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In Which I Give Some Birthday Shout-Outs

It’s not my birthday, but I wound up celebrating it anyway.

Our family made the trek to where I grew up, near Washington, D.C., with some in-laws coming to town as well. We were all set to have a lovely brunch one Sunday morning. No sooner did I walk in than 20 people I know through high school, college, and work are there, yelling, “Surprise!” My wife and my mom had been planning it for a month or more, and it turned out really great. I hadn’t seen half the people there in more than a decade.

The vacation was an unqualified success, with everyone from my side of the family getting some time in to see me, my wife, and the kids. We saw museums, participated in my brother’s favorite hobby, and I gained approximately two pounds in a week from my sugar guzzling. But on the plane ride home, I had time to think.

I Have My Come-to-Zeus Moment

Of our family, I had the last flight out, and it was from DCA, also known as Reagan National Airport. In case you’re not aware… I hate flying.

I don’t puke or anything. I don’t refuse to get on planes. I just talk to my seatmates to have something to do because I know my life is in some stranger’s hands for a few hours. Nowhere is this more obvious than when I’m flying out of Reagan National specifically.

In the best of circumstances, National is not an easy place to land — the pilots have to follow the Potomac River because they can’t use airspace over the Pentagon on the south bank of the river, or the White House and Capitol, which are both close (as planes go) to the north bank.

Air Florida Flight 90, 1982

Once in the 1980s, ice formed on the wings of a Boeing 737 passenger jet and it plowed into one of the bridges spanning the Potomac, 30 seconds after takeoff. Every time I went into town as a kid on I-395, I could see the discoloration in the nearby reconstructed bridge where new steel had replaced the old. Of course, since it’s 2025, this time around my mind was on the fatal crash in January when a plane coming into DCA hit an Army helicopter on maneuvers.

Intellectually, I know that air travel is technically the safest kind of travel given the long distances compared to cars and the relatively low number of incidents, let alone full-on fatal crashes. But when I’m on a plane, my brain isn’t so easy to convince. Here’s a few reasons why:

We Focus on the Negative

The human brain remembers negative outcomes better than it remembers positive outcomes. This makes sense as a matter of evolutionary psychology: it’s important to remember “The lake has no animals left to eat,” much more than “I ate a frog a day at the lake for exactly 65 days.” One’s a problem that could necesitate a change in behavior to survive, and one’s just the status quo.

I don’t know how many planes I’ve taken, but it’s probably in the high-double- to low-triple digits. And the flights I remember most are:

  • That time when I flew to Columbus, Ohio and we came in for a landing… and then the pilot pulled up. Not telling us anything, we left the runway behind and the GPS map showed us headed toward Chicago. We eventually turned and came in for a landing again, and he pulled up again. Coming over the intercom, he said, “We’ve got some conditions on the ground we don’t like, but don’t worry, we have enough fuel to do this one more time.”
  • The flight from DC to LA that went through Colorado, where there was a clear blue sky and the worst turbulence I’ve ever experienced. The plane would drop ten feet on a bump and whole crowds of passengers would scream or gasp. The completely-full flight was batted around like a toy from every direction. The pilot climbed to get above the rough air, and it didn’t work. After about a half hour of nerve-wracking flying, he descended 12,000 feet and got below whatever was causing it, and from then on it was fine.
  • A three-hour flight from Shenzhen, China, trying to outrun an incoming typhoon, followed by a twelve-and-a-half-hour flight to the West Coast of the U.S.. There were at least 8-10 solid hours of turbulence on the second flight, to say nothing of being seated next to the bathroom. Every flush turned into that vacuum-sucking noise and it felt like my seat was being smacked.

Fairly vivid examples? Yes. Also, outliers. Many of my flights have had nothing remarkable to report. “Oh, gosh, the seat belt sign came on for a half hour over Nebraska, but that was it.” Unmemorable… and ideal.

Failures Are Publicized, For Good Reason

Once, when I asked a flight attendant how long the pilot expected turbulence to last, she said “Don’t worry. Storms don’t bring down planes. When they do, it’s so rare, it would make the news.”

While I appreciate her efforts, that voice in the back of my head says, “Okay, and I watch the news all the freakin’ time.” I watched September 11th, 2001 live on TV, and the airline industry were just as flabbergasted as everyone else. There’s a long list of aviation disasters (and near-misses, and deliberate attacks) beyond the ones I listed above. And when a plane goes down, the death toll can easily be everyone on the flight. You’re in a 65-ton metal tube going 500 mph at 35,000 feet.

But on the other hand, I used to live in the flight path of an airport. I heard the planes coming in to land every ten minutes or so. And they got it right more than a hundred times per day without a hitch. No news cameras. Just skilled people doing their job.

And Now What?

And, of course, because I’m slugging away at a political novel, I’m tuned in to the barrage of social media and news sites that tell me there’s been mass layoffs at the Federal Aviation Administration. The White House says it’s fewer than 400 people and they weren’t essential. Politico claims to have found 130 people who arguably are essential. (For context, there’s about 45,000 FAA employees.) What do I think?

  1. Taking politicians at their word when they’re covering their butts is a fool’s game.
  2. I never get on a plane and say “Wow, what a nice safe feeling this is, all made possible by deregulation.”

If you let a corporation like an airline legally cut costs, they will cut costs. They will put the rules back after some incident makes them put the rules back. And I don’t want to be that incident.

And On That Cheery Note, the Shout-Out

So I wanted to give thanks to my family for putting together the surprise, and my friends for showing up. But I also want to praise the airline staff that make trips like mine possible.

That flight attendant giving the boring demonstration has bet their life that the pilots will get everyone to their destination in one piece.

Those pilots have bet that they can handle an aircraft the weight of a battle tank and put it down gently enough that there’s only a minor bump when it hits the tarmac.

The air traffic controllers, the radar technicians who track weather systems, the maintenance staff, the marshallers (that’s the name for the traffic-directing person on the runway waving glow-sticks)… somehow they make it all work, day in and day out. And most of us never even see them mess up. They’re good at what they do.

I can’t get the laid-off ones a job. But I can remind people that they’re out there every day, trying to keep untold numbers of people safe.

Let’s do right by them, okay?

Mass Effect Codex, Galaxy Map, and Item Descriptions

Story time.

When I was writing for Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare Edmonton’s design director called me into his office and said “How do you feel about working on Mass Effect 2?”

My response was, “Um… why, do they need me?”

ME2 had six writers on it already. But it turned out that three of them were leaving the company when they were done writing the dialogue, and a fourth one broke his shoulder slipping on an ice rink at a kid’s birthday party. The grunt-work writing remained: the Codex entries, the Galaxy Map, the weapon descriptions — essential words to make the game function, but nothing as glamorous as writing characters the audience would love.

So I took over the non-voiced text from the previous IP expert, Chris L’Etoile, starting with the Galaxy Map. I said, “This works like Star Wars, right? Ice planet, swamp planet, city planet?”

In response, Chris sent me a chart of the minimum molecular weights of gases retained by a heavenly body. This was important to get right, he said, because 90% of the 300 planets on the map were not going to be able to support life. They were going to be barren rocks with gases, just like in the actual Milky Way. My job was to turn them into something interesting and accurate at the same time.

“Uh… does your audience actually care about this?” I asked.

“Yes,” Chris replied. “This chart is why you can’t terraform the Moon. Even if you pumped in all the oxygen and nitrogen you needed to create an atmosphere, the weak gravity means it’d float off into space. You need to know that, because this is the way we did it on Mass Effect 1 and some of our fans on the forums are astronomers. They’ll know if something is off and they’ll tell everyone. By the way, remember that BioWare’s CEOs are doctors, so they’ll know if any alien biology doesn’t work. Good luck!”

That was my introduction to writing hard science fiction, or at least harder than I’ve seen in any other space opera video game. Video games, as a rule, are soft science fiction, with plasma guns and teleportation and all kinds of tech that would require huge leaps in science but makes for easy narrative grease.

