Yello!

There's a sketch on Tenacious D's first album called "One Note Song" where Jack Black impresses himself by coming up with a song with one note plus a "little bendy thing" with the guitar string.  And in self-deluded grandeur proclaims that he's ready to move on.

"Next song!  Next song!  NEXT!"

Well, that's where I'm at now.  The Breakers is out in the world.  I went to the Get Lit Conference a few weeks back and sold some bundles to folks.  Including Jeff Koterba, a local "Omaha-famous" cartoonist and DJ for an Omaha classical radio station.  He bought my books for his grandson, because he's also into "Brando Sando" (Brandon Sanderson), which aligns very much with my audience.  Jeff's presentation was by far the best part of the conference.

Here's a pic of me at my Git Lit table with my books, including The Breakers, and my "on Jim McGowan brand" wild shirt with tropical AT-ATs.

Pretty rad, in my humble opinion.

But now, with hopefully less self-delusion, it's time to move to the next thing. Next thing!

NEXT!

I'll be going to the Local Author Fair in a few weeks at Council Bluffs. I'll go into the details in its own section below.

I think I'll also do a Bookfest event in Omaha in December too.

And there's all the writing projects, also in their own section.

Plenty o' fun for the near future.  And because we must obey the rule of threes, the following all-caps proclamation is inevitable:

NEXT!

I'll be at the Council Bluffs Public Library Local Author Fair on Sunday, October 19, 2025 from 2pm-4pm.

If you're in the Omaha area, come and say hi.

Tap the books image above or the button below for more info on the Council Bluffs Public Library's website.

Frulgrath looks like something out of a nightmare.  A description he might even self-apply.

A lanky demon with dried-out, dingy tan skin and needle-width pointed teeth.  Armed with hand-axes that can penetrate energy shields, armor, and the flesh of dragons.  He also uses trinkets and various oils to render himself invisible or to add additional potency to his attacks, depending on the foe he fights.  His insides are full of dust, and he can heal from nearly any form of harm.

But not all harm.  His own axes are just as dangerous to him.  

Frulgrath once had four arms.  He lost one when Ashe Stelfire lopped it off with the Demon's own axe during the climax of The Brigands.  He remains exceedingly deadly with his remaining three.  And he craves payback against Ashe for the maiming.

Payback he aims to collect.

He has another name that Thebes gave him as a joke back when they were on the same side in Repenter.  But it's since become far more serious to anyone who encounters him.

Hatchet Man.

He has served as Corsis's agent throughout the ages.  He kills with ruthless efficiency, but he doesn't revel in it.  Frulgrath is pragmatic and possesses a keen sense of what is realistic.  He also has a dry sense of humor, which Corsis enjoys.

Frulgrath is one of the few people who can speak bluntly to the Master of the Game.  Corsis will even sometimes listen to him.  But not always.

And Corsis has a new job for Frulgrath.  One that he'll relay to the Hatchet Man through Balpors.  Find out about Frulgrath's latest assignment in The Breakers.

Art by Ringasure.

I went through the edits to The Game War and agreed with most of them.  I plan to keep using this new editor, Lori with First Editing.  She's quite good.

I'll be doing another pass with ProWritingAid and maybe try out their AI Beta Reader to see if it has any valid feedback.

Following that, I've made the judgment call.  I'm going to try out ElevenLabs for digital narration.  If I like it, I'll release Repenter through whatever outlets that allow it, and depending on how it goes, the other books too.  Sadly, Audible only allows their own inferior digital narration product, so it won't be available there for now.

For those who aren't fans of AI digital narration, or AI in general.  I totally get it.  Much of it was built on scraped training data.  

I just ask for your grace as I try this out.  

These products are not going away.  I can't afford $5-10k for a professional human narrator.  If I don't have my novels in audiobook format, I am missing half or more of the market.  My books have almost certainly been scraped as well.  And I'm frankly fine with it.

