Rain, Rain on the (Wasted) Plain

So what is there to do? Well, for one, write! I’m knee-deep in the revision for Umbra’s sequel* with plans to get it out sometime this year. I’ve also revisited playing Wasteland 2, just to “stay in the groove” of the post-apocalyptic genre.

It’s… okay.

I got very excited when it came out, especially because they gave the characters an Animal Whisperer skill and the first creature you could use it on was… a goat! Aberforth is his name, but you could rename him. My first squad consisted of Shaw, Vera, Mance and Deergut. And Aberforth standing in for Casey. Except now the creatures can be renamed.

“Who’s Deergut?”, you ask.

“Gee… I don’t know”, she says with cackling glee.

When I started again, I replaced Deergut with Elvis.

“Elvis?” you ask. But I digress…

For one, it doesn’t have quite the same… charm… that its predecessor did. Not that there aren’t cool jokes (like the L’eve Lupe Mine, the name they gave to a mine you could clear out in the original that served no purpose story-wise other than to… level up). They’re also big fans of A Christmas Story too, with multiple references to it including Red Ryder and Ralphy Parker. I imagined Highpool, the first location you go to in the original game, as an almost pristine paradise, a campground with children and barely-matured adults akin to the obnoxious child crew of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, sheltered from the worst of the world’s post-apoc fallout, not a heavily-industrialized dam/water system for the wasteland. The developers DID, on the other hand, keep the Agricultural Center footprint pretty much the same, including the use of the dish in the middle of the greenhouse area.

Note the “satellite dish”. And Miguel gets a shout-out too, although I didn’t find the root cellar (that orange portion) in the upper right corner when I searched for it in WL2.

Also regarding Highpool, the Rangers save Jackie, generally at the expense of rabid Rex the dog. Killing Bobby was something I never did in the original game–yeah, even though they were just sprites and pixels, it felt abhorrent**. Yet here the WL2 game treats as canon that the original Rangers just did him in, too. Oh, and you’re forced to choose either the Ag Center or Highpool, can’t save both. What in the hell are the other rangers out there doing? The game acts as if your team Echo is the ONLY one out there doing anything in the wastes.

So far, I’ve only made it as far as Santa Fe. I will, I believe, sit down and do a full write-up of the game.

Oh, and I’ll probably go back and play WL1 again, but I would have loved it even more if they included the C64 version of the game, to really hammer home my nostalgia factor.

---

*If you haven’t read the first one, you can check out the link in the sidebar or below, if you’re on a phone.

**Even the “spiritual successor” Fallout thought so too, as they had a special reaction if you killed kids in their earlier games. Deservedly so. Monsters.

Busy Like A Bee

BEE-attitudes – Bee kind to one another.

This is me, busy like a bee… I’ve been going pretty much non-stop for the last few weeks that it’s nice enough to sit down and write a simple blogpost.

So what am I up to?

• Storytime Blog Hop resumes in October, and you’ll find a link to the latest 1000-word flash fiction installments when they’re ready. The date is slated to be 26 OCT 2023, but I’ll let you know for sure closer to go time.
• COVERS! If you joined my free newsletter then you know that voting is going on for the covers of Waking Dread (Book One of Eater of Dreams). After I’ve announced the winning cover there, it will show up here, along with a link to preorder. The date of the announcement here will be 17 OCT 2023. The book releases on 31 OCT 2023
• Books in progress: I’ve written quite a few novels, though I have published relatively few. Well, that’s changing as I put my rear in gear and revise. I’m in the middle of revision now of a “cyberpunk noir” and will provide more updates on progress in my newsletter. The story takes place in the same “universe” (worldbuilding-wise and literally, seeing that it’s science fiction) as Clones Are People Two. It’s on Kindle Unlimited, so you can read it for “free” if you take advantage of the program. The novel won’t be on KU, at least not right away.
• Speaking of which, there’s also a cover for that story too, which will be released closer to when it publishes.
• I also opened a survey to my newsletter readers on which of the stories they would like to see after I publish the cyberpunk noir, and the answer was overwhelmingly the sequel to Umbra: Shadows Over Hinge (originally published as Umbra: A Post-Apocalyptic Mystery). That revision commencing depends on the progress of the cyberpunk noir, which, barring any kind of emergency, should be done by the end of November, and a date of publication will be chosen before then.
• Totally unrelated to the books, I have to shore up my chickens’ coop before the weather gets too cold. It’s great that it’s more math/geometry/non-word hands-on, something to do when my brain gets rut-bound on parts of the revision. An hour or two with a saw and measuring tape and paintbrush can loosen up the old muse.

So that’s it for now (as if that is not enough).

Yes, I’m a Bad Kid. But wait… there’s Blip McFinn, Space Captain!

Yup, that’s me. I seemed to have gone on a hiatus without letting anyone know. Honestly, I’ve been neck deep in my revision of two large project and have been trying to get my focus there, besides everything else that goes on in normal life. And especially now that sumō is over. Terunofuji won yet again, but the whole thing was really weird, with all lower-than-ozeki rank hanging around at the top of the scoreboard for the longest time.

The first of the two has been a major P.I.T.A.–Umbra 2. As much as I love the story and I love all of the ideas I have written about/presented in the draft, I really hate how it’s not going together in a way I find cohesive. So much so that I ended up writing an additional 50k words for it, and now have to go back and decide which of the ideas have to go (or at least get relegated to the back burner for a while, maybe to resurface again in a later story).

The second of the two has been another ongoing thing, a collection of inter-connected short stories in a dark fantasy realm, with possible novels to follow (which are written, but alas, also need to be revised). The “ancient evil” antagonist borrows more from Lovecraft than Gygax (oh yummy, there’s plenty of body horror!). “Magic” is not the typical fantasy Dungeons & Dragons magic; it’s less “I’ve got a spell for that,” and more of an extremely limited manipulation of the elements, and is innate rather than learned. If you happen to possess such “magic” and you aren’t “registered” with the powers-that-be or belong to a protected group, then you are hunted down. What they do with you when they catch you, well… no spoilers.

When I get too frustrated with Umbra 2 and feel like I might be doing more harm than good to the manuscript, I step away so I can come back with fresh eyes. But if I step away from writing for too long, I feel guilty (yeah, I know…) so I work on revising them as well. As they are shorter stories within the whole, I can revise them faster. As for the covers, I’m hoping to get a group of covers made for each series, as I’m realizing that a cover is less about accuracy of story and more about being a marketing tool to grab the potential reader (and the reason why all those novels in the 20’s and 30’s had the scantily-clad women lounging around lusting after their men on the covers, and not a single scene coming close within the text. Sex selling and all that.). Anyone know of a good and relatively inexpensive cover artist they can recommend?

BUT… I’ve gone and added another possible project, one that takes more of my artistic skill than writing skill (I know, I know, we creative types are weird). This one is–so far–lighthearted and fun. Introducing: Blip McFinn, Space Captain!

Alright, so he’s not much now and it’s a low-res scan from a doodle on a lined notebook paper. You can even see his name there, written in blue before I gave the head/helmet a body. He started as a doodle while I was watching or listening to something, probably right after I cleaned my fish pond and had my finned critters on my mind. I’ve got a few others of his crew I’m working on, just letting my pen do the walking to see what it comes up with. As for his name, my grandmother had this nearly three-foot long goldfish I called ‘Bloop’ and this character almost had that name attached, but I thought Blip sounded more futuristic. And the McFinn part, well, let’s just say that most if not all of the characters will have some punny or on-the-nose names. Lighthearted, right? This is wholly an exercise for my fun as much as it is supposed to be fun, and an attempt to stay very family-friendly.

Anyway, I’m going to keep playing around with it and when I have enough panels drawn up with a bit of a story behind them, I’ll start publishing them. It will give me a reason to play more with my XP-Pen, and keep the creative juices flowing. Does anyone know of any comic-strip plugins that are really good? Drop me a line.

Back to sticking my nose in a manuscript and hoping to unravel the mess of Umbra 2. Until then…