Howdy!

So. I’ve had an interesting week.

My area in the middle of the US got hit by what I’ve been calling a 30-minute land hurricane. It shredded through a bunch of mature trees in my city, many of which broke a lot of power grid infrastructure. And it resulted in a whole lot of houses being without power for days. Mine included. In 90 and 100 degree F heat. With stagnant, nigh-windless air, which made opening the windows an empty gesture.

I do not subscribe.

Thankfully, while widespread, the storm didn’t knock out the majority of the city’s power. So we’ve both helped other family members and leveraged help from others. We have a pretty friendly community and neighborhood, so we’ve not had to worry about jerky behavior.

This is sadly not my first rodeo with a lengthy power outage, though the last time was 16 years earlier. My wife and I slogged through a few days reading analogue media using daylight and then nice flashlights. But we tapped out yesterday. I’m currently writing this in a hotel room, leveraging my new Nord VPN service.

I’m counting my blessings on this. It’s miles better than it could have been. We suffered no property damage. It’s not winter, where we’d have to worry about snow, freezing pipes, hypothermia, and more. And we are hopefully closer to the ending than the beginning based on the last robo call I received from the public power company, which has been most impressive in their transparency and competent management of the crisis.

It knocked out my writing productivity for several days, but I’m back at it.

And immensely grateful that I can do so in a place where disasters are met head on by many helpers.

Tempes is not the favorite child of Corsis.

He’s neither brave nor charismatic. He’s been known to sabotage his other family members’ interests to further his own pursuits. And he makes no secret of doing so, which earns him no allies within the ambitious and treacherous clan. However, Corsis abides all these shortcomings because his son can do something no one else can.

Manipulate time.

Tempes greedily guards his knowledge of chronomancy. Actively furthering his own mastery. Though its side effect has made his skin jaundiced. Which he accentuates with his garish yellow attire.

He murders those who attempt to learn the temporal art. Or sabotages others’ efforts to explore other avenues of the ethereal discipline, including even his father. Though Corsis has never proved that suspicion. Not yet.

In the meantime, Corsis leverages his son’s power in Dread Corps. Inflicting Tempes’s hateful knowledge on those who oppose his father. Others like Ashe Stelfire. Like Avril Enzali.

Learn more about Tempes’s spite in Repenter and The Brigands.

Despite the lack of electricity curveball from the past week, I’ve made lots of headway.

I finished the fourth draft of The Game War and sent it off to beta readers. It’s easily the most epic thing I’ve ever written with multiple POVs and some big status quo changes. It clocked in at 1102 pages with 295,240 words. Not as big as some of the Sanderson, Martin, or Jordan yarns, but definitely not a breezy read either. As I said earlier. It is epic.

I then finished outlining Secret Fronts in Scrivener and made use of Scapple to map out some longer term plot points with some of the later books.

PLUS! I’ve started the first draft of Secret Fronts in trusty plain-old Word with its infinite page-after-page of text. It remains the best way to get maximum words on the screen for me. I’m up to page 34 with 8942 words. It’s fun to get back into the saddle of first-draft creativity. It’s equal parts planning and improv.

I love it.

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

Gath toasted his shot glass to Nadia. “Wait till you get to the aftertaste.”

Chosen of Chaos by Benjamin Medrano

This one is a softer recommendation, but I enjoyed it enough to call it out.

Evelyn Tarth is an ultra powerful elf warrior mage in a sci-fi fantasy setting where the characters use magic along with tech in space-faring adventures.

It kind of feels like she’s a new game + character who’s hanging around in the beginning stages of a video game. Nothing in the story challenges her. Nothing. She and her Irish-accented djinn friend swat down any who attempt to harm her.

Strangely, I didn’t get bored by it because of a few important things. Evelyn is kind when people aren’t trying to kill her. She frees a bunch of enslaved women and offers them help to get back on their feet. Some of them end up joining her crew. And there’s a lot of witty, lighthearted banter throughout that’s well-performed by the narrator, Abby Craden.

It’s breezy with low-stakes, but give it a try if you want a fun sci-fi fantasy romp.

The Ultimates by Deniz Camp and Juan Frigeri

I’m really digging this latest round of the Ultimate Universe that Jonathan Hickman set up with the Maker, a younger evil Reed Richards, who altered another reality of the Marvel universe. Preventing heroes from achieving their destinies.

The Ultimates focuses on the Avengers characters put together by that universe’s good Reed Richards, who wears the Doctor Doom mask and just goes by Doom. And a teenage Tony Stark who goes by Iron Lad.

The second issue’s focus on Captain America was poignant, especially with his learning that the US was dismantled in the 1960s by the Maker. As was a kid’s reaction. “Mom, what does that letter on his head stand for?”

Heart wrenching and compelling stuff.

The art is well done and I look forward to seeing how this alternate-reality Avengers team succeeds or fails during this run.

That's all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim