March 31, 2017

Announcements, Monthly Author Check-In, Personal

Dear March 2017, Don’t Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

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So here’s the thing: March was a disaster of a month for me. Between a family member being in the hospital and the crappiest weather possible and car repairs and a thousand little headaches, these past 31 days have taken 31 years. Which sucks even more than it should have, because JUST before this all hit the fan, I had an unexpected three-day writing binge and finished the manuscript of a new book.

I know! I hadn’t planned to finish this book for MONTHS, I’ll be honest. So the enthusiasm that I carried with me into the beginning of March was unbelievable. I was pumped up, I was in “the zone”, and I was tentatively hopeful that I could get the vast bulk of the editing done by the time April rolled around.

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February 20, 2017

Storytelling, What I’m Reading

Gameplay, Storytelling, and the Choices We Make

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Recently I downloaded a new game to my phone: Choices, by a company called Pixelberry.

I did this in part because I skimmed an interview with one of the Pixelberry team members, and it caught my attention, but mostly I downloaded it because I am a sucker for choose-your-owns. I cannot even count how many I’ve played through. Fantasy games, mostly, because that’s obviously where the storytelling method really became popularized, so I guess another thing that drew me to Choices was that a lot of their stories WEREN’T. They had one fantasy “book” (and it’s accompanying sequel) in their app, yes, but there were also several mysteries, and a number of romances. And hey, I like seeing how storytelling methods apply to genres they aren’t usually used for, you know? And it was nice to see a normally male-centric game type being marketed toward a distinctly female audience. Overall, I was really predisposed to like this app.

I’m not even going to use this space to get into my game-level disappointments with it. Things like the micropayment system it uses and how it uses it, or the fact that these really aren’t so much choose-your-own stories as… slightly tailor a predefined narrative arc to your preference. Instead, I’m going to talk about the one “book” that I played all of the way through, all 17 game “chapters” worth, a romance called The Freshman. Because, um. Wow. Buckle up, folks, this is going to get feminist-ranty.

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January 14, 2017

Announcements, Monthly Author Check-In, Personal, The Beacon Campaigns

Author Check-in, January 2017

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I need to acknowledge, both publicly and to myself, that I really am not good at blogging.

I know: obvious statement of the year, right? I should know this by now. I have, after all, been maintaining on-and-off web presences in various forms and on various places around the internet since the dinosaur era, when blogs were called “online journals,” and we uploaded individual entries through FTP and linked together each page by hand. Never have I been good at it.

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April 12, 2016

Announcements, Heart’s Blood, The Beacon Campaigns

“Heart’s Blood” Release Day!

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GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE! “Heart’s Blood” is finally done, and is appearing NOW in all of the usual online retailers. Ebook and paperback are both out, and if they’re not up on your favorite bookstore yet, they will be soon.

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November 23, 2015

Announcements, Heart’s Blood, The Beacon Campaigns

Cover Reveal: Heart’s Blood

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