What's Next?

I sometimes find myself thinking about what I'll do after The Nameless Way. I'm still not sure. It's not that I don't have any ideas I'm excited about; it's that I have too many. And I talked a little in 2025 about what happens when I fail to keep my imps in line.

One candidate is Ghosts of Blackridge, the one I actually started before I switched to Nameless Way. It's kind of a soap-ish horror thing based loosely on my college years. We didn't have quite so many demons running around then -- not literal ones, anyway -- but adaptations are never perfect. 

The pitch: An inhuman spirit preys on students in a fictional late-80s college town in the Arkansas River Valley. No one knows where it came from or who to trust. Or maybe some of them do. There's another newcomer to Blackridge, someone with plans to put the demon to use in his own schemes. 

I wrote quite a bit of this when Amazon introduced its now-defunct serial fiction platform. It's some of the worst writing I've ever done. I like the plot. I like the characters. I'm even proud of the way I made the setting my own. The actual prose, though, is bland garbage. It reads more like an outline than a finished story, or even a good draft. I think it's worth fixing, though. 

Forgotten Cities of the Komaran Sea is another one I tried to serialize. Like The Nameless Way, this one was inspired by some D&D adventures. Unlike Nameless Way, "inspired by" is pretty much where the relationship ends. 

The pitch: A traveler plunges through a misty otherworld to an abandoned underground temple, where he meets a group of ruthless treasure-hunters and learns that he is in a desert in an unfamiliar, dying, land. Even though he knows he can't trust them, he doesn't see any other way to survive the hostile environment, so he joins the strangers and helps them search for the relics of the lost civilization. 

This one is actually a sequel to Losing Lanterns (for those who've read it, the protagonist is Aradoc), but it stands alone. It digs into a lot of things I've wanted to explore for a while. As far as having emotional patterns I want to infect you with and a vision of life I need to share, this is the best of the three. I'm not sure I'm ready to grow it into what it needs to be, though. 

If I were getting started today, I'd probably be working on one I've been calling "Dogstar" in my head. There is an absolute zero chance of this being the actual title, by the way. The name comes from -- well, let's back up a bit. 

A little while back, I talked about this thing that's been percolating in my head for a long time. Imagine telling stories as a sort of Plato's Cave scenario. There's the story being told now, but, somewhere outside, there's the pure story, the story everyone is trying to tell. No story we tell is the real story; it's just what we've put together from the bits we can see. It's impossible for any medium to convey the pure story. Our stories are only shadows. 

The idea of a pure story behind the story was the foundation of The Nameless Way. I've been digging into a chaotic mess of scenarios and, not just mechanically translating them into a coherent story, but dissolving and distilling and reconstituting them to taste what I can of the truer story they came from. 

So anyway, there was this space opera comic strip I did when I was eleven or so years old, just a grid on sheets of notebook paper. It starred a rocket-powered talking dog (based on Mike's favorite bean bag toy) who gets sucked through a black hole into another universe, where he has a series of outer space adventures. That's why my placeholder name is "Dogstar." 

There's a stack of those comic strips that I've somehow managed not to lose over the years. As I suggested earlier, I'm studying the whole pile like it's a bad translation of a great story, a transmission I was trying to relay, but couldn't get right. 

While I've resisted the urge to actually start writing it, I did build a Scrivener file for it and I poke at the details every now and then. I've already uncovered a promising narrative and a bunch of characters with interesting conflicts and story arcs. There's even a little romance. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. It always looks easier in this phase. I haven't even made up my mind how I'm going to portray the dog. 

Of course, I've got to finish the one I'm on, first. My New Year's Resolution was to publish at least part of it (maybe I'll explain what I mean later) this year, and that still looks like a plausible goal. I got a lot done before I had to go full time on the money-grubbing and, now that I'm adapting to the situation (and the new manager helped me get a schedule that doesn't completely crush my soul), it's picking up again. 

You can also find this on my Substack, Whiskey and Fire. 

Child of Fire

Remember me talking about the Blackridge setting and the series of short novels I had in mind for it? No? That's okay. I was thinking about it the other day and rattled this out. If you want to find out a little more, click that link and scroll down past this post.

Prologue

Lyssa checked the clock for the first time since‭… ‬okay,‭ ‬thirty seconds ago.‭ ‬The storm was almost here.‭ ‬She adjusted Professor Gathright's expensive lens array and looked at the sky.‭ ‬Glowing green and red wisps were already sliding across the horizon.‭ ‬In the grooves of the carved circle and its inscribed triangle,‭ ‬orange salt flickered with more than reflected light.

The crystal lenses lit up as the solar flare illuminated more and more of the sky. The electric lights around her surged with the induced current. One of them popped but the others, chosen with this phenomenon in mind, held up. Lyssa made some adjustments to the array and watched the triangle.

She gasped as a pale blue, almost invisible, flame sprang up from the concrete floor inside the triangle, rising to a height of six feet before thickening to a foot or so in diameter. Much as she wanted to see this, much as she trusted the work she and Professor Gathright had done, she had never really expected it to work. The fire shifted to a deeper blue and tightened into a human-like shape.

Electricity arced from surface to surface. Lyssa could feel the charge tingling in her skin and lifting her hair. The lights flared and faded, but they were unnecessary now. The fiery figure in the triangle grew unbearably bright. Before she had to avert her eyes, Lyssa saw its head tilt back, as if it were looking up through the lenses.

Something grabbed her head and turned her face irresistibly back to the shape of fire. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to raise her hands to cover them, but her arms wouldn't move. The light burned through her lids, first red, then white. She begged. She sobbed. She screamed.

When the phantom hands released her, Lyssa collapsed into darkness.

Shadow of the Peryton

Qalidar: Resistance - Thursday, July 30, 8pm-Midnight
Promo Blurb: The quiet college town of Blackridge is being haunted by a soaring shadow, a dark, winged shape with antlers. On the ground, weird agents are looking for something, terrorizing people in their homes and then disappearing. Is it just a coincidence that there's a nuclear power plant nearby?

For this one, I had five players, taking the Ascendant, Fixer, Karcist, Mystic, and Scrapper characters. They were third level, high enough to have some cool powers, but low enough that they can't just rampage through the town. I opened with the statement that they had all done a little bit of Storm walking, but this was a familiar town on a familiar world. The Fixer was actually a student at the local college (University of Arkansas at Blackridge) and the Karcist was his dad.

As the blurb promises, there had been some weird sightings and some suspicious retractions, and the heroes were there to check it out. Also, there wasn't really a nuke plant in town, but several people had seen the ghostly image of one across the lake.

After finding out what they could from their senile motel manager, they headed out to the college to interview students. After stalking a few, they found their way to Matt, a zine publisher who was able to point them in the direction of Jim and Stacy, who had seen the creature, and to Doctor Morton, who had made a public statement and then retracted it. Also, there had been bigfoot sightings at the Cliffs overlooking the river, but not even Matt put much stock in those stories. The Mystic and the Fixer saw a cloud that looked like a steam plume from a nuclear plant.

Morton wasn't terribly helpful, but Jim and Stacy independently provided fairly consistent accounts of an encounter on a hiking trail on Chactas Mountain. The Ascendant had a strange, brief conversation with a man in a suit. They really did see Bigfoot at the Cliffs, much to the Fixer's delight. The Karcist nailed him with a magic feather and he floated off into the foliage below.

On a nocturnal trip to the lake, they encountered a pair of eyeless children whose psychic assault almost killed the Karcist. The Ascendant encountered another man in a suit hidden in the trees, but he (the man in black, not the Ascendant) disappeared during the fight with the other creatures. I was gratified by the level of creepedoutedness my players displayed in reaction to this encounter.

