Tag: Chris Hepler

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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 Mock Someone Who Actually Deserves It

A big red warning light saying "SCAM."

This being the Internet, I’m sure quite a few readers will instantly take exception to the title of this post.

Fear not! This is not about me hating on someone for their politics, though I’ve certainly got some venom in reserve for that these days. Nor is it about their opinions in some fandom. At this point in my life, I try not to slag on any fellow creators, even if I think they could have improved in whatever I’ve read or played or watched. The gods know I’ve made my mistakes and stuck my foot in my mouth plenty of times.

When it comes to a big ol’ public post to put another human being on blast, I reserve my ire for one particular kind of person.

Would-be scammers.

Poof! Everything I’ve Ever Wanted!

Part of the experience of having an indie book self-published is that I get targeted by some inauthentic folks who find my email or my phone number and call me up, promising everything a writer would dream of on a platinum platter. One such type of call goes like this:

I get a call that my caller ID says is Universal Pictures.

I answer, because it usually happens at seven in the morning and I’m bleary and just want to make the ringing stop. And they say…

“Hi, Mr. Hetler [sic], this is Jordan Moblo, Executive Vice President of Acquisitions at Universal Studios. Do you own the rights to the book Civil Blood?”

“That’s me.”

“Mr. Hetler, our intellectual property review team have read your book and believe strongly that it is the sort of A-list property we look for. We are willing to purchase the rights to your book for $300,000 to make a feature film out of it or a Netflix series adaptation. Would you be interested in such a deal?”

“I’m listening.”

“What we’ll do is pay a writer to write a script, put together a pitch presentation, and attract investors. Could you give us your e-mail address so we can forward you a contract?”

“Yeah, okay, I can take a look at your offer.”

This is, in fact, past the point where I stopped listening, because they’ve already hit a LOT of red flags. Then the email arrives… and the last flag flies up. Let me tell you what those flags are, because on the off chance you’re ever in the same situation, this could be useful.

Scam, Scam, Eggs, Sausage and Scam

#1: The Email is Fake

The e-mail always clinches it, because it’s never from a studio’s actual e-mail extension. The mail title always has a name of UNIVERSAL PICTURES (or whatever) and then it’s “jordanmoblo@universal.pictures.mail.com.”

You can Google actual e-mail extensions for people who genuinely work for a major production studio, because they’ll have them. These billion-dollar conglomerates pay for their own employees to use that kind of thing.

A real Universal email would be something like “jordanmoblo@nbcuni.com.” The fake address, you’ll notice, ends in “mail.com,” which is an email-address company like Gmail or Hotmail. You can get your own address that says anything in five minutes or so, but it’ll end with “mail.com.” So the chances that this message is the real deal? Not bloodly likely.

A variant of this happened to me recently with someone impersonating the literary agent Alex Glass. I got a “Endorsement to Major Publishing Houses” e-mail from “alex@glassliterary.org.” If you’ve got sharp eyes, you can see the problem.

A professional agent making those sweet deals isn’t going to have an extension that ends in “.org.” It’d be “.com” because the last thing an agent wants to be is a charity. But the “.org” version was available, so the scammer scooped it up.

#2: The Chain of Command Doesn’t Check Out

Far earlier than the email is the telltale sign when I picked up the phone. The chance that some executive vice president is going to be your first point of contact is Not Fricking Likely.

People in the film biz with any reasonable amount of fame have personal assistants that schedule meetings for them, because their weeks are invariably packed. Even when they aren’t, there’s a constant habit of trying to build anticipation. They like the power move of making anyone more desperate than them wait for the meeting.

Did you see Looney Tunes: Back in Action? In that movie, a Warner Brothers executive says something like “Move my 1:00 to my 2:00, then move my 11:00 to my 1:00 and move my 2:00 back to 1:30 and then cancel it.”

That’s an exaggeration for laughs, but I guarantee that joke got approved because the folks in production could relate.

Oh, and it’s never going to happen with them calling at seven in the morning like some fresh-faced production assistant on their first day. Early bird or not, even they know a call that early is going to be unwelcome.

As for agents, generally agents are inundated with scripts that writers send to them. They have no need to go searching through hundreds of indie novels that haven’t sold a bajillion copies already, looking for some perfect rose on top of a mountain of shit. (Not to slag indie novels — those roses do exist, but the point is, agents don’t need to reach that far to find manuscripts.)

