Top Ten Lame Excuses for Not Writing Today

10. My cat is laying on my keyboard.

9. My knick-knacks need dusting.

8. I already wrote twice this month.

7. I’ve only got half an hour.

6. My neighbor is mowing his lawn.

5. I’m writing a sad scene, and I don’t want to make myself depressed.

4. My chair keeps squeaking and breaking my concentration.

3. I may have gotten an e-mail in the last hour.

2. I can’t snack and type at the same time.

1. I have to be somewhere inspiring to write, like France.

A Special Gift for My Biggest Fans

I’ve been thinking of a good way to reward the members of my street team since the group was organized. Calling themselves my Guild of Adventurers, these dedicated fans have embraced the call to share my stories with friends and associates. In addition to participating in monthly goals (or quests) given to the group, individual members have posted blog articles, spoken to schools and public libraries, loaned copies of my books to friends and families, and generally been an amazing bunch of fans who believe in me and the stories that I am sharing.

Dedication like that deserves an expression of sincere thanks, but I struggled to think of something that would be appropriate. After all, there are only so many free books that I can give away before they have them all! I wanted something that would be fun, unique, and ongoing. After some serious consideration, I realized that there was a way to combine my love for stories with my love of gaming to create a special gift for my biggest fans. I would organize an online role-playing game set in one of my worlds.

This game will be an informal, exclusive event hosted by me, and only active members of my street team will receive an invitation to participate. It’s up to the group which book’s world will be used for the game, though so far it looks like the clear favorite will be a game involving a group of hunters sent to Krendaria in the world of The Beast Hunter. The rules of the game will be developed by me, and will focus on role-playing and simplified dice rolls rather than complex diagrams and large handfuls of dice. My hope is that it will be fun for both avid gamers and fans who just want the unique experience of personally exploring a world that they’ve only seen in a novel before.

If you’d like to participate in the game, there’s still plenty of time. You can join the Adventurer’s Guild by signing up for my mailing list and writing an honest review for one of my books on Amazon. In fact, the December Quest for the guild is to get a total of ten reviews of my latest book, Magic, Mystery and Mirth on both Amazon and Goodreads, so you’ll already be an active member just for signing up! If we reach our goal, the game will take place next month in January using a free, online chatting platform.

I hope that many of my fans will take this opportunity to delve deeper into the world of The Beast Hunter and share their love of my stories with others. I’m very excited to interact with more of my readers in this unique way, and look forward to continuing this tradition if it’s successful. See you in Krendaria!

To learn more about my street team, click here.

To write a review for Magic, Mystery and Mirth, click here for Amazon, and here for Goodreads

Top Ten Things I’ve Learned About Video Gaming

10. Nobody cares what difficulty you play a game at.

9. If you haven’t had fun with a game for a while, stop playing it.

8. If you feel that you need to start an RPG over again, don’t do it right away. Play a different game.

7. A great story will only make up for poor gameplay on the first play-through.

6. The most effective way to play a game is never the most fun way.

5. Games you have played with friends are never as good by yourself.

4. Nobody cares how many trophies, Easter eggs, or achievements you’ve unlocked.

3. Even among gamers, video games are a terrible topic for conversation.

2. If you like a game enough to play it all the way to the ending more than once, never sell, trade, or lend it out.

1. Play the way you want to. It’s your game!

Expressing Gratitude as an Author

With Thanksgiving coming up next week, I’ve been thinking about all of the supportive people that I’m grateful for. They say that it takes a village to raise a child, and I think it must take a whole community to support a writer. Of course, authors do have some unique ways to express gratitude for special people. Many of our books start with an Acknowledgments page where we list a few specific individuals that were instrumental in seeing the project all the way to publication. We can also dedicate books to people who have touched our lives in a special way and who deserve more honors and accolades than we could ever provide.

Even so, I’m often worried that I’ll forget to mention someone that I’m truly grateful for. I’ll often do my best to compensate for this by thanking groups of people like my beta readers, street team members, and friends. While this may result in some person somewhere feeling slighted (though I sincerely hope nobody ever is) my hope is that I can better show my gratitude by the way that I treat my friends and fans on a regular basis. Sure, seeing your name in the front of a published book can be exciting, and having a book dedicated to you can be touching. But isn’t it more meaningful to have a relationship that demonstrates gratitude and appreciation? The kind of relationship that goes beyond the books?

I know that I could probably get more sales and reviews if I hounded my friends for them, but I prefer for my friends to be friends first and fans second. If they do buy a book or write a review, I would want it to be because they either liked the story or wanted to support me in my craft. That’s the sort of fan that I’m truly grateful for, and I want to express my thanks, once again, for all of you that have shared in this wonderful adventure thus far. I couldn’t do it without you.

Concept Art for the Magic, Mystery and Mirth Cover Image

During the book launch party for Magic, Mystery and Mirth earlier this week, we raffled off a poster-sized print of the cover's artwork. Today, I thought it might be fun to share a few of the rough sketches and concept art that went into making this wonderful piece.

Here's the very first rough sketch, done in a pocket-sized notebook.

This initial color concept was when I really started to get excited about this cover. Notice how some things, like the rider and alligator, remained very similar, while the genie here is very different from what ended up on the cover. We were even considering adding the puppet Lumpy to the image, but he didn't fit with the general theme and had to be removed. 

The alligator was drawn normally at first, with the dress added in later stages.

Similarly, the rider's cloak was added in later versions. 

The genie went through many iterations. Look how dapper he is in the bottom picture!

I like the design in this picture, but it didn't really suggest a genie, so we discarded it.

This was the last version of the genie before the final.

The dirigible in the mountains has always been my favorite part of this picture.

More dirigibles. 

The final version. I love this cover!

A Word for Professional Writers on Measuring Success

Earlier this week, I was tagged in a conversation that had been started by a writer friend of mine who was feeling a little discouraged. She was frustrated by the way our industry often encourages authors to aim for exposure over financial rewards. This often means giving books away in order to receive reviews, writing articles for someone else’s blog, taking a financial loss to speak at a writing conference, and a host of other common practices for professional writers.

As I followed the conversation thread, I could understand the frustration that my friend was feeling. I'm sure that all authors have felt it from time to time. It’s hard to know what sort of value we should place on the various types of work that we do. Should we equate everything to dollars? Exposure? What's the quantifiable value in each activity that a writer does?

I don’t think that there is an answer to this question that would satisfy every author out there, mainly because we’re dealing with the disparate worlds of business and art. There are benefits and blessings that come from doing what you love that are hard to define, let alone quantify. But in order for an author to share their work, there must be also a business plan, complete with tasks, budgets, and goals all designed to put books in the hands of eager readers. So where’s the balance?

I remember spending summers with my grandfather running trotlines in southeast Texas to try to catch enough fish for us to eat every night. It was all about consistent effort, trial and error, and lots of hooks in the water. We enjoyed the process, but we also knew that we needed real results. We also didn’t expect to catch enough fish to sell at market and buy more equipment. We kept our expectations reasonable, and measured success based on our efforts, not our daydreams.

Beyond that, there's something to be said for karma and good will. Sometimes you take a loss somewhere because you have faith that it’s the right thing to do, and hope that you will find success in the future. At the moment, I know that I'm doing much more free writing coaching work for disadvantaged high school students through the Educurious program than I am for paying clients, but there's a totally different reward system in that for me, and I'm happy.

For all you writers out there, remember that you're doing so many things right. I won't say not to get down, because you should have permission to have doubts occasionally. But don't let it paralyze you. Do what you love, and you'll find success, however you measure it.

Top Ten Frustrating Things about Role-playing Games

I’m a huge RPG fan. I love the storylines, the strategic gameplay, and the feeling of going on a journey that you don’t get with almost any other type of video game. But there are some things that will annoy me even as I play my favorite genre of games. Here’s the top ten things that bug me whenever I see them in an RPG.

10. Not enough gameplay

RPGs will almost always have more storyline than other genres. The point of the game is to play a role, after all. But when an hour or more passes by of walking from one cut-scene to another, I start to wonder why I’m not just watching a movie or reading a book instead. Games are supposed to be interactive. Let me play!

9. Extreme difficulty spikes

I’m not opposed to hard games. They give the player a real challenge along with a sense of accomplishment upon completion. But it’s annoying to spend hours developing my character through a bunch of small battles only to have him killed in one hit from a boss. Why am I the hero again? It seems like I’m not cut out for this career. Maybe I should switch to making crates and barrels. There’s always a market for those in these sort of games.

8. Abrupt endings

With the possible exceptions of either a novel or an entire season of a TV series, role-playing video games are the most immersive, long-term, fantasy escapist experiences. So why do so many of them wrap up over sixty hours of gameplay with a thirty second cut-scene? Is it a crime to give the player some closure? I’ve even seen games that have the player’s companions say their last farewells before the final boss battle, as if even they know that the developers are basically just going to drop everything and take a three-day weekend rather than give us any significant resolution to the storyline.

7. Too much post-game content

The other end of the spectrum of course are games that don’t stop after the ending, but don’t really go anywhere either. This isn’t like an open-world RPG that has tons of sub-quests to do after the main storyline is finished. These are the games that drop you right back into the world without any goals or tasks beyond endlessly continuing to farm levels. Yes, that’s exactly what I want to do, rather than start up a new game…

6. Useless level-ups

A good RPG makes every level-up a tiny victory for the player. A sign that not only are you doing well, but that your characters are going to be even cooler now. In a bad RPG, your current level might as well be a total-hours-played display, interesting to see how long you’ve been at this, but it has no bearing on the experience.

5. Battles we can’t win

I’m not talking about hard battles here. I’m talking about battles that are scripted for the player to lose. You are not allowed to win these fights, but they’re still treated like a regular fight. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve burned through all of my expendables items (doubly painful for me, as I’m definitely a hoarder gamer) only to die for the fourth time, check online, and find out that I should just stand there like a doofus and let the character kill me because the developers couldn’t be bothered to make this fight a cut-scene.

4. Battles we can’t lose

These are even worse. At least with the last issue you can get a sense of the helplessness of your character and the inevitability of defeat. But with these battles, it’s like the developers decided that I’m just too stupid to be trusted with the difficult task of playing their game. The worst example of this was a JRPG that would automatically resurrect any killed characters during the final fight of the game. Gee, I hope I win…

3. Puzzles that require a walk-through

I grew up in the heyday of adventure games, so I’ve done my fair share of trying to use a tuna-fish sandwich on a broken airplane, but I’ve never been a big puzzle fan. That’s why I play story-driven games where I can regularly kill monsters. At least the internet exists for people like me.

2. Too many useless NPCs

I realize that a game world devoid of people can be boring, but the solution shouldn’t be filling it up with dozens of villagers just wandering around all day. Often these people will only have one or two lines of dialogue, but in some games each citizen in each town has a different comment to make after every major plot point in the game. I never know how many of these people I should talk to for the ‘full experience’ before I just start racing past them all because it’s been over an hour since I last did anything that earned me experience points.

1. Invisible, arbitrary rules

This is the worst, and it happens all the time. “Don’t open those three chests or you won’t get the best weapon in the game later.” “Don’t talk to that merchant or you’ll miss a quest later.” “Don’t walk to the left of the screen or you’ll trigger a cut-scene.” None of these rules are ever intuitive, and often you have to reload the game or check a walk-through before you play through an area just to make sure you don’t miss things. Maybe some people like this sort of thing for replay value, but personally, I’d rather replay a game because I enjoyed the experience, not because I accidentally stepped on a butterfly on my first play-through that caused a hurricane that swept all the healing potions in the world out to sea.


Those are my personal top ten things that bug me about RPGs. If you’d like to read more about this style of game, check out my list of the Top Ten Character Tropes in Japanese Role-Playing Games.