I had to learn the rules before I broke them, so I learned all I could about planetary formation and the early stages of life on Earth. Then we got to the Codex entries on weapons, and I had to figure out how to make things sound awesome and match up with what the combat team wanted. I did this through the game shipping and 9 pieces of downloadable content. I also headed up the team on the Cerberus Daily News, 365 player-facing entries that had to be important enough to seem newsworthy but inconsequential enough that we didn’t complicate the writing of Mass Effect 3.

By the time Mass Effect 3 rolled around, I was designated as “the writer who cares about the science,” and was dubbed the de facto IP expert. I did what I could to make the game and its accompanying DLC (another 9 pieces) as consistent with the laws of physics as possible.

Below are some examples I’m proud of.

The Thanix “Cannon“

The Thanix weapon you get for your crew’s spaceship is an example of the writing “iceberg” in ME2: a lot of effort, 90% of which the player will never see. We knew that we wanted the weapon to be adopted from Sovereign’s main gun in Mass Effect 1, and that it was super-advanced. The Reapers had a civilization millions of years old and technology that should sound awesome.

It couldn’t just be a laser, because how boring would that be? Further, it shouldn’t be a particle beam (you get that as a hand-held weapon in the game), or a microwave/maser weapon, or anything we’d heard of before. On the other hand, it still had to make physical sense and look like a directed-energy weapon, because that’s what the cutscenes in ME1 showed. So the bar was high.

I ended up scouring pages from the U.S.’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and ultimately a 1951 book by Arthur C. Clarke from which a DARPA project (MAHEM) was inspired. Yes, it was an old idea… but if an old idea is grounded in physics, it still works.

Palaven, the Turian Homeworld

I like this one because it’s an example of literal world-building. It’s also an example of where the Codex and Galaxy Map overlapped, and I had to say similar-but-not-identical content in two places.

We met turians in Mass Effect 1, and Chris L’Etoile’s codex entry mentioned that their homeworld had intense solar radiation, more so than Earth. This is why turians look metallic — their life evolved to incorporate metals in their organic processes so that their silver carapaces reflect away the damaging rays.

But when we finally got to go into the system in Mass Effect 3, I had a conundrum. How would their plants work? Turians breathe nitrogen and oxygen just like humans, and their plants photosynthesize the same… so if the plants were metallic, wouldn’t they be handicapping their energy source?

That’s when I researched my butt off, and found out how Earth’s life deals with intense solar radiation. I wrote that bit about shutting down metabolic processes during the day and repairing the damage at night because lichens on Earth do that already. That’s how good science fiction works — you find a factual core around which you can wrap a narrative.

The Geth Plasma Shotgun

I bring this one up in interviews a lot because it’s an example of being a team player. The combat designers wanted an “unshotgun” that could operate at longer ranges and charge up for higher damage. They spent a lot of time and some art resources on it and they had really good gameplay reasons: certain classes that could use shotguns were due for a buff and would love this weapon. It was the “energy shotgun,” or the geth’s “Plasma Shotgun,” since ME1 mentioned that geth sometimes plasma-burned Alliance soldiers.

Here’s the thing: plasma weapons, in physics terms… are bullshit.

I know they’re in a lot of science fiction, but there are reasons real-life weapons manufacturers aren’t making them. You don’t fire “bolts of plasma” and certainly not “shotgun shells of plasma.” Plasma’s a superheated gas. A stiff wind would blow it back in your face. Nor is it easy to magnetize it and fling it, especially with enough force to do much to an armored, moving opponent. It’s orders of magnitude easier to make a gun or flamethrower that does the job better and cheaper.

But… my job is not to make other people throw out their work. So I didn’t say no, and I didn’t give up. Giving up is not in my workflow.

I talked with a physics teacher I once had who now works at NASA, and with a science-fiction conflict-simulations group, and we brainstormed over e-mail. The result is what you see up there: room-temperature superconductors, miniaturized into toroid-shaped shotgun rounds, that are charged up and flung at the enemy, flash-creating plasma on impact. Pow. The Geth Plasma Shotgun that made the writing, art, and combat teams happy. And players got that sweet gameplay we all wanted. They freakin’ loved it.

