Author: terribleminds (page 66 of 467)

EDIT: And I’ve replied to the 15 winners below — please email me at terribleminds at gmail dot com with subject header FIYAH SUBSCRIPTION, and I’ll get you set up in the next day or so.

FIYAH is a speculative fiction magazine by and about black voices. I confess, I’m a ding-dong who has kinda stopped paying attention to SFF fiction magazines — not because there’s not an astonishing amount of great storytelling going on, but because honestly my reading time is constantly in competition with itself in terms of doing research for my books and getting books to blurb and I sadly do very little reading for pleasure. (Also, the pandemic has eaten my time even worse than usual? How has that happened?) Falling asleep at the wheel here has meant I have not paid nearly enough attention to a magazine like FIYAH, which is waaaay the fuck my bad. As such, I’m gonna try to rectify that error for myself and for some of you, too —

I’m giving away five subscriptions to Fiyah.

All you gotta do is reply to this post in the comments. I’ll pick five tomorrow, and you’ll get a digital quarterly subscription. (And if you don’t win, don’t forget you can subscribe on your own, too.) I’ll also ask that if you win, you donate to Black Lives Matter, to a bailfund, or the ACLU — somewhere that impacts and renders aid to black voices.

That’s it. Comment up to 11:59PM tonight (6/8) and I’ll pick the five winners and then I’ll get your email addresses and you’ll be sorted with a FIYAH subscription.

UPDATE: Ryan Sohmer is gonna cover another five, so that’s ten total subs to give away!

UPDATE: And Ben LeRoy is tossing in another five!

Soon after her husband’s tragic death, Robin Besher makes a startling discovery: He had recklessly blown through their entire savings on decrepit rentals in Four Points, the Appalachian town Robin grew up in. Forced to return after decades, Robin and her daughter, Haley, set out to renovate the properties as quickly as possible—before anyone exposes Robin’s secret past as a teenage prostitute. Disaster strikes when Haley befriends a troubled teen mother, hurling Robin back into a past she’d worked so hard to escape. Robin must reshape her idea of home or risk repeating her greatest mistakes.

***

It’s not really that fun to buy and renovate a cheap old house.

The Distance from Four Points is about an affluent suburbanite who’s forced into landlording when she finds out her late husband blew all their money on rental properties in her Appalachian hometown. To research the story, I spent a few days in my hometown in southwestern Pennsylvania, having a realtor take me around to residential and commercial properties for sale. I wasn’t looking for viable places to work or live—the ones I chose to see were mostly priced below $50,000, many as low as $10,000, and I was interested only in the ones with tragically ruined beauty. These places were once homes to the wealthiest people in town—a former coal-mining town that once held more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. The homes I saw had turrets, original woodwork and stained glass, wraparound porches, gorgeous brick walkways covered over with weeds. They were also actively crumbling.

But: I bought one. Friends made the leap first, claiming a turreted, five-bedroom, red-brick house for $17,000, and asked me and my husband to partner with them on flipping it. The house had been split into a triplex decades ago. There were collapsing dropped ceilings, holes in the floor, broken or missing windows, and the turret was missing its pointy peak. It was a forlorn, forgotten ruin straight out of HGTV renovation porn. For a while it was exciting to lead the restoration; then it broke us, emotionally and financially. A cheap old house is not cheap to fix up. And even a gorgeously fixed-up house can’t be flipped when the location is all wrong. We still own it. We had to turn it into a rental. I could tell landlording stories for days.

Waitressing influences everything I write.

In the summers after high school, I was a waitress at a few different places in southwestern Pennsylvania, including a country club and a chain restaurant that, for a while, required all servers to wear a funny hat. The complicated joggling for tips, the conversations I shared or overheard, the glimpses of other families at the tables I worked, the blatant theft and scheming—even two decades later, these experiences feed my work. In the two novels I’ve published, my characters are waitresses. This isn’t accidental. Waitressing, even in a nice place, requires a particular kind of gritty resilience, a willingness to be swept along with the rhythms of the shift, a tolerance for—or an openness to engaging in—petty feuds and sordid liaisons. It’s no surprise that Robin, the protagonist of The Distance from Four Points, meets a trainwreck lover during a dinner shift, or that she meets the husband who’ll save her during a different shift in a different year. People pass through places, and they need to eat, and even in a small town where it seems like every single face is familiar, as a waitress, sometimes you’ll meet a stranger.

The protagonist from my first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, was a one-eyed bartender based on a man a waiter friend told me about one night after our shift. That entire novel wouldn’t have existed without that particular night of running tables, my arms aching from carrying BOGO platters of bourbon steaks and seasoned fries with a side of ranch.

Every day as a waitress was a chance to find new stories. I’m still drawing from them, all these years later.

My novels are political. (Maybe all novels are.)

I published my first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, in June 2016. It’s about a small Appalachian town that’s upended when a group of itinerant thieves start robbing people’s homes, and its themes are xenophobia, grief, and belonging. It’s set in southwestern PA—Trump country, though I grew up there and am connected to the area in a way that goes much deeper than easy labels and dismissals. When Trump was elected that November, xenophobia ran rampant; there was a constant thrum of debate over who was an outsider, who was a “real” American, who deserved to be valued, respected, protected. The vilified outsiders in my novel took on new meaning. The story became almost comically allegorical. I hadn’t intended to write a political novel, but there was no denying I had: the apocalyptic effects of small-town xenophobia were relevant well beyond the pages of Vagabond. 

This time around, The Distance from Four Points falls into similar queasy territory, questioning who exactly are the victims and the oppressors, who deserves leniency, how much we owe to others and ourselves. We’re all in lockdown now. The residents of Four Points are in a kind of lockdown too, unwilling or unable to see beyond their small-town borders. For them, there is no wider world, no such thing as expertise or global perspective. I know this for a fact: the characters in The Distance from Four Points wouldn’t be caught dead in a homemade face mask. It’s discomfiting to me that my affection for these characters only grows.

I write best when my time is limited.

I wrote most of The Distance from Four Points when my daughters were under age five, still in preschool. I had less than three hours a day to write, three days a week. I’d drop them off at preschool and literally run home, spending every second I could at my desk before I had to return for pickup. Somehow, I wrote a novel this way. I had a singular focus. I was master of the little time I had. I didn’t get distracted with errands or housework or crafting or exercising or meeting friends for coffee. Once both my kids began elementary school, I had the entire school day to write—yet I accomplished less. With more time, there was less reason to feel so frantically resolute. It’s hard to get back into that mindset of time-scarcity. I’d be well served if I could.

With every novel I write, a line of discarded pages will stretch for miles behind me.

The very earliest version of The Distance from Four Points involved a nun faking a pregnancy and planning to kidnap a troubled teenager’s child. Another early version concluded with a dramatic and symbolic act of arson. The actual published novel includes none of these things; there is a nun, but she is only a next-door neighbor to a more important character, not the driver of the plot. I wrote hundreds of pages of story before I actually realized what my novel was about, and a lot of scenes, characters, and plotlines were discarded along the way. This is not an efficient way of writing, but for me, it’s necessary. I don’t outline because I often don’t know the twists and turns my characters will take. With Four Points, I didn’t even understand who my main characters would be. Cindy, best friend of my protagonist Robin, initially appeared in only a couple of scenes—until she elbowed her way into more. Vincent, Robin’s monstrous former lover, was terrible until he showed himself to be less villainous than regretful, aging, and weak. The process of finding a story isn’t something I can easily explain. There’s no formula for it. And there’s no avoiding the false starts and retries. I wish I could become a more efficient writer, but this novel has shown me that the long road to any future publication will surely always be lined with dead darlings.

***

Margo Orlando Littell is the author of the novels The Distance from Four Points and Each Vagabond by Name, both published by the University of New Orleans Press. Each Vagabond by Name won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal, was longlisted for the 2017 Tournament of Books, and was named one of fifteen great Appalachian novels by Bustle. Originally from southwestern Pennsylvania, she now lives in New Jersey.

Margo Orlando Littell: Twitter | Instagram | Website

The Distance from Four Points: Bookshop | Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

A stolen throne. A lost princess. A rescue mission to take back what’s theirs.

***

THERE’S A REASON WHY PEOPLE STICK TO ONE POV

My first book, THE TIGER AT MIDNIGHT, has dual POVs and it came to me pretty naturally. I had a clear idea for each of their storylines and it was overall an organic process. Not so for THE ARCHER AT DAWN. This book required me to meticulously plan out every step in both Kunal and Esha’s individual journeys in a fairly painstaking fashion, making sure that they had individual character arcs that merged with the plot––and with each other’s arcs. At the end, however, I had a truly intertwined and unique story that I realized only could have been achieved by planning it from the perspective of dual POVs.

HEISTS ARE HARD

I don’t know about you, but I always wanted to write a heist of some sort, especially after seeing Danny Ocean smooth talk his way to stealing a whole casino in Ocean’s Eleven (yes, I know it didn’t exactly work like that). But heists in films and heists in literature are two different beasts. I ended up doing a twist on a heist, a people heist, if you will. And it was one of the most difficult parts of the plot to figure out. Heists are hard! Especially in a fantasy world. But scribbling furiously onto large notepads and creating multiple excel sheets helps. Also, watching lots and lots of heist movies.

SECOND BOOKS ARE FERAL THINGS

Sure everyone tells you that second books are hard, but it isn’t until you actually try to write one that you understand the unique pain that is trying to wrangle a second book. THE ARCHER AT DAWN’s first draft came out as a tangled, snarling mess of words and it was my job to wade through and find the story. It was definitely there but at points it felt like the story didn’t want me to find it. I was in a constant battle between the story it wanted to be and the story I thought I needed to tell. It wasn’t until I let go and listened that I was able to tame the story and make it into a real book.

SECOND BOOKS ARE ALSO MAGICAL

Yes, second books are hard. But there’s also a certain magic to being able to dive back into a world and into the lives of characters you already know. Writing THE ARCHER AT DAWN allowed me to dive into my characters’ lives and backstories. To write them having special, hilarious moments with each other that they wouldn’t have had in the first book. It’s like when you reach the next stage in friendship with a new person. You’re past all the stilted conversations and slightly awkward coffee dates and finally on to the good stuff–the emotional rewatches of your favorite teen movies, the late night drinks pondering the vagaries of the universe. That’s the magic of a second book.

NO ONE WRITES ALONE

The typical image of a writer is alone at their desk, typing or scribbling away furiously as inspiration pours out of them and onto the page. We all know the latter is untrue and just rude, but the idea of the solitary nature of writing has endured. It’s romantic in a way, I suppose. But none of my books, and certainly not THE ARCHER AT DAWN, would exist in their form without the support and help of my many writer friends. They were the ones who helped me brainstorm a new way to tackle a plot hole or encouraged me when I was absolutely sure my deadline was out to murder me. And while I’ve always loved my writer group, I learned to truly and deeply appreciate them after writing THE ARCHER AT DAWN.

***

Swati Teerdhala: Website | Twitter

Archer At Dawn: Harper Collins

When her mother dies in a heat wave that kills twenty million, Zia León abandons a promising diplomatic career to lead humanitarian aid missions to regions ravaged by drought, wildfires, and sea level rise.

What Zia doesn’t know is that clandestine forces are gathering around her in pursuit of a colossal secret: someone has hijacked the climate, and the future of human civilization is at stake.

To avoid a world war that appears more inevitable every day, Zia must build a coalition of the powerless and attempt the impossible. But success depends on facing the grief that has come to define her life, and rediscovering friendship, family, and what it means to be true to yourself while everything falls apart.

* * *

Follow Your Curiosity

A few years ago, I listened to a podcast interview with award-winning journalist Charles C. Mann in which he described scientists researching how to intentionally manipulate the global climate to offset the worst impacts of climate change.

While geoengineering proposals range from seeding the oceans with bacteria to sucking carbon dioxide directly from the air, only one approach is practical with today’s technology. You fly planes into the stratosphere and spray inert dust that makes the Earth ever so slightly shinier, reflecting a tiny bit more incoming sunlight back into space, thus reducing the amount of energy entering the Earth system and cooling the planet. The kicker is that it would only cost two billion dollars a year to offset the current rate of global warming. That means that any country and even a few wealthy individuals could decide to create such a program all on their own.

This scenario raises so many questions that will define the coming century: what does it mean to exist within an environment in which we ourselves are the primary agent of change? What will the future look like when technologies like nuclear weapons, CRISPR, the internet, and geoengineering can give a single human being the power to literally change the world? How can we harness our own natures in order to leverage such technologies to actually make the world better?

Holy shit, I thought. Someone needs to write a novel about this.

And Veil was born.

Don’t Try to Be Original

The more I learned about the science of geoengineering, the more I pressured myself to construct a story as intricate as the climatology models I was reading about. Part of it was wanting to honor the source material, but there was also a less honorable aspect: wanting to impress readers with an original science fictional take on an important issue.

We’ve all experienced the joy of appreciating a truly original work of art—something that opens new worlds for us. But is the originality we experience the result of the creator striving to be original? My best work emerges when my ego gets out of the way, when a story flows onto the page as if I am no more than a conduit. Veil refused to get going until I stopped trying to be clever and just wrote what seemed obvious.

Don’t try to be original. Just do what comes naturally. Others will call what comes naturally from you “original” because *you* are its source, your nature informed it. But you know the secret: you did what was obvious, and that’s what made it inspired.

Don’t Let Routine Get In Your Way

As we shelter in place to flatten the curve of a global pandemic, it feels like a lifetime ago, but last year at this time my wife and I were embarking on a pilgrimage. The Camino de Santiago is an ancient pilgrimage route, a network of paths across Europe that lead to the purported resting place of St. James in Santiago de Compostela. My wife and I aren’t religious (only about half of the pilgrims we met were Catholic), but we love walking, and over the course of five weeks, we hiked five hundred miles along the mountainous northern coast of Spain.

I was supposed to have finished writing Veil before we started.

I hadn’t.

So after spending all day lugging a heavy pack through pouring rain, howling wind, or baking sun, I would sit on my bunk in the converted gymnasium of a remote village albergue—volunteer-run shared sleeping quarters for pilgrims—and write a chapter, or a scene, or a sentence, before passing out.

So often, I trick myself into thinking that I can’t write unless the conditions are right: a large block of time, hitting a minimum word count, a quiet place to work, having eaten the optimal breakfast, an ample supply of inspiration, etc. But routine can hinder as well as help. I finished the rough draft of Veil on the Camino because I didn’t let routine get in my way. I wrote whenever, wherever, and however I could, and you can too.

Choose the Rollercoaster

Writing Veil was an emotional rollercoaster. Here’s the 1980’s montage version: bursting with ideas and enthusiasm—>thinking “wow, this one is different in a good way” as I whiz through the first few chapters—>insidious doubts gather in my mental shadows until—>somewhere around the halfway point I have an existential crisis that this book won’t, can’t work—>after extensive struggle, the crisis resolves into a new understanding of the story itself—>momentum builds until I’m experiencing the excitement of reading the climax even as I write it—>etc.

It turns out that this doesn’t get easier. It’s a rollercoaster I board ever time I write a new novel. The only difference experience makes is that now I know that I’m buying a ticket when I sit down to draft a new story. The rollercoaster is an integral part of my process. I choose the rollercoaster.

Realizing that the rollercoaster is a choice is crucial. It means I’m signing up to do the work. It means that when things get tough, I recognize that the struggle is the work. It means that when fear rears its ugly head, I face it—clear-eyed and even-keeled.

Find the Heart of the Story

I only ever figure out the heart of the story as I’m writing it. Rather than executing a clever plan, working through a manuscript sentence by sentence feels like hacking through dense undergrowth, following an overgrown path that might or might not lead out the other side.

As I explored this particular jungle, patterns began to emerge. Zia took on unexpected depth and started making decisions that surprised me. Her circle of friends came into focus. Strange loops connected choices, objects, locations ever more tightly—opportunities to increase the story’s density of meaning, a pocket universe reflecting itself.

But it wasn’t until a long train ride through Italy—interrupted by a wildfire on the tracks during which conductors handed out plastic water bottles to sweating passengers—that my wife posed the ultimate question: why are you writing this story in the first place?

Only by answering did I realize the answer. I was writing this story to take readers on a journey that would challenge them to reflect on life in the Anthropocene. I was writing it because the characters’ personal losses echo how we have all lost capital-n-Nature—the ability to draw a clear line between humanity and our environment. By coming up with ever more ingenious tools that extend our reach from the subatomic to the cosmic, we have lost a neat metaphor for explaining the world to ourselves. The cast had to find the courage to face their grief, to reconcile, to figure out a way forward. That is precisely the situation we find ourselves in with respect to the Earth system: we can no longer afford to pretend that our actions don’t have consequences or that it’s possible to turn back the clock. However difficult it may be, we must take responsibility for the extraordinary powers we’ve developed, and use them to build a better future together.

* * *

Eliot Peper is the author of Cumulus, True Blue, Neon Fever Dream, the Uncommon Series, and the Analog Series. His novels have been praised by the New York Times Book Review, Popular Science, San Francisco Magazine, Businessweek, io9, Boing Boing, and Ars Technica. He has helped build technology businesses, survived dengue fever, translated Virgil’s Aeneid from the original Latin, worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a venture capital firm, and explored the ancient Himalayan kingdom of Mustang. His writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, the Verge,  Tor.com, TechCrunch, VICE, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he has been a speaker at Google, Comic Con, SXSW, Future in Review, and the Conference on World Affairs.

Eliot Peper: Website | Twitter

Veil: Amazon

A bit of a preamble, if Chuck will allow it, for those who may be wondering, “Full Deck Roleplaying? Is this a book? A game? Weird title for a novel.”

Full Deck Roleplaying is a book. And a game. It’s a tabletop roleplaying game or RPG, kinda sorta like Dungeons & Dragons which is everywhere these days. I’ve been making RPGs for almost twenty years. They’ve done well for me. They, in no small part, are responsible for my career in making video games.

Now, RPGs run the gamut as far as how they’re played and what they do. D&D is a dungeon crawl. You get together with friends and another person, the Dungeon Master, sets out challenges the players have to overcome to be heroes and get loot. Some RPGs are story engines. They are all about giving people the tools to tell engaging narratives. Some RPGs have lots of rules and some have very few. And there’s tons of options in the middle and all over the place. Tabletop roleplaying is a vast and varied landscape.

Full Deck Roleplaying is built around telling stories which might be why Chuck invited me to write something for his blog. Stories are my passion. Games are one of the ways I tell them.

In Full Deck Roleplaying, players create characters, create worlds, and create drama through the use of standard playing cards. But the cards are not just there to do your bidding. They influence the game by narrowing your choices and adding new details, forcing you to adapt to the hand that life—or at least the game—has dealt you.

You can try out Full Deck Roleplaying for absolutely free or you can kick in a few bucks if you want, no pressure. The beautifully-illustrated 66-page PDF contains the core Full Deck Roleplaying game system—setting creation, character creation, and the rules of play including handy reference sheets so you don’t have to dig for information during a session.

Full Deck Roleplaying puts the story in your hands.

What follows are five things I learned while writing this game, my first major game release in over eight years.

* * *

Write Where the Comfort Is

The past four years of my life have been defined by terrible things. I lost my brother and my father almost a year apart. (My brother died after a long battle with sepsis. I found out my dad had cancer on Christmas of that same year, he died only months later.) The top of my left femur literally started decaying and I had to have my hip replaced. I pulled up roots and yanked my family across the country away from friends and an established community for a bad career move. My recently-widowed mother relocated to be closer to us just as the studio I was at and I decided to part ways and just as I was told I was being divorced after almost 26 years. Soon after, my two kids—the light of my entire life, folks—moved back to Illinois and far far away from me.

It’s been a bad ride, friends.

Now, there have been bright spots. Even though the job didn’t work out, I met some good people there. I got to hang out with friends in the area and get to know them better. After that job and I shook hands for the final time, I was offered an opportunity at a great studio working with some fantastic people—and it’s only three hours from my kids. Plus I’m near a Trader Joe’s and that’s always nice.

But. Still. I have never carried this much pain in my life. It weighs on me every day. I feel its shadow over me in the morning and its breath on my neck at night. I never thought my life would so utterly implode. I’m still trying to find stuff amidst the debris.

I let the feelings of the past four years—all of which culminated in the greatest middle finger from the universe I’ve ever seen—keep me run into the ground for months. But one good thing came from it. Well, one good thing in regards to writing. I stopped caring about market trends and zeitgeist. I stopped caring about marketability. I started to just write. For me. I started to write where the comfort was.

In February, I wrote a Middle Grade novel that I’m currently shopping to agents. In March, I wrote a new roleplaying game that I just released in May. Those two projects may not seem to have much in common but the link there is that I wrote what I wanted. I wrote to comfort myself. In the novel, I wrote the story that came to me after my father’s passing. With the game, I wrote a system that I’d like to play. I didn’t know if anyone else would connect with it or not but it’s what I wanted. Those projects, well, I won’t say they “made me happy” but they gave me a joy I hadn’t felt in a long time.

I found a lot of comfort in both them. They were cathartic in different ways. In the novel, I got to see my father again. In the game, I got to see myself again. My younger self who took more risks and swung harder for the fences. I found a fire again. And it wasn’t the crackling embers of Hell at my feet. It was flames in my belly giving me the strength to pick up and move.

Editing is Alright

You could fill a book with chestnuts and platitudes comparing writing versus editing—and people have. Some writers love the editing process. To me, it was a necessary evil. I did it. Like I said, it’s necessary. But I didn’t enjoy it. It was rushing up river, it was playing in traffic.

But now, for whatever reason, I have found enjoyment in editing. Maybe it’s just narcissism but I like reading what I’ve written. I like rethinking how a chapter is constructed, how something is worded. I like making sure all the right seeds are planted throughout the text so, when the tree sprouts at the end, you want to sit in its shade.

I honestly don’t know what happened there. I don’t know what switch got flipped. Maybe it’s because, for the first time in ages, I feel connected to the material so revisiting it and making it stronger isn’t a chore. It’s helping a friend get better.

Routine is Nothing; Routine is Everything

I wrote the entirety of both that novel and that game in Google docs on my phone. 30,000 words on the novel. 8,000 on the game. I’m currently writing these words in a Google doc on my phone. It’s how I’ve been writing for the past eight months. I’ve written this way on my couch, in my car during lunch or in the parking lot of a grocery store, on a lumpy half-broken bed way too late at night, on the floor, on my back, on my stomach, on my side.

Which to say, anything I thought I needed to write—a comfy chair, the perfect software, the right atmosphere, the proper routine—were all excuses. What I needed was to write.

That said, the intimacy of being inches from my phone, the familiar motion of tapping letters on a screen with my thumbs became my routine. When I think of writing anymore, that’s what I think of. It’s comforting. And, most importantly, it gets the writing done.

This method didn’t come about as a personal challenge or a deliberate means to break some unhealthy writing barrier—

Actually. Well.

That’s a lie.

It came about because I was deep deep in the thrall of depression and would spend my entire evening staring at my phone, watching YouTube, checking Facebook, texting friends, and, of course, reading TerribleMinds.com, RELIGIOUSLY. I couldn’t watch TV much less sit in front of a computer and write.

But I knew I needed to do something, to distract myself if nothing else. So I gave myself a project—a book for adults about a cult deprogrammer on his last assignment. Which is weird because I see myself more as a kid lit author but I also knew I had some stuff to work through that was better suited for an adult audience. Anyway. I figured since I was staring at my phone all evening anyway, I may as well put that to use. One night, I opened up the Google docs app and started tapping away. The next night, again. The third night, the same. Then every night for a month. Multiple sprints every evening. Anywhere from 500-2000 words a night. Day after day. I didn’t want to break the streak.

I started to feel that rush. I was building momentum, chapter after chapter, and I would be up until 2a some nights writing away. The dopamine hits started coming. I was writing. After years of not doing much of nothing for myself, I was getting words down and building a story.

The routine came from that. And, y’know, writing on a phone isn’t hard. Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by blinking his left eyelid. Tapping a screen is cake.

Sure, it has its frustrations. App notifications, text messages, the dreaded phone call, making sure you have enough battery, autocorrect’s helpful edits but all that can be managed. And I don’t find myself switching apps to check Twitter or Facebook but I do switch apps to quickly open Wikipedia or to Google something. I love it. Anymore, I can’t imagine writing any other way.

