LitRPG Before it was Cool

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I’ve written bad fiction for a long time. I cleaned out a closet recently, stumbling across some of my very old work. This was written for English class when I was fifteen. My teacher, Pamela Sharp, was amazing, encouraging me despite the hack prose I wrote. I don’t have any of the work in digital format (much was written on an old 8088 running WordPerfect, and all that tech is lost to time and memory). However, I do have a camera on my phone. I snapped the pages of a short LitRPG story I wrote because ain’t nobody got time for transcription. I wrote this before I’d heard of anything called LitRPG; I was a huge geek and avid roleplayer, and thought telling a story from the character’s PoV would be fun and interesting. I dunno — should I make Read More …

Changes in the Empire

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Y’all might see some changes if you’re on my mailing list. Up until today I was a customer of MailerLite. They had nifty templates, cool automation functions, and really seemed to understand that readers of newsletters didn’t like spam. Being a customer of theirs felt like being part of a neat community where we respect our fans and all’s well until morning. Turns out, darkness gnawed at the bitter fruit inside the hearts of humans. Or something. Email delivery cratered over the last few months, peaking in August when MailerLite were blacklisted by Spamhaus. My emails hadn’t been reaching fans. I picked up on this earlier in the year when a few emailed asking where I’d been. Checking the system, emails to many bounced, and had been doing so for longer than August’s hard fail. For a small window of Read More …

Sadie’s On a New Drug

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From the current WIP – presented without comment. You may remember Sadie’s recovery time from Reed’s psychotropic drug in Upgrade was … pretty quick. She leads that kind of lifestyle. Even in the life of a busy corporate bee, you needed coffee. Sadie found a once-was mom-and-pop cafe across from Human Energetic’s plaza. The syndicate bought out the owners, turning it into a company drone stall. She was surprised it was open, what with the rioting and looting, but this close to Human Energetics, there was little of either. Some half-hearted tire fires. A burned out car. Nothing much else going on. Inside the coffee shop was no different. No one here except the young man behind the counter, the hologram HumanE logo shifting on his apron. All the surfaces were spotless, gleaming whites and steels. A well-stocked cabinet held Read More …

Tyche’s Gravedigger is out!

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Released from the clutches of Pew! Pew! 5, Tyche’s Gravedigger is out. I really enjoyed writing this one — a reprobate meets a baby pirate and they save the universe. A scream for help across the hard black, then silence. That was the start of Chad Forradel’s bad day. One minute he was checking out a planet of bug corpses, the next he’s catching a ride on an old heavy lifter, bound for a system infested with pirates. When Chad reaches New Haven, he finds the space terraforming platform all but destroyed, all hands lost. The insect-like Ezeroc have returned, and this time they have subverted a Navy corvette. One guy — charming, handsome, and good with a blade, but still just one guy — against a whole warship is hard enough. But the Ezeroc are after an esper hidden Read More …

The Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Trailer Is All The Wow

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You may remember when I began to believe the hype on Cyberpunk 2077. CDPR released their gameplay trailer today, and oh my. This has all the nostalgia of my days as a baby nerd, playing Cyberpunk 2020. Trauma Team. Night City and the NCPD. Ripperdocs and Johnny Silverhand. Samurai streetware. Militech, optical scanners, and being a solo. It’s all there, but wrapped up in a skin that feels like Witcher meets Syndicate. Grab a coffee, beer, or other narcotic and check this out:

The Difficulty of Being Difficult

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People seemed to like our regrets, so here we are: a fiesta of difficult and rewarding writing. I asked some of my homies which scenes were hardest to write, and which were the most fun. Let’s see where it landed up. Yudhanjaya Wijeratne I think the most fun scene I’ve ever written was the opening of (an unreleased) manuscript, where the angel Michael invents a new programming language and lobbies for it to be used in Creating planets. It’s either that or the entirety of the Slow Sad Suicide of Rohan Wijeratne, where an alcoholic from Sri Lanka signs up to fly into a ring singularity – basically torus-shaped black hole with nothing at the core. That was so fun the entire story just came out in one writing session. The hardest was writing the middle sections of Numbercaste. Mapping Read More …

Rekindling the Romance

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I’ve been getting deep into Upgrade’s sequel. It’s hard to return to a world five years on, but it’s also hard to put on pants and I do that most days. Most. Here’s a scene I’m working on. I’m not sure if I’ll keep it for the final. Here is the first time in the new book we see Harry and Lace. You probably shouldn’t read this if you haven’t read Upgrade, because it will quite probably cock up a bunch of the emotional pull of a subplot. You’ve been warned. Harry leaned close to Lace, smelling the back of her neck. She wore her hair up, a hint of a smile on her face at his touch. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” “I own this place,” she said. “It’s my place.” Harry Read More …

The Names We Regret

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You might remember my take on the power of names. I figured since I know about a zillion authors, I’d get their take and we’d turn it into something fun. We all make mistakes. Characters we’ve named without considering all the angles. I put out the call: what’s your favorite and least favorite character’s name, and why? And — this is vital — would you kill off the least-favorite in order to not have to type those foul letters anymore? Let’s see where we ended up. As a side note, and not in any way resentful, fuck all y’all with no regrets. Michael Cooper My favorite character name is obviously Tanis Richards. Tanis was the name of my first girlfriend, and also the name of a cool character from DragonLance. Often people think its a male name (because of DragonLance) Read More …