K.M. Carroll's Blog

Book review: The Shattered Ones by Brigette Cromey

First off, here’s the book and its summary:

The Shattered Ones: Gabriel just wants to do his job and be left alone. The alien oppressors of his childhood may be gone, but their legacy of unearthly technology, nightmarish monsters, and ordinary people developing Shattered powers still lingers. With the violent past threatening to become a bloody present, Gabriel joins forces with the other members of his base–men and women of the Earth Defense Force who successfully pushed the xenos back into space eight years ago.

Seven veterans. One rookie. None of them ever had the families they dreamed of, but battle forges a bond stronger than blood. When the unthinkable happens, Gabriel must trust his newfound family, find his own courage, and embrace the truth he’s always known–that even the worst places and most broken people deserve someone who’s willing to fight for them.

My review:

Can I start off with a screech about how good this book was? Because this was a really good book.

A friend read this book and recommended it to me, saying how the main character Gabriel is very similar to my character Jayesh from After Atlantis. You know the type: the inexperienced kid, lonely, insecure, really wants to belong but doesn’t know how? Yeah, I’m a sucker for that kind of character. Also, it’s the aftermath of an alien invasion? It’s post apoc instead of dystopian? And also found family? Shut up and take my money.

It starts out as a military outpost in the desert outside of Tucson. The aliens are gone, but a gang called the Blood Angels has moved in and is using alien tech against the military and civilians. Gabriel is dispatch, stares at screens all day, but is always writing down the stories from the Shattered he’s working with. To him they’re superheroes, the super powered people who drove off the aliens. He’s also very good at what he does, and everyone in the base likes him, although he doesn’t know it. But he so, so badly wants to belong.

I wanted to hug him and wrap him in a soft blanket, except I know what happens to these kinds of characters and I was here for it.

I can’t really say what happens to Gabriel without substantial spoilers, but it’s exciting and fun, and there is substantial angst while fighting alien monsters, blowing up crap, and dealing with desert monsoon storms. It’s like all my sweet spots all in one book.

Honestly, the author was kinder to Gabriel than I would have been. He didn’t suffer nearly as much as I expected, and it has a good ending, although left open for more books. There’s some loose ends that need further books to explore (like all those stories he’s writing down at the end).

But overall, this is a fun book with a group of superpowered characters working together and becoming friends, like the best kind of supernatural TV show. It’s also inspired by XCOM 2, and I went OH, because I knew it was based on SOMEthing. I know a fanfic when I smell it because it has so much love poured into the characters. Highly recommend, will watch this author with great interest.

Check it out on Amazon. I am too lazy to turn this into an affiliate link.

The artificial Kindle Unlimited Aristocracy

In 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle ereader and blew up the face of book publishing. Suddenly anybody could publish a book in electronic format, and it was easy to find and read. Books ranged from 99 cents to $2.99, because people liked to read a lot of books and they liked them cheap. The next ten or so years were a gold rush of people shoveling out whatever weird stories were on their hard drives and making bank. Hugh Howey did very well with Wool, which is now a TV series called Silo, just as an example.

In July of 2014, Amazon rolled out a service called Kindle Unlimited.

For just 7.99 a month, readers could read as many books as they could cram into their eyeballs. Authors were heavily encouraged to enroll, promised money per page read and additional bonuses for top earners. Authors signed up in droves. Readers signed up in droves. The average income from the subscribers was parceled out to authors through something called the Kindle Unlimited Pool.

This fluctuated every month. Authors won big or lost big, depending on the payout of the pool that month.

It was addictive. It was fun. You could get rich or go broke paying for advertising. But it came with a big fat catch:

Your books had to be published exclusively on Amazon to enroll in Kindle Unlimited.

Other online bookstores popped up, of course. Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google, Kobo, everybody had a competing ereading device and their own stores. But their sales were lower than the Amazon juggernaut, where you could buy a book, a pack of diapers, new jeans, and your kid’s birthday present all at once, with free shipping. Amazon just had more customers, period. That was where the money was.

And then, slowly, ever so slowly, Amazon began to decline. Their corporate overlords got greedy and began to increase the charges to merchants. The secondary market of used items began to get flooded with third-world countries offering fake and inferior items. The algorithms stopped working, or got gamed, and had to be reworked. They began pushing advertising to their merchants, who bought into it whole-hog. Now listings are flooded with Sponsored Items that may or may not have anything to do with the item searched for.

Kindle Unlimited was no exception. Scammers would scrape whole sections of Wikipedia, slam it into a “book”, then hire people to click and click and click on every page of these fake books to skyrocket their rankings. Then, each month, they would clean up the bonuses awarded to the top earners. This was well-known and talked about on kboards.com every month. But Amazon didn’t care, aside from maybe banning an account now and then. Now we have AI-generated books, so I imagine it’s even worse.

But Kindle Unlimited had another effect on the ebook market. Because, you see, all these authors and gurus pass around advice like narcotics. None of it is beneficial to customers, only authors. “Pad out your book,” they advise. “Have a book that is only 100 pages and then stick three or four chapters of other books in the back matter. If people page through them rapidly, that still counts as clicks!”

More advice: “Write a series of five books as fast as you can and release them as fast as you can. They don’t have to be good, you just have to put them in a hot genre and give it a good cover. People skim through it and you make money!”

And then comes my very favorite:

“Set book one to .99 or 2.99. Make sure it ends on a cliffhanger. Then price the other books in series at 5.99 and up. BUT … if the book is in Kindle Unlimited, the readers don’t have to pay that price tag at all, you just get the page clicks!”

What quickly happened was the rise of the Kindle Unlimited aristocracy. A huge corner of the market can’t afford to buy an ebook at 5.99 or 8.99 or 12.99. They’d rather just buy a paperback at that price. And since ebooks are primarily used to discover books and authors (Amazon makes it clear that buying an ebook is buying a LICENSE to that ebook, and they can take it away from you whenever they want), what you wind up buying is nothing. 6.99 is a lot of money to spend on nothing.

This forces the heavy readers into Kindle Unlimited. They can’t afford 50+ books a month at 5.99 a book. But they can afford 7.99 a month (11.99 in 2025 dollars).

So now you have readers who are the Haves and the Have Nots. Sometimes a person just wants to try out a series, or pick up a cool story that catches their eye. But it’s 6 or 7 or 8 bucks, and they also have bills to pay. 3 bucks used to be considered expensive for an ebook. But prices are creeping upward, because the authors are just as bloodthirsty as their Amazon masters. None of it is customer-serving. And the higher the prices get on the nothing-ebooks, the more people are forced into subscription services … or reduced to browsing the libraries. But because so many books are exclusive to Amazon, only a fraction of authors bother publishing on all bookstores, including libraries.

Very few authors ever think about their readers, except as paypigs who will cough up to read the next installment of My Billionaire Alien Dragon Prince. And that’s an unhealthy business mindset. Where will it end? I don’t know, but the decline will continue until the next train comes down the tracks. Then KU and the authors who built their careers on it will collapse.

Blade and Staff for Hire: Book Birthday!

Technically Blade and Staff’s book birthday was January 23rd, 2023, so I missed it by a few weeks. So happy belated birthday, book!

Bayan Avanar is a warrior of whom the bards sing. He travels the lands, seeking his promised bride and slaying monsters with a fiery spellblade.

After two years of searching, Bayan arrives in sunny Leon and at last finds clues pointing to the girl he has only seen in visions. Accompanied by a young half-elf healer Charles Whitmore, who joins him in his quest for a wife, Bayan must confront the monsters in his path if he is to rescue the girl of his dreams.

Kesara Francesa has dreamed of her dark warrior for months and is terrified that he brings her death. But this dark warrior is her only hope, for her time is running out: on Midsummer’s Night she is to be sacrificed to raise an ancient god. Only Bayan Avanar, legendary warrior, can save her now.

I had been playing a lot of MMOs at the time, and I kept having this story in my head: a story of a warrior and his healer buddy in search of the warrior’s future bride. It’s very much a buddy-story, and also a bit of a Cinderella story on Kesara’s part. I wanted my warrior to be the kind of quiet, power-under-restraint sort of guy who is only working as a sellsword to pay the bills. But having a giant spellblade doesn’t hurt, either! Also, I wanted to set it in Fantasy Spain, because I’ve read zero fantasy set there, and Medieval Spain was a crazy place politically. You know Aragon held an election to decide their next king, and picked Ferdinand??

I was going to turn the book into a graphic novel, but I realized that my art skills weren’t quite up to the style this story demanded. You can see some of the pages here:

Anyway you get the idea. Bayan is the brooding dark warrior and Charles is the ray of sunshine. It’s super fun and there’s lots more monster slaying in store. I even had a cover for the next set of chapters.

Anyway, I love these characters and this book. A friend read it and said, “There was no third act misunderstanding! It was so refreshing!” My bros don’t split up, the girl comes in early on for an extremely sweet romance, and it’s just fun and hopefully avoids the pitfalls of modern storytelling. I wrote what I wanted to read, man. I also really want to do more with this graphic novel once I finish my current project.

Happy book birthday, Bayan, Charles, and Kesara! I promise that I have two more stories with you waiting in the wings, and they’re great reads.

Buy the book on Amazon or on other retailers! It’s also on Hoopla if you’d like to grab it from the library!

The extremely competent protagonist

I’ve been thinking about the rule of competent protagonists.

You can have an absolutely unlikeable protagonist, but as long as they’re extremely competent at something, you’ll read and even enjoy them. See: Sherlock Holmes and House. It’s fun to see this antisocial grouch tackle a problem nobody else can solve and figure it out. It’s clever and it teases your brain. You want to figure stuff out like that, too.

It’s even better if the protagonist IS likeable, like Deku from My Hero Academia. His extremely competent strategist brain combined with his down to earth demeanor really makes you root for him. Same for the hero of the Martian by Andy Weir. Sure, he’s a scared dude stranded on Mars. But he’s a COMPETENT scared dude. He figures out the science of food, oxygen, shelter, and ultimately, have to get off Mars. Probably my favorite part in the book is when the arm gets ripped off his suit, and he keeps a clear enough head to seal the breach with tape and get a fresh suit.

The rule of competent protagonists is what every Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, other technical mens writers like that all have in common. Their characters are pretty flat, but that competence SHINES when the nanites attack or the dinosaurs get loose or the silver apes are crushing people’s brains with paddles or the nuclear submarine disappears.

The hero of Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia might be an accountant working a desk job, but he also works out and knows a lot about weapons, so when his boss turns into a werewolf and tries to kill him, the hero throws him out the window of a skyscraper and gets hired by MHI the next day.

I read an article somewhere that stated that extreme competence is the ultimate male fantasy. The idea that you, with your weird collection of skills, might one day be the only one capable of fending off an alien invasion. Like in Ender’s Game where Ender is the only one who can think far enough outside the box to defeat the aliens for good. And you know? I don’t think it’s just a male fantasy. I know plenty of women who wish that their collection of skills would save the day someday (and win them a handsome man in the process).

The trouble arises when you have a writer who botches this.

The entire Young Adult genre is a parody of this. You have a girl who ostensibly has some crazy skill, or magic, or political position. She should be competent. But instead of feats of cool-headed competence, what we get is an air-headed cupcake who just has everything handed to her because she’s the protagonist. The Voice of Power series is particularly guilty of this. It’s like the author kind of knows that the heroine needs to be competent, but then lets her win by virtue of girl-bossing it instead. (Also the heroine is as dumb as a box of rocks, so you never feel like she earned any of the stuff she does.)

The flipside is when you have a character who is extremely competent in TOO MANY areas. I read a book where the heroine was a super skilled mage, a super skilled marksman, a super skilled shapeshifter, and also a dragon. It was too many things. Pick one of those skills to start with, and have her earn the rest over the course of the book. When she starts with all the skills, she comes off as a Mary Sue, and it ruins the conflict in the story. “Another world-ending threat? I’m sure the heroine will pull a new skill out of her butt to solve it. Oh, look, she just did.”

In Final Fantasy 14, the protagonist of the latest expansion, Dawntrail, is very guilty of Mary Suedom. I don’t know if they fired their writers or what, but in every other expansion, the new characters were extremely competent in at least one thing. Aymeric is a good leader. Estinien is an expert at killing dragons. Lyse is extremely well connected and knows everybody in the Ala Mhigan resistance, plus she’s a great fighter. Alisaie is socially awkward but a fantastic sword fighter, while her brother is great at politics and social situations but extremely weak when it comes to fighting (comparitively). The Crystal Exarch is a complete dweeb but he’s insanely good with his own brand of magic and uses it to protect a whole city over and over.

Meanwhile, the new character in the new expansion isn’t competent at anything. She’s the YA girlboss who is a princess who somehow wasn’t educated in anything about her own country. She gets seasick (and airsick and carsick) despite being a toughened warrior. She succeeds at everything OFF-SCREEN while your character, the hero of the story, waits around the campfire for her to come back. (There is a campfire scene on average every 1-2 hours of playtime.) Everything is handed to her, she earns nothing, and she is competent at nothing except … talking to people? And even then she’s still dumb as a box of rocks. AND YET she defeats the final boss FOR YOU, stealing your moment of glory, with her powers of … talking to people. You know it’s bad when you can scroll Tumblr for hours and see more fanart of every other supporting character but not her.

In general, people like to see competence. They like to see a smart hero who has a weird skill that can save the day. In Dragon Mage by M.L. Spencer, the hero is autistic and his only skill/interest is tying knots. He collects different kinds of knots. He wants to be a sailor so he can tie knots all day. Then it turns out that he’s this incredibly rare mage, and tying knots is how his magic works, because he’s literally messing with the weave of reality. So you have this hero who is autistic, with all the drawbacks of that, but he has this shining, amazing ability to work magic through his knowledge of knots. It’s really fun to read.

I’m over here mulling over a story I want to write, thinking of how to build a hero with that one weird skill and a host of other, more normal traits. It’s kind of reassuring that even if I screw up and make him kind of unlikeable, that one skill of extreme competence will carry him through.

Is this something you think about when you’re creating characters? Do you give them that one skill to be massively competent in? Tell me about your characters/stories/books!

Art process: Comic page

I’ve been streamlining and perfecting my comic art process so I can make a couple of pages a week for After Atlantis: Bloodbound, and not just spend all week on a single page. (I mean, some pages I kind of have to, but not all of them.)

Anyway, some other comic artists expressed interest in learning my secrets, so here is a post to divulge them as clearly as possible.

I’m using Clip Studio Paint, but Photoshop and other programs have these same basic tools. All you need is something that can clip layers to other layers, and something that can do basic layer settings like Multiply or Screen/Add/Add Glow.

First off, the pencils.

Messy and guideline-heavy, but you get the idea.

Now basic inks, without shading:

The sketch has been set to light blue underneath the inks layer. I’m using the Vector Layer in Clip Studio Paint, because it lets me use the Vector Eraser to quickly snip off little overlapping line ends and stuff like that. I can also easily thicken or thin lines, or connect ends.

Once I’m satisfied with the basic lineart, I do the shading layer.

Black shadows under the chins come first, then the dark parts of Jayesh’s hair. I read a tip from a comic artist to always just use black for any character with dark hair, because it saves so much time. Color goes in the highlight areas. I tried it and never looked back. Other black things are the computer screen and shadows under the arms. I have a nice set of digital pen brushes that are kind of grungy and jittery and look like hand-drawn ink lines on paper. Clip has vast amounts of these in the Assets section on the launcher, and they’re free. Just install a bunch and try them out.

Next is color flats:

I turn off the shading layer and just use the clean lineart vector layer to select and large areas. I use the magic lasso tool to select an area, then use Expand Selection by 1 pixel to get the color under the lines. Then Clip has a nice button right on the Selection menu to fill just that selection. I mash that button like it’s going out of style. The color fill goes on another layer called Color Flats. You can’t actually flood fill on a vector layer and I’m so thankful for that.

See the paintbucket third from the right? It’s grayed out here because it can’t flood fill on a vector layer, but I just jump down to my raster color layer and go like the wind. Every single button on here lets you do cool things with selections, and this menu only pops up when you actually make a selection. It’s neat!

Jayesh’s outfit is a bit more complex in this page. I imported a graphic for his shirt, clipped that layer to the color flats layer, erased the bits that overlapped areas I didn’t want, then merged the layer into the color layer so I could put shading on it. Not all characters will need this much detail, but sometimes you just need it.

Next comes the shading. I draw the shaded areas with the lasso tool and fill them in with Clip’s Fill Selection button. I’m putting this onto a Multiply layer that is clipped to the Color Flats layer. That way I can draw all over the place outside the color layer, and nothing shows up but what is on the color layer.

The layers with the red bar beside them are clipped to the layer below. Because I am lazy, shadows are “sh” and highlights are “hl”.

I’m using a light grayed-out purple for the shadows because I’ve found that it looks nice both on skin tones and cooler colors like blue. This is what it looks like with Multiply turned off.

After I’m satisfied with the shading, I do a Highlights layer. This is another layer clipped to the Color Flats layer, but this one is set to Add Glow. You can get a similar effect with Screen or any of the other additive layer settings.

I’m using a watercolor brush for the highlights on this page because the heroes are indoors and I wanted very light, transparent highlights. For harsher lighting, I’ll just use an outright pen tool.

Now it’s time for the background flats.

The previous page had a warm background tone, because the characters were happy. Here the characters get a huge block of “Oh Crap” dropped on them, so the background changes to a more somber blue. Thanks, Pixar, for explaining that trick!