You Are Building Towards Something

I’ve been making games for almost twenty years. My first published effort, Little Fears, was a great setting with an okay system. In the years since, I’ve released other game books—some entirely of my own creation, some based on established systems and lines. With every release, every project, I strove to make the best book I could. There’s something different about Full Deck Roleplaying. I don’t mean that as ad-speak. There was something different in how I wrote it. Not just that I was writing for comfort, like I said above, but I felt like all the little lessons I’d learned in my years as a game designer were coming together. Full Deck Roleplaying is the culmination of everything I know about making tabletop games. And there was incredible freedom that came with that. I knew what I wanted this to be. I scrutinized every rule to make sure it was doing what it needed to do. I stripped out anything that didn’t belong. It was the first time, if not ever then in a long while, where I felt strong. A musician nailing a solo. A surgeon intuiting a procedure. It gave me a level of confidence and clarity that I had been missing for years. I didn’t feel meek. I didn’t second-guess and compromise. I had a vision and I worked hard to make something that fit that vision.

Full Deck Roleplaying is what I’ve been building towards as a game designer. And the plans I have for it are what I want to do. I see a road where nothing was before. It’s an amazing feeling.

All this is to say that, whatever it is you’re doing, you’re growing. In skill, in endurance, in wisdom. Even the work you look at it and spit on has given you something. If that something doesn’t manifest soon, it will eventually. Just keep going.

I Have the Best Friends

Okay, maybe I didn’t learn this while writing Full Deck Roleplaying. Maybe I knew it way before. But it’s certainly been made evident in the days following the game’s release.

I was blown away when Chuck asked if I wanted to do a Five Things about this little self-published game book of mine. I’ve known Chuck for about a decade now and we both come from the tabletop mines but he is all National Bestseller and Awesome Writing Advice Guy and he wrote a book that maybe caused the pandemic? I dunno. I skimmed the headline. But he’s Chuck Wendig, y’know? He’s someone that I feel awkward mentioning in the list of people I know because it sounds like a name drop. I’ve read his work. Turns out? It’s really really good. You might say he’s a Kick-Ass Writer. [ed — goddamnit, blair — c.w.]

Me, I make my living as a game designer. I make video games during the day and tabletop games at night. Sure, I have aspirations to be a novelist—and I’ve self-published a novel—but I’ve yet to make that transition to Writer With Books at Barnes & Noble or Author With a Respectable Amazon Ranking.

Still though, I was totally gonna take him up on the offer. I’d be an idiot not to. Which, I mean, I’m an idiot—but not that kind of idiot. Chuck was doing me a real solid—and he wasn’t the only one.

My friends have been spreading the word about this new game of mine, retweeting and sharing posts, talking it up to people. In 20 years of working in games—and 40+ years of working at life—I’ve made some amazing friends who have my back.

Full Deck Roleplaying may seem like just another game book. Easily made and easily ignored. Plenty of RPGs come out every day. But this game means a lot to me. It’s an attempt to crawl back from total life failure in some way that I own and control completely. I cannot overstate how wonderful my friends have been. Maybe they sensed something special in this game. Maybe they’ve kept up with what’s been going on in my life and just want to help. It doesn’t matter why. It just matters they are. I know it and I see it.

Thank you to Chuck, for the platform to reach more people and just to talk about things I usually only talk about in filtered groups on Facebook. Thank you to all my friends who have helped make navigating the River Styx that much easier. Thank you to my mom and aunt for the immeasurable support. Thank you to my kids for knowing how hard this has all been. I can’t even imagine how it’s all been for you.

Finally, thank you—YOU—for reading. I hope your friends are as wonderful as mine are. You deserve it.

* * *

Jason L Blair makes video games by day and tabletop games by night. A recent transplant to the Chicago area, he is currently enjoying the confines of his tiny apartment and longing for IKEA to reopen. In what time is left over, he likes to write Middle Grade novels and chapter books that he hopes, one day, kids of all ages will get to read. You can keep tabs on him over at JasonLBlair.com and see what kinda games he’s cooking up at FunSizedGames.com.

Jason L. Blair: Website | FunSizedGames | Twitter

Full Deck Roleplaying: DriveThruRPG