Asteria

This was a little throwaway entry in the Galaxy Map. I wanted to include it because every science fiction property in the world has habitable planets that are filmed on a back lot in Southern California or something similar. The air is hardly ever a problem, the animals look like pets from a store like those snakes in the Dagobah swamps… they’re just not alien.

So, I made Asteria, which is a habitable garden world… except the numbers are 95% right instead of 100% right. It’s just a little off-target, with too much CO2. Not enough to totally prevent humans from adapting, but retaining enough heat to feel worse than Earth. And advising visitors to, almost literally, bring a canary like it’s a frickin’ coal mine.

This detail was possible because the player can’t land on Asteria, so we didn’t have to expend resources on some weird mechanic showing it off. You don’t want to go there? Super. We give you just what you want, and get text that evokes versimilitude to the universe at the same time.

Bekenstein

I wrote this one up for the Kasumi: Stealing Memory DLC, the planet where Kasumi Goto takes you to an arms dealer’s fancy party. Having seen farming colonies like Eden Prime in Mass Effect 1, I thought it’d be neat to make the planet the equivalent of the humans’ New York or Tokyo. Its proximity to the Citadel made it all come together.

My one regret is that if you’re not from the USA, “more expensive than surgery” may not ring quite as true.

The Omni-Blade

This was an example of retroactive continuity and avoiding worse retroactive continuity.

By Mass Effect 3, we wanted a melee attack that was cooler and more unique than Shepard elbowing his enemy. Word came down from on high to make a “holographic switchblade.” Which, of course, doesn’t make sense. Early ideas (from someone I’d rather not rat out, since God knows I’ve had my share of non-starters) justified it as saying it was a form of “hard light.”

Of course, the previous two games didn’t have any hard light. No lightsabers, no holo-shields. And this wasn’t even newly-captured Reaper tech, it was a weapon Shepard has from the get-go. It was going to have variations based on Shepard’s character class, so the Alliance had clearly mastered it.

So, it was up to me to craft a Codex entry explaining what this glowing blade (or bludgeon, or whatever) actually was. And, as a bonus, I avoided saying they were just invented, because at the time we didn’t know if we were going to visit the First Contact War in another game or comic or whatever else the franchise needed next.

Thus, this entry: highlighting that Alliance soldiers, like real-life modern soldiers, rarely kill in hand-to-hand, but the Reaper invasion demanded new tactics.

And Let’s Not Forget the Cerberus Daily News

President Huerta’s Predicament

I wanted to have some news items from Earth, since ME1 and ME2 never took us there, and many players would want to hear what Earth life is like. Some of my biggest writing influences were in the cyberpunk genre, and though Mass Effect is more space opera than cyberpunk, the advancements of technology would change the world.

The Huerta stories explored this idea — that humans would use data storage in medicine, and somewhere, the law would need to draw the line differently regarding what “death” really is. Of course, the story grabs more attention if you give it enormous stakes, such as the Presidential line of succession. Incidentally, the Huerta stories showed up as a tiny mention in Mass Effect 3 with Huerta Memorial Hospital — a hospital named after a President who insisted he wasn’t dead yet. Welcome to the politics of the future.

Let’s end this sample with a bang — the final entry of the Cerberus Daily News when the collected peoples of the galaxy started to figure out that the Reapers were coming. This last entry left on an ominous note (if you were following the storyline ending in ME2 and/or the Arrival DLC) and the next thing the players would see was ME3 trailers that showed the Reapers attacking Earth. I thought this put a nice capstone on the entries and built the hype like we needed to.

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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 Bite the Freaking Bullet and Knock on Doors

A box of letters aimed at swing states.

When we last left our intrepid introvert, I was writing letters to swing states to get out the vote. I kept that up until October 1st, the designated first day to send them out for maximum impact.

By then, I was so sick of writing ’em. The final tally was 100 letters sent early to new voters in Pennsylvania, and 740 more spread across the swing states. That’s Michigan, Wisconsin, an additional 100 to Pennsylvania, then bunches to North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. And in case you haven’t seen the price of postage lately, the stamps added up to a sizeable bite of my disposable income. So I felt like I’d done my part and it was time to stop with the letters.

But that feeling didn’t last long. I didn’t want to wake up on November 6th thinking “Did I really do all I could have done?” So I looked around for events in my area that took more time than money. Canvassing supposedly has the highest-yield ratio of all the get-out-the-vote efforts, so I wanted to get in on the ground game.

I signed up to take a bus to a “nearby” swing state, canvass Saturday afternoon, get put up in a hotel for the night (Exhibit A of where your campaign donation money goes) and canvass all day Sunday. Then it’d be back on the bus and we’d be home by bedtime.

So I got trained over Zoom during the week, got up at 4:45 Saturday morning (oof) and met up at the local campaign headquarters where the buses gathered in the parking lot. Around 100 of us got on the road for a trip that took a lively four hours and change. I got to know my bus-buddy to ensure neither of us were to be left behind, and eventually we rolled into a little mini-mall in what looked like an industrial section of town.

My First Time Canvassing

The swing state town was big enough to matter, but the field office was a bit smaller than the one on Dem home turf. Trying to assign door-knocking turf to 100 volunteers, even with the handy app designed for the purpose, took some time. But of all the problems to have, “too much manpower” was a pretty good one.

I went around back to where a coordinator gave us some more training specific to the state, such as saying where the polling places were, the hotline for if a resident hadn’t gotten a ballot, and so forth. Then I got back in line to get my turf assignment.

While I waited, a steady stream of drivers grabbed volunteers going to clusters of destinations, and I realized every volunteer’s car was essential when they had a surge of people-power like this. My bus-buddy shared an Uber with some others and was gone well before I was ready. No problem. I said, “I’m not choosy, put me where you need me.”

I was given a turf 50 miles away.

About five minutes later, the team conferred and agreed that shipping me all the way out there solo wasn’t a good idea — they’d hit that place the next day with the bus and a bigger group of volunteers. Instead, I got a ride to their sister office a suburb over, got turf near there, and another ride to my destination.

On My Own

So there I was dropped, a few hundred miles from home, alone, on foot with a pile of flyers and an app telling me to knock on doors and ask strangers annoying questions. It was a warm day, and I’d brought my jacket because I’d prepped for my hometown, and at 6 am it’d been chilly.

The first person I canvassed was the easiest. He was standing out by his truck in his front yard, had already voted straight up and down the ballot, and thanked me for volunteering, saying “I don’t know how you guys do it.” We shared a smile: I had no idea how we did it, either.

Most everyone else on the 3-4 streets I hit had already been canvassed earlier by a related group, a PAC local to the state. Unfortunately, this meant that most people were kind of annoyed at having been bothered twice, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. It’s actually illegal for a political campaign to coordinate with an outside group, so we couldn’t share our data of which houses had been hit already. (Of course, if you’re rich and influential and your candidate wins, they might be corrupt enough to pardon you, so really, your mileage may vary.)

Some houses had signs saying things like “NO SOLICITING — REFER ALL INQUIRIES TO GERMAN SHEPHERD” and they weren’t kidding. Others were friendly and said yes, they voted already, so I could check them off. Rather importantly, that meant we could stop bothering them and focus on other, more persuadable households.

I hit 17 houses in total and was getting tired out and dried out. My bag was heavy enough to make my shoulder ache, I was sweating under my jacket, and oh yeah, remember how I dislocated my knee in January? The knee was fine, but the ankle started taking some stress. I had to stop and sit on the curb to drink a little water.

At the next few houses, I saw flyers identical to the ones I was leaving, and followed them until I ran into two other volunteers. They gave me a ride in their car and we coordinated — they were almost done. They’d take four more and I’d go in the other direction down the street to get the last two.

And Then There Was Jerry

The second-to-last house, no one was home. I was ready to give up, but I went to the last house and knocked anyway.

