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[As usual, two weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Got the Mondays. Behind me, the pantry is closed up with a couple of big fans and a dehumidifier that have been going like hell since Thursday, so I’m reasonably confident that the floor is dry on top. Spare fan blasting the other side of that same wall since Friday. More gear in the crawl space. Sometime in the next few hours, I expect a call or text from the gang letting me know that they are inbound to inspect and probably collect everything.

It would be nice to have peace and quiet again. And figure out how soon I can finally start rebuilding everything. I still have bits and pieces left over from the bathroom remodel that keep getting pushed out by circumstances, so the house is a mess.

Been newslettering this morning instead of anything else. Got the BW monthly newsletter on publishing. Got the quarterly BSQ newsletter reminding folks that we put out another issue. Got this little tidbit of things. Probably won’t actually write fiction today, on account of it’s the last day of the month and I’m at about 96k words with what I’m writing here.

Last week, I finished the fourth Corsac Fox novel: Warlord of the Spinward Reaches. I am having a tremendous amount of fun with these. At some point (TBD), Kickstarter will finally approve the campaign for Corsac #2: Mistaken Identity and I can launch that.

At this point, I’m planning to drop 3-5 as part of the regular schedule, then save up ideas for #6 (or 7, if it ends up running that far) and aim for a big KS with a lot of swag. Mostly, that’s folks really liking this series and giving me great sales and reviews of #1, so I don’t want to stretch them out as long as I had originally planned to by only doing 2 KS campaigns per year.

After that, I have been working on the rpg. Got a lot of notes, and am slowly expanding things as I come across bits and pieces I need. The game is going to be set in a mythical Tang Dynasty China where all that magic that you read about in those stories is real. Gods, demons, whatever. At the moment, I’m working my way through a magic system that is not European/Tolkien/D&D in nature or scope, because I honestly expect everyone coming out with a new rpg to be making variants of Dungeons and Dragons (whichever edition was most formative for them) as WOTC pissed off a lot of people, first with the OGL debacle, and now by announcing that there will be no rule books.

Instead, you apparently have to sign up for a monthly subscription that lets you access the books. And lets them turn the books off whenever they want to. Sure, they promise that they won’t, but they make a lot of promises, and unless you own the book, you don’t own anything.

“The Cloud” is just a fancy way of saying “Somebody elses computer you don’t control.”

F#$% you very much, WOTC. I still have my 1st Edition books. I don’t play them, but I have consulted them in the last month for certain details. And my 2nd. And 3rd. Etc.

So I’m deep into Tang history. Wrote the origin story for Wan-Xian and her sister. That’s pure Action/Adventure, so no magic, because these are for The Thrill Ride Magazine.

However… (and I get to blame the Fabulous Publisher Babe™ here)

We are training for a long walk in England next year. Hadrian’s Wall. 80+ miles in a week. We walk trails here to get into better shape. We also talk about something other than sportsball.

Saturday morning, we talked about the game, and Chinese history (she hitchhiked from Beijing to Hong Kong in the early 90s, after taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad across.)

She reads a lot of fantasy, both modern as well as historical/epic. She suggested that I look at some WuXia books and see what tropes they use and how they run them.

Writerbrain engaged. It’s all her fault.

So I have a plan for perhaps some short novels or novellas in a series, vaguely inspired by Hua Mu Lan (Disney did not invent Mulan. They merely made the 179th movie about her, and did it animated with a dragon. She’d Robin Hood or King Arthur to the Chinese. Maybe both.)

In this case, I will be writing directly into this new game world, to provide an expanded universe of world-building. Hell, I planted a seed in English Paul’s ear for a musical soundtrack, so I’m hoping I can convince him to write me a short symphony and theme music to game by.

Welcome to my Multimedia Publishing Empire.

Speaking of Paul, sometime in the next day or three, song #2 should go live everywhere. Time to Say Goodbye. I should have links by next week, and will add it under the music tab on my website. All I ask it that you buy it, because the 30 cents I make from you 99c purchase is the equivalent of you streaming it every day for the next decade or so. Seriously.

Next song is a Scottish folk tune. I sent him the melody and demo vocals and instrument list. He’s noodling with composition at this point, and then I’ll rerecord my vocals when we have something better. Hopefully, it won’t take a year this time. (He got sick, then moved to Los Angeles since last September when we recorded the final vocals for #2.)

More news soon. More silliness.

More Monday.

shade and sweet water,

blaze

West of the Mountains, WA

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