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. 

2024(-ish): More Than I Thought

A while back, I lamented that it had taken me nine years to write 55,000 (now closer to 60) words of The Nameless Way, and I still had a long way to go. I was thinking about how that happened. I don't much feel like recapping 2024, at least not in public, but the New Year seems to be a good time to look back on the stuff I've been doing since I started this novel in 2015.

I committed to the book as my main project in June of 2015, and started writing the draft (except for the prologue, which I wrote in 1999 or 2000 or so) in August or September. The first chapter was based on the adventure I started the original campaign with. Getting that down was the most fun I had had writing in a long time. I think the second chapter was pretty easy too, although it was an almost entirely new story to explain some stuff from a segment I couldn't use. That's a topic for another blog, though. 

I think it was 2016 when other stuff started eating into my progress. I don't mean the usual stuff. I don't mean the dayjob, or gaming, or conventions, or eBay, or even random crises like bouts of depression. Those are all issues, but not issues worth commenting on. That's just life. The delays I'm looking at now are the side projects. 

Some of those projects were things I felt committed to because I had already done most of the creative part and just never shared it. Some of them were things I thought would make me some money to keep me going while I finished The Nameless Way. On that second purpose, it's worth noting that none of them succeeded. In retrospect, it's almost like I was being scolded for straying from The Plan. 

So, the first thing was Qalidar. I had already given up on my original vision for a Qalidar Role-Playing Game, partly because my soul was crushed in mid-stream by personal shit, but also because I had been thinking for a while that designing games was never going to keep my demons fed. So I settled on a less ambitious way to finish what I started. I made a "basic" book with an adventure and introductory rules. This was before I started on The Nameless Way. Rather than making a book of complete rules or something like that, I decided that I would follow the basic book with supplements, which would eventually expand it to a more complete game. Less satisfying and, obviously, less marketable, but honest. 

I published Supplement 1: The Fire Within, in 2016. The original idea was that each supplement would highlight a particular culture/race/whatever. This got fudged right at the start, though, because my real goal for the first supplement was to make sure the game worked all the way to the standard d20 level cap of twenty, to finish the rules for organizations, and to cover any missing equipment and stuff like that from the basic book. Ultimately, it was obvious to even a casual reader that the cultural focus on the Stardust was just an afterthought. I already knew there would be no more culture-focused books when I finished this one. I was just paying lip service to that plan. 

In another year, there was Supplement 2, the Qalidar Qritter Qatalog. As before, this was something I felt I owed to the two or three people who had actually played or purchased Qalidar. Also, part of the main artist's pay was a cut of PDF sales, so, having already delivered some amazing work, he deserved at least a little effort on my part. By this time, I knew I was never going to go on with the culture-focused supplements. I did have a bunch of creatures I could share, though, and I knew the game wouldn't be complete without them. It was just a matter of formatting it all. And of course formatting takes time. 

Because of its weird production history, the Qalidar game is a little awkward if you want to put it all together and dive right in to the full game. It still works well, I think, if you play the intro scenario and move on to the rest from there. I still enjoy playing it. Well, running it. I'm the only GM, so that's all I can do. Every once in a while, I think I'd like to put it all together into one book like a normal RPG. I know I shouldn't. 

There was a little bit of ghostwriting. Four projects, scattered across the time I was doing this other work. That actually did pay, but not nearly enough to justify the time it ate. And yes, that's all I'm going to say about it.

HOGZILLA! HOGZILLA! HOGZILLA! Or TerrorHog. Whatever. The Hogzilla episode of The Last Drive-In was lots of fun. Not long after that, we had planned one of our "hoot" get-togethers. I started putting together a Hogzilla Crawlspace scenario to run at that event, complete with insanity rules and a drinking game. However, most of our gaming friends in Ohio had become unreliable, so that hoot never happened. 

Anyway, Tom convinced me that I should put it together for publication, because that would be easy. There's a big difference between my convention-event notes and an intelligible scenario that someone else could run. Like, seriously, I'll go to Gen Con with only some pre-gens, a vague idea, and some names scribbled down. If I had to actually prepare for the games I ran at conventions, I would never run games at conventions. 

Thinking I might reach a new audience, I dove into the rabbit hole and made TerrorHog, the Hogzilla game. Joe Bob Briggs held the book up on TV in his goofy Biedermeir/pimp costume, Shudder tweeted about it on their official account, and still nobody bought it. To paraphrase Joe Bob's introduction of the movie, I did all that work, only to find that the world was not clamoring for Hogzilla role-playing games. Another cosmic rebuke for my infidelity.  

The next thing was that Amazon announced this new feature for publishing serials in 2020. I immediately thought of Blackridge, which had originally been patterned after serial format stuff. I had just moved and, obviously, lost my job, so I thought this could help. It inspired me to start a second serial on a different platform, just to, you know, feel out the market. This stuff actually overlapped the Hogzilla thing, by the way.

The first one was the Blackridge serial on Amazon. I still feel that it's a great story. I like the characters and it had a great plot. Unfortunately, the episodes I published were some of the worst writing I've ever done. Well, the worst since college, anyway. It was more like the Cliff's Notes of a story than an actual story. 

At the same time, I also tried to serialize the Komar novel I had been outlining, the sort-of sequel to Losing Lanterns, starring Aradoc, with characters from my high school D&D group as the sociopathic treasure hunters he gets stuck in the desert with. The stuff I wrote for this was better, but also rushed. As before, I was cranking it out for all the wrong reasons. It was very much a story worth telling. It's still a story I want to tell, but it wasn't the right time. I also think the weird proprietary token buy-in thing Amazon and this other platform were pushing was stupid, but that doesn't redeem my infidelity. 

Part of the plan for TerrorHog was to make it a complete game, since we couldn't assume that the audience we were trying to reach would have any interest in investing in a new game on top of the pig monster book. To make it easier to get into, I made a customized version of Crawlspace, made only for the one-shot with the pre-generated characters. That being the case, we thought it might be nice to have a version of those rules that could stand on its own with character generation and stuff like that. So I put Crawlspace: 21 & Over together for that. 

I collaborated on a novella with a friend. She had already written most of it. All I did was go back through to insert some weird stuff about nephilim and write the end. As it happens, both of us had done much better work on our own projects. Her part was probably the better of the two, but I did enjoy sinking Columbus and a lot of southern Ohio into a giant magma pit. 

After all that, there's another edition of Stars, Specters, and Super-Powers. The first edition had a terrible cover, and I had omitted a story that should have been in it. I also added some background stuff and art Mike did for the comic book plot that led to "The Man Comes Around." Having this book and Losing Lanterns out there and looking good when The Nameless Way finally drops, has been part of The Plan for a long time, so that was unquestionably worth doing. 

So, why blather on about all this? Mostly as a reminder to myself. Memory plays tricks on you. I keep coming back to, "What have I been doing all this time? What's the point if this is all I've got after nine years?" I sometimes wonder if it was all like the past couple of weeks, during which I've hardly written anything because I've been buried in life garbage and it messes with my head even when it's not stealing my time. I can look at this, though, and remind myself that I wasn't just staring at the wall the whole time. 

And I guess it's also a reminder that the time side projects take up isn't free. 

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2023: Schemes and Dreams

I wasn't going to bother with the New Year thing -- I barely mentioned it last year -- but, since the timing lines up with a couple of announcements I've been waiting to make, I figured that post might as well do double duty. 

The Announcements

First, I put together a new edition of Stars, Specters, and Super-Powers. I did it mostly because it had always bothered me that I rushed it out with such an awful cover. I also had one more story I wanted to add, one that I thought about including the first time but, for reasons I don't remember, left out. Since I was doing all this anyway, I thought I could add a couple more things to make it worth a second look: an RPG scenario I had written up based on one of the stories, and a comic book plot that inspired one of the others. And I threw in the art my brother drafted for a page of that comic book plot. 

The other announcement is audiobook formats for both Stars and Losing Lanterns. I used AI readers because they were free. Think what you will of that. All I'm going to say is, I write my own stories and pay real artists to draw the pictures. A program that converts text to speech is basically just a another kind of printer. Someday I'd love to hire a calligrapher instead, but it's wonderful to have this in the meantime.

Both books in all their various stores and formats can be found at: 

https://books2read.com/ChristinaLea

The Other Stuff

After a fun game of The One Ring at BASHCon, I almost fell back into running RPGs. Boring story for the most part: by coincidence, I missed the first session and that made me think about the fact that it was a mistake to be doing it at all. The thing about RPGs is, I'd like to be using the miniscule amount of time that's actually mine either writing or semi-passively relaxing. Role-playing games are neither. They accomplish nothing and, if you start to relax, everybody gets mad because you're not contributing.

More recently, it occurred to me that what I'm really tired of is the pseudo-social ritual of video-chat gaming. For gaming to be more than just the needy bastard of productivity and relaxation, it needs to be in person. There needs to be hanging out, snacking, ordering a pizza or even pausing to go out together. It needs to be a party. I guess that's why I still enjoy it sometimes at conventions. 

Projects: I've kinda been all over the place creatively, but I can't think of any way it could help me to talk about that. It never has before. I'm actually not sure why I tell you people anything at all. I've already written the other stuff, though, so I might as well publish it. 

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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.

Losing Lanterns - Finished!

Hey, don't bother reading this long, meandering post! Just look at the cover, then run over to Amazon right now and grab the book in whichever format you prefer. It's pretty cheap, and better than anything you'll find in the ratty old blogosphere.

Still here? Hrm. Well... Okay, I guess I'll have to blather on about how I ended up writing this - as in history'n all that. Once upon a time, there was Eposic. They published my story, "Starshadows in Sideways Time" in The Book of Exodi (out of print).

After that book, the next one was scheduled to be Out of Order, in which the theme was, as you might have guessed, stories with a mixed-up temporal presentation. I don't remember if time travel was a requirement or if Faulknerizing would be allowed. My submission for that book was "As Always," the precursor to Part One of this novella.

Well, Eposic accepted "As Always," but went out of business before Out of Order was published, so I got the story back. I sent it to a couple of other places. I also sent the story that would become Part Three of Losing Lanterns around a bit. "As Always" actually got accepted by another outfit that went out of business before publication. I got a couple more rejections and got bored with the whole process. I know, I know, but it just occurred to me that I already knew how to get art and do layouts and all that, so maybe there was no reason to burn all those hours dealing with the ritual bullshit of submitting stories elsewhere.

I had intended all along for the two stories to mesh into a larger collection once they were done with their appearances in third party magazines, so I decided to just go ahead and re-shape them into a novel. Or a novella. Whatever.

Then I finished it, and everybody hated the end. Eventually, I agreed with them.

Then I finished it again, and here it is.

Another Year Over

In a lot of ways, 2014 was dominated by mourning. I don't mean to say that I spent the whole time shuffling around in goth gear, wailing for my dead brother, just that dealing with the loss influenced a lot of what I did and how I saw the world. I'm not done with that process - I'm not sure I ever will be - but I think 2015 might be something different.

Among the good parts of 2014 is that I've stayed in touch with some old friends  that I recently re-connected with, and even managed to drag one of them to Gen Con. Speaking of Gen Con, I made my usual round of conventions in 2014: BASHCon, Gen Con, Carnage... I missed the local Holiday Game Bash this year, and I'm not counting Cleveland ConCoction, but I still covered the main ones. I even started an Icons campaign. It's been a while since the last session, but I'm hoping to get it back on a semi-regular schedule now that we're past the holidays.

Despite lingering indifference to the whole game publishing thing, I managed to get Qalidar Basic out. I also put Stars, Specters, and Super Powers together in preparation for more fiction projects. All my projects have kind of drifted in a lazy, half-hearted morass, though. Being lazy and half-hearted isn't an unusual experience for me, but I'm wondering now if I could be ready to be something new. Probably still a lazy something, but maybe I can remember how I used to work around that.

