Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 60

Is there a better way to reach more weirdos?

Today, I ran across this blog post from Raw Dog Screaming Press, which was talking about how some people are publishing a few thousand ebooks, often with knockoff titles of bestseller books to confuse readers. While there’s a number of small press publishers and indie writers who work to make quality ebooks, there’s also a lot of operations set up strictly for the purpose of making a quick buck off of impulse buyers. What this leads to is reader fatigue with book promotions of any kind. Readers can’t be sure who to trust, so they stop paying attention to announcements of book releases. These ebook spammers are only in ebooks for the money, and that makes it so much harder for the rest of us to get our message out through all the noise.

Raw Dog wrote:

Karen Peebles, who is the author of I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, says she has self-published around 10,000 books though CreateSpace, not all of which are in her own name. “I am a single mother who home schools her children,” says Peebles, who says she sells “thousands and thousands” of books a month. “Self-publishing is a great way for me to make income. I receive a pretty nice royalty every month.”

Reading a quote like this makes me a very sad Zoe. I could be accused of a lot of things on my writing, but trying to trick readers will never be one of them. So yeah, it offends me that someone like Karen is enjoying so much success by taking advantage of people. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want a similar kind of success. Yeah, I’m not in it for the money, but that doesn’t mean I find the idea of making a few dollars offensive.

Thing is, I can’t rightly say that I’d be selling more if only people like Karen would grow a conscience and stop selling their crap titles. Even with less authors in the pool, I’m still an acquired taste. With their focus on bizarro fiction, I suspect Raw Dog Screaming may also have the same problem. We’re not looking for just any reader. We’re looking for the distinguished connoisseur of weird shit.

The article goes on:

At 10 years I expected RDSP to be lounging on a small but sufficiently comfy bed of laurels, getting its belly rubbed and wagging its tail. Instead we’re going back to the hungry dog days, planning a new attack with fresh ideas about how to bring great, but overlooked, fringe fiction to the world. Next year we’ll be celebrating 10 years of publishing but mostly we’ll be trying to reinvent RDSP to keep up with the changes in publishing. We think it’s time for something drastic and a new approach. Hopefully this dog still has a few more wags of the tale left.

I have not been toiling at this writing thing for nearly as long as Raw Dog, but I share their dilemma of finding readers. Back when I first got started, I’d read books on publishing, and the message that I took away from them is that there are two ways to make a living off of writing. The first is to make one book so good that everyone has to read it. The second is to write a lot of books and make a few sales off of each title. Obviously, I chose the second route, but my plan never really worked out the way I hoped it would.

For most of the time that I promoted my work, my big question was “where can I find readers when they’re actually in the mood to receive a book pitch?” I didn’t want to do hit and run ads, or resort to asking friends to write glowing reviews. I was looking for legitimate methods of gaining interest, which in theory is easy. Or it is if you’ve got a book so good, nobody can resist the premise. It would be fair to say that a great deal of my stories require a leap of faith in shaky premises. Sure, if you stick with them, I can promise you’ll get a story like no one else has out there. But first and foremost I have to generate interest in each new premise.

I’ve seen a lot of potential answers given for how to woo readers, but none of these options worked out for me. Word of mouth promotions had a very limited reach. I got some reviews for a few titles, but apparently never reached the saturation point to make the right impression. Forum posting didn’t work, and social media just led to me building lists of other authors. Which is great when I want to figure out what to read, but it’s not so good for selling copies of my own books. I signed up with Project Wonderful, and while I did get some impressions and clicks as a result of banner ads, these never converted to sales. Interviews and guest blog posts all had similar results. The same goes for my Goodreads giveaways. I’m not saying these methods can’t or don’t work, only that they didn’t work for me. But, does that mean I’m doing it wrong, or that I’m simply too weird for any traditional marketing plan to work?

One might assume that after all these failures, I might start looking into desperation tactics like naming my books similar to bestsellers. But I’m not in this just to make a buck or rip people off, and the one time when I had a title conflict with another writer, I changed the name of my book. William Meikle was releasing a book titled Berserker, and I had a book coming out around the same time with the same title. Of course I could have just released the book with the same name. And since I was on schedule to release mine first, it’s not like his book would be confused for mine. His was about Vikings versus yetis, and mine was about a pack of werekin being adopted by the FBI. But I chose to host a poll and ask my blog readers to pick from a list of titles, and folks overwhelmingly voted for Blind Rage. So Willie’s book went out with the Berserker moniker, and I got the title my readers felt was the best fit for my beastly story.

Ironically enough, another book was also titled Blind Rage, which was released not long after my own first edition went live. And ultimately, the title didn’t matter because the book flopped. I think that was my second flop, but every story after that also flopped, and nothing I did could get any book to make a blip on peoples’ social radars. I’d send out requests for review copies, but months would go by, and not one of the copies I sent would get reviewed. I literally couldn’t even give my work away.

This year, I gave up on promotion, which I assumed meant my sales would die out completely. But right up until Smashwords dropped some of my books, I was getting regular quarterly royalties worth writing home about. This told me that the books were good enough to warrant attention, if I could just find the right readers at the right time. But because I’m not doing anything, it’s hard to build a promotional formula for new titles. I can’t even point to cover art as being the defining factor for a title’s success or failure, because many of the later releases that sold without promotion also had no cover. The blurbs alone were good enough. So how do you build on what works for you, when what works is apparently doing nothing? You can’t do more nothing, can you? Well, maybe a gifted procrastinator could, but for a workaholic like me, I’d much rather find a proactive plan for presales promotions.

Which brings me as always back to my quandary: if I have a new book that I want more people to know about and remember, how do I find the right time and place to court readers? I’m still convinced that there has to be a right way to do this, but I haven’t figured out where I need to be, or what I should do to generate interest.

Which I suppose is why I keep wandering to every blog post where someone else talks about generating sales. Because I’m looking for something I haven’t done that’s worth a shot. So, I’ll be watching Raw Dog Screaming Press to see what new ideas they come up with, and if they report success with their ideas, I’ll also try a similar tactic. Sure, I’m just playing follow the leader, but lord knows my efforts at being a trailbreaker didn’t work out so well. Raw Dog’s stated goals are very much in line with my own, and so if they find a successful formula for finding readers of fringe fiction, of course I’ll want to find the same kind of readers willing to experiment.

I agree with Raw Dog that something new needs to be done to help break the ice. After all, anything has to be better than doing nothing at all. Because doing nothing only works for about 10-15 sales a month. And that’s not quite enough to afford my 150 euro a month pot habit, to say nothing of my much more expensive video game addiction.

A YA rant…

This morning, just getting off my couch, I stumbled onto a realization about something I hate about YA writing, and by extension something I hate about real adults. It’s a fallacy that is embraced by adults who read YA, and it’s an excuse that I hear over and over as a justification from real adults for why they try to program their teens like they’re personal appliances and not people with their own personalities and needs.

In two different reviews with two entirely different premises, the reviewers explained how the teen character gets into trouble, and the parents respond with unreasonably harsh punishment methods. Yet the adult reviewers both said, “I had an easy time relating to the parents, because they were just protecting their kids from bad influences.” Urgh!

News flash, adults: those “bad influences” are called “the rest of the human race,” and eventually, your own little bad influence is going to have to go out and deal with all those other people. The longer you insist on protecting and coddling your teen, the worse an influence they will be to someone else’s kids. That’s right, someone is looking at your “little angel” as their “little shit.” And they’re right to do so, because it will be your kid going “Hey, I’ve never done this before. Let’s try it.” It will be your kid acting as the bad influence because they had their own bad influence at home. YOU.

The sad joke is, for all your smothering efforts to coddle and protect your charges, you can’t change their minds on anything. You have a slim window of opportunity to influence their decision before they’ve made their minds up on any topic, but once your teen takes it in their head that something is a good idea, you have no more chance of stopping them than your parents had of stopping you before you made your own fuck ups.

And yet, over and over I see adults pick up the same delusion: “My kids won’t make the same mistakes I did.” YES, THEY WILL. In fact, they’ll make some of the exact same fuck ups, intentionally, just to rub your face in it. Why? Because of you, mom and dad. They learned it from you. You told them about your mistake and said you didn’t want them to do that. So they go ahead and do it just to spite you. If your kid does that, it’s not a sign that they’re a bad kid. It’s your sign that you’re doing a poor job of parenting. Just like your parents, most likely. Your folks failed to protect you from your mistakes, and by repeating their methods, guess what? You’re going to get the exact same result. Let us recall what the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result.

Again and again, I see parents in YA get treated like non-entities, only being there to punish the kids and lecture them. They don’t have personalities or anything resembling character development. They rarely cook dinner or talk their kids through homework, or do any other parenting besides lecturing and handing out punishments. I see these fake adults and I wonder, “Are there any YA parents who don’t treat their kids like shit for the sake of being a fictional antagonist?” YA parents are always “acting in the best interests of their kids,” at least according to adult readers. But it’s more honest to say that these adult characters are given only one role, to overreact and be a foil to their teen offspring. That sloppy writing, peoples, and you shouldn’t make excuses for it.

Real adults acting in this way are working from their desire to mold their kids lives into something more like what they want instead of what the teens want. So maybe to YA writers, this feels like the best way to handle every story. But it’s not realistic when all stories treat parents as adversaries.

I lived with some really shitty parents. I hated my mother sometimes. But when I needed someone to talk to, often I had no choice and had to come to Mom for advice. And the thing is, it was during my teens that my mother and I were the closest we would ever be. Those were the years when I could talk to her. The same goes for my dad, and that’s what I’d like to see every once in a while, the idea that even if a teen has a lousy parent, at least sometimes, the kids go to their parents for advice on major problems, even if they eventually decide not to listen and do their own thing.

I don’t need to see this in every story, and I’m not saying “writers, stop making this kind of conflict.” But I get tired of the chasm that develops in YA between kids and adults over and over. In fact, the last YA book I threw down, the scene I gave up on was the teen main character still not talking to her own mother about her developing problems, even though she was digging an unrealistically deep hole for herself. I get that this is a “strong conflict” in the writer’s mind, but what they aren’t seeing is, so many YA writers use the same trope that it’s a bad cliché, the idea that no good parents exist.

And the fact is, this harmfully stubborn streak in YA’s teen cast members is so common that it’s turning all the kids into caricatures. If these teens are so wild and rebellious, why are they virgins at 17? Why do none of them drink booze? Why are none of them party girls or easy girls? No, the kids depicted are near perfect angels, and they still get punished harshly for making common mistakes. And, I’m sorry adults, but I don’t see how you can identify with the need to torture kids just for the sake of “making a point.”

And why is it that these relatively good teen characters are punished in an extreme way just to provoke a reaction from the readers? Can’t parents be written more realistically in YA, or is YA really about blowing everything out of proportion in an effort to reach the teen readers with your coded lectures? Because you have to know, when teens read, they ignore the lectures in their fiction just as much as they avoid them in real life.

YA writers, I’m begging you, every other book, try to make at least one parent whose sole responsibility isn’t to act as a punishing dictator. Maybe sometimes, even make two great parents whom the kids love, but who still can’t help their kids with their bigger problem in life. It is okay for a parent to just answer “I don’t know what to tell you” instead of winding up with another two page lecture. My parents told me that all the time, and while it frustrated me, it also gave me the motivation to look elsewhere for answers. So my parents could be the catalyst to a decision without being adversarial in their role. And what I’m saying is, every once in a while, maybe your fictional parents can also be depicted in this way, which I feel is more realistic.

And adult readers of YA, stop acting like these extreme punishments are fair just because the teen character isn’t doing exactly what the adults want all the time. Most of these kids you’re reading about are virgins who never drank or did drugs. So if they have one really good fuck up, why is an extreme punishment “for the best”? Teens aren’t computers that you can tell what to do. If you think a harsh punishment is justifiable, then you’re a bad parent too. (You’re also probably the same kind of parent who insists that your kid is great while everyone else is a little shit. Which means you’re delusional as well.)

Being able to identify with the bad parents in the stories is not a good thing. So, how about you grow up a little and accept that your role is one of advisor to your teens, and not as the absolute ruler of their world? Cause if you see yourself in that light, your kids will too, and then, they won’t trust you. Then you’ll be a stereotypical YA parent. And that would fucking suck, to be a walking caricature with no other motivation than to agitate the fuck out of your teens.

Why I won’t be buying Diablo III: a rant…

I kinda suspected this was coming, and have had this creeping worry ever since Starcraft II and its single episode of ret-con bullshit. But even knowing that Blizzard stopped giving a fuck about everyone besides their World of Warcraft players, I still held out hope that they’d remember what was great about the Diablo series and not fuck it up. I also hoped that instead of rehashing the rescue Deckard Cain sub-plot, we might see a new lore guide.

But no, Deckard Cain is about the only thing that came back for Diablo III. Yet this is not why I’m pissed off. No, I’m pissed because the skill trees are gone. The attributes menus are gone. The game only gives you a predefined skill set for each character class, and you adjust NOTHING about their stats. The game does it all for you.

Remember how in Diablo’s dungeons, some were all twisty and turny, like mini-labyrinths where you weren’t quite sure if you’d just doubled back or not? Or remember walking outside of Tristram and being presented with an open field? Yeah, forget that kind of freedom. Here, the game has straight corridors that lead you where you need to be. You can’t get lost because your goals on the map will blink at you, to make sure you can’t make a mistake and wander off somewhere else. So much for the fun of exploration.

Most of the time that I was playing with the wizard last night, I kept getting popups for every little item, like the game assumes I’m a moron. Okay, the first time I get an inventory item I can wear, sure, tell me how to open the inventory. But why do I need a reminder for every single item? After I’ve already found gloves, a “tunic,” and some boots, the game is still popping off with shit like, “YOU FOUND PANTS! MAYBE YOU SHOULD PUT ON PANTS NOW!” I close that annoying box and go back to killing the monsters hidden under the fucking pop-up, and yet two minutes later, “YOU STILL HAVEN’T PUT ON PANTS. MAYBE YOU SHOULD PUT ON PANTS NOW!” FUCK YOU, STOP BOTHERING ME!

AND, when I finally put on the stupid pants, it doesn’t show on my character’s bare legs, nor does it remove her stupid fucking skirt. Every “armor” item for my wizard is a bra. Sure, it says “tunic,” but it’s a bra. Tunics don’t leave that much skin exposed to the elements. And for fuck’s sake, the tiny avatar can’t be zoomed in on, so why do I fucking care if she’s trying to dress as a middle ages hood rat?

The inventory also blinks at me every time I do anything. Walk over gold? Blink. Pick up a club of random loot dropping? Blink. It’s distracting as fuck, and there’s no option to turn it off. And, once I get into the inventory, everything new that I’ve taken since the last time I checked my inventory is highlighted. If I hover my mouse over the items for even half a second, it pops up a huge ass window describing the item, and then it pops up ANOTHER huge ass window comparing that item to whatever armor or weapon I’m carrying. Then if I don’t see how that dual-handed battle ax is superior to my magic wand, the game will pop up another reminder, “YOU HAVE BETTER WEAPONS NOW. YOU SHOULD EQUIP THOSE AND STOP USING THE WAND.” WILL YOU FUCKING FUCK THE FUCK OFF ALFUCKINGREADY? I want to play the game, not have Blizzard fucking play it for me!

There’s a cool down period on heal potions, and it’s ungodly long. For the wizard, that meant every other fight involved me running in circles around a horde, watching the menu bar instead of where I was going while I wait the fucking agonizing length of time it takes to get back a fucking MINOR POTION. It’s a potion for fuck’s sake! I could drink a fucking six pack of them without needing a cool down. Cool down is what you put on spells because they’re really powerful and might be abused in PVP matches. You do not put that shit on a vital fucking heal potion.

There’s no mana potions, or even a storage space on my belt. So instead of fighting my enemies, I have to keep running away to let my “arcane energy” regenerate. (Blizzard decided everyone having mana was lame, so everyone’s mana gets called something different. But it’s still all used for the same spells for every class, so why they needed to rename every class’s mana ball, I have no idea.)

Then there’s “achievements.” The killing monsters streak award, I understand. But I’m breaking open barrels, and here’s another fucking pop-up saying, “NEW RECORD! YOU SMASHED 8 BARRELS!” So fucking what? I’m not so desperate for constant validation that I need a fucking award for destroying inanimate objects. But these worthless fucking achievements are here so that when the game is ported to X-box and PS3, they can give players trophies for every inane little thing. Again, I get the point when I make extra HP for slaying 20 monsters in a row. But I’m not so clear on why there’s a bonus for exceptional barrel-killing streaks.

And my god, the voice actress for the wizard takes just the right tone of voice with everyone that I fucking hate her guts. People in Tristram are rightfully scared after losing their entire army in one night, and this bitch strolls into town and acts like a royal fucking cunt with all the empathy of a drunk man looking for a quickie with a grieving widow. She calls the mayor a coward, and then tells him later that maybe he should just drop dead. FUCK YOU, YOU SELF-RIGHTEOUS CUNT. I might not have felt this way if the character’s tone of voice didn’t always come across as condescending in every voice sample. But it’s like Blizzard set out to get the worst possible reaction from me with their voice acting. It’s not bad acting, but it’s also not compelling either. Instead of drawing me into my character, the grating voice shoves me away.

Then there’s the blacksmith telling the character, “If you see my apprentice, tell him to come home.” There’s no physical description given, and outside of Tristram, the bodies of villagers and soldiers are scattered like debris from a bomb blast. AND YET, my know-it-all cunt walks up to a body labeled HAEDRIM’S APPRENTICE, and she recognizes this one corpse out of all the others to say “Haedrim’s apprentice is dead. I shall have to inform him.” HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS IS THE RIGHT BODY? IS HE WEARING YE OLDE NAME TAG? And if he is wearing a name tag, shouldn’t it have his NAME and not a fucking placeholder as the servant of someone else?

And for everything they left out of the game, they still managed to bring back Deckard Cain for the exact same fucking “You must rescue the lore master” quest from the first two games. In fact, most of what’s going on in this game has been covered in the first two games already. Blizzard didn’t write a new story. They just shook the dust off the old scripts, shuffled the two stacks into each other, and then changed most of the names. Except Deckard, the most annoying aspect of the first two games. OY.

So, between everything I liked about Diablo being taken away plus the continuation of Deckard Cain, the world’s lousiest plot device, plus the addition of a catty main player who I already want to set on fire, plus lousy fucking writing that wouldn’t make sense if examined by an editor for two seconds, I have zero desire to buy Diablo III. With this last fucking up of games I used to care about, Blizzard has lost me forever as a fan, and I was with them back in the old days of the first Diablo. But I guess WoW really is more important to them as a “revenue stream,” and they don’t care to make a better Diablo game.

Instead, what they’ve given is a piss poor effort that time and again assumes I’m really stupid and didn’t want so many options. (Which makes no sense, given that in WoW, they give players more options, not less.) I loved customizing my Diablo II characters. I spent whole nights crafting special weapons and armors in the second game, only to learn that I’d need to level up and boost my strength to put the darn things on. And I loved that, that feeling of slow progression and character development. So when I got to the end of the game with my nice collection of hand crafted items, the character was exactly what I wanted to play up against the big boss. I went to fight Diablo with the equipment I wanted, and not the equipment I wished I had.

But right off the bat, all the items in Diablo III have the same look. Leather boots and chain mail boots look the same as “cracked shoes.” They’re all brown mid-calf boots. There’s no attempt to make anything look different, so it’s all just loot. And none of it interests me.

Okay, yes, there were a few minor changes that I actually liked, but they don’t balance out all the things I hate about this game. Adding the breakable environments seems cool, except now my shots won’t reach their targets without me first breaking everything in my firing path, and of course enemy fire phases though solid objects. (I’ve already seen enemies float through solid objects too, so collision detection is once again only good for the heroes, not the villains.) Also, I liked that I could just walk over gold to pick it up, while I had to choose which items to take into inventory. That makes sense, and it’s a nice touch. But this is one nice feature in a pile of shit game, and I don’t want the rest of the pile.

This was only a “starter” game, so I won’t give a star rating based on what little I played. But I will say that based on that first 4 hours of questing, I will not bother buying the full game. So I guess I should thank Blizzard for helping my budget stay balanced. But mostly, I want to say, “Fuck you, Blizzard. You ruined Starcraft II, and now you’ve ruined Diablo. Why don’t you make a new Warcraft and see if you can fuck that up too?”

Your mileage may vary, but I’m so, so done with this shit. Uninstalling today, bitches.

The mainstream isn’t for me; a ramble…

So I’m still wandering in this crisis of identity lately, not knowing what to do with myself in the absence of day long writing sprees. I’m still disillusioned and unable to recapture that creative spark that kept me working with enthusiasm, even on my worst days. But, in looking around at the creative offerings of other people, I’m reminded again of why I felt the need to write so differently.

It’s because I need diversity, and I’m not finding it in the creative efforts of most folks. Their main characters are white, and straight, and almost all narratives are set up in a heteronormative framework where anyone who isn’t straight or white is cast in shady terms for being different.

Which is not to say that all of this fiction is bad. Some of it is really good, which is why I still make an effort at reading mainstream stuff. But I can count on books like this to never push any boundaries, lest the writer risk making the mainstream squirm. So if there’s a gay character, they’re the sexless “safe gay” whom the female characters can confide in. There will be no trans characters, no bis, and nothing “kinky” in the story, unless that kink is displayed by the antagonist as a way to show off their “bizarre perversions.”

And kids. There’s only one kind of kid in mainstream fiction, the innocent angels. If you have a sexually active child, it can only be because they were trapped in a child porn ring by their druggie parents and now some cop has to take care of this oversexualized caricature as part of a plot about taking on the skeezy porn ring that had formerly employed the child. The cop will of course find the child’s sexuality to be revolting and disgusting, because that’s the only reason the child displays sexuality in the story, is to highlight how normal the protagonist is. You don’t find kids who’ve played doctor, or anyone who’s made out at a school party behind the bleachers. Those kinds of realistic and complex kids are too grey to fit into the black and white world of mainstream fiction, so they’re erased. They just don’t exist in our perfect text worlds.

I’ve been reminded a lot lately how little material out there even tries to paint a more realistic picture of people who can’t fit into the mainstream for whatever reason. You can’t make a mainstream YA with 15-year-old girl who’s already sexually active. All YA females must be 17 and still be a virgin, because that’s the real value of being “special” in YA, whether or not you can be a good little virgin until you turn 17. Look at how many YA stories use the slut stereotype as the place to dump all the worst traits into the same character. It’s like saying sex makes people evil.

It’s also seriously creepy to me how women writers of YA focus as much on their girls’ hymens as male porn writers do in penny porn. I stopped reading penny porn cause I thought it was creepy how many stories were about a virgin just turning 18 and turning into a super-slut. Well I’m sorry, but having your YA heroine never notice boys until she’s 17 isn’t much better, even if you only move the couple up to a steamy kiss scene.

The biggest issue I have with this kind of writing is, how does it make the readers feel when they aren’t a perfect person? I don’t know how other readers take it, but I find it extremely frustrating to have narrators tell me over and over that I’m freaky for having anything besides vanilla heterosexual fantasies, all the while validating straight lifestyles as being “the way the real world works.”

Mainstream fiction in its present form is a delusional fantasy that embraces escapism over all other goals. As a reader, I have so little to enjoy because I can’t find books about people like me where we aren’t treated as a freak sideshow attraction, a diversion from the straight white main character’s story. Almost every single depiction of transsexual characters I’ve seen in the last few years might as well have used the term she-male. The authors don’t even care to try and depict us as real people. We’re just sluts with dicks, and there’s nothing worthy of showcasing in that trope.

And indie fiction? Is really mainstream, still. Indie doesn’t mean people are experimenting more boldly with the text art form. It means they’re taking their mainstream work and publishing it without professional representation. You know, working independently. But that means they’re still writing about straight white people, and their stories will still all revolve around the same mainstream concerns. For them, this is probably a good story, and for the mainstream readers, it stands a good chance of having success.

So I’m not knocking the mainstream for its values, or the consumers of those values either. I’m saying that as a reader, I’ve been forced to read constantly from fiction that offers me no one to identify with. I can’t relate to these morally black and white heroes, and I often feel bad for the villains because their story is so unimportant to the writer that it never comes up.

And this is why I wrote weird shit, because I wanted to know the villain’s story more than I cared to meet another straight hero or heroine. I wanted to follow the misadventures of the slutty girl rather than follow the seventeen-year-old virgin who wonders what kissing is like, and who meets “the one true love” just pages into chapter one. I wanted to write about kids who get abused, and who don’t turn out as hypersexual caricatures. I wanted to eschew some escapism in favor of a reality cast more in grey, and less in black and white.

I always knew this would mean not enjoying mainstream success, but up until this year, I hadn’t had anyone suggest that I was doing this to promote “deviant lifestyles.” And when that happened, it sucked the creative wind from my sails. Gone are the days where I whip out 10K on a story and then spend an hour or two before bed mentally outlining what ideas I want to explore in my next book. I no longer like to talk about my work either. Now when people ask me what I write, I just say something like “You probably won’t like it.”

I want to push past this feeling of defeat, but when I sit down to write now, there’s always this nagging voice that asks, “What’s the point of writing a story that no one else wants?” I need an answer to rebut that question, and I don’t have one.

I guess what I’m saying is, I still want to write, and I still don’t have anything else that can replace my writing habit. But I can’t write when I feel like every story is a failure.

Game review: Red Dead Redemption

“What, bitch is reviewing an old game?” Yeah, I know Red Dead Redemption has been out a while, but I didn’t have an Xbox to get it when it first came out. Once again, I was lured to a game by the siren call of an engrossing story, and that turned out to be a half truth. Before I get to the gushing and ranting about the game, I want to make clear that this is a two-part review, and a long review at that. First, I need to review the game itself, as in the game mechanics, the graphics, the sound, and the overall atmosphere. Then in the second part, I’ll review the story.

So, I loved the game, but I didn’t like the story. The story is all about this pissy outlaw who finally got caught and was made to pay for his crimes. Despite this, the main character manages to look down on everyone else he works with, or for, even with him being worse or no better than some of his cohorts.

But let’s set all of that aside and talk about that after I talk about the game play. First of all, the world is fantastically detailed, with every ride on horseback leading to a nature hunt of sorts. Throughout the game, I was spotting new species of animals. I saw incredible animal interactions occurring randomly, like an owl swooping down on a rattlesnake, or foxes trying to sneak into a hen house. At one point, I even decided to look for the rattlesnakes to see if they were really there, and sure enough, they are, and they look and act like real rattlesnakes when provoked.

The models are so well animated that just by the lope and profile, I could tell what animals were long before I could make out the details of their fur. That’s AMAZING recreation of a world environment, and I cannot gush enough about how much I enjoyed riding around on my horse, just watching the world around me. Day or night, the trips to any location are so engrossing that even after I learned about fast traveling using a camp, I only used it for really, really long trips.

The towns and cities are just as detailed, and the people in every location have enough variety in the models that I never got a clone world feeling like I did while playing Prototype. People also talk to my character, and he talks back. When the other characters talk, their mouths move. I can’t tell you how many games I’ve seen that give the main characters facial animations, but don’t do the same for NPC characters. Here, the models are all detailed with as much care as the main star.

The music and sound effects are fantastic, and where I normally play games with my phone blasting tunes, here, I turned up the TV to hear the great backing tracks. Even the slowest guitar or mariachi piece feels fitting for the pace of the game, and as the action speeds up, the tempo of the music shifts for the best dramatic effect. The sound effects are just as good, and as I mentioned before, the sounds in the game aren’t just background noise. If you hear a rattlesnake rattling loudly, it means you’re threatening it. You’ll hear wolves and coyotes long before you see them, though the mountain lions and bears don’t give nearly as much advance warning of their arrival. In any case, the animals sound as real as they look, and the other sound effects like guns loading or whatnot also sound authentic.

The basic selection of guns is pretty good, and to be honest, I ignored a lot of weapon upgrades in the stores because the guns I got for free just playing through the missions were fine. About the only standard-issue gun that I hated using was the sniper rifle. Sniper rifles are supposed to make a far away target easier to spot, but the scope on this gun is dirty, and the magnifying lens is warped. It’s like shooting using a cola bottle as your lens. Yeah. So not liking that.

The missions you take on can be part of the story, or you can just go to a bounty board and take jobs for cash. Along every trip, there will also be little tasks, like stopping a wagon thief or saving some dude’s kidnapped wife from being hung. The missions for the story have even more variety, although some missions are better than others. For western flavor, some of my jobs were breaking in horses or herding cattle, but most everything else was variations on killing people.

Now we get to the semi-muddled bit in the transition between game play and story. I played the game trying to be as honorable as possible. If I shot a sheriff accidentally during a wild gunfight, I’d reload a saved checkpoint. Of course with the random nature of the open world, sometimes I would ride back through the same spot, and there is no gunfight on the second try, and thus no sheriff accidentally wandering into the mix at the wrong time. Maybe this time the random encounter is a wolf who’s going to kill my horse. Or maybe it’s a chick in her underwear, looking to steal my horse. (But if a horse dies, just walk away a bit, and then whistle. Like magic, a new loyal steed appears. I both hated and loved this feature.) So I’d make a mistake, reload, and then muddle my way back through to the bounty hunt or mission I’d agreed to take on. (Assuming I didn’t get eat by a bear during the trip, of course.)

For all the trouble I went to to be good, though, the good people of the game never stopped complaining about me. Every mission where I had to ride in a posse, people were going “We don’t like you city folk and your strange ways.” This despite John Marston looking nothing at all like city folk. Instead of recruiting the cowpokes to form a posse after all the work I did with them, honorable John instead hooks up with a drug dealing con man, a grave robber, and a drunken Irish thief named…wait for it…Irish.

No matter who I had to ride with among the criminals, John spends the entire trip in a moral argument. Why? Why is a killer trying to argue that he’s better than a grave robber or a snake oil salesman? “Because I’ve changed,” John says, over, and over, and over. And yet, he still sounds like a pissy outlaw to me, not a reformed farmer who’s mended his ways. Everyone John deals with, it’s always the same tired spiel: “I saved your life! Now, help me, or I’m going to shoot you!” And this charming rapport is repeated like every other ten minutes. FOR TWENTY FUCKING HOURS.

The criminals almost make convincing arguments for their loose lifestyles, until you realize they’re all full of shit cutthroats who really shouldn’t be working together to assault a fort. The plan stinks, and it should have failed…oh wait, it did, multiple times.

That’s because the plan was to get a gatling gun for our big assault, hands down the most useless gun in the game. I wanted to give that honor to the sniper rifle, but during one gatling gun sequence later in the game, I decided not to use it and just go with a repeater rifle instead. The rifle had better accuracy, and I didn’t die being shot at by guys my gun couldn’t reach.

The missions themselves are fun most of the time. Ride to a spot nice and slow like, and then spend five to ten minutes shooting and moving from one cover point to the next. Simple, really, though there’s a challenge in finding the right line of attack in many missions. But far too many of the mission objectives suck, and you don’t find out until after they’re done how badly the job stinks. At one point, I agreed to get a package for a Mr. Tollets. Well the package I took from the rebels was opium, and it was stolen by me and sold to a rail boss who was using it to keep his Chinese rail workers stoned and enslaved. Well…that’s…fucked up.

During the second half of the game, the hunt for John’s old gang moves to Mexico, where things get even worse. John starts working for the Mexican Army, and for the rebels, so he sees on both sides that most everyone is loco en da cabeza. Despite working with these people seeming like a bad idea, John firebombs a village, and he helps the Army shoot women and old people. Yet, his honor just keeps going up. At the same time, he’s whacking Army soldiers in other missions for the rebels, but no one in the Army notices. This is crazy in the game world because if I shot a sheriff in the middle of nowhere in the Texas part of the game, I’d be wanted instantly. Yet, once I’m in Mexico, my actions don’t affect the authorities on either side of the revolution.

The story reaches a point that feels like the ending. John finds all the gang and they end up dead one way or another. The government releases John’s family, and now would be the best time for a typical Hollywood ending. But not this game. No, it drags on for hours after the natural place for an ending and forces me to stay on for an extended visit with the most creepy family in the world. Rockstar really drops the ball here, because where the strangers in town chatted with John, his son, wife, and “uncle” won’t speak more than a word or two at him while he’s in the house. They can’t sit down to dinner, or even have a family fight. John can go stand out by Jack for an hour and watch the stars with nary a “Yep” between them. In a game that went to all the trouble to make the animals act realistically, that went to the trouble of hiring great voice actors, this time spent on John’s farm is excruciatingly dull AND creepy for the lack of signs of life.

The few missions offered during this time show John arguing with his family, and the only time that John finally has what seems like a family moment with his son, that immediately leads to what should be the definitive ending, because *SPOILER ALERT* John dies when the agency he worked for decides it’s too risky to let him live. Hey, hero dead, and no health regens now. So, that’s game over, right, Bill Paxton? Right!

But NO, then the game moves over to Jack, who then spends more time wandering before a stranger’s quest opens up in Blackwater. This mission is where a government agent is asked about another agent by someone who looks like trouble, and then just gives the answer for exactly where to find the dude. This extremely unrealistic final clue leads Jack to the man who done shot his Pa, Agent Ross. They duel, the credits roll…and the game goes right back to playing! WHY WON’T YOU FUCKING DIE, GAME? YOUR MAIN CHARACTER ALREADY DID!

I mean seriously, how did the game let the story play out to this point without coming to the next obvious ending, Jack getting shot for avenging his dad? Jack only leaves a trail of witnesses who know what he looks like and who he was going to see. But if you play out after the rolling credits, you’re just doing the same missions that “dear” old dad did. Lame and unrealistic given the way the rest of the story played out.

And while I’m complaining, I find it crazy how I don’t have to buy anything as Jack, because everything Pa owned, Jack owns. Even the leases on hotel rooms, years after the death of his father and mother? Even the room rented for his pa in Blackwater by the agency? Right, okay, whatever.

And nothing changes about any location, despite Jack aging several years. The house looks the same; okay, I get that. But when I go to Armadillo and the same guys are still hanging around the bar, and they haven’t changed a bit, it kinda proves that Rockstar didn’t think through this last few hours of game very well. I was almost hoping Bonnie would pop up on the map, so I could continue a different story ending, but the game after that is all quest missions, all the time. It doesn’t give me much incentive to keep playing, or to play the game over.

So this is a muddled review for me because I loved playing the game but hated sitting through the shit story. I wasn’t the least bit surprised that John died, and despite riding with him some 36 hours, I still feel like it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving asshole. But even if Rockstar was going to go that route for the story, they could have skipped the Manson family reunion. It’s so weird to see a completely lifeless and unrealistic family in a game where everything else was full of seeming life and spontaneity. I really didn’t want to sit through a day of cattle ranching, or to go looking for wild horses. But I can’t just get the story missions over with because the other characters KEEP HOURS. I’m not allowed to talk to my son unless it’s 5 AM to 6 PM? He’s keeping a banker’s hours? WHAT THE FUCK?

But if I set aside the crap ending…and almost all of the plot, I really, really did love the game. So, rather than try to split the two scores and give the game a 4 out of 5 and the story a 2, I’m going to give Red Dead Redemption 3 stars. I’d recommend it to most anyone with the patience to sit through the long ass story, but I gotta say, for a game so amazing at reproducing the great outdoors and all its myriad wildlife, it sure did suck at capturing anything resembling human emotion. A great game, but what a shitty story.

Writing update…

You’d think with this month being my birthday that I’d be in better shape. But right after the warmer weather of March, this has been a cold and grey month in Milan, and I’m having to bundle up and deal with all kinds of joint pain and mood problems.

Despite this, I did get some writing done…and then Word erased what I’d written. I don’t get it. I’ve got the system doing backups, and I make regular USB key backups. Yet, sometimes Word hiccups, and I lose a few chapters in the process.

I’ve gone back and rewritten two of those chapters, and I’ll get back to where I was, I’m sure. Once I finish Thicker Than Blood, I can get back into All Maid Up and finish another season or two before I take another break. With the series, I always post the rough draft online, and I save the chapters as individual files. So I shouldn’t lose any of those, at least.

And then, after I finish the serial…I dunno. I’m finishing these projects for a literal handful of four or five people, but after this I don’t have any other stories that I want to work on. Maybe after I finish the serial and have a month or two off, the muse will come up with something. But it’s been a while since I’ve had any new ideas, and the few old ideas I had, I’m passing on because they’re not likely to sell, even if I first gave them away for free as another serial.

Maybe some of it is just the continued wacky weather driving me nuts, but I’m not getting anything out of writing like I used to. It used to charge me up, and now it just grinds at me. When I don’t feel like writing, I game all day. But I’m running out of games, and money to buy more. And at the end of a day of gaming, I feel like I’ve wasted my time. I feel like I should have written something. And the muse is like, “Well yeah, and I’d love to help. But every idea I pitch, you shoot down on the grounds that no one wants to read this crap.” And, the thing is, I know I’m right in turning down these pitches, because no one wants to read that crap. I got history providing the burden of proof. Readers want escapism, and my muse apparently hates escapism. So, we’re at an impasse, and in the meantime, I try to finish what’s on tap.

I dunno, maybe someday I’ll come up with an idea that doesn’t suck. But it’s probably not gonna be today.

Game review: Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus

So, after several week of contacting Sony, I found out that my purchase of Unit 13 was refunded to my wallet again. For all intents and purposes, I consider the matter with Sony fairly resolved. So I cut my losses and did the honorable thing by deleting my copy of the game.

I decided to pick up a different game, Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus, which ought to carry the subtitle, The Longest Ninja Gaiden Title Evar. No. E.V.A.R. Rather than make a full game, Team Ninja has ported a PS3 title to the Vita and added a few features for the touch pad and rear touch interface. So, how does that work out?

Well, it's hard to say. First of all, Ninja Gaiden has always had a reputation for being difficult. But, up until a certain point, I didn't feel the game was being too cheap. But, I was playing at the lowest level, so that should be taken into account. However, in Chapter 12, two days into having a great time with the many long fights, I was put against a helicopter who can fire heat seeking missiles sideways out of the launcher rack, and these missiles, even when blind-fired from behind a building, fly to their target. Even if said building should cause the missiles to blow up before reaching their target. This cheap ass boss tactic left me completely cold, so much so that I stopped playing, won't finish the rest, and don't care enough about the story to YouTube the rest. If it wasn't for the eleven chapters of fun…nine chapters of fun I had, this would be a one star game.

I want to make clear, I made a brief attempt to play on Normal Mode, but I died so much in the first level that I just opted to go with "Hero Mode" AKA: Easy Mode for people who are trying to avoid saying easy. On this level, the fights kinda went like this. The bad guys spam all their weapons until Ryu drops to low enough health to auto block. Then Ryu turns into an actual ninja and starts killing people. This kinda of fighting style is known as "You guys are going to get tired of whipping my ass soon." (I'm sure it translates better in hiragana.) Right after the fight is over, many of the enemies drop blue health essence, so Ryu pulls back from the edge of death, ready to get his ass kicked again while I study the patterns of my enemies.

I'm not kidding about this being my only constant tactic, because everything else I tried involving movement or finesse is a waste of time with these controls. I want to find something nice to say about them, but the front touch pad aiming is terrible, and makes me get shot most of the time for being out in the open. It's easier and safer to fire arrows just using the jump and shoot method, so much so that I only used the touch screen and left stick to aim at one target on a wall. A non-moving target. And I my mark missed a lot.

The game gives out new weapons every other level, so Ryu has a lot of toys to play with and upgrade. The best of the bunch is the twin katanas, but there's also a Vigoorian flail, like a nunchuku with blades on the ends. When Ryu gets a combo going with either of these weapons, it's hard for enemies to break it, and it does a LOT of damage. Ryu also does a special Ultimate attack if you hold the triangle button, and the first and second modes look like the aura power up from Dragonball Z. If you unleash it and an enemy is within Ryu's range, he leaps forward and goes into a blurring fury of attacks that usually ends with someone losing their head or other limbs.

But where the game hooked me was in the boss fights. That first fight with a flaming samurai on horseback was awesome. I didn't mind getting knocked around or dying, because I was taking my time to really watch the boss and all the great detail that went into his steed. Every boss up to the chopper in chapter 12 was fun and interesting, and I didn't even mind facing the same boss over again. Yes, the technique I needed to use to win was tricky, but it wasn't so hard as to seem impossible.

And then right there in chapter 12, Team Ninja says, "You get the fuck out of our game, biyatch. No women allowed in our boys club. You been here too long, having fun with our clever level design and whatnot. So now here's a spitwad shooter, and go face that armored helicopter." No, Team Ninja, fuck you. That's exactly the kind of cheap ass boss that you'd avoided doing throughout the rest of the game, and you even threw a giant zombie dinosaur at me. But I balk when you decide to arm me with a bow and arrow versus heat seeking, phasing technology-equipped missiles.

So, you know why I don't know how the game ends, and you know I don't care. But let me try to tell you about this shitty plot, because it should factor into the score. Ryu Hyabusa, eternal prick with a dick up his ass as a replacement for a personality or an acting career, has left Hyabusa village to take in some training in a neighboring village. After killing some guards, Ryu faces off against the master of the house, and then they have tea, and the master asks about the EXACT SWORD that's about to be stolen back at Hyabusa village. No, they just finish discussing it when a big boobed chick with lavender hair rushes into the room to explain that Hyabusa village is on fire. Ryu runs home alone, because that other dude can't be bothered to help, I guess. And there he faces evil samurai who have come for yet another sword under the family's protection.

Yes, I have played Ninja Gaidens before, but all back in the NES days. I've played three incarnations of the game, and I'm frankly amazed that despite 20 years passing, the Hyabusa clan is still being entrusted with swords despite having one stolen in every, single, game. But given that this is the ONLY plot that guys can come up with to bring Ryu back, I let this go. And hey, it's kind of nostalgic revisiting the same freaking plot over, and over, and…yeah, nostalgic. Right.

Shortly after Ryu sets off to face the higher fiend who stole his family's most evil sword evar, he meets Rachel, a walking cliché that makes it clear every person on the development team for this game's side characters is a man. Rachel has giant red cock sucking lips, bigger boobs that jiggle when she blinks, and long eyelashes to give her that proper doe in the headlights look. (She's good at the slow doe blink too.) She's dressed in a leather bikini that wouldn't contain her through one fight, much less the melee slogs she goes through.

And for a chick this heavily endowed, what do the game makers arm her with? With a bastardized hybrid battle ax/war hammer. Any lighter weapons? No, not really. So, as you might expect of a women in a bikini for armor who's carrying around a hundred pound weapon, Rachel handles like a brick. But what makes Rachel infuriating is her sudden feeble fits. Right after you use Rachel to fight in a level, Ryu will come along and rescue her from this monster or that. Then, right after Ryu says "You shouldn't be around me" and abandons Rachel after fighting her twin sister Alma, she gets kidnapped to be used as a blood sacrifice for reviving her sister.

And… I really don't care. Maybe it was the fan service female designs that really killed my interest, or maybe it was the way the game makers took the one part of the game I was enjoying, the boss fights, and turned it into a cheap and aggravating experience in just one level. Maybe it's the fact that at no time did I ever care what happened next in the story, I just wanted to see what new enemy types were still in hiding.

And that's what I liked about the game, the sheer variety of enemy types. There's ninja, super-ninja, samurai, and armored soldiers with guns and swords. There's guys with uzis riding motorcycles, flying robots with laser guns, fire breathing demons, and even hordes of zombies. After playing a bunch of Vita games where enemy variety was kinda weak, it was awesome to play so many different kinds of enemies in this game. I was enjoying that so much, I could forgive the shit story and the cheap tactics used to make the game tougher just for the sake of being difficult. But the cheap chopper fight is my limit, and since I didn't really have to pay for this game, I'm going to just cut my losses and quit instead of letting the game aggravate me.

I guess this kind of game appeals to some niche market of hardcore players who feel the only good game is a game that dumps shit on them. The strategy I used on Hero Mode won't work on higher difficulty levels, and while the promise of even more enemy types is vaguely tempting, the combination of locked arena game play with endlessly spawning hordes has never been a good match for me.

The variety of weapons is good, yet the upgrades don't really feel like they do much extra damage unless Ryu pulls off a level two ultimate move. And wouldn't you know it? Most enemies don't give you time to pull that kind of move often. But, the combat here is better than in Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen, and the shuriken aren't completely useless…just mostly useless. Still, I'm sure that this kind of fighting style will appeal to fans who like memorizing button patterns to pull off bigger combos. For me, it all turns into a long blur of button mashing. If I manage to pull something off, yay, it looks cool. But most of the time, I'm just alternating between hard and light attacks to see what makes it through the enemy's defenses.

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that the continue screen ALSO has a cheap tactic of changing "Continue?" to "Abandon the path of the Ninja?" That's "Do you want to quit?" And if you're pushing buttons to try and get back to the long ass loading screen, you can quit pretty easily without realizing what you're doing. This same cheap ass tactic was used in Shinobido 2, and I have to say, I don't understand why Japanese game makers think this kind of thing should be thrown into their games. It's like they're saying "This game isn't hard enough…on the continue screen, let's alternate the default continue question with a trick question that will dump the player back to the start menu." What the fuck. Who thinks that's a good idea? Seriously.

I'm sure male players will love Rachel's bouncy…personality. I hated her tits, and her oversized lips. She looks like an over-inflated sex doll instead of a real person. None of the females in the game look like real people, which is weird, because Ryu does look like a real person. The women have huge googly anime eyes and poofy hair that is somehow still stiff, and when compared to Ryu, they look fake. Even Alma, the demon boss, is hyper sexualized with a set of gold nipples. (No, for real.) So it feels like the women were designed solely as fan service, while Ryu was actually modeled to take his impressive list of moves into account. This could be said of all the male models, and since you're fighting all dudes, all the time, the dudes look great. The demons do too, so why the chicks have to look like something out of a Yujin manga drawing, I dunno.

Actually, since I've brought his moves up, there's nothing Ryu does that isn't copied from somewhere. Half of Ryu's moves are borrowed from Prince of Persia, and the button mashing combos certainly feel very similar to a Prince of Persia title. Others have been staples of Ninja Gaiden since the 2D NES days, like the wall jumping, charged attacks, and timed jump and shoot fighting style. Some of this was good, because it brought back nostalgic memories. But then the continued missile fire from the last chopper reminded me of another historical detail: I've never finished a single Ninja Gaiden game. Not even the first one. At some point, there's always a boss with a cheap tactic that sends me stomping out of the room in a fit about Things That Aren't Fun In Video Games.

So, I give Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus 3 stars out of five. I'm taking into account that before the chopper, I was having fun in the game. Yes, even though my progress was slow and stumbling. I still felt I was making progress by learning a new enemy's moves. But the only thing I learned from that last boss fight is, collision detection wasn't in the missile budget.

I flat out hated the levels where I played as Rachel, but these were mercifully short. The boss fight with the old dude in a trenchcoat was pretty intense, and I muddled through it with Rachel's shitty lack of moves. But right after this huge fight, Rachel gets one-shotted and dragged off, either another useless sacrifice, or another "save the princess" scenario. I don't know how the story plays out, and I don't even care to Wiki the synopsis. That's how fucking tired I am of video games where the only purpose the women serve is to be rescued by the big strong man.

Seriously, guys in the game industry, you claimed that 2011 was the year that video games matured, but we're still seeing this adolescent storytelling bullshit where the little women hang back while the men do the real work. Enough with the rescue the princess drivel and try to make more women playable for longer than one or two levels. And if you're going to make them playable, don't kidnap them or get them swallowed by demons so a man can rescue them. And dress them in something a woman would be seen wearing instead of an attempt at softcore bondage porn. Cause that bullshit is so fucking tired and worn out. If I hadn't had so much fun playing though levels and bosses with Ryu, this game deserved one star for Rachel alone. So Team Ninja is getting off light with three when the story, plus Rachel, plus cheap tactics should equal a bomb. Instead, what you get is lots of fun combat wrapped around a really shitty story.

*Takes deep breath* So, yeah, that's my incomplete review of the game. Your mileage may vary.

Game review: Unit 13

I got Unit 13 shortly after launch, and if you don't know why I didn't play it until this month, it's because the version I got online wouldn't play in English. After having no success dealing with Zipper Interactive or Sony about this, I decided to make do by switching my system language to Italian and playing the game in what should now be my second language. I'd say that I'm doing…moderately well.

I'm not so good with Italian, but once I got the gist of the missions, the rest of the game became easier to understand. A training camp mission introduces players to the basic combat functions, and it unlocks the first single mission. Single missions are graded by points that convert to a star level, from one two five. Points can be accrued for killing enemies in a variety of ways, including extra awards for head shots, or for shooting enemy mines to kill the terrorists. Completing single missions with a high star rating will allow you to unlock primary missions, which pit an agent against a high ranking terrorist and his freaking huge army of cloned minions.

In this case, not having a story makes the game easier to play. Objectives are written out during the audio briefing for each mission. I can read Italian better than I can speak it, so having each mission explain in the bullet points in little words helps. Of course, I would have like a larger font. Sometimes the little text here is hard to see.

The radio chatter with the command post during missions is all the same stuff said in the briefing, so once an agent is selected, the rest of the game plays like a standard military FPS. I've usually gone with the agent suggested by the game for each level, but during one or two mission, I substituted the default choice with a sniper, to help him level up a bit. (Though, so far as I can tell, leveling up doesn't seem to do anything for any agent.) I can't say I have a preferred agent yet, as all have certain strengths for their kinds of missions.

One of my nagging issues with the game was the low number of enemy models, and after playing through 27 of the 36 single missions, as well as trying out the unlocked primary missions, the one thing I know about every location is that it's hot. Oh, and also that the enemy troops are almost always hungry. The enemy dialog is repeated many, many times, but I did find it a nice touch that the different locations meant that there were slight dialect changes. It's just that everything is translated the same. "It's hot." Or I'm hungry." Or for some real variety, "When I get paid, I'm buying a better gun."

Also, the subtitles are really small. No, like teeny tiny. Compared to Shinobido 2 or Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the subtitles here are almost unreadable for their tiny size. They also don't work unless you're right on top of the enemies speaking. But since they're always saying the same things, this should be considered a minor complaint.

Another problem similar to the too common enemy models is the repetitive nature of the missions. But once I unlocked some missions and started seeing new maps and mission types, I stopped noticing the cloned models and got into the flow of the game. Each new mission presented me with a unique encounter that could last half an hour, or if I kept screwing up, half a day.

The twin stick controls have a weird attempt at assistive aiming, but it's only going to work if the agent's aim is somewhere near the right spot. If the aim is off in the air somewhere when the left shoulder button is pressed, it won't swing the agent around to an enemy's position. But if the aim is pressed near an enemy, the cross-hairs will move slightly to cover the target. This is not as good an aiming option as the six-axis aim in Uncharted: Golden Abyss, and there's no attempted use of the back panel for zoom, or of the motions controls. Which does make the game feel a bit more restrictive than the Vita's other combat heavy launch title. However, I've been able to make consistent head shots with most of my agents, and I'd credit that more to the assistive aim than I do to my leet skills. (tru fax: I has no leet skills.)

The game does use the touch screen for different buttons. One lets you vault over waist high obstacles, and another allows you to change the cross-hair zoom level on an agent's rifle. Depending on the weapon, this can either help improve accuracy, or it can blind an agent's peripheral vision, making it all too easy for an enemy to come around a corner and fill said agent full of lead.

The auto-aim is somewhat wonky, and doesn't work when an agent is stuck on certain types of cover. Nine times out of ten, the game will stick the agent against a wall unless you've moved the character all the way to the corner, which prevents aiming or even blind firing at enemies advancing on your position. This too, once taken into account, becomes a part of the game flow. If you're facing one or two enemies, sticking to the wall and sliding to the corner factors into the plan of attack. If you need to move for a big firefight, you may want to think of a better firing position. If it's just one guard, you might sneak around the corner and knife him in the back. Or in some missions, you might just sneak behind him, disarm the bomb he passes, and then slip back into another room while he's sweeping a balcony in vain to search for someone to shoot.

Possibly the best missions were those where the point was to avoid killing people. All of the mission types have their own kind of fun, but there's an intense heart in the throat nervousness that comes from slipping into a room directly behind a guard just as the room you're exiting is about to get some new arrivals, all of them armed to the teeth. And speaking with their gun. Even with a silencer on, you can't kill someone without risking setting off an alarm and blowing your cover.

