Happy New Year!

As has been my pattern for the past few years, I like to share a yearly theme that doesn't have a fail state like a New Year's Resolution.  So no specific "do X by Y date" type of stuff.  It's more mindset and behavior based.  And even the timeline is not annual, it can be a season that's shorter or longer than 365 days.

This season, I'm going with intentionality.  Personally, that means specifically making time for friends and family.  With my writing pursuits, that means to keep outputting words on the page.  And also getting new stuff released into the world.

To be intentional about sharing the epic Players of the Game saga with all of you. 

I'll talk more about that in the works in progress section.

This version of Nirva Iniv appears in Repenter and The Brigands as she amasses power in Sufrinzon.  From marrying into the Iniv family, to becoming the Baroness of Palle, to conquering Alagar as the Empress of the Palle Empire.

She reclaimed the Drandfiev armor from the tomb of the long dead empress of Sufrinzon.  The dark-red attire amplifies her ethereal might and further cements her claim to legitimacy as the ruler of the dark world.

She schemes to reclaim her daughter, Avril, whether she wants it or not.  Nirva has a bad history with Avril's father, Ashe Stelfire, and deeply craves to wreak suffering on him.  She will inflict her unhinged desires on anyone close to them.

Desires dictated by the abstract painting that she created.  Her masterwork drives her to dominate the super continent.  Originally, she did it to prevent a worse disaster from coming to pass.  As Corsis whispered in her ear to do it.

But she has long since lost sight of that altruistic motivation.  Nirva's ambition has consumed her in a fugue of cruelty.

Find out if her ambition also consumes Ashe, Avril, and their friends in Repenter and The Brigands.

As part of the intentionality theme for this year, I have both the Breakers and the Repenter Collection in the hopper.

The Repenter Collection is an e-book bargain boxed set that collects Book 1: Repenter, Book 1.5: The Hidden Chapters, Book 2: The Brigands, and Book 2.5: The Favor.  My graphic designer just gave me the cover components, and I'm hoping to get it released in the first half of 2025.

The Breakers will come out after that in both e-book and print.

With the Secret Fronts work in progress, I'm up to page 211 with 59,600 words.  Which makes it 23 pages and 6900 words since the last newsletter from a few weeks back.

It's a shorter time frame on this round, but I'll still aim to up the productivity for the next month.

The key is to keep moving.  So I shall.

Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:

Goodspeed:  “I’m in. But my reason for agreeing to this is not high minded. I don’t actually want to win so much as I want my grandfather to lose. The Game. And everything else. That’s what I want more than victory. More than a lot of things.”

Mercy of Gods: Captives War, Book 1 by James S.A. Corey

The pair of Expanse authors have released a new sci-fi series under their Corey pen name. 

This time, it's about a humanity that's on an alien planet with a separate set of biological natives, but they've been there for thousands of years and they don't know how they got there.

That ends up being more of a longer term mystery, because they are soon ruthlessly conquered by an empire led by giant sort of crab, sort of centipede aliens.  And in a pithy comment by one of the POV characters: "They are all assholes."

Dafyd Alkhor is the main character of the ensemble that gets shanghaied to the alien homeworld, and he spends much of the book trying to figure out how their new alien overlords think.

The authors make a smart move with bridge sections that talk about how the aliens are ultimately brought low.  I generally don't like "we're stuck in prison" plot lines, so that explicit foreshadowing helped keep me engaged with the rest of the compelling story.

But humans are nowhere near that victorious outcome just yet. 

Humanity is thoroughly humbled throughout the book.  Dafyd and his brilliant scientist colleagues are tasked with figuring out how to make food edible from one alien flora to another alien fauna.  All while other competitor captive species try to sabotage them.  And the opposing side of the aliens' war reveals itself in an invasive parasitic form.

Jefferson Mays does another fantastic job of performing the characters and narrating the story.

Good stuff.

Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers's take on the century-old, Weimar Republic-era silent film is incredibly well shot.

The movie riffs on the Dracula story with a lot of differences with Count Orlok played by with unearthly menace by Bill Skarsgard.  Including his epic mustache, that is a visual but cool departure from the completely hairless original version.

The movie's use of shadows is really striking.  And all of the actors do a great job.  I'll call out the doctor character played with understated grim pragmatism by Ralph Ineson.  Anyone who's played Diablo 4 will also recognize him as the voice of Lorath.  Which was a cool bonus.

This movie really makes the vampire seem more like an animated corpse than an urbane killer.  And his influence on the town upon his arrival is depicted as a plague smashing through town.

The sound of him gulping down blood is just unsettling.

The climax also makes a cool twist to the typical "exploit a vampire's weakness" solution.

I'm not the biggest horror fan, but this was absolutely worth seeing.  Especially if you like creepy cinema.

That's all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim