Category: Seasonal

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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!
Posted on

In Which I Shut Up and Wrote

As the little date indicates, it’s been about three months since the last post. New Year’s Day seems like an apropos time to let you all know what I’ve been doing instead of blogging.

In late September, I flew to Shenzhen for business reasons associated with my day job (i.e. the Pirates of the Caribbean project). Shenzhen is a lovely tropical metropolis on the Chinese coast. Basically, if you go to the island of Hong Kong and then take a bridge to the mainland, you’re in Shenzhen. It’s full of Times-Square-style glitz, but with lots of trees and green spaces.

I came away from the trip with squid-flavored potato chips and red tea, brought my daughter a silk scarf embroidered with skulls (she’s writing horror interactive fiction these days) and swore I would never again be on a plane trying to outrun a typhoon.

Around that time, I finished my burst of reading and reviewing urban fantasy books. Since publishing Civil Blood, I’ve joined a bunch of UF readers’ groups, and posted my reviews to Amazon, Goodreads and Booklikes (the links here are to my rec lists). If you are looking for some new reads, or some old ones, feel free to check out my short list of long reviews. When I wasn’t doing that, I was chugging away in the Critters Writer’s Workshop, critiquing short stories and the first chapters of a lot of novels. The break that let me read instead of write gave me some necessary perspective and a few new online friends.

Then I did a numbers game with Civil Blood: it got a few kind reviews and a few mediocre ones, but neither seemed to drive any sales (literally, zero — I have metrics). Then I hit the extreme down-side of self-publishing: I had cordoned off a specific budget for the novel and, by extension, any sequels. No profit, no sequel, that’s the rule. As an additional stab to the liver, no traditional publisher will touch a self-published series unless it is raking in the readers by the cathedral-full. So any chance of writing a sequel and submitting it would be a nearly-impossible needle to thread.

So I took a break from sequel planning and told myself I should do some short stories — one in the Civil Blood universe and one in the climate fiction genre, something I’ve been meaning to try. I composed the first CB-universe short story, “Stopping the Bleeding,” and got it reviewed in a workshop, because I needed a lot of fresh eyes that hadn’t lived in the novel’s world for the past year. The critiques came in throughout November, interrupting my cli-fi attempt. National Novel Writing Month for me was more like National Kinda Write Um Some Short Story Drafts This Year.

On top of that, a colleague and friend, Chris L’Etoile and his wife Jamie, were hit with what’s politely called a “life event.” Jamie got seriously ill. Complications from the illness led to a stroke that paralyzed her right side. At the time, Chris was on the other side of the continent. My wife and I (and a *ton* of other friends) jumped in to help. So November and December had a lot of online searches for resources, phone calls, and late-night discussions of WTF Will They Do To Get Through The Week. (My explanatory Facebook post that got retweeted all over the place is here and the GoFundMe is here. We raised a lot, but their expenditures are *insane*, so rest assured that any contributions will not be wasted.

So you better believe I wasn’t paying attention to blogging, right?

In late December, things calmed down a little. I did some short story revisions, so I’m going into the new year with the following goals:

  • Extend Civil Blood’s readership (I have additional plans not specified here).
  • Get “Stopping the Bleeding” and possibly additional CB-universe material out to readers.
  • Finish and submit a cli-fi story to a magazine or anthology.
  • Announce and launch a new intellectual property that is currently secret.
  • Attend conventions to meet new people — announcements will be posted here and on Twitter.
  • Do 30 minutes of cardio a day, 6 days a week — I’m on Week 3 at the moment!
  • Stick it to The Man.

Thanks for sticking with this ginormous update to the end. May you smooch a replicant in 2019, and may the old gods bless your new beginnings.

Blog