Finally, they made their way out to Chactas Mountain, where the Karcist's ghostly helper led them to the peryton, actually just a winged shadow-humanoid with smoky tendrils twisting up from its head. In the fight, it was destroyed fairly quickly, only to release a fiery wraith from its charcoal-coated skeleton. The wraith was eventually destroyed by the Scrapper's crystal knife as well, leaving a fine, iridescent dust which the Fixer collected in a canteen.

Renting a boat from Ray's 24-Hour Marine, they went out to the nuclear plant and confirmed the Mystic's intuition that the forces drawing it towards this reality (which would have been extremely disruptive) had been neutralized by the creature's destruction. There was other stuff that led them to all this information, but that's the general idea.

And, damn it, I forgot to tell them about interrupts, which is a pity, because interrupts are cool.

Back to the Gen Con Write-Up:
http://www.christinalea.com/2015/08/gencon15.html

Carnage, Social Media, and Bad Ideas

I switched my main focus from Blackridge to the Bad Idea. I just found myself too consistently pulled in that direction, while every step on Blackridge was feeling forced. Still, maybe someday. There's a lot of potential there, and I developed some cool stuff while I was working on it. One of my Gen Con events is set in Blackridge, even.

Qalidar... yeah, I know. I'll get there.

I submitted one event (Doctor Who: Out of Joint) for Carnage. Planning to put in one more. I'm thinking it'll be D&D or another Doctor Who. Possibly both, at which point I guess the "one more" bit would need updating.

I probably won't be visible much on Google Plus or my public Facebook page for at least a few weeks. Maybe longer. I think social media stuff is consuming way more brainspace than it's worth right now. Seems like I've been figuring out ways to talk about what I'm working on more than I'm actually working on it. I'll probably still tweet a random thought now and then, though. It's easy enough to blurt those out and be done with it.

Here's a picture of a tree.

Eyes Open

Losing Lanterns was as good as Losing Lanterns could be, but there are things that nag me about it. Chief among them is that it's a novella made out of short stories. It was never really plotted out the way a novel should be, so it has a weird, lumpy, pacing and... other stuff... I guess. Yeah, boring topic. I only mentioned it because I'm excited to be doing this next one the right way.

Okay, technically, my next-up project is another Qalidar supplement, but I don't have a lot more to say about that. Okay, a little bit, but then we move on to novels. The Qalidar supplement is going to have the rules for taking characters up to 20th level, which is as high as I see it going. Beyond that, it's going to focus on a species of aliens called the stardust, including sections about their technology, organizations, goals, and methods. That's pretty much it. Mostly it's material I wrote a long time ago that just needs cleaning up.

One project that isn't next is a fantasy novel that's been slithering around the back of my head for the past 15 or 16 years. It's based on an our 1999-2000 D&D campaign, which is why I have been referring to it as my bad idea. A story like that -- even after I turn it into a coherent story -- is going to be full of nostalgic moments and other memories that mean nothing beyond a very small group of people. Naturally, I can write around that, but my own unreliable instincts would be something I'd have to constantly look out for. See? Bad idea, right? There's still a good chance I'll try it -- I came up with some great stuff just tinkering -- but not this time.

Another contender, one I haven't mentioned before, is a different fantasy novel. This one would feature Aradoc (from Losing Lanterns) on his own in a strange, dying land. The reason for this and for his jumbled memories is something that gets worked out as we go. No, it's not Hell or any other kind of dead people place. The other thing going on is a tense desert journey with a group of adventurers with loosely overlapping agendas and not much in the way of scruples. And lots of other stuff that I'm not prepared to go into here. Again, this is definitely still in the queue; it's just not next in line.

The winner? Welcome to Blackridge, a fictional college town in the Arkansas River valley. A diverse collection of characters plot and scheme in a vaguely soapish fashion. Also, some of them are conjuring spirits and making deals with dangerous alien intelligences. I'm hoping to combine some engaging characters with an area I know very well for a backdrop and some low-key but creepy paranormal/occult stuff to keep them hopping. There's an actual plot in there too, but I'm keeping that to myself for now. I don't have a title yet.

Imagine the perfect conclusion.