I'm leaning in to being human and dipping my toes in to being an AI artisan author, to steal Joanna Penn's term.  I don't use AI for the actual writing, because that's not fulfilling to me, and AI-generated text will not replicate my authorial voice even if I did use it.  But my literal voice is not up to the task of reading hours upon hours of my stories.  I'm prone to laryngitis, and I'm not looking to strain my vocal chords with a whole lot of talking.

So I'm starting this ElevenLabs experiment.  We'll see where it goes.

I also tried out Google's Notebook LM again and reloaded the POTG novels as text files instead of PDFs, and that worked much better.  It's now at an 85-90% accuracy rate, which is fine for what I need it for.

I actually used it for this newsletter.  I couldn't remember if Thebes first called Frulgrath as Hatchet Man in Repenter or The Brigands.  Yes, I could have done a find-search in both books, but it was handy to just use Notebook LM to track down the info.

The faux podcast thing is still kinda spotty with its accuracy and more of a gimmick, but asking the text portion to tell me about characters and story events yields decent results.  I shall add this to my writer's tool belt.

I'll get back to Unseen Scars and start on its second draft after I do the audiobook thing.

ABC: Always be creating.

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

Vurg to Vick: "Yes, I fortified our defenses. But they failed. That’s the hard lesson of the Weird War’s aftermath, lad. Sometimes, to protect, you must attack."

Blood Squad Seven by Joe Casey and Paul Fry

This is a very "inside baseball, except it's comics" recommendation.  So I realize this might not be for everyone.

This series is based on analogue characters from a team of superhero celebrities who were big in the 90s.  And now some of the original characters are back to try it again with other younger characters who are either their kids or some other legacy aspect.  

In real life, the team from the 90s was called Youngblood originally published by Image, but lots of legal madness over the ensuing decades has made that basically impossible to publish it with the original characters and that name.  So we have a retconned team called Blood Squad Seven with analogues.  Kind of similar to what Watchmen did with the old Charlton characters.

The hook of the series is that it's both a modern look at how superheroes would absolutely be celebrities in the modern era.  And they have a legacy to older characters from the 90s, not unlike how some of the JLA (Justice League of America) members in the 60s were legacy characters to the original versions in the JSA (Justice Society of America) from the 40s.

I like the tense dialogue, and I like the art style as well.  Very esoteric and not for everyone, but I dig it.

One Battle After Another

And it's another recommendation on which I'm guessing others' opinions might diverge.

It's a Paul Thomas Anderson movie set over a 16-year span of time with a Weather Underground-esque group that's doing revolutionary/terrorist attacks and liberation missions of immigrant detention centers.

Not diving into the culture war aspect of this stuff, but honestly, that's more of the background to the movie.

Without spoiling too much.  It's more about a family that's dealing with the fallout of a lot of violently unwise or lustfully unwise decisions that were made in the past, and come back to haunt them when a certain child reaches her 16th year.

Leonardo DiCaprio does a great job of conveying a former revolutionary who flames out and is doing a so-so job of raising his daughter.  A daughter who Sean Penn's relentless, unhinged, and also pathetic army colonel will stop at nothing to capture.  It also has a lot of cool long-take action shots amid riots and desolate car chases.  The score was noticeably well done too.

I run hot and cold on PTA movies.  I despised Magnolia.  But I enjoyed Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood.  This is a movie that's still sticking with me after I saw it.  So it must have done something right.  For me at least.

Give it a try if you're feeling like something challenging and unique.

Want to know the score fast? Select Quick Recap, and Corsis will detail all his jerky skullduggery in just a few minutes.

Want to know the nitty gritty? Select Detailed Recaps to jump in with both feet and learn all the big events and character moments of the Players of the Game saga.

Check out maps of Jeea and Sufrinzon on stelfire.com/atlas.  All can be viewed in magnified detail.

Mobile users can tap on the map image and select "Download image" to zoom in on a map.

That's all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim