Hey everyone,
Happy Early Memorial Day!
I have some exciting news about what’s coming along with my writing this month.
How’s the Audiobook Doing?🎶
In case you missed it, my last update announced the early production of an audiobook. After a long time searching, I’ve found a narrator who seems the perfect fit for Maxy. An early sample is in the link above.
It was great seeing everyone’s shared excitement.
The auditioning process is still ongoing. So, I don’t have much to show yet, but I can share one more sample in the meantime.
Give it a listen.
Please let me know what you think. I may not have updates on the project until after the auditions. As I was telling someone today, I’m eager to see what’s next and excited to see this play out. The quality is immaculate, and this feels like a great voice for Maxy.
New Beginnings🌅
These past weeks I’ve been busy doing something I normally hate to do: plotting.
I detest outlines but see their purpose.
So, this past month or two, I’ve written a novel’s worth in outlines, notes, world-building, character arcs, and relationships, trying hard to brainstorm a timeline for the events of the series with the undead assassins.
It’s so much material that it merits its own post to show the methods to my madness. It’s been great, but albeit draining. This level of writing takes hard work, and I really want my stories to be good. So, it is definitely worth it. I just fear burnout will take over again.
Anyway, all these outlines culminated with where to start my series. I’ll be saving my past work-in-progress (WIP) in this setting as a follow-up. This new WIP will tell the tale of how the infamous outlaw, Belladonna Bates, earned her stripes, who she is, and where she came from.
It’s been absolutely wonderful to write again as well. Editing is a dreadful business and I hate the slog and puzzles along with it.
Thankfully, the story consultant I’ve been seeing has truly helped me bounce my ideas off her and hopefully saved me a few levels of rewrites.
I’m 18k deep in this first draft, but I intend to rewrite part of the beginning again to add more breadcrumbs, so the setting’s rules and logic gain some needed clarity and the characters’ worldview stick with the reader. That’s this weekend’s homework.
How are the Other Stories Coming? 📖
Most of the other projects have met smaller bumps in the road recently. The comic book had a bit of a hang up from its previously steady progress, but it is still coming along nicely. That’s from technical issues.
The prison break story with Garnet sits on hold until I can find a good work and life balance. Sadly, that one falls on me.
Life has gotten extraordinarily busy for better or for worse. I write six-to-eight-hour days on the weekends and every night of the week I either have to run some plans, errands, or catch-up on something I’ve missed. Sometimes I have to force myself just to relax.
I also can’t wait until I get to the point of my life that I can write full-time. While I enjoy helping people, customer service kinda sucks because people are nasty. I could tell you some stories. Like I can’t make this stuff up how people are; it’s crazy.
Personal Life and Hobbies🎲
In efforts to release some stress, I’ve picked up running D&D and TTRPGS again after a month off. One of my players will sadly be heading back home and she wished to see her character through, so I intend to give her a proper send-off soon. She seems to be enjoying herself and it will be a shame to see her leave.
I also ran a few games of another tabletop game I had never heard of before, but once I heard a take on it, I was sold.
The Game is called Monster of The Week. 👻
The premise? High school monster hunters. That’s the pitch I gave to my players, and it has genuinely been one of the easiest games I have ever run. We had a lot of fun.
If anyone is interested in tabletop games but is concerned that they’re too hard to learn, this one is for you. The game is beginner friendly. Just pick up and play.
Making characters proved as easy as you simply walking through a checklist, no math or memorization needed. The players chose characters and we set-up in as little as ten minutes. Even better, we played for what felt like twenty minutes, yet it turned out to be two hours. We got sucked in, lol.
Unlike D&D, this game uses only 2 six-sided dice for your choices. Look into the Powered by Apocalypse System. There are also no zero-sum outcomes either.
So, if I look for clues and fail to roll high enough in D&D, I find nothing and the game stalls. In Monster of The Week, you fail forward. Characters even gain the chance to level-up by failing enough times.
What Makes it Unique? 🤔
The best way I can explain this is by the dice. Dice rolls have three outcomes, but I’m mainly focused on the first one. Roll a 6 below and a complication occurs.
This result means bad things happen. However, the point is not that the players fail, and that’s the end of it, but that conflict arises that forces them to act or else deal with consequences later.
Typically, I rule this as something injuring a character or slows them down. Or better yet, the monster acts and puts pressure on the players. A flat failure is not fun, but without stakes, any story becomes less entertaining.
A player might injure themselves bashing a door, yet they can try again. The monster escapes and now the race is on to find it before it strikes again. The game moves forward.
For us, it was the high school’s angel character hilariously kept teleporting them anywhere but where they wanted to go. Even directly on the football field during the big game.
However, this is actually how they found more clues and tools to help them along the way. They turned a bad situation and made it work overcoming the obstacles. Plus, they leveled up. Twice. It was great!
The Downsides 🤷♂️
The only big downside I experienced stemmed from a lack of guidance for the gamemaster who runs the game for their players. Coming from a D&D background, this game carries no stat block for monsters. It has no monster manual. In fact, I was hard pressed to find any monster stats for reference at all, making up a lot of calls on the go.
The game’s simplicity is wonderful, one echoed by every player around the table. The pace went fast. Combat never dragged, and the table stayed interesting.
So, in a way, the simplicity lends itself as a double-edged sword. The rules expect you to improve and adapt to the players’ actions as a gamemaster. Granted that’s a given, yet I only wish it gave more guidance and inspiration for monster creation mechanically as it does thematically.
The mantra of this game is style first, rules second. Coming from D&D, I wanted more substance in the rules, however. Monster of The Week offers incredible freedom and flavor to play how you want, but that freedom falls short when I want more guidance. It leans toward my style of improv, but stats and mechanics may be the hardest thing to pantze.
Next Month’s Writing Goals ✅
My goals for next month are as follows
- Continue the First Draft on my work-in-progress
- Complete more pages of the comic book
- Follow-up on more on the Audiobook
Wish me luck.
Until next time, Keep Writing!
-Antonio