Howdy, all!

Halfway through the year, and after many updates with the incremental crafting of various works in progress, I am ready to share the Breakers’ cover.

So let’s get right to it!

I’ve had this image for a couple of years. I even gave a cropped version of it to my cousin. (Hey, Nick!)

I think it looks amazing.

This shows Ashe Stelfire and Celsis Kri in the middle of a fight with a bunch of Fethelither demons. I love the sense of frantic action.

I might end up changing the titling design with my name on the bottom, instead of being squeezed at the top. But the image will stay as is. It was made by Ringasure. You can check out his stuff on DeviantArt and ArtStation.

I’m still narrowing down the launch date for it. Probably end of July or sometime in August. I might even set up preorder on the various platforms to see how that goes. More to come in future emails.

As predicted last time, various personal matters, which have thankfully turned out well, ate into my productivity. I’m up to page 408 with 116,000 words on Secret Fronts. So that means I only wrote 16 pages with 4800 words. I don’t feel bad about this at all. The past month has driven home that there are more important things in life than productivity goals. I’ll ramp back up next time around.

And I’ve come to a realization with this bonus novel WIP. It’s actually two bonus novels.

One focusing on the fallout from the events of Game War, and one showing a previously unseen long siege with other characters who will meet Ashe, Avril, Ed, Harry, and the rest in the sixth main book in the series. I had outlined a briefer exploration of the long siege, but the story of Gathiner and especially Nadia’s struggles against Corsis’s cruelty took on a lot of life as I wrote it, and demanded more story real estate.

So much so that the aftermath story and the long siege story each need a separate book, rather than a single bonus novel.

Right now, I’m guessing I’ll be designating them with Book 5.5 and Book 5.7. I still need to figure out a new title for the split bonus novel, but Secret Fronts will probably be the name of the latter one.

Onwards!

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

Ashe and Crystala:

Crystala bent forward with one hand on her knee and the other raised with her forefinger extended upward. Pitch blackness danced at the edges of her vision. “Give me… give me a ten count.”

Ashe Stelfire crouched to meet her gaze. “Nuul Light is roiling around your eyes. You need more than a ten count.”

She huffed out a laugh. “You might be on to something there.”

Dark Deity II on Steam

You thought you could escape mentions of tactics video games in my monthly missives, but you can’t. Grid-based game reviews are as inevitable as the passing of the seasons.

Dark Deity II has more of the same Shining Force/Fire Emblem-esque game play. Fun weapons, skill, and character class customizations. Too many characters, so you end up ignoring half of them. Though that’s better than ignoring 2/3 of them from the first game.

The voice acting is good. And the writing is mostly okay, though it gets a little wordy and melodramatic when they’re confronting the bad guy boss characters.

The tactical progression through the battle maps is the big selling point of the game. And it does that part quite well. So I’m happy with it.

The Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The Final Architecture trilogy ups the stakes throughout this third installment. 

Idris discovers lots more about the nature of the universe. Specifically, the unspeakable thing in unspace that drives sentient minds insane and suicidal. And the masters pulling the strings of both it and the moon-sized, crystalline Architects. But he’s so mentally broken and twitchy that he has a hard time convincing the others of this bigger picture.

I don’t generally like whiny main characters, but Idris was compelling. And Solace, Kris, Havaer, and Olli were thankfully more assertive in each of their own ways.

But first the characters need to deal with Magda super thugs and their unexpected allies. And a weird empire that’s hung around the periphery that gets VERY pissed off with all the human factionalism and other more esoteric concerns, though their chosen means of multiple layers of interpreters gets in the way of communicating that.

One minor quibble. I wish more time had been spent with Idris and Solace’s quasi romance. It was mentioned in passing throughout the series, but never shown very much aside from a few interactions where they leaned on each other for strength. I didn’t really get a sense of actual intimacy between them.

But that’s not enough to hinder my enjoyment. I loved this book. And the whole series. Read it with your ears or eyes!

That's all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim