’t a given.

Looking to the Future

Okay, so let’s give the forward-looking goals, if not actual resolutions.

  • I want to get employed again. With the game industry as grim as it is right now, I’m looking both in and outside it. That means training for alternative professions if I have to.
  • I want to finish the rough draft of Civil Blood’s sequel. Not necessarily a draft good enough to show other people yet. The rough draft is, in the words of some writer or other, “being able to tell yourself the story, before you can tell it to anyone else.”
  • If I find myself with free time, I’m going to polish my portfolio. I have samples for various formats that aren’t represented, and I can write more, so that page may be built up in the coming days.
  • I’m learning about SEO optimization, so perhaps this site will have some more visitors as I experiment and implement my new knowledge.
  • I haven’t decided yet on what I want to do with my social media presence. I want to cut down the number of hours a day I look at it, while also making myself visible on BlueSky, where I’m growing a following.
  • I may post more about my martial arts hobbies, which I haven’t mentioned on this page yet. I’m experimenting with Chen family tai chi, which is not as combative as some of the other arts I’ve studied. But it’s aces at rebuilding leg strength!

So let’s ring in 2025, and brace ourselves, ’cause we may need all the resilience we can get.

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In Which I am Back in the Saddle

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…

The cover of Paladins of Valor, 5th book in the Libri Valoris series.
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.

Time to get to work.

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In Which I Experience the Worst Pain of My Life

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.

You know… just what the doctor ordered.

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In Which It’s the Most Plunderfool Time of the Year

The Great Hall, decorated for Eventide in Wayfinder

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.

Chris's character chases the Plunderfool goblin through the snow.
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!

A caroler in Wayfinder promises her audience to sing a song about the Gloom.
The darkest, most metal of the Eventide carols, coming up!
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In Which I Trade New Stories for Old

"Fangs for the Mammaries" @2023 by Clyde Caldwell

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.

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In Which I Get (Not Go) Viral

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:

  1. 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?
  2. 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?
  3. How could a virus this infective not shape human history in an obvious way, if it existed before qi (magic) was proven to exist?
  4. 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’s Old 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.

Drink up. And cheers!

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In Which Months Go By

580 letters to voters.

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.”)

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In Which My Novel’s Sequel Starts Actually Happening

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.

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In Which I Am Gainfully Employed

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.”

Stay cool.