Answering the door was this 60-something guy I’ll call Jerry. I started off with the standard patter: “Hey, sorry to bother you, I’m Chris, I’m a volunteer with the state Democrats and (tired grin) you’ve probably heard there’s a really big election coming up…”

And Jerry lights up, comes out of the house, and plops down on a chair in front of his porch. Big smile. He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, tell me all about it.”

I thought he was messing with me, and got nervous because I’d have to remember my shpiel about what the presidential and Senate candidates’ positions were on any particular topic. I know my senator’s positions, but assembly members in another state? Oh, heck no.

But he said, “Do you have a ballot I can use?”

“Um,” I said, “we’re with the campaign, not the government. We don’t have ballots. The state should have sent you a ballot already in the mail.”

At this point, another 60-something guy comes to the door. Maybe a roommate, maybe a relative, maybe his lover, who knows? This guy says, “Oh, Jerry, you said you didn’t want to vote this year, so I threw out your ballot.”

“Oh,” I said, not adding the word crap. This was actually more familiar territory. “Well, there’s a couple of ways you can still vote. You can go to a polling place, like the student union at the local university, most of the public libraries… early voting’s still on until November 1st.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Jerry’s friend. “I gotta make this up to you, I’ll drive you tomorrow.”

I said my goodbyes, because they’d already covered the next part of the conversation, which was me encouraging them to commit to a plan, preferably voting early so they wouldn’t be stuck in a line on Election Day.

With my 19th house finished, I returned to the car, and said the words every canvasser wants to hear:

“I got one.”

Epilogue

The next day we had more time. My bus-buddy and I got successfully paired up. We handled maybe 50 houses, again coordinating with other volunteers when our turfs got too close or when another canvasser ran out of fliers and I ran some over. By the time the bus (and an Uber) got me back home, I was starving, sore, and tired. Yes, the campaign office had tons of pizza, water, and sugar, but the bus didn’t stop for dinner on its 4-hour return trip. At least I got to sleep that night feeling like I’d done a little something.

So I just want to say, if you’re out there canvassing, and it’s hot and the dust from the road is getting in your eyes and you’re thinking about giving up:

Push through.

Be as stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay.

Go to that last house on the block.

You never know what might happen.

LINKS

I’ve posted this before, but I’ll post it again, because you might be reading this in the final week of this insane presidential campaign, and now is not the time to sit on the fence.

You can still volunteer for the ground game. Remember how I said canvassers have cars as a chokepoint? Bring some wheels to a big volunteer event and suddenly you’ll be everybody’s best friend.

Besides just Googling organizations in your county or city, Mobilize has volunteer events for canvassing, phone banking, text banking, and ballot curing.

What’s ballot curing, you ask?

This is when someone has made a mistake on their ballot that would render it invalid (in California, for example, a mail-in ballot needs the voter’s signature on the outside envelope or it doesn’t count). But if someone meets with the voter and gets them to reaffirm their ballot (i.e. calls them up or visits in person), they can say “there’s a problem with the ballot, fix it” and the vote can then be registered as valid. This matters a lot in super-close elections where sometimes as little as 500 votes stand between a potential representative and the U.S. House.

This process can be slow — people often don’t answer their phones or doors, so to make a difference, a campaign needs lots of volunteers, late in the game when the ballots have already been cast. And they need them done before the state’s deadline.

So HERE is a place to volunteer for ballot curing.

And don’t forget…

The Content Creator Team is the place to go if you’re a designer, videographer, artist, or meme creator. Yes, you read that right, you can meme for the team.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has this page here on being a virtual text banker. It’s like phone banking, but no speaking required!

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In Which I Give Worried Introverts Something to Do (2024 Edition)

A few years back on this site, I revealed my political preferences in American elections. While my novel Civil Blood and its sequel try to be political without being heavily partisan, I myself am pretty firmly in one camp.

And over the last month or two, I and many of my friends are looking at the current election cycle and saying:

“OH CRAP, WHAT CAN I DO?”

If you’re asking that question, I’m here to help.

If you want to cut to the chase, the links are at the bottom of this page. If you want to hear my reasoning… strap in.

So What Can You Do?

The easiest answer is, of course, “Vote!” or “Vote harder!” or “Vote and bring three friends!” Which is nice, but it doesn’t move the needle much. I’ve been voting. My friends are already voting. Further, I don’t live in a swing state, so the chances that my personal vote is going to make a difference are negligible. This might be the case for you, too. But giving up doesn’t feel right, either.

Politicians, whom you may or may not trust, are all too happy to say “Donate!” Which is nice if you have disposable income, but if I gave money every time I felt afraid about the political future, I’d be buried under a pile of debt as big as Mount McKinley. Also, as a side note, if you’re going to give, don’t trust text messages and e-mails screaming about giant match numbers. Look up the organization before forking over the money: sometimes they’re only tangentially related to the candidate you think they’re advertising. Go to the candidate’s website to do it directly.

To be clear, I’m not against donations. In 2008, being gainfully employed with a certain amount of stability, I gave to my first political campaign, and have ever since. But that doesn’t feel like enough any more, right?

So the third option presents itself…

Volunteering to Get Out the Vote

The best way to get out the vote, by far, is canvassing: you go out in person, knock on doors, and introduce yourself to one voter at a time. Even if you’re not in a swing state, you can influence the course of a congressional election that could change the balance of power in the House and Senate. That’s a big deal. (The not-so-glamorous local elections also matter, but being on the introverted side, I have yet to try this technique.)

In 2016, I tried phone banking, which supposedly is the second best method, but I found it annoying. The best thing I could say about my attempt was that I eliminated disconnected phone numbers to let some other volunteer concentrate on calling actual people. My few contacts with human beings on the other end of the phone changed no minds, netted no voters. It didn’t help that I didn’t have a script to follow, or training of any sort.

But in 2018, I found I could use my talents more effectively. I could write letters or postcards to get out the vote. My handwriting is legible, and I possess a little patience.

If this describes you… you could swing a state.

Introducing Vote Forward

The organization I volunteered for is called Vote Forward, and they’re awesome for worried introverts.

Their key argument is this: a lot of eligible voters toss out direct mail or e-mail without reading it. But if you got a hand-written letter in the mail, it’s such an unusual occurrence that you’d open it up just to see what it is. And once you read a personal message from a volunteer, you might be more likely to vote.

Of course, it’s far from magic. Vote Forward estimated that sent letters or postcards have about a 3% conversion rate. It doesn’t sound like much, but that’s a lot higher than e-mail or direct mail. I usually pitch it as “for every 100 of these letters I write, it’s like voting in a swing state and bringing 2-3 friends.”

These numbers can add up. In the 2020 presidential election, about 200,000 Vote Forward volunteers sent 17.6 million letters, and moved approximately 126,000 votes. Now, if you’re sitting there with a calculator, you might be like, “Wait, that’s actually more like a 0.7% conversion rate,” which is fair. But the margins of victory in some swing states that year?

Georgia: 11,779 (Biden)
Arizona: 10,457 (Biden)
Nevada: 33,596 (Biden)
Pennsylvania: 80,555 (Biden)
North Carolina: 74,483 (Trump)

Obviously, I’m not saying it made all the difference… but with margins that narrow? This year, it might.

But Will I Feel Like a Shill? Is It Complicated? Or Expensive?

No to all three.

After downloading a batch of 5 or 20 addresses and blank forms, you fill out the form with a blue pen (supposedly the friendliest, most professional-seeming color) including why you vote and why they should, too. Note that you’re not supposed to mention a specific candidate or slogan, as those can be turn-offs. But you can tell a personal story or just go with something generic like “I want to be a part of making history,” or “since my grandparents came here from another country, I feel a sense of duty here.” Stuff like that.

Then you address an envelope, put the letter inside, add a stamp, and the mail is ready to go. Now, stamps are a little pricey for mass mailing these days — 100 letters at 73 cents per stamp adds up to as much as a decent campaign donation! But if you can’t afford postage, Vote Forward’s website has a place where you can sign up and they’ll send you voter kits that include rolls of stamps.

All that’s left is sending the letters at the optimal time. There’s two kinds of campaigns that differ here — if the address belongs to a potential first-time voter, you send it ASAP so they can register in time. If it’s part of a get-out-the-vote drive, you send it at Vote Forward’s optimal time in October where there’s still enough time to register and/or vote, but not so much time that the voter blows it off and forgets about it until Election Day.

And That’s It?

Yes, unless you wanna be super-enthusiastic and tell all your friends, or get your parents or your kids involved… that kind of thing.

So far this year, I’ve gotten one co-worker into it, two families’ worth of family friends, my daughter, and four of my daughter’s friends. And check out the photo!

That’s our first crop of 200 letters, 40 written and addressed by the kiddo, and 160 by me. Of course, the photo is old — with a little help from the team, we hit 400 by July 30th, and we still have all of August, September, and a bit of October to go!

What if I Don’t Know What to Say?

I kept mine nicely generic. You can use it if you want:

“I vote because generations of Americans before us marched, fought, and died to secure our right to choose our leaders. I’m not giving up on this state or this country, and I hope you’ll join me by voting as soon as possible. Let’s make those past heroes proud!”

This keeps the focus on a lot of good patriotic feelings. The person you’re writing to might not agree with “a woman’s right to choose” (which is definitely on the ballot this year) but I think we can agree we’ve got a right to choose our leaders, and a democracy is only healthy if we exercise our right.

“I’m not giving up” doesn’t shame them for not wanting to vote (that’s legit) but it sets me up as someone who doesn’t quit, and “I hope you’ll join me” is an invitation rather than a castigation.

Then there’s what advertisers call the “call to action” at the end — voting as soon as possible — and the warm fuzzy motivation of making our ancestors proud. Sometimes I switch it up and say “let’s make history,” because this election is totally going to be historic one way or the other, but most of the time, I stick to this script.

So that’s the kind of structure you want — not too long, not too short, nothing insulting or offensive, all brought together at the end with a “get out and vote” message. And by the time you write 100 of these, you tend to believe it. And I feel much less worried, not because I’m confident in a particular candidate, but because I know I’m doing what I can.

I’m not giving up, no matter what the polls say.

And I hope you’ll join me.

ADDENDUM: THE LINKS

In case you’re shopping around for other organizations…

Canvassing:

If you’re an extrovert who’s read this far, the state party websites for Democrats that provide training for actual door-to-door canvassing are here.

Note that the canvassers often need a ride to their destination, so even if you don’t want to talk to people, you can provide the wheels (and maybe some air-conditioning!) to help the team directly. The door-to-door team needs to be dropped off within walking distance of targeted houses, and so the volunteer with the wheels is going to be dropping off 2-4 of them at a time and zipping back to the local field office to pick up the next group, and when a shift is done, they need another ride. You really can’t have enough cars.

Ballot Curing:

One way to help your side net more votes at the latest stage is via “ballot curing.” This is when someone has made a mistake on their ballot that would render it invalid (in California, for example, a mail-in ballot needs the voter’s signature on the outside envelope or it doesn’t count). But if someone meets with the voter and gets them to reaffirm their ballot (i.e. calls them up or visits in person), they can say “there’s a problem with your ballot, fix it” and the vote can then be registered as valid. This matters a lot in super-close elections where sometimes as little as 500 votes stands between a potential representative and the U.S. House.

This process can be slow — people often don’t answer their phones or doors, so to make a difference, a campaign needs lots of volunteers, late in the game when the ballots have already been cast. And they need them done before the state’s deadline.

So HERE is a place to volunteer for ballot curing.

More Writing:

Postcards To Voters is like Vote Forward, but the postage is cheaper and the messages shorter. You can make your own postcards or get them from your home state to let the voter know that we’re all in this together.

Postcards For America is different, but also useful — it sends postcards to elected representatives to help sway their votes.

The Center for Common Ground specializes in BIPOC voters. Again, postcards.

21st Century Stuff:

The Content Creator Team is the place to go if you’re a designer, videographer, artist, or meme creator. Yes, you read that right, you can meme for the team.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has this page here on being a virtual text banker. It’s like phone banking, but no speaking required!

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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!