Tom had an idea for new Qalidar stuff which led to a way that I can keep working on it without making it such a grind. To be clear, Qalidar never stopped being something I love - I just got bored with the task of turning it into a "product," and explaining it to convention players because none of them ever bother to find out anything about the games they've signed up for. Anyway, rather than focus on a big ole complete book, I'm going for a sequel to the Basic one next, with material for advancing to - I don't know - maybe 12th level, new abilities, new creatures, and at least one short adventure. Maybe more.

First, though, I've got to get Losing Lanterns, which is embarrassingly close to being finished, out there. By the way, that link goes to an old interview sort of thing which is outdated in many ways, but it's still the closest thing to a summary I've got.

Other projects? Well, there's the bad idea I had a couple of months ago. I've fleshed that out quite a bit since then, and it's shaping up into what I think will be a really good novel. I'm still not quite ready to say what it is or why it's a bad idea, though. Another idea for a novel I've been working on is, I think, quite a good idea, but I'm not going to share any details on that, either. I've been doing research and coordinating concepts, though.

So, projects for 2015:

• Losing Lanterns (almost done)
• Qalidar sequel to the Basic Book (mostly a matter of formatting and artist-wrangling)
• A Bad Idea for a Novel
• A Good Idea for a Novel

I'm not sure which of the last two will come first. I'd actually be really happy to get any three of these done. I think two done and a third well underway is a more reasonable goal, though.

Nice Things About Writing Fiction

Working on Echo of the Dreamers and putting together Stars, Specters, and Super-Powers brought to mind several things I had forgotten. There's really a lot to love about writing fiction as opposed to writing RPG stuff.

• I get to create characters, throw them together, and bring them to life. I can include NPCs in an RPG scenario, but the stars of the show are the players, and I don't even get to meet them. (Of course, if we're talking about playing games, that's a whole different deal.) 
• I might still need a cover artist and maybe, maybe someone to dress up a map, but that's all I have to ask anybody else for, and I can get by without even those. Oh, and I guess I should pretend to need an editor. I hear that's all the rage with people who talk about being writers. Still, for the most part, I can do the job myself without having to muck about with humanity. 
• There's no pressure to descend into the hell-pit of crowd-funding. While role-playing game enthusiasts are increasingly expecting frills that only piles of cash can provide, a novel is still all about the words. Throwing money at it might give you some advantages, but that's more about promotion than quality.
• Graphic design is waaayy less complicated, and there's no need for cross-referencing, sidebars, or anything like that. The only person who needs to understand my notes is me.
• Once I get going, fiction writing has a current that I can get swept up in. Sure, I have to plan it out in advance, but that plan gets revised constantly as I go along. In a lot of ways, I get to experience the same thrill of discovery that the reader (hopefully) will. I may know how it ends in general terms but, like Merlin says, "until you've tasted it, what do you really know?" 
• RPG stuff is completely meaningless to non-gamers. Anyone can read a story. Well, almost anyone.

But still, glurb glarg rargh blargh. I hate conclusions.

Okay Delay

So, about that novella I was working on...

I ran up against a deadline I set for myself a few weeks back, so I've put it aside for now. I was really close to the end, but "really close" could drag out through several iterations of, "okayokayokay, now seriously I'm extra-super-amazingly close" and dribble its way into next year if I'm not careful. Sometimes I still peck at it a little on the bus ride to work, but not much.

That's okay, though. For one thing, the extra distance I'll get from stepping away for that long will make it easier to give it a good edit. For another, digging into the projects I'm putting together for Gen Con this year has just been amazing. It's been a long time since I've enjoyed writing this much. This is going to be a fantastic summer!

The Next Blog Thing

...or, as it was presented to me, "The Next Big Thing Blog Hop Tour" in which writers answer some standard questions and then tag in some other writers to do the same. I was tagged by Michael K. Eidson, a speculative fiction author, blogger, and web programmer.

Although I've got a whole bunch next big things in the works right now, I've decided to apply these questions to my almost-finished novella, which should be available in couple of months, if not sooner.

1. What is the title of your book?  
The working title is As Always, which was also the title of the short story that started all this. I might still change it if I think of something I like better.

2. Where did the idea come from?
The main elements of the setting are all part of Qalidar, which evolved from a combination of dreams, travel, meditative trances, and role-playing sessions. Also, for reasons I'll go into under another question, this book owes a lot to a prompt from Eposic.

3. What genre does your book fall under?
It starts out as heroic fantasy, dives into time travel pretty quickly, and takes on more science fiction elements as it goes along, while still dipping back into the original heroic fantasy setting on a regular basis. Also, there's an Old West style gunslinger.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

• Zira: Michelle Rodriguez - I hadn't initially pictured Zira looking like Rodriguez, but there's no reason she couldn't. Mostly, I picked her because her range of expression fits this character really well. The actor who plays Ceira needs to be able to display a believably tough, guarded mood as easily as wide-eyed curiosity. 
• Fentar: a digitally dwarfed Michael Madsen - And no, I would not want him to affect an accent, most especially not a Scottish one. 
• Veth Tarkas Rhel: Cillian Murphy - A winning smile, beautiful eyes, and good at being creepy. What more could you want?
• Wilkes: Ben Browder - I was originally thinking Nathan Fillion, and I'm sure he'd do a wonderful job as well, but, the more I thought about it, the more Browder seemed right, somehow.
• Aradoc: Anton Yelchin - He may be a little young, but he's got the right look and can certainly manage Aradoc's cocky, playfully dishonest style.
• Rathlind: Alec Newman - I'm finding it really easy to picture Rathlind's maniacal intensity on Newman's face. Plus, Alec Newman is awesome. He should be in every movie.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Zira, a roguish explorer and treasure-hunter, is drawn into the multiverse-spanning machinations of a charming, amoral mystic, and must find a way to take control or always be a pawn.

6. What is the longer synopsis of your book?
In the course of, you know, that stuff from #5, our heroine has to deal with loss, ambiguous personal relationships, and destructive extra-dimensional corporations. She explores her own world as well as the between-space known as Qalidar. She discovers disturbing things about the forces that shaped her universe and the inhuman conglomerates that are trying to warp it even further. At this point, I need you to imagine you've just read a concluding sentence that brilliantly wraps up the scattered thoughts above and leaves you desperate to find out more. Ideally, it should also convince you that the characters are interesting. Maybe just go back and read #5 again.

7. Is your book self-published or represented by an agency?
It's not quite there yet, but I've already decided to publish this one myself.

8. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
The first draft of my manuscript? Just how long have these questions been circulating? You know it's not 1975 anymore, right? Here in the future, we have word processors. I have to admit, though, I do miss disco.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
It started taking shape as a story when Eposic announced its second anthology and started soliciting stories with a particular set of time travel elements. Although the short story was accepted, Eposic later had to cancel the anthology, so I still had the unpublished piece to market elsewhere. After that, it was accepted by two other publishers, which also folded before my story could see print. Naturally, I had several rejections as well, frequently along the lines of "great story, but ________ (time travel or heroic fantasy or something else) doesn't fit my theme." One guy just didn't like Wilkes.

So anyway, I had this story, and several other bits written. My original plan had been to publish more Qalidar stories through other people. These would have been standalone tales, but would also star the same characters and would continue to develop the overarching plot. Then maybe I'd put them together in an anthology later. Because of the first story's tortuous journey to nowhere and other adventures in time-wasting, though, I scrapped that plan and decided to publish it all myself. And, since it's easier to sell something large than something small, I figured I might as well write the whole thing the way I originally imagined it, as a novella.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It'll be really really cheap in Kindle format.

And that's it for the questions! Now to tag in some more writers and spread the virus. Only one of the people I contacted wanted to play, so allow me to introduce Andre Kruppa of Game Soapbox Productions, master of theatrical horror gaming. He'll be blogging about his next project soon - probably next week.