Those missions were the few that I could ace with 5 star ratings because I would make it all the way through a tightly guarded nightclub, and only have to kill the guard at the bar with my knife. It's all sneaking and hiding, but played as a change of pace to the run and gun missions, this is a great counter-balance to the flow of the other assignments.

The toughest missions are elite assignments, in which the agent is armed with some kind of super shotgun, a stock pistol, and only his current health. If the agent dies in these missions, there's no checkpoints or saves to load. You start back at the beginning of the mission.

Some elite missions were so tough, I had to play them for hours before I learned the right pattern to get through the patrols and rescue the hostage or disarm the bomb. While the missions were hard, they didn't feel cheap. Enemy movements can change slightly from one attempt to the next, so even after playing the same level over and over, I can't say that it felt repetitive. I also didn't get any cases of gamer rage or accuse the game of cheating. Every time I died, I understood where I'd screwed up. So even when I got sent all the way back to the beginning, I was cool with starting over. You know a game is fun when I take all the abuse it can dish out and still come back ready for more. In this way, Unit 13 has that same addictive "one more try" grip as Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Super Stardust Delta.

I have not yet found a friend to try the co-op missions, and I didn't get the network pass. I don't know much about the online features, but that may change in the coming months. I am curious to see what the network passes enable, and if anyone has a Vita and wants to play Unit 13 with me, my handle is Zoe_E_W on Sony's network. I still don't know how to make the microphone work, though, so I suppose I should fix that before I attempt online co-op missions. I have tried the daily challenge, and those are fun, though you only get one attempt per challenge. So if you suck like I do, some of those daily mission are a leeeeettle difficult. Yeah.

The game progress counter on the Vita Trophy counter says I've completed 25% of the game, so this should not be considered a complete review. But what I've played up to now has been engrossing, challenging, and most importantly, fun. Which is why it's sad that I have to report that Sony is closing down Zipper Interactive with Unit 13 just out of production. This is sad because Unit 13 could use a maps pack DLC, and maybe even some new enemy packs to make the game feel a little more varied. I'd even chip out a five or a ten for a new gun pack. But even what's in the game is worth the asking price, in my opinion.

I give Unit 13 four stars out of five, and I'd recommend it to Vita players looking for FPS action similar to Counter Strike or to the cover combat systems in Gears of War and Uncharted. This makes 3 PS Vita launch games that I've bought and loved, and three games that I bought and hated. And to me, this is not a bad ratio. If Sony can put out more FPS games like this, I suspect I may find out how durable the controls are under heavy and constant use.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have another mission to complete.

A writing update? Now? HERE? Well, okay then…

This should be a good season for me, and April should be a good month. Sadly, it never is. The weather shifts hot and cold so fast, I can't adjust and end up dropping for longer and longer fatigue comas. So then I end up awake all night because I was crashed during the day. This also messes with my diet, so of course that's another thing making me cranky.

Despite all of this, I've written another 20K of Thicker Than Blood, and I've started doing brief promos for book 3 Roll the Bones after I finished the cover. Because sales weren't so hot on either of the first two books, I wanted to run an Indiegogo campaign for my editor, Tara Frauendienst. Or, more truthfully, Tara will run an Indiegogo campaign and collect donations for her editing fee. In this way, I won't see a dime of the proceeds from the campaign. It will all go to Tara, who deserves a huge bonus for all the work she's done on the first two books. I'm proud of the work she did, and I will do everything I can to promote this project. I've written up the basic proposal for her, and I'm offering some other books out to help sweeten the deal. When we get the proposal on the site, I'll bug folks here and on Twitter.

But, assuming that the project is a success, I'll have to give out a lot of books. I'm not on Smashwords, so I can't use their coupon system. Amazon doesn't have a coupon system, nor do I think I have the ability to offer 100% discounts through No Boundaries Press. I probably should have thought of this sooner, but for the past few weeks, my larger concern was baking my brain for some decent incentives that would make donating feel like money well spent.

I have to know how I'm getting those ebooks out to people before we can put this project up on the Indiegogo site, but short of hosting them on my site and using the honor system, I don't know what to do. So, comments are open, for once. Any ideas? Really, I'm open to suggestions here.

Why social media sometimes does more harm than good…

I rambled on this topic yesterday on Twitter, but since I ramble about a lot of things, this topic passed through the stream pretty fast. Summing up, the changes to Twitter's RT system have made cross-promotion more difficult for indies, while making it easier for cliques to either promote themselves or to shut others out who don't share their same interests. The problem is Twitter, though, and not the actions of the users.

Giving brief anecdotal examples, when I'm online all day, I'll see someone RT something I tweet or retweet, and many times, it's not even people following me. They just saw my tweet in the general timeline and sent it along. It might be a one-line joke, or several tweets strung together in a ramble. Or it might be a news story from someone else that I was passing along. So if I sit here all day and watch those little user portraits changing, I can confirm that several people are RTing links, and that the people of Twitter are doing their part. The key point is, I only see it if I sit on top of my stream like an owl watching for a mouse to come popping out of its hole.

But let's say that I've published a new book, and I post a link and then leave for a nice dinner with hubby to celebrate. And let's say that five authors also RT that link in the time I was gone. When I come back, all I see is the one RT. I don't know who to thank, or who to make a note of later so I can promote their stuff in return. The only way I could know that is by being here 100% of the time, and that's not how Twitter is supposed to work. People check in when they want, and they ought to be able to see when other people retweeted their stuff.

I'm a die-hard Twitter junkie, and if I can miss stuff like this, you can be sure authors who only check in for an hour or two are also missing out on who retweeted what. So even if they're committed to cross-promotion and reciprocating retweets, they can't know who to retweet anymore. This isn't authors behaving badly. It's twitter cutting off their ability to keep track of their follower's activities. And if this is a problem for authors, its even more so a problem for the casual user who only checks the most recent tweets and mentions before checking back out.

The new RT system is just like the new timeline on Facebook. The change means a streamlined interface with less updates, which sounds good in theory, but which is shutting out many music apps that used to generate promotions for indie artists. Traffic is dying on those apps as a result of the new timeline, and musicians are getting less attention from their fans. Why? Because Facebook made these changes without considering who it would effect. This new design is somehow seen as more efficient, and so even if it's more harmful to the artists relying on it for promotions, it doesn't matter.

Who benefits from these changes? Cliques. Why? Because members of a clique will got to their friend's pages, scroll down through their tweet stream or status updates, find the links that their friends wanted promoted, and then share or retweet those links. They put more effort into helping their friends because they know their friends will also scratch their backs and return the favor. Which is not to say the cliques are evil. They're just more willing to put in extra effort for people they already know. Think of it as wind tunnel promotion.

What this means is that the average user who just checks the first few pages of their timeline will miss out on most of the news items their favorite artists were posting. Those average users will not be able to share the news and help it spread, because they don't think to got to each fan page or individual timeline. That's too much work, and anyway, isn't it all supposed to be in their main page? No, not anymore, but you certainly can't blame the user for not noticing how there's less and less updates from the artists.

I'm not on Facebook now, so I can't even begin to suggest how to fix it. But on Twitter, we need changes to the RT system so that every RT can be tracked, instead of being lumped into one tweet with no way to tell who else passed it along. We need to have tweets like the old system, but perhaps with Twitter not counting the characters in the user name against the 140 character limit.

But in any case, as the social media apps run right now, they aren't helping with promotion. Instead, they're making promotion that much harder for legitimate artists, while doing nothing about the constant floods of spam. Somehow, we need to give artists the chance to hawk their wares and see who is helping with cross-promotion. After all, they can't return the favor if they don't know who was helping them in the first place.