R.W. Krpoun's Blog, page 19

First Edit done!

The first edit on Scared but Willing is done, and the second will begin Wednesday. I added about 800 words in this first review, just tidying up the plot and details, and will add a few more before it is over. The June publishing date still looks viable.

More news as it develops.

Scared But Willing is done!

93,000 words of rough draft, a complete LitRPG novel. I’ll start the edit process later this week, with the hope of publishing before the end of the month, although deadlines are not kind to me.

Meanwhile, another stalled project has gotten a possible unblocking idea, so I may start working on it later this week as well.

Update 4/26/2019

Scared But Willing broke 90,000 words as the final plot arc plays out. I had hoped to be further along, but deadlines are seldom my friend.

On the plus side, plot issues sorted themselves out fairly neatly, and plot-wise it is a straight shot to the conclusion, and then the bloody fields of editing beyond.

I will keep the updates coming when there is news to report.

Never dismiss the utility of an unrelated documentary

I write fantasy, litRPG, occult westerns, and zombie fiction. Pretty much your standard 21st Century writer, right?

Feeding the beast that is inspiration

Writing a novel is a lengthy undertaking, and parts of it are going to be a slog of word count and setting establishment. Not that setting establishment is boring stuff, but the simple fact is that you are going to have to get out of bed every day and reach inside yourself for both the creativity to write, and the desire to write, so you can produce 1500+ words of rough draft.

You have to make word count, and above all you have to maintain the momentum; I have a lot of projects waiting on hard drive for the spark to re-ignite.

One key, in my experience, is to control what you watch and read. I haven’t seen any zombie films or even the last season of the Walking Dead (not hard because the season before blew) because I am staying focused on fantasy until my current novel is finished (in rough draft). I don’t want to get hit with a great idea for a zombie plot while I am hammering on a fantasy novel. And vice versa.

Meanwhile, Scared but Willing is at 83k words of rough draft (more once I finish this post) and the plot issues appear to be all hammered out. What is next? I want to publish two books in 2019, so once SBW is published I will be hitting the keyboard again. The exact nature of the second project is something I will work out after I settle SWB.

Scared But Willing is novel-length!

It crossed the 80,000 word threshold today. The story isn’t done, but I’ve got the length and the plot nailed down, and now it’s just a matter of time.

I lost most of this last week due to a head cold, but I’m back in gear and hammering the keys. I hope to publish in early May, but my luck with deadlines is not the best. I will keep my progress posted.

Gamer Story XXXIV (FS2)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days of the 2000s I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement, but after the first couple campaigns the practice died off as novels consumed my writing time. This campaign was set in our second Fading Suns campaign, and is my last gamer short story.

Dear
mum,

I
pray this finds you well. We are on Severus, a rather unpleasant place under
the auspices of House Decados, so you may rest assured I am not leaving the
confines of the spaceport, and by preference shall not leave the ship.

Its
no hardship however, as once we make landfall the lads are busy running about
brandishing a variety of weapons, so I have the boat largely to myself.

Severus
is a jungle planet, very hot and untidy. It has a vast number of this
eight-foot bugs called ascorbites who are extremely hostile. The starport, and
everywhere else people live, is frightfully well fortified, so you might say
that here the people live in a zoo, ha ha!

The
lads have learned how to jump out of aircraft with parachutes so as to arrive
safely or silently in the jungle. I’m sure I can’t think of any reason why they
would want to be in the jungle, but they are very self-important and serious
about it.

***

“Get
to the top of the pyramid!” Fulneer bellowed into the squawker, blazing away at
an on-rushing ascorbite, the caseless rounds drilling through the creature’s
hard exoskeleton. “There’s more on the way!”

“Pancreator!” Dane gasped as he dropped his shotgun onto its assault sling and ripped his sidearm from his vest. The buckshot had barely penetrated the ascorbite exoskeleton, and the damned things were loping ever closer. “Take that, you blasted…oh, crap!” The pistol’s locking lever stood upright: a stoppage. Dropping the useless pistol, the Brother Battle clawed for his sword as he backed towards the stairs ascending the side of the pyramid.

 “Whhheeeeee!!!” Voldar trilled, the sound drowned out by the high-pitched droning roar of his Falchion assault weapon, the cloud of steel shot sand-blasting an ascorbite into oblivion.

An
ascorbite’s shattered body was flung from the brush like a broken doll; nodding
to himself, Richard pulled another grenade from his vest as he trotted around
the base of the pyramid. “Dance with the Muster, bug-boy, and you’ll get what
you deserve.”

“Carpet
bombing, I told them,” Sir Svaltus muttered to himself as he reloaded, backing
towards the pyramid. “Clear it out, I said. But noooo, we have to parachute
in.” He fired a long burst on full automatic at a charging insectiod. “Comes
from listening to an intelligent ape, way I see it.” Movement at the base of
the pyramid caught his eye, and he casually tossed a grenade at it, the frag
catching on his tactical glove and getting a bad spin. “Bugger.”

“Could
this day get any worse?” Dane swore, only to hear a plastic clatter at his
feet. He saw the grenade a split second before it exploded and his screen unit
electrified him as it diverted the shrapnel. “Stupid question,” he answered
himself as he staggered on, uniform smoking.

“There’s
Richard! Come on, up the steps! Drake, call for extraction,” Fulneer slid a
full magazine home.

“That
grenade came from you!” Dane shouted at Sir Svaltus as the two trotted up the
stairs.

The
knight shrugged the accusation off. Churchman or not, Dane was just a serf-no
point in getting attached, really.

***

They’re out there now running about the trees collecting bags of the most frightfully filthy junk you could imagine, no doubt waving about their weapons in a very manly manner as they do so. They’re like children for all their honors and titles. Still, it gets them out from underfoot so I can catch up on my ‘lantern serials and enjoy a cup of tea. Even JD is out with them, poor chap; he doesn’t care much for this hero business either.

***

“Abort,
abort! They’re all dead!” JD yelled over the roar of the engines, hopefully
reaching for the brake jets.

Beside him Mike shook his head, scowling, and jabbed a finger downward. Muttering, the pilot kept the shuttle in its power drive. Serve them right to all die down there, dragging him all over Known Space, ruining his acting career; another year and his fan club would have noble groupies. Well, at least Yeoman.

“They
always die,” Freeman whispered to himself, rocking in his seat as much as the
crash harness allowed. “They scream and they fry, and in the end all die. Sad,
sad, so very sad.” Unaware of the tears on his cheeks, the Engineer touched up
his sketch for a folding alloy apparatus which resembled a ten-foot-wide metal snowflake,
which should deploy a decoy device from an altitude of two hundred feet.
Probably.

“Why
is it so loud?” Mike yelled.

“That’s
the laws of physics registering a protest,” JD snarled, straining at the
controls. “We’re shaped like a brick and moving at mach one point five straight
down. It’ll really get loud when we stop.” He eyed the exterior skin
temperature indicator. “If we stop.”

“Look,
there’s more pyramids that were cleared, like this one,” Mike pointed.

 “Look, we’re going to make a really big
crater,” JD mimicked, wincing at the way so many indicators were crossing the
yellow and heading towards red. “Freeman, are you sure the counter-grav relays
will take this?”

The
Engineer leaned into the cockpit. “No. But they probably will. If not, it will
be mercifully quick, unlike explosive decompression. Or a fire in zero gee. Or
a flash burn from hydraulic ignition…”

“Yes,
thanks, I understand.”

***

Vegetation flew as his grenades exploded in a precise row across the front of the movement. Richard nodded to himself and slipped another clip of 40mm grenades into his Thunderbolt. Give him a target and plenty of grenades, launched or thrown, and life was good. Bugger all this running around wondering who did what and why; what a man really needs is a good fight now and then. Shouldering the weapon, the lean Muster operative inhaled deeply and released half.

“JD,
you better be on your way,” Fulneer shouted over the whining roar of Voldar
firing suppression and Richard launching grenades.

The
shuttle swept in at a steep angle, hull bright with heat, ramp dropping even as
it leveled off. Freeman Jones, wearing a survival vest, two safety cables, and
a fire-retardant suit, assisted the Templars on board. 

JD wasted no time; they were a mile from the pyramid before the ramp had sealed shut.

“Where
are you hit?” Drake edged past the kicker unit to reach Sir Svaltus.

“I’m
not hit,” the knight looked up, surprised.

“You
weren’t shooting, there at the last, and you were crouched over,” Drake had to
shout to be heard over Dane ranting about a grenade. “I thought you had been
wounded.”

“An
interesting specimen,” Sir Svaltus held up the glossy multi-colored beetle he
had found on one of the statues. “Bears a striking resemblance, shape-wise, to
the Huntington Red Swarmer.”

***

Well,
there’s the warning tone, Mum, so I shall sign off. They will be trooping in
with muddy boots and sacks of rusty old junk, leaving bits of plants all about
as they talk very loudly and tell each other about what they just did.

I
will write again soon.

Love from your Maya

Buffalo Riders is on sale!

Although my book sales picked up dramatically with the arrival of April, I am going to be running sales on the more pricey volumes ($2.99) in the hopes of expanding my readership.

My writing continues apace, with Scared but Willing standing at 77,000 words of rough draft.

Gamer Story XXXIII (Tribe 8)

I’ve always had a web site devoted to my gaming campaign to help my players keep track of events. In the early days of the 2000s I wrote short stories based on the PCs and posted them on the site for my player’s amusement, but after the first couple campaigns the practice died off as novels consumed my writing time. This campaign was set in the Tribe 8 setting.

“Damn, it’s cold,” Elean clapped his mitten-encased
hands together. “There better be cough medicine in this cache, is all I’m going
to say.”

“A Letter From Prague is confident,” the skinny,
almost –starved youth observed in a detached voice.

“He would have to use the third person,” the
Entertainer observed to Bubba. “One day we’re gonna run into a normal, sane
person, and it will be unnerving. We won’t cope.”

The Tinker shifted his Sharps’ sling so the heavy
rifle rode more comfortably. “I’m thinking of sort of a parka with a heating
element in it, say oil-based, with thin copper tubes both for heating and to
vent the exhaust.”

Crunching footsteps brought Elean around in a single graceful spin, flicking off his mitten to get his gloved hand on the trigger of his rifle. “Damnit, Gordon, quit walking up on me like that!”

“Bite me,” the husky Jacker made a short, sharp hand
gesture. “Where’s Roland and Omni? I’m freezing.”

The three Fallen and A Letter From Prague were
crouched in a stand of saplings on the snow-covered west slope of the ridge
running north of New Hom. The low-hanging clouds overhead were the color of old
lead, and the wind from the north-northwest carried a chill that sliced sharper
than any knife. The temperature was well below freezing, and the short winter
day was past half spent.

The drumming of horse hooves on thick snow and
frozen ground preceded the appearance of Roland as he cantered up, the
hunchbacked Omnimpotent clinging miserably to the back of the gunman’s saddle,
his red jacket and gold braid concealed under a fur parka.

“There’s a cave, just like he said,” Roland gestured
back the way he had come, accidentally elbowing Omni in the forehead as he did
so. “Sorry, dude.”

“S’all right, boss,” the hunchback shrugged amiably.

“Any sign of the bear?” Bubba unslung his Sharps.

“Bunch of tracks. Wish we had Kid Twist along.”

“Or a Healer. Especially a Healer,” Gordon observed.
“A Dreamer wouldn’t hurt, either.”

“We’re all that’s available,” Roland shrugged. “Quit
being a eunuch. Anyway, since I’m in charge…”

“You’re not in charge,” Elean interrupted.

“I am! Nalek, Rith, and Bane are off towards Magog,
so I’m in charge.”

“I’m senior,” Bubba observed mildly.

“You’re an ass,” Roland snapped, ripping off his
mitten to draw a Colt New Army as the Tinker pulled the massive wrench from his
back. Elean and Gordon immediately leveled their rifles at Roland. Omni,
struggling to get his rifle off his back, slid from his perch and crashed
heavily onto the slow-covered ground. 

“I’m in charge!” Roland insisted, swinging the
revolver’s muzzle back and forth across the trio.

“Are not!” Gordon snapped. “You’re insane.”

“That’s not a disqualifier!”

“Everybody shut up,” Bubba announced, stowing his
wrench. “Lets go kill the bear. Maybe it’ll kill Roland first and save us the
trouble. Can we bait it?”

“Yeah,” the gunfighter nodded as he spun the
revolver before holstering it. “Same as before. Piece of cake.”

“I brought some cake,” Omni reminded him. “You want
some, boss? Vanilla pound, pretty good.”

“Not now,” Roland kicked a booted foot free of the
stirrup and leaned over to offer his hand. “Climb back up.”

“You coulda taken ‘em, boss,” the hunchback observed as they rode a short ways ahead of the others, who followed on foot. “No way they could have beaten the greatest gunfighter in the world.”

***

The cave was a ragged hole in the slope, possibly a
bit of ruins of The World Before. Roland tied off his horse a safe distance
away and helped Omni down. “Leave your rifle, and bring the bait,” he
instructed the hunchback.

Bubba was driving three sticks into the ground to
form a crude tripod upon which he rested the heavy barrel of his rifle. Elean
was standing beside him, mittens off, rotating the cylinder of his rifle to
insure that the cold hadn’t fixed the action in place. Gordon darted across the
area in front of the opening and took up a position which allowed him to fire
at anything emerging from the cave without endangering Bubba or Elean. A Letter
From Prague stayed near Roland’s horse.

“OK, send the freak out,” Elean called.

“Asshole,” Roland muttered. “OK, come on, Omni. I’ll cover you.” Tucking his mittens under his belt, he tightened the fit of his gun-gloves and drew his Colt, shortening his stride the match Omni’s waddling pace.

The hunchback, Roland just behind him, took up a
position directly in front of the cave mouth, about twenty feet back. Opening
the sack he was carrying, Omni brought out a freshly-cut ham securely lashed to
a length of rope and began to twirl the meat preparatory to heaving it into the
cave.

With a deafening roar, a massive sculler bear
exploded out of a ticket behind and to the left of Roland’s position, the weak
winter sunlight turning the green of its intestines bulging against its
hairless and moldering skin into the color of fresh bruises.

The gunfighter spun and fired, putting two conical
bullets into the beast’s face as it raced across the intervening ground, but
the creature’s heavy bone structure absorbed much of the impact. The near
passage of Bubba’s heavy .45-70 bullet and its impact into the bear’s neck
occurred (to Roland) simultaneously with his own shots, followed closely by
Gordon and Elean firing twice each into the creature’s side, the Entertainer
having had to race towards the cave to get a clear angle.

The hail of gunfire slowed the creature a half step,
but as Roland was thumbing back the hammer for a third shot, he saw the
hairless monstrosity leading with a paw tipped with great curving claws, the
deadly swipe coming in low and fast, aimed at ripping his legs from beneath
him.

A blurred form in fur was there and gone as blood
splashed the gunfighter’s face, but the death-stroke that should have laid open
both thighs did not come. Firing faster than he ever had before, Roland put his
four remaining rounds into the bear as Gordon and Elean fired and Bubba hastily
reloaded.

The bear crashed into the snow, its life draining
from a severed jugular and numerous other wounds. Staggering back, Roland drew
his converted Dragoon and shakily wiped the blood from his face, freezing in
mid-gesture when he saw Omni, his head nearly severed by the blow he had
blocked, crumpled on the ground to his right.

“He took the hit,” the gunfighter mumbled. “He saved
my life.”

“And lost his,” Gordon observed, as he peeled the
bloody hood back, bandages ready. The hunchback’s neck was snapped and his head
was nearly severed. “Hard to say what killed him first: spine damage, bleeding,
or shock. He’s hamburger between the chin and chest.”

“BASTARD!” Roland squeezed off two shots into the dying bear’s body. “That was my friend!”

***

“You know, if that goof-ball raises his prices, we
might as well just shoot him and take the medicine,” Elean observed to Gordon
as Roland carefully wrapped Omni’s body and strapped it to his saddle; the
Entertainer pointed with his chin towards A Letter From Prague, who was
crawling out of the cave. “Might do it anyway. Who would know?”

“Everyone, if Roland saw it,” Gordon shook his head. “Look; he’s got a case of the bottles. Maybe this will work out after all.”

Update 4APR19

Well, I am fast running out of the gamer stories I wrote long ago; after the first couple campaigns I started focusing all my creative talents, such as they are, on novels. So my blogging will likely drift back to my previous poor levels. Frankly, I really don’t have a good grasp on the concept of blogging. I think of things, and then say “Who in the world would take the time to read that?”

As to current projects, I have 75,000 words of rough draft on a new LitRPG novel with the title Scared, but willing. I hope to get it published this month, but that may be over-optimistic given it isn’t complete yet. Beyond that, I hope to publish a second novel in 2019, and get a start on a third so that 2020 will see three, but that is just hopeful speculation.

I hope SBW will jump-start my sales, which have been flat lately, except for the Dream trilogy, which consistently sells. I am grateful that there is still interest in my work, and I will continue to write no matter what. SBW will be my 19th published novel, and hopefully nowhere near my last.

Anyhow, never fear: the wee hours each night find me pecking away at the keyboard with a large fat ginger tom watching me through the window and very eclectic playlists rolling through my cheap Logitech computer speakers (turned low, because my wife is asleep).