Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 50

Guest post – excerpt: Above Ground by A.M. Harte

A.M. Harte writes twisted speculative fiction, such as the post-apocalyptic Above Ground and the zombie love anthology Hungry For You. She is excellent at missing deadlines, has long forgotten what ‘free time’ means, and is utterly addicted to chocolate. She lives in London, a city not half as foggy as some seem to think.

Book blurb:

The first glimpse of sun may be her last.

When Lilith Gray goes above ground for the first time, she hardly expects to stay there — much less be trapped on the surface with no way home.

Hunted by trackers and threatened by the infected, Lilith is on the run, desperate to return underground. Her only hope for survival lies with a taciturn werewolf with a dark agenda of his own.

Lilith’s old carefree life has been reduced to one choice:

Adapt. Or die trying.

Excerpt:

“You saved the wrong girl.”

Emma’s eyelids were heavy. She blinked, blinked again, stared at the solid metal ceiling with blank incomprehension. Her body ached, and every time she tried to focus her vision swam sickeningly. Where was she? What had happened?

“There was no other girl to save.” The second voice was smoother, more a steely tenor than a rumbling baritone. Neither voice was familiar. Emma closed her eyes again. Took slow, deep breaths. There was a dull thudding pain at the back of her head. Was this a hospital?

“You’ve put the entire operation at risk, King,” the first man snapped. “You should have brought Lilith, or nothing.”

It was the sound of a familiar name that tugged Emma into consciousness. She opened her eyes again, gingerly turned her head to the side. She was lying on a cot in the corner of a rectangular room. Large screens covered the opposite wall, showing surveillance footage of countless bodies crawling and twitching, or worse—not moving at all. One camera had been knocked askew and was pointing at a wall instead, directly at a large, dark liquid smear.

The memories returned in a rush: the theatre, the spatter of blood, the sharp grins of the vampires. She’d passed out, hit her head, and Lilith… Lilith had been kidnapped, no doubt eaten, her best friend gone forever because Emma had been too weak to fight. It could have been her to die, and yet here she was, bruised but safe, watching the silent carnage on-screen like it was just another horror film. Emma tore her eyes away, her stomach churning.

The blood had no effect on the two men standing in front of the monitors. The first was tall, in his late forties, wearing a white lab coat that only highlighted his broad shoulders. His clothes beneath the lab coat were plain but there was a confidence to his stance that exuded power. His companion, on the other hand, was wearing all black, his body thin and angular, with features that fell just shy of pretty to seem, instead, masculine.

The thinner man turned to the screens, tapped a few buttons on the console below them. One of the lower monitors faded into a radar display. There were two pulsing dots on the map: one at the very centre, and one on the right, moving towards the edges of the screen.

“There she is, Dr Gray,” the thin man said, pointing, and Emma dared to hope that Lilith was okay. The man crouched lower, traced the dot with his finger, his black jacket riding up to reveal a tranq gun holstered in the small of his back. “I can track her down, bring her back.”

“And lift your topside ban, King?” Gray scoffed. “I think not. No, you will deal with this little mess you’ve created.”

Meaning her. Emma closed her eyes, tried to even her breathing. Best to feign sleep while she thought through her options. She’d been rescued from the theatre, by mistake, it seemed. Were these men secret police? Terrorists? And what could they possibly want from Lilith?

Kindle US – http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009YA879S

Kindle UK – http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009YA879S

Goodreads – http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16090171-above-ground

Game Reviews: Sun Flowers and Super Stardust Delta: Advanced Pack

Today you get two game reviews in the same post. Or actually, you’re getting one new review and an update about an older game I reviewed earlier in the year. I’ll cover it at the bottom, so first I want to talk about Sun Flowers for the PS Vita.

I admit, when I got this game as a demo first, I was just looking for something to pass the time until Assassin’s Creed: Liberation came out. But the basics of the game play were so addicting that I went ahead and bought the game, and I’m still playing it over other “better” games, including my new copy of Assassin’s Creed.

The premise of Sun Flowers is simple enough. You play as the sun, floating over rows of flower beds. You shoot sunbeams, and they must pass through at least one happy-faced white cloud to make a raindrop with a smiley face. When a water drop hits a seed or a plant, that plant evolves to the next stage of growth…turning into a flower with smiley face. Have I made it clear that this an exceedingly happy game? Even the sun is smiling most of the time. (The sun goes emo for some levels. Guess winter bums it out too.)

Pass a drop through two clouds, and the resulting raindrop carries more “oomph,” increasing the level of the flower’s growth. If your sunbeam hits a plant directly, the plant catches on fire, and will eventually burn up. Hit it a second time with a sunbeam, and the plant bursts and dies. You have three lives, and although it is possible to earn extra lives, you can’t “bank” anything past those three.

To make the game more challenging, there are black clouds that unleash lightning, and these bolts also burn up the plants. As the seasons pass, you will have to shake the Vita to get leaves off of the plants that absorb water drops, or wipe the screen to get rid of frost. Sometimes the plants ice up and you have to melt the ice with direct sunbeams. And then there’s the bonus stage, swapping the moon for the sun and turning your “gun” into a “moondrop” of water. Then your goal is to avoid all the clouds until the end of the bonus round.

If it sounds goofy, yes, it kind of is. But once I got used to using the screen controls for movement and fired sunbeams with the shoulder button, it turned into a very satisfying and simple way to pass time. I should mention, the game uses a weird vertical game screen, meaning you turn the Vita on its side to play this. At first it seems awkward, but after a few levels the position becomes comfortable.

There are three difficulty setting on the main garden with 165 breeds of flowers to collect through 61 levels on each setting. (I think) Harder levels get you rarer flowers, and it is possible to play starting on harder levels once you’ve reached levels 21 and 41 in regular play-through. Additionally, there is a second island-based garden with 165 more flowers to collect, and many tropical-themed variations on the aforementioned obstacles. Ice patches are replaced with monsoons, and instead of shaking leaves, the island goes dark, requiring that you expose the camera sensor to light to make out which clouds are which.

This feature was a bit irksome because the camera senor is under the back of my thumb with my normal grip, so I have to bend my right hand around at a weird angle, leading often to my thumb tapping the screen and causing a misfired sunbeam. (FYI: Tapping the screen fires too, but using the shoulder button ensures better accuracy.)

The premise is simple, and the music is chintzy. (A midi of Four Seasons is the main theme. Okay, it still works, but it sounds chintzy.) But the game is just so much fun, and I’ve lost many hours and drained my Vita in short bursts just trying to get one more rare flower, or just trying to making it past level 42 on hard. And for a game that was only 2.99 euros, it’s about the best bargain I’ve found all year, considering the investment to time spent ratio. Even after I lose on the harder levels, I still just want one more try. So, given that addictive quality, I’m giving Sun Flowers 4 stars. It’s a fun game that will take up a lot of time between runs in Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed.

Game two is Super Stardust Delta, but I’ll only be reviewing the advanced pack. First of all, I wish I’d gotten the advanced pack before just now, simply because of one single addition to the game. There are other modes that came with the upgrade, and those are okay. But what this shooter needed was a little bit of chaotic randomness, and the Endless mode delivers on that in spades.

To recap the game, you have a starship that you move around a planer with the left stick. Your right stick fires one of two guns in whatever direction you move the stick. You switch from a fire whip to a multi-shot ice gun using the right shoulder button, while the left moves your ship at hyper sonic speeds briefly. You also have mega-bombs, missiles, and black holes at your disposal by playing the Vita-enhanced version. But I only play in Pure mode to deactivate the rear touch pad. I’m just awful at tapping the screen at the wrong times and misfiring my weapons. So, I admit, I’m not a snob, just a klutz.

In the regular game, you move from one planet to the next, facing waves of enemies in predictable patterns before facing a big boss. And this is fun, and I’ve lost countless hours to this game. But Endless does away with the planets and bosses, and it just throws an eponymous endless stream of enemies at you. When the planet is thick with enemies and asteroids and ice fragments, flying in any direction becomes tricky, even if you’ve got an itchy trigger thumb. Luckily, every 30-45 seconds, a nuke is set on the planet. Find it and blow it, and it wipes out everything on the screen, giving you mega points. A word of caution: sometimes you want to wait on blowing the nuke until after more enemies arrive. Blasting early means you may be swamped by an incoming wave with no way to get breathing room.

And, it’s insanely hard. I got a trophy for surviving 10 minutes once, but my more common runs are 2 minutes at best. I just keep hitting restart because the next game will be completely different. I don’t know if I’ll die within a few seconds of starting, or if I’ll finally break my previous high score of 13 million points. But damn, I’m having fun getting my ass kicked. No, I mean there’s none of my usual growling over losses. I laugh out loud about half the time because it’s a boneheaded stunt that I knew wouldn’t work, but I still tried it anyway. That’s what I love about this add-on. It encourages me to fly crazy, and then punishes me for pushing the envelope just a leeeetle too far. Fly crazy, but fly right. I love it.

I’d already recommended Super Stardust Delta as a great budget game for the Vita, but I wanted to make an update and enthusiastically suggest you also get the advanced pack. If for no other reason than the Endless mode. With only one life to live and a never-ending supply of enemies, the game takes on a fresh and frantic feeling, and during the more insane moments when the screen is so thick with enemies I can barely see my ship, it’s an intensely exciting ride for a surprisingly small amount of cash. So I give the advanced pack 5 stars, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough to Vita owners looking for good cheap fun.

Progress report: Saving Gabriel

I’m past the halfway point in posting chapters for Saving Gabriel, though I changed very quickly from a post every two days to two chapters every night at midnight in an effort to get more votes. This strategy seems to be working, as I’m up to 166 votes for 3,792 views. I’ve already passed my best numbers with all my previous stories, and the votes-to-readers ratio is higher than I’ve normally seen. Comments are almost all positive (setting aside typo comments, which are good, but in a different way) and the chapters where I cover the alternate history of heaven seemed to go over well.

I still would like to reach the top 10, but to do that I’d need at least 10 regular voters hitting both chapters each night to make it. Much as I’d like to go all utlra-beggy to reach that peak, my gut instinct says I don’t have enough reach to get there from here. But where I’m at now, I can still make another run into the top 20, and that’s not too shabby.

If you haven’t yet tried the story, please give it a chance. You can make a Wattpad account using your Facebook sign-in, and it takes all of two seconds to get set-up. Very easy, and no fussing with new names or passwords.

Since it’s been pointed out a few times that folk can’t find the vote button, it’s because the button is at the top of the page. So when you finish reading a chapter, to vote on it, you have to scroll back up to the top. It’s a little squirrely, I know, and if it were my site, I’d add a second vote button at the bottom of the story.

Anywho, I know I’ve said this before, but Saving Gabriel is probably the closest I’ve come to a mainstream YA book. The story is centered around a mystery, an attempted assassination of the main character, Rosalinda Fernandez. She’s saved because she has a guardian angel, a fallen angel named Gabriel, who assigned himself to Rosalinda when she was five. Gabriel is ordered by the archangels to find out why the other fallen have taken an interest in Rosalinda, so he moves in closer for a stakeout.

It’s a short novel, only 53K, and the chapters are fast and choppy. It’s a first-person perspective told in past tense, but from two POVs, Rosalinda’s and Gabriel’s. There’s a few huge fight scenes, several plot twists, and a really different take on biblical history. The heroine isn’t your typical YA girl, nor is Gabriel the standard hero.

Totally going ultra-beggy on you haven’t I? Yeas. Well I can’t help it, can I? I’ve got this feeling that this might finally be the one good story that I could build a small fandom around. Now I just need to find enough fans to make that happen.

In the contest between Facebook and Twitter, Twitter is still hands down giving better feedback. I’ve got lots of RTs and even RTs of RTs of RTs. This is making a better run at the whisper down the line game, but I suspsect with Facebook, the problem may be with the platform itself. Facebook wants people to pay them to promote posts, and just to still get updates from my family, I had to go to their profile and click “Add to my interest lists.” What a rotten pain in the ass that would be to do for every single friend, and I only have 36 or so friends. I can’t imagine the poor schmuck who has 1,000 friends and has to keep telling Facebook “YES I WANT TO SEE UPDATES FROM MY FRIENDS.”

Seriously, a huge pain in the ass, so I feel like Facebook has lost the point of their own service and they keep hamstringing people to prevent them from connecting. Total bullshit, and I’m grateful Twitter isn’t like that.

To return to my chorus, please go read Saving Gabriel. It’s a good fantasy story, and I think it deserves your time. Who knows? You might even like it and decide to vote for it. You might even decide to be a fan of the book and buy a copy when I release the ebook next year. You might write a short review for the story and do other fannish things like squee or ask for a sequel. (Or possibly demand a print run?) And, I am totally not opposed to doing a sequel, provided I can find some demand for it. This could be a series, but only if I can find a small fandom for book one. And I’m not picky. I’m not aiming for anything more than 100 fans.

Cause, just imagine it. If 100 fans all bought ebooks on opening day, that would shoot the book up in the ranks and put it on the best selling list, even if only for a day. That’s still time to catch someone’s eye and maybe make an impression. But then, imagine if y’all gave 100 honest reviews. Not all 5s, but a mix of 3s, 4s, and 5s…okay and those other two icky numbers, I suppose. But just think about how much of an impression 100 reviews has. It says people felt enough about the book to say something, and that many reviews will give any reader a solid idea of what they getting, even before they get the free preview.

I admit, it’s still a long shot for now. I’m getting better numbers of readers, but still not enough voters/commenters to crack that rarefied air at the top 10. Perhaps I’ll have better efforts now that folks know where to find the vote button too.

Okay, I’ll shut up now…but please, try my book. It’s free, so the only thing you’ll be wasting is a few minutes to decide if I’m worth more of your time.

Con report: Lucca

So, we went for our yearly trip to Lucca for Lucca Comics and Games, and this year, I was all about the games. Seriously, I blew my whole budget on day one buying two Vita games, Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, and an imported SEGA title, Project Diva. The rest of the con, I had to just look at stuff and mope sadly around going, “But I can’t get it this year.” Aw well, next year.

I walked a lot. No, I mean a lot. There were no chairs to sit in this year, so after my legs finally gave up on me, I just hunkered down in the middle of the floor. Then I took out a book to read, or I pulled out my Vita and played games.

I ended up spending a LOT of time playing Project Diva. No shock, as it’s a music game, and those are like crack for me. Think of it like a J-pop version of guitar hero, with a music video playing while prompts pop up on the screen for what button to press or hold. This game is insanely hard. No, I mean, it’s kicking my ass on easy mode, and normal mode won’t even let me get to the guitar solo before it slaps me out of the game. Brutal, tough game. But damn, the music is so catchy.

Also, kudos to the game makers for putting together a tutorial that makes sense without needing to know the words. The extent of my rusty Japanese vocabulary is hai and iie, so I knew which buttons to press on the “are you sure?” screens. But beyond that, I would have been lost if not for that tutorial level. And also? The tutorial song is an aggressive earworm that makes Banana Phone sound weak in comparison. Even after playing four great songs, the tutorial’s beat was still stuck in my head.

My phone at the con does not work. This is a problem with our service provider, Vodafone, as people with other services connected and made calls or browsed online. But my phone wouldn’t let me tweet, or search, or surf until later on at night when traffic died down.

So, I chose to use the phone as a camera, and I took a few pics of the con. I’ll have those up on a Photobucket album soonish.

On the last day of the con, hubby announced that I could have more moneys, so I bought a few comics and a copy of Rocksmith for Xbox. So, that’s yet another music game, but this time, one that lets me turn my guitar into a controller.

I’ve been thinking about this, about my current list of favorite games. There’s LIPS, Sound Shapes, Lumines, Beat Hazard, and Project Diva. And soon, I’ll add Rocksmith to that list, I’m sure. I’d add Dance Central, but I feel kind of dorky dancing badly to a video game. I love to dance, but I don’t dance well. So having the game score my dancing is kinda demoralizing. (>_>) Anywhooo…my point is, these days if you want to hold my interest in a game, make sure the music is good.

So that’s the con report. I was in surprisingly good shape this year, and I only had two MS-related crashes. One was a fatigue-induced nap that I had to take with my head dropped on a miniatures painting table. The other was a random attack during dinner that got me sweating and panting right after I’d finished the main course. I had to stagger outside to barf, but fortunately only lost a quarter of what I’d eaten. Once I was outside in the cold, I felt better and was able to go back in for dessert. I still crashed on hubby’s shoulder five minutes later, but to be fair, I’d been up since 6:45.

I have to get back to my regular schedule here at home soon, but today I just plan to lay down a lot. I love these cons, but man, they really take a lot out of me. But I guess the tradeoff is, I had a lot of fun. So maybe the pain is worth the fun, right? Well that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Report of the week

Well, this week was a study in contrasts. When it comes to health and mood, I had a pretty shitty week. The weather was partly to blame, but I also had some momentary temper tantrums over little shit that isn’t worth recapping here.

And yet, the week was mostly good in other ways. I had a job with the glass web site for one more week, meaning my invoice this time will be for four weeks. So that good paycheck will allow me to make some charitable donations and to pay some artists for covers, and even to buy some geeky stuff for myself.

I got a 5-star review on Amazon for NINJAWORLD, the very first review for my bizzaro adventure story. On the same day, I also made four sales on Amazon for other titles. AND most of those were in the UK, where I have had a hard time making sales.

Also, there’s Saving Gabriel and its rising popularity. I began posting the story on my account at Wattpad this week, and I’ve been diligently begging people on Twitter and Facebook to please give it a try and vote for it or leave comments. People are doing both, and many of the comments are typo corrections like I was asking for. So the story is getting fixed as we go along, and it’s quickly climbing the charts at the same time. As of 9 AM this morning, I took a screen cap to show my progress:

That’s my first trip to the Wattpad top 20 in any category with a lovely 19 in Paranormal. I’m in the top 100 of Fantasy at 56th place, and that’s not too shabby either. I suspect that getting into the top 10 of either category will be a tougher fight than getting into the top 100, but even this new record wouldn’t be possible if y’all weren’t willing to play along by voting and commenting. With only 8 parts posted, Saving Gabriel already has twice as many votes as the full run of my next most popular story, Sandy Morrison and the Pack of Pussies, and it’s only had a third of the page views that Sandy’s story did. With progress like this, I really do believe Saving Gabriel can make the top 10. If I can keep Rosalinda and Gabriel’s story in this rarefied rank for even just a day, it will help give more visibility to my other stories too. So you aren’t just helping me promote this one story, but all of my offerings on Wattpad.

I really do appreciate these efforts on your parts, and to encourage more of you to vote and/or comment, I’m offering y’all a bribe of sorts. If I can crack the top 10 of Paranormal or Fantasy with Saving Gabriel, I will begin posting my next story, the YA werewolf tale A Boy and His Dawg, in early November (after we return from Lucca Comics and Games, that is) instead of late December as I’d originally planned. So while you’re still getting your fix for fallen angels, you can also be checking out a new breed of werewolf based on African wolves who turn into people.

Even if I can’t make it to the top 10, I’m glad that many people are willing to give Saving Gabriel a chance, and that y’all are willing to leave votes and comments. And this is why, even if my week totally sucked, I’m taking the Friday post to thank y’all for sticking with my crazy ass and trying out my stuff. And if I do make it to the top 10, know that you have my deepest gratitude for your help in promoting my new story.

Now with the genuinely grateful butt smooching out of the way, we now return to your regular streams of piss and vinegar.

Game review: Borderlands 2 (PC)

I’ll start by saying that I didn’t like the first Borderlands, and my main complaint was how the game felt incomplete, like a beta level product that still needed work to make it worth playing. Hubby loved the first game, and when the second came out, I decided to pick up the pre-order and give it a shot. At this point, I’ve played 78 hours with three characters, and I’ve watched hubby play with the fourth. With one of my characters at level 24, I’m ready to drop the game and stop playing, mainly because I have very little to enjoy in this “romp”.

I’d like to start with a comparative analogy. Let’s say there a guy, Dave, and he LOVES Terry Pratchett and thinks Terry is a genius. (Terry probably is a genius, but we’ll leave that for another debate.) He wants to write just like Terry Pratchett, but unlike his literary hero, Dave has no talent for humor. Or any talent whatsoever. So Dave takes all of Terry Prachett’s best jokes and manages to shoehorn them into one slightly incoherent story, and he presents his work to the world as a “tribute” to his hero. Dave is not original. Dave is an asshole with little respect for the material he’s stealing or for the artist he’s stealing from. His tribute is really a pathetic copy of the original, and in this way is kind of insulting no matter what the creator’s intentions were.

This, sadly, is the formula for the writing in Borderlands 2, where all over the place you will find references to other games or cultural icons, sometimes even games or icons that had genuinely funny material. Borderlands 2 would like you to believe it is just a wacky, silly story, and so in addition to all these plagiarized…I mean, “tributed” lines, there’s one stereotype after another lauded over for the lowest humor efforts possible. Midgets talk funny! Irish people are drunks! Fat women are funny! Rednecks are into incest! Retards talk funny! And so on and so forth.

I liked the core concept of the game. Give players a set of characters to choose from, and then give them a planet loaded with guns and bombs, not to mention an unlimited supply of moving targets. I liked the improvements made in how characters react to being shot, both my characters and the enemies I’m pumping rounds into. I like having a huge variety of weapons to play with, so the progression of levels doesn’t feel too stale.

But I don’t like strafing around a corner and getting stuck on a two-inch bump in the pavement, requiring that I jump over a crack like it’s a stack of matchboxes and I’m in a twit of the years contest. Actually, I have a huge list of problems with in game’s bugs, with the enemy AI, and with the often ridiculously overwhelming bosses turning the game into a curse-filled nightmare every few battles.

But the absolute biggest sin here for me isn’t even the suck ass story or the sexist and sometimes racist jokes passing for humor. No, the real crime here is, there is a great story lurking under the game’s methods of reincarnating EVERYONE to keep areas populated with killers, thieves, and rapists. Hyperion Corporation supposedly wants you dead, but then they just keep reviving you. WHY?

This in itself could be turned into a DARK and bizarre story about how one company is profiting off of the deaths of all people and animals by forcing everything to pay for the privilege. Even the animals on the planet are smart enough to be dealt with in such a way, and once they understand the rules, even the animal life is geared toward murder and looting their victim’s bodies to earn the funds for another life in the inevitable event of their demise. The same company charging people and animals to be revived is ALSO the company selling everyone guns and grenades, so this whole murder planet theme is incredibly dark, and it turns everyone, even women and children, into battle hardened psychopaths.

BUT this is not the story the game is telling. Instead, in an effort to shore up their shit story from last time and the total non-ending, Gearbox have come up with a villain for BOTH stories, and he’s a complete fucking doofus. He’s evil in the same way that wrestling heels are, using cheap insults and lousy jokes in an effort to stir the player. When he finally does do something truly evil, the writers fuck it up by trying too hard to tie the two games together.

In a kid’s game where everyone was good, Handsome Jack would come out looking pretty evil. But on Pandora, everyone is killing each other and behaving in majorly psychotic ways. The zoologist Sir Hammerlock only hires you to kill animals, and everyone else hires you to kill people or animals for no other reason than “they’re bugging me.” So even though Jack seems to go over the top to prove he’s the most evil, he’s still competing with the crew in Sanctuary. There’s nary a sympathetic character in this cast except for the player character Maya. Even Lilith, the siren from the last game, comes off as deluded and evil.

And the worst sin of all for a game, even if I accept the lousy story, is that I was rarely having fun. Sometimes, at random, I’d kill someone with a remarkable level of skill, and I’d enjoy that one moment. Then there were my actual mistakes providing a moment of real comedy relief, like me spending three minutes trying to time a train before crossing the track at just the right instant to catch the train in my face. That was funny.

But the game itself is DULL, and a lot of the overwhelming waves of enemies just aggravated me. After a while, aggravation gave way to boredom.

And while I’m complaining about the game, let me talk about credibility. In the start of the game, CL4P-TR4P takes me to his base and uses a fancy door scanner, saying he needs the security to stay safe from bullymongs. A minute after we’re inside, a bullymong descends from an ice tower in the middle of the room and steals the robot’s eye. This is how the security works for Sir Hammerlock’s base too, where he has electric fences surrounding his empty village, but his buildings are already overrun with bandits. Every place promised as secure is usually revealed just moments later as not being secure at all.

This is a trend in the game, by the way. The alcoholic intelligence officer never has good intelligence. Nobody’s security is very secure, and the “demolitions expert” is a little girl who talks like a male gamer who’s never met a real little girl, (and who possibly has limited contact with any females) and whose idea of bomb making is tying stuffed rabbits to the sides of guided missiles with rope. In short, in a world full of morons, if you’ve got two IQ points to rub together, of course you’re the hero. You’re already smarter than everyone else in this game, including the writers.

So this is a game that’s dumb, dull, and dreadfully written, a wasted opportunity where there was a great story possible from the exact same setting and characters, if only the writers could get over themselves and stop trying to crack “tribute jokes.” In short, I couldn’t be more disappointed.

I give Borderlands 2 two stars, and about the only nice thing I can say about it is, I got it at a discount for preordering.

Beta reading: Saving Gabriel

Right, I have at last got out a first draft of my fallen angel WIP, Saving Gabriel, and I’m opening this up for a beta reading in the most ways I can. If you follow me on Twitter (@Zoe_E_W, by the way) you can send me an email address to get a copy of the doc file. Already, I have quite a few more readers than I have on previous projects but hey a few more couldn’t hurt either.

If you’re one Wattpad, I’m also posting the story here, and I’ll upload new chapters up every 2 days. As this is a beta reading of the first draft, after one month each chapter will be taken down. The book will not be put back up on Wattpad again, so this is your brief chance to look over my story before it goes into a cocoon for a hibernation into a second draft book. (Then I’ll have to hunt down all the typos I introduced through the revision process in drafts three, four, and possibly five.)

Or if you’re not a tweeter, you can just email me your address at zoe_whitten (at) yahoo (dot) com. I will hook you up!

For those that don’t recall what Saving Gabriel is about, it’s a kind of YA dark fantasy with a mystery as the main focus and a romance as the subplot. This story is different from most of my other stories because there’s very little to be squicked out by here. The couple involved is straight (although engaging in interspecies romance, I admit.) The main characters are very different from the stereotypical YA couple, in that Rosalinda Fernandez is neither skinny nor a dainty flower. Gabriel isn’t the ubiquitous domineering boyfriend either, and the conflict between these two is more a matter of angelic law than Gabriel’s habit of “stalking” Rosalinda.

There MAY be some slight risk of causing offense to some religious folks, but I don’t think it will be too serious since I’m not suggesting that this is “the real story of heaven, hell, and Earth.” But yeah, some people might get upset because I manage to write God completely out of the story and turn this into a morally grey story about angels and the fallen. The story suggests that not everyone in hell is evil, nor is everyone in heaven good. And the people on Earth are a mixture of both qualities.

In short, this is about as close as I can get to mainstream. I think it’s a pretty good story with a mix of action, violence, a teensy bit of gore, and some romance thrown in for good measure. I’d like for this story to catch on before release day, so I’m hoping to get enough beta readers to iron out all of the little flaws and make this a purdy ebook for opening day.

And yes, I still would like to get the ebook into the hands of at least 10% of my Twitter followers on opening day, as that would mean rough 130 sales, enough to put me on the social radar briefly.

One more thought on this: If you do beta read this for me and send in a critique, you’re under no obligation to do anything else. BUT, perhaps when the book comes out you could distill your thoughts down to a review and rating? One of the hardest parts of convincing new readers to try my stuff is, I need more reviews. Not five star reviews, if you don’t think I earned it. My last review was a 3.5, and that’s still above average. So it works for me. Just think it over and maybe help me out opening day?

Okay, that’s enough begging for now. I’m not saying I’m completely done on begging for readers on this book. Just done for now. Yeah.

I’ll shut up now.

It’s a good day for a rant…

I’m on a mandatory day off from Twitter, as the sudden downshift in the temperature has me feeling extremely negative and snappish. I’m having trouble focusing on work, and the usual cast of voices in my head is joined by the Master Debater, a whiny little shit who won’t leave any topic alone.

I hate having multiple sclerosis, and I wish it was the only issue I had. But I’ve got three different flavors of mental illness to go along with it. It often bugs me to see people say in jest that they’re crazy, or worse, when someone says genuinely, “I’m crazy,” they seek to boost the self-esteem of the confessor by saying, “Oh, yeah, man, me too.” I want to ask people like that, “Oh really? So you’ve had a fight with the voices in your head about picking up scissors and cutting a hole in yourself?” Because when they mean crazy, they mean Steve Martin, “two wild and crazy guys” crazy. When I say I’m crazy, I mean some days I hear voices that say everyone is out to get me.

Where did those voices come from? From being stomped into the ground no matter where I lived, and having my head pounded and softened up at least once a month during the school year. From having my head thumped throughout life by my mother, who thought my skull was a moving target to practice her throwing skills on. Maybe part of it is being misdiagnosed as ADD and being fed Ritalin until I was lacking in the attention span department.

In adult life, people graduate from bullying to shunning for people with my kinds of problems. They don’t hit you anymore. They just find the most derogatory thing to say before stomping off to leave us in exile. And how dare I not play along with their need for 100% sunshine blown up their ass? As an artist, my “job” is only to be inspiring, not to be ranting about social injustices or bullshit politics or oppressing religions. If I can’t find the right tone to kiss your ass with, then what kind of friend am I?

This is what I mean by working with handicaps. I’m an abuse survivor cursed with a tendency to snap at the slightest provocation, and no one gives a fuck about understanding why I am the way I am. People online expect me to be happy and joking all the time, because the internet “is not for serious stuff.”

I get so tired of this need for shallow pandering at all times to everyone. My sense of humor came as a defense mechanism because bullies who are laughing are less likely to be throwing punches. I became self-deprecating because bullies throw punches when you try holding a cutdown contest. This is what I’m reduced to online by so many people telling me to be good, returning to defense mechanisms to please them. It’s online bullying, but in a milder, more socially acceptable form. It’s maddening to me, being asked to wear a happy mask even after coming out of the deepest darkest part of my closet.

I’m tired of the hypocrites of this world saying “Nobody had better judge me because I don’t plan to please you,” but then will turn around and judge everyone around them for the littlest shit. They’re anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-socialist, and anti-social. For fuck’s sake, they’re anti-teenager and hate kids, but somehow, this rose colored cynicism is the new cool mode for the average Joe. They think everyone should agree with them, and people who don’t should have a law made again their kind. They have little to no empathy, and these are the sane people.

Most of all, I’m tired of people treating me like I should be their best friend, when they’ve always got me on conditional probation. I’m just one unvoiced opinion away from not being good enough for them. I’m sick of insincere people who say how much they care, but don’t really care at all. I’m sick of people who pursue happiness to the exclusion of all other emotions, as if this escape from negativity is the only right way to live. I’m sick of our cultural forced assimilation of individuals while our delusional films, TV series, and books continue to celebrate “chosen one” heroes. We claim to worship people who stand out as unique individuals and fight back, but only if they fight back against “the real bad guys.” But real world people who stand out and speak up are slapped down hard from all the same people who claim to worship individuality. In these cases, they don’t really celebrate diversity or the individual’s triumph over conformity. They only like the idea of their “right” to be unique, while everyone else must conform to social ideals.

People, part of what ALL minorities are trying to tell you is that a lot of “good people” are really the bad guys. We’re not paranoid about others plotting our oppression. We’ve had direct, daily evidence of their plots, and the plot is so widespread, we can’t even call the cops, because they’re mostly in on it too. Worse, there ain’t no motherfucking chosen one to save us from our oppression.

That’s the reality I’m coming from as a writer, and it why I write what I know instead of pandering to a social lie about chosen ones saving everyone else from “the forces of evil.” Instead, I recognize that social conformity and peer pressure are a large part of “the forces of evil,” and I write about people who struggle against that demand for conformity. Some win minor battles, and some lose. But none of them will “save the world.”

I see people say they want to read more diverse artists, that they don’t want the same old cookie-cutter stories, and I’m screaming at them “HEY, I WRITE STORIES LIKE THAT.” But people look at my books with the most passing glance and say, “Oh I didn’t mean like your stuff. I only read for the escapism.” You don’t want queer authors telling you about queers. You want straight guys mansplaining everything to you through a perspective that isn’t so…gay.

And y’all wonder why I drink so much.

I’m just tired, people. I give you the thing you ask for most often, complete honesty, and instead, you want me to lie to you and pretend to be your best friend. But I don’t know you, and you won’t take the time to know me. So what exactly would make us friends?

It can’t be because we’re both into the Internet. We have to have something else in common to be friends. So no, I don’t want to lie to you and pretend to be your bestest buddy when in truth, I’m afraid of you and I’m just waiting to find out what kind of bully you are. How are you going to oppress me, and what derogatory term will you deem appropriate for me? Am I ugly, skanky, or nasty; stupid, retarded, or moronic; a bitch, slut, or a prude; a queer, tranny, or a homo? Or maybe you can go for the ultimate low blow and call me a pedophile. What’s your angle of attack going to be? I want to prepare myself for the worst with all of you, because while I’ve heard every insult listed, I never develop thick enough skin not to feel your judgments.

I’m tired of being a crazy person in a land full of people who only want good behavior online from their artists. Why can’t I just cope like the rest of you? I don’t know. I guess I’m just crazy.

Post-project report…

Yesterday, I got up and put butt in seat to crank out 8K and complete my fallen angel WIP. It felt good…for all of two minutes. This one isn’t really my fault, though. It was more a combination of twitter news about kids. Strike one was reading about a little boy whose cat was killed by bureaucrats because they couldn’t be bothered to leave a note on the cage at the shelter. Then I read a story of how a baby in the UK starved to death because the social services agencies had tossed the kid off in the paper sea. And strike three was reading a report about the rise of child slavery and sex trafficking in America, where fully 80% of the victims are American kids pimped out by their parents.

This of course led me to think that this story is the very reason why I wrote Peter the Wolf. Because, wanting to say something about my friend Cherry and the way she’d been pimped by her grandmother, I felt that I would have trouble getting people to believe a girl that badly abused would grow into a sex-obsessed nymphomaniac. (Cherry had a HUGE porn collection, and people were always telling the guys she lived with “good job” for it. They got confused to learn a woman collected all this porn.) So I made Peter male, and was still told “that’s unrealistic, having someone think of sex all the time.” Well, seeing as how I lived with the real wolf, and she liked sex 3 times a day or she wasn’t happy, I thought my toned-down male version of her was pretty tame.

The muse kicked me in the gut by declaring that the new story “betrays all our goals.” I don’t know what to say to her. I have lots of stories that aren’t like Peter the Wolf, and my goal at this point is, I just want a story that people will read.

Until she decided to kick this story for being too mainstream, she was LOVING it. It has a heroine who’s a big girl, a weightlifter who doesn’t need to be rescued. It has a great mystery plot about fallen angels, and it has a nice amount of romance without the guy being too stalkery or controlling. It even has Lucifer in a surprising side role as…a hero? Well a temporary hero, at least, and that was certainly intriguing enough to the muse to want to share it. It was a damn good story, one so good my inner editor’s only ongoing comment was “shut up and keep typing! I want to know how this ends!”

But no, because the real world sucks and I can’t always write stories about abuse, somehow, I’m betraying my artistic principles. And, this is a fight I had in my head with my muse. Not some outside person who didn’t get my art. No it was a screaming match with my flighty, mean-spirited muse, who can’t understand why someone with a chronic illness might want at least one damned book that doesn’t flop on arrival. Heaven forbid I might want a royalty check with three or four digits.

But so that was her final kick for the night, the reminder that long before Peter came along, I’d had flops. I’d had books that I was sure would be bestsellers. They had diverse casts and great plots and no sex and lots of violence. They were so close to actual mainstream writing that I’d get to thinking, “This time, this time for sure, I’ve found a story people won’t turn down.” And they flopped.

Maybe what the muse did was mean, but after that, I decided to just let myself down early. Maybe when the fallen angel story goes out next year, it will sell a lot, and I’ll be able to pay bills and have some money left over. But given my four year history, it seems more likely that I’ll have another flop no matter how excited I am about the story. Actually, being really excited means the crash into reality would be more painful.

I dunno, people. Sometimes I wish I could just quit writing. The high of finishing a story only lasts two minutes now, and I’m still waiting for just one of my stories to find an audience. I keep writing, and maybe something in 2013 will catch peoples’ attention. But I can’t hold much hope in finding good homes for my ugly kids when even my own muse likes to kick me two minutes after I’ve typed “The End?”

Guest Post: James N. Cook

Hello everyone, this is James N. Cook, author of the Surviving the Dead zombie series, and the upcoming Jeremiah Cain: Vampire Hunter novels.

My most recent novel is This Shattered Land, the second installment of Surviving the Dead. If you’re into the zombie apocalypse genre, TEOTWAWKI, or just plain action-adventure/horror/thrillers, then I think you will like this story.

If you haven’t checked it out already, also be on the lookout for No Easy Hope: Surviving the Dead Volume I.

As a kid growing up in rural North Carolina, October was always my favorite time of the year. The blistering heat of summer faded into chill mornings and pleasantly cool afternoons, the leaves in the oaks and maples mellowed into brown and gold, and the first nips of winter began to creep into the air. With all this idyllic pleasantness surrounding me, it always struck me as odd that so many people chose that time to celebrate the dark, mysterious side of the human experience, watch creepy movies, and generally look for ways to scare the hell out of themselves. Nevertheless, I always found myself getting caught up in the fun.

Trick-or-treating was cool, even though my father had to drive an hour to find enough neighbors to make it worth his while, but eventually I got too old for it. Lacking the ravenous pursuit of a five-day sugar binge, I started looking for other ways to get into the Halloween spirit. Costume parties were out—given that I lived in the middle of nowhere and couldn’t find one if my life depended on it—so I inevitably turned to books and movies to while away the long evening hours of Halloween night.

Stephen King novels have always been a favorite of mine, as well as The Howling werewolf movies, Fright Night, Creepshow, and the Cook family perennial favorite, An American Werewolf in London. That agonizing sequence where David transforms into the wolf to the tune of Sam Cooke’s version of Blue Moon has always stood out in my mind as one of the most memorable scenes from any movie, ever.

If I had to pinpoint a specific period of my life that, more than any other, captured my imagination and planted the seeds of storytelling that would eventually bear fruit, I would have to say it was those cool, early fall weeks leading up to October 31st, and all the ghouls, goblins, fangs and beasties that went along with it. There was always the sense that maybe, just maybe, there was something to all those old nonsense fairy tales of monsters, and boogeymen, and things that go bump in the night.

Or maybe it was more practical than that. Maybe it was a simple acknowledgment that we don’t know everything that there is to know. That evil might just be real, and that to ignore the dark, scary side of existence is to give it power. Maybe we figure that by making light of it we can diminish its ability to frighten us. It is also possible that people are simply accepting the fact that we can’t have light without the darkness, and that spending a night walking in the other side’s shoes is an important reminder of the power and allure of our baser urges. The ones that make people do terrible things when they are frightened, or desperate, or angry. It’s a powerful thing, Halloween.

Even now that I’m well into my thirties, married, and raising a son of my own, I still find a certain magic in this time of the year. The air is as cool as it ever was, the leaves are, if anything , brighter, and a cold beer in hand whilst wearing a Roman centurion costume on the patio at a grown-up costume party is way more fun than family movie night ever had a chance to be. At least until the little guy gets old enough to appreciate scary movies.

When the time comes, I’ll make sure that he is well versed in the classics. Happy Halloween everyone.

 

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All five of us – Tonia Brown, James N Cook, John O’ Brien, Armand Rosamilia and Mark Tufo – hope you have been following along on the Haunted Halloween Blog Tour 2012. We love to see comments after the posts, and we also love to pick a random commenter and give away a free eBook or even a signed print book, so maybe you’ll get lucky!

We have centralized all the upcoming dates and blog posts on a Facebook event page. Feel free to join us there and see what is coming up next!

https://www.facebook.com/events/211796112284317/