#3: The Deal is Too Fast, Too Much, and Too Good to be True

Entertainment studios, at least back when I worked for them in the early 2000s, didn’t just “purchase rights.” They didn’t drop a giant chunk of change like $300,000 on a book this early in the process. They’ve invariably got a big slate of properties being pitched to them by the smaller fish — production companies. Producers try to find good stories, sometimes in the indie world but more often by talking to writers with agents and traditional publishers. Then they option them to have a chance for them to be made.

The deals are typically more like “I’ll give the author $5,000 for the rights to shop it around for a year.” Then they talk to a screenwriter who’s willing to write a script on spec (i.e. for no money unless the script sells). They work on that in the ensuing year, put the script in front of actors and directors to see if they want to attach themselves, and tie it all together in a pitch. If the year goes by and no one’s interested, the producer’s out $5,000 instead of sitting on a property that could be a dud.

The one exception to this would be if the book is selling like hotcakes (a fact visible in the Amazon rankings, so they shouldn’t have to ask you how it’s doing) and if multiple studios have somehow heard of it and get into a bidding war. But no executive is going to assume one of those already exists and preemptively offer $300,000 when they could start off at 1/60th the price. $300,000 is a scammer trying to get you to say “yes” to something.

#4: And Then They Put the Touch on You

This is the red flag that all legit agents warn authors about. Legit agents make their money off authors when those authors get paid by publishing companies. They take their 10-15% or what-have-you out of the book deal and the rights to other media that they hammer out in big fancy contracts.

What they do not do is ask you to pay some videographer to make a book trailer for you. Or pay some screenwriter to write a screenplay to sell it to a production company. Or anything else that makes the money flow from you to them. It should be flowing in the opposite direction.

Sometimes, if they’re impersonating agents or other promoters, they try to walk you through looking at their website. Gosh, look at all those other writers whose books have gotten onto the New York Times bestseller list! Wouldn’t it be impressive if you had any guarantee that the person on the phone had anything to do with it?

Now, it may seem more reasonable if someone isn’t promising hundred-thousand-dollar deals, but instead calls you up saying they can promote your book to get it into a huge book fair too far away for you to attend. Or maybe they want to create a book trailer for you that only costs $5,000 and because they “believe in your book so strongly” they’ll cover $4,000 and all you have to do is send them $1,000.

Just remember the verifiable facts: some stranger called you up out of the blue and tried to talk you into sending them $1,000. For a scammer, that’s their payday. All the other numbers are wisps of air until proven otherwise.

You shouldn’t be worried about a marketer doing a job of questionable quality on advertising your book. You should want to know what’s your evidence that they are going to do anything at all?

Do you really have reliable contact information for them and a lawyer you can hire if things go south?

Do you have any proof that “the biggest book fair in Mexico” (or wherever) they want to take the book to will actually have them manning a booth, hawking copies? Or are you going to find out that they’ve blocked your number, possibly declared bankruptcy, and left no forwarding address?

Are you going to find that your contract says “you will receive royalties on your re-branded book once it becomes profitable,” with no definition of “profitable?”

I thought so.

Accelerate to Mock One

I’ve done this enough that I’m starting to take great pleasure in ruining these folks’ days. To the “movie studio” wannabes, I tell them this:

“I was greatly impressed at your quote of offering $300,000 for the rights to my indie novel. I have excellent news. I believe in your company so much that I’ll let you have a much better deal. Send me $5,000 to option the rights for a year, and use all the saved money in your budget to create the promotional materials. You can even pay a screenwriter to work up a treatment for a script that I can review. I’m sure you’ll agree that this is a generous offer, and if you have any legitimacy to your claims of business acumen, you will take it. Somehow, I don’t think you will.”

To one wannabe promoter, I wrote:

“Thank you for brightening my day with your kind letter. I have Googled Seraphim Global Marketing LLC, and I can find exactly one book on your site, River’s Trail Home. On that site, it has no reviews. On Amazon, it exists and has *one* review in English and *two* in Amazon.be (which I guess is Belgium). That’s it. While my book does not have many itself (it’s got 47), those numbers do not exactly convince me of your company’s marketing prowess.

“If you want my attention, tell me what the last line of Civil Blood is, and what it’s a callback to (a very similar line occurs earlier in the text). Then, since you are “committed to investing” in books like mine, get me three more reviews on Amazon. They can be from any source and any rating. Otherwise… I will remain unconvinced.”

The most hilarious part of that one was that they leaped into action and wrote back.

“Your point about building trust and legitimacy resonates deeply. I appreciate that you’re seeking genuine engagement with your work, and I’m more than happy to meet your request. Without giving too much away for potential readers, the last line of Civil Blood is a callback to a pivotal moment earlier in the narrative where Victor Varkas reflects on justice, emphasizing the very theme of the book—a commentary on legal rights in a world of the undead. The callback powerfully ties together the personal stakes and systemic struggles, giving closure to both plot and character arcs.”

Sounds cool, right?

Except there’s no character called Victor Varkas in Civil Blood.

Also, that’s not what the last line is about.

This guy could have paid $2.99 for a Kindle copy of my book, flipped to the end, then done a search for similar phrases, and gotten the appearance of what I want. Instead, he asked some AI crap to summarize it for him and got a confidently wrong answer. Not only was he a scammer, he was a lazy scammer, and cheap enough that he wouldn’t even pay for a single copy of my e-book. (Seriously! It’s $2.99 for a 400-page work! Value, baby!)

As for the reviews, he sent me screenshots of people reviewing Civil Blood on Amazon like I was asking for praise instead of trying to get people to read the damn book and comment about it. So I don’t think he was super bright, either, or at least he clearly misunderstood the assignment.

I Tried So Hard, and Got So Far, But In the End, It Doesn’t Even Matter

Now, I don’t think these guys (and they’re all guys so far) are ever going to stop. I told “Readers Magnet” that I wasn’t interested and to stop calling me a year or more ago, and my caller ID still shows their name and number popping up. Such is the indie publishing life. Apparently even putting your number in the national Do Not Call Registry doesn’t fully deter these jerks.

I don’t pretend I can hold back these idiots’ tide with a bucket. But hopefully, this post will be another resource for writers to refer to when they want their suspicions confirmed. Other sites like Writer Beware dedicate much more time and resources to this sort of thing, so be sure to check them out.

And if the scammer wants to know why you’re laughing at their e-mail, just send them a link to here. Because that’s what I’m going to do from now on.

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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 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 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 Dodge This

The picture shows the heroes of the game, known as Wayfinders: Senja, Niss, Wingrave, Silo and Kyros.

2023 started off, for me, with some seriously annoying moments. Key among them was my son catching COVID around January 3rd. We tried to isolate him in his room, and started wearing masks even when going from one room to another in the house. But my wife (Jennifer) and my daughter (Beverly) caught it anyway, which really sucked. Beverly’s case was pretty mild — she’s had it before, in the summer of 2022 — but it hit my wife like a truck, and we had to get her on Paxlovid to kill off the brain fog, the body aches, and fever. Some nine days later, the kids started testing negative and so did Jenny… until the rebound hit, which is a known danger with Paxlovid. After 5 more days of feeling like utter garbage and an additional 5 of isolation, she’s still not at 100%. Her job now is to concentrate on getting better.

And me?

Well, on day 1 I had a negative test. And day 2 I had another. And then I kind of had a runny nose from breathing the humid inside of a mask on day 3, but still tested negative. Days 4-6 my nose dried up a little, and I developed a headache from the mask straps, but tested negative all three days, and you know what, I lasted through 16 days of straight negative tests despite having 3 other positive people in a pretty small house.

Never caught the dang thing. I don’t know how exactly. I’ve tried to be good about it, but I would be totally unsurprised if I had some level of immunity. Here’s what I did:

  • I wore masks in the house a LOT.
  • I tried to limit exposure as much as possible to parts of the house where other people breathe, while still doing the dishes, laundry, and other essentials. Eat food, mask back on, do dishes, retreat upstairs.
  • I only exercised outside, not anywhere where there might be droplets in the air. Because it’s been raining up a storm here, that’s cut short my regimen quite a lot.
  • I’m vaxxed and boosted, and have a pretty strong immune system. When I was in 8th grade, chicken pox inconvenienced me for 4 days where it took out other kids for 2 weeks.
  • I washed my hands whenever I touched anything someone else may have messed with, and dried my hands on disposable paper towels or towels that I knew no one else in the house used.

As much as my immediate family resents my immune system, it was pretty useful for me to be able to run to the pharmacy or supermarket like a hornbill fetching food for the nest.

Now, on another note, 2023 has had a few upsides. First among them: I am employed again. I’m working for Airship Syndicate on their upcoming MMO-esque game Wayfinder.

“If you want to be in the club, you gotta do the pose!”

Wayfinder is a post-apocalyptic fantasy with arcane technology. Most of the world has been lost in a wave of infective chaos called the Gloomfall, and the spiritual echoes of great heroes reappear to battle it. There’s a FAQ here.

The game is doing closed tests now, but they need a lot of words to be written before launch, so I’m signed up and ready to rock. I’m now in my third week of work, and I’m getting really jazzed about the stories we can tell in the game.

As for personal writing time — I got in a little over winter break, and am now about 10,000 words into Civil Blood‘s sequel. Unfortunately, once the Covid hit, the time doing chores kind of killed my morale, and once I was gainfully employed, my spare time started going towards playing the game I’m working on. Now that the house is plague-free once again, I’m looking forward to getting back in the groove. It’s where the music is.

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In Which Months Go By

580 letters to voters.

I once flipped through a dictionary (Merriam-Webster Collegiate, I think) and found that in the back, they had a super-cool list of foreign words and phrases that are or were popular. You know, like the Latin “finis coronat opus,” which translates to “the end crowns the work.” If you ever want to whip out the snotty literary criticism, throw that baby in and sound like a scholar, when all you’re really saying is “a story needs to stick the landing, or it doesn’t add up to much.”

I think my favorite, though, is “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus,” which is “Mountains will go into labor, and a silly little mouse will be born.” That one’s about overpromising and underdelivering. You know, like the game that’s been delayed ten years that better be the Second Coming of Almighty Zeus when it comes out, or else all that expense and hard work will be met with a resounding “meh.” (It’s kind of telling that there’s a few games out there this could apply to.)

Me, I try not to overpromise. But it has been a long time since I posted, so I hope you weren’t betting on me giving birth to a mountain. There’s been good news and bad news in my life, my career, and my personal writing. So let’s take a tour.

I Got (More) Political This Year

As I posted in 2020’s “In Which I Give Worried Introverts Something to Do,” I decided to use a not-insignificant amount of my spare time to volunteer for a get-out-the-vote campaign. This year, I started earlier than I did in 2020 because historically Democrats don’t turn out in midterms, and if past was prologue, they were going to get pasted.

I wrote 20 letters a week to get voters to turn out in Texas, Georgia, Florida, Nevada and Pennsylvania. By the time of the big send-off in late October, I finished 580 letters, about 100 more than I managed in 2020 if you include the Georgia runoff. It would have been nice to do an even 600, but in that last week I was crunching at work and totally out of brain fuel. Then, the next week, when it became clear Georgia was going to another runoff for its Senate seat, I burned all my free time and got an additional 100 letters out.

I don’t regret the time spent — the Democrats snatched a stalemate from the jaws of defeat and broke a pattern 20+ years long of getting routed in midterm elections. However, I am quite happy campaign season is over for the moment. I have a little more time on the weekends, and the ability to find other topics to talk about on Twitter.

I Tried To Be an Involved Dad

Just a minor note here from a proud pops: I helped teach my daughter how to drive and I wrangled my son through a frustrating season of soccer. Both kids’ grades are pretty great, and they seem to be thriving. Couldn’t be happier with them.

Some other obstacles came our way: my daughter got COVID for about 10 days. She was vaxxed and wasn’t in much danger, but it hit her like a truck. The rest of the family masked up and sanitized religiously and all somehow avoided it, even including a 3-hour car trip (shout-out to my wife for doing the driving, windows down the whole way).

I Kept Submitting Stories

I wrote and rewrote a few more short stories, but they have yet to find a home anywhere. As with martial arts, where you are only as good as your next move, a writer can have great experience and skill and still, the story may not resonate with whoever’s at the editing desk. So that was disappointing and consumed a bit of time.

Then There’s Civil Blood‘s Sequel

When I last posted about the sequel, I was reviewing its outline, trying to turn it into the book I really wanted to read. Rather than write by the seat of my pants, I spent a month or so planning it out and adding notes for a direction in which to take a third book. This all took time, but I’ve managed to get started on the manuscript itself. As of this writing, I have one chapter down and a pretty good grip on the second, so I really want to make this happen sooner rather than later. It’s been “later” long enough.

I Crunched Like the Captain

This one is kind of bittersweet. After months of work that sucked up weekends and evenings, my job with Mattel163 came to a close. The project is in soft launch now (it’s not in the US or China yet) and the prognosis is good for it being able to ship. I’ll tell you all about it when it goes wide, but right now I need to set my sights elsewhere.

…and We Lost Some Good Ones

Lastly, some things happened on a vastly more serious note. Some of my life had to be put on hold to grieve.

Since I last posted, three people I knew died. The first, Jerome Joaquin Mabrey, was a gamer I met at San Diego Comic Con in 2012. He was on the first team to beat the Mass Effect multiplayer’s fancy new Platinum difficulty, he ran a great Facebook group called Nerd Alert, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of space opera. The second was Kevin Barrett, who was director of design at BioWare and was responsible for giving myself and my wife our most significant video game industry job. We used to love arguing with him in a BioWare dev book club. We disagreed all the freaking time, but we never had a negative experience with him. The third was Ferret Baudoin, who worked with my wife on Dragon Age, ran a killer Roman-themed D&D campaign for us, and after the BioWare diaspora, wound up at Bethesda. I had mad respect for all three of these men, and the world is smaller for not having them in it.

…and that’s all, he wrote.

So, all told, this summer and fall were pretty busy. I don’t have a lot to show you just yet, but I hope you’ll understand that sometimes, life isn’t a performance, or all about your next gig. Quite often, it’s day-to-day progress, or even just holding the line when that progress tries to disappear.

Festina lente. (In English idiom, “More haste, less speed.”)

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In Which I Share a Heartwarming Story About Torture

How things change in a year. The last time I got a short story accepted, it was a goofy tale of some poor sap in the superhero equivalent of the DMV, getting beaten up to test if he really had regeneration powers.

This time around, it’s a grimdark high fantasy story of Camelot after Arthur’s death, where all the good he did died with him. An unscrupulous king, Constantine, has sent a would-be knight to find Arthur’s legendary spear, the Rhongomyniad. It was last seen in the hands of Mordred’s court torturer, and no one should bat an eye about putting a torturer in pain to get what they want… right?

That’s the premise of “The Torturer of Camelot,” a story about disobeying orders, the limits of forgiveness, and if we are more than our worst deeds. I wrote it last year for the FantaSci writing contest. The theme was “magical relics,” so all the stories had to have items of legend, and the anthology was in the Books of Valor series, so they had to have some valorous deeds in them as well.

I burned some midnight oil in order to get it written, critiqued, revised, and submitted before the deadline… and it all paid off.

The anthology, Keen Edge of Valor, was released at the FantaSci 2022 convention in North Carolina this March. Four finalists from the contest were published in the 14 stories of the anthology, and first place went to…

…um…

…me.

I haven’t really been in this position before. I’ve entered a few writing contests, but the last one I placed in was more than two decades ago. I tried for an Isaac Asimov Award for undergraduates, and got an honorable mention for a cyberpunk story. So as you may surmise, I’m kind of pleased at this turn of events.

I also haven’t really mentally absorbed the whole situation yet. The week of its publication, I was in a frenzy trying to finish off some work at my day job so I could go on a vacation with a clean conscience. Then it was a week in Hawai’i, where my attention was taken up by all the lovely things there (volcanoes, dolphins, geckos, swimming, you name it) and when I found the urge to write, I made some progress on another humorous short story which may or may not ever see the light of day. Its deadline could be soon in the grand scheme of things, and I still need to find the funny, so that’s where my nighttime writing focus is.

Once that’s sorted out, I promise, it’s back to Civil Blood‘s sequel planning, which is what this whole short story detour was originally intended to bring about.

But here it is, short and sweet: If you want to check out the anthology, Keen Edge of Valor is here. It’s the third anthology put out by New Mythology Press/Chris Kennedy Publishing, so if you like it, don’t forget the other two might be up your alley, too.

Bring some steel arrowheads. I heard iron is proof against the fay. Even that one.

Goodnight.

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In Which My Novel’s Sequel Starts Actually Happening

Longtime readers may remember my novel Civil Blood, and particularly attentive readers may remember the reasons I hadn’t started working on a sequel yet. Long story short, I promised my family I’d only begin work once I had accumulated a nest egg big enough to pay for a cover and editor(s), assuming costs in the same neighborhood as my previous self-publishing venture. The catch was, this nest egg would solely be financed by my other personal writing, and my path to that was A) novel sales, and B) short story sales. Since I have little in the way of advertising budget and thus a very meagre novel-based income, I ended up relying on “B.”

Well… with a final anthology sale coming out in 2022, approach “B” has finally put the numbers over the top. So now I have a little news: I’m finally working on a sequel to Civil Blood. Here’s what I can say:

  • I am currently in the outlining stage. It will take me a few months before I start the rough draft. I should warn the reader that it takes me years to write a novel.
  • I have tentatively titled it with another blood-related Shakespearian phrase (again, with echoes of the play, but the specific title may give away some of the parallelism in the plot, so I’ll be mum on that for now).
  • The story will deal with an American presidential election in the time of VIHPS. Though I hesitate to use the word “pandemic,” the vampire virus is the top issue on the minds of the electorate. It is not, however, the only issue, and part of the political dealings is that Infinity and Ranath will have to choose whom to support despite the candidates not matching up with their every ideal.
  • The main characters of Civil Blood will be the main characters in this story as well. There will be many familiar faces, and a few names only hinted at in Civil Blood will have some stage time in this one.
  • I might be able to make this story comprehensible if you haven’t read Civil Blood, but I’m not betting on it. As I work on the outline, I realize that trying to sum up why a character is not only a doctor but also a hitman and also has his hands on potentially world-changing research that he didn’t actually do just stretches credulity. I may have to highlight that it’s “The Skia Project, Book 2” and just roll with that.
  • Ideally it will not have a cliffhanger ending, because at this moment I don’t know the chances of making a third installment. Also, I like books to have enough of a satisfying thematic resolution that they can stand on their own. So, less The Empire Strikes Back and more Terminator 2.

To all the fans of CB that have stuck with me this far… thank you. I hope to make you happy once more.

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In Which I Am Gainfully Employed

One of the “problems” with my writing career trajectory is that I’m not a specialist. If you really want to be a household name as a writer, you create a series and you get fans devoted to it. There are a lot of examples I could pick from, but let’s go with Agatha Christie.

“Why?” you ask? Because according to the Guinness Book of World Records, Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time. She’s sold more than two billion (with a “b”) books. Her name is synonymous with detective mysteries, having written 66 of the things. She wrote a few plays, some of them record-breakingly popular in their own right — they were mysteries, too. And her branding was helped by the fact that when she wrote a handful of non-detective novels, she did so under a pen name. She specialized, and it paid off.

Me? I’m the opposite. You never know what the hell I’m writing next, and sometimes neither do I. Since my last blog post about My Loft, I’ve been working on:

1) A visual novel (romance genre). It is now complete but not public yet.
2) Lore for a fantasy RPG video game. It’s in pre-production, totally not public.
3) A metric ton of writing tests for various companies.
4) Submitting short stories to various online magazines, some in the Civil Blood universe, some humorous superhero stories, and one cli-fi piece.

The first two are both gigs that ended recently, which meant I had to throw myself into #3 with a vengeance. #3 and #4 were the most discouraging, as my hit-to-miss ratio is typical of freelance writers — in other words, there were a lot of rejections. But, as of today, things are looking up.

I have been so fortunate as to accept a position with Mattel163, a mobile game developer and subsidiary of the famous toy company. I am working on an unannounced project as a full-time employee, and I want to make it sing.

What does that mean for you, the audience? I don’t know yet. All indications are that I will be up late at night on this job, since many of my co-workers are in Shanghai, 15 time zones away from me. On the other hand, a lot of my mental energy was taxed during my job hunt, so I may end up feeling happier and healthier, with a little security in my life once more.

That means I could end up able to do more personal writing, and submit more stories to more outlets.

One question that has come up regards Amazon’s Kindle Vella. In case you haven’t heard, Kindle Vella is essentially a platform for monetizing short stories and serial works on a Kindle, which naturally made my ears perk up. As always, a little more personal writing income means I can afford a second indie-publishing venture — a full-fledged sequel to Civil Blood. There’s two drawbacks to Kindle Vella: the first is that it’s got a limit of 6,000 words per installment, which is a little short for my taste. The more difficult hurdle for me to get over is that you have to build your brand — it takes a lot of 99-cent stories to add up to a single traditionally-published short story in a magazine, which could net $500 or so. That’s the reality. I’m working on building an e-mail list, an important step in the whole author ecosystem, but I don’t have any illusions about indie-pub sales.

So, will I die before my dream goal is achieved and leave you all in the lurch? Well, I’m happy to say I’m fully vaccinated as of today. It’s not proof against being hit by a bus, but as Bill Murray said, “I got that going for me, which is nice.”

Stay cool.