I now had to spend a layer just to make the one HeroTube panel in the top right look good. It had to have its own background and painting, so I worked on that.

Next comes some basic shading in the background to emphasize the characters/speech bubbles and give an impression of the inside of the room without actually drawing it. I’d rather not waste time drawing detailed backgrounds when they’re absolutely not important to the plot. These were shaded with a vertical flat watercolor brush.

Next comes the glowing computer screens and the glows on the fire in the HeroTube video thumbnails.

This is done by tossing a layer into the very top of the layers, setting it to Add Glow, and going to town with an airbrush. I know there’s more elegant ways to do this, but this way is fast, dirty, and gets the job done inside of 2 minutes.

Next comes the text:

I actually do the speech bubbles way back in the lineart stage, just so I know the layout and what parts of the art/background might be covered up by them. I turn the text on and off as I work to make sure it looks good. Notice how the background shading is often darker behind the speech bubbles for greater contrast. Also, Andrew Loomis says to always put the areas of greatest contrast behind your character’s heads, so I try to do that, too.

And there you go! The whole page done in just a few hours!

Page from this tutorial

Beginning of the comic if you want to read the whole thing

Things I made for you in 2024 and what’s coming next

It’s my favorite time of year: time to recap the old year’s doings and look forward to the new year!

My resolutions for 2023 were to publish Tyrona, final After Atlantis book, as well as Heart and Crown. Well, I did get Tyrona published! I also published my first scifi, In a Mirror, Darkly, and it did pretty well.

Heart and Crown I didn’t know what to do with, so I’m publishing it as a serial on Substack. You can read the first 11 or so chapters here, which is as far as I think it’s gone so far. Currently having to stop and write a new chapter, which I’ve been putting off for about two years.

Also on Substack is a shorter story called Fairytale Wanderer: The Golden Bird. It’s about this displaced healer character wandering the little kingdoms of the Germanic tribes round about the decline of Rome, because that seems to be about when all these fairytales happened. A fairy has cursed him to wander and help other people find their happy endings before he can find his own. I want to write five fairytales and bundle them into a book, and I’m focusing on lesser-known ones that I love dearly. Such as the Golden Bird. Not sure when these will be finished, they’re kind of a comfort project.

I also drew 55 pages of my After Atlantis: Bloodbound comic, which has me pretty excited. You can read it here as I’m posting it! It’s like a superhero universe that overlaps a fantasy universe, as a guy from our world gets enmeshed in this fantasy world and each world affects the other.

Looking ahead to 2025:

I have a baby due in April, which means my plans for any creative projects for the rest of the year are pretty much shot.

Tentatively, I’d like to finish posting Heart and Crown and get that edited for publishing.

I’d like to write a few more fairytales for Fairytale Wanderer and get that out to beta readers.

I’d like to finish the sequel to In a Mirror Darkly, which I’m tentatively calling These Earthen Vessels. I only have the last 3rd left to write, but it’s such intense action I’m going to have to really focus on it.

I’d also like to finish the Bloodbound comic, but I have no illusions about what a baby would do to my art tablet, ha ha.

Anyway, hoping to have more cool stuff for you to enjoy in the coming year, and I’ve got some projects going on that you can enjoy right now! The comic and the substack stuff are all free, because I’m developing a pathological hatred of paywalls. If you want to support me, buy the books when they come out.

How to build a fanbase

Today I was checking my messages on Deviantart, and I was happy to see that someone had read through my whole Bloodbound comic and left lots of comments. I was mentally checking my progress in building a fanbase for it, and it dawned on me that most people don’t know how to do this. I see authors and other creators all the time vainly seeking “engagement” or whatever the buzzword is now.

I’ve built fanbases for my work three separate times. These exact techniques may not work for you, but I think the principles stay the same, so hopefully this is useful.

The first one I built was when I became a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog. I started writing fanfiction and drawing art of my characters. Back then, in the early 2000s, to get in touch with fans, you built a fan site and joined web rings of like-minded fans. So that’s what I did. I wrote and wrote fanfics, and drew and drew art. On my 10th fanfic, I started getting friendly emails and AOL Instant Messenger texts from people who had enjoyed my work.

Number 10 is an important number. Don’t forget it.

My site grew into a fairly large fansite, but I burned out and closed it all down. As it turns out, I wasn’t cut out for administrating what amounted to a whole social network by myself. But I still liked Sonic, so I posted my work on sites like fanfiction dot net and deviantart. People congregated there, and it was fun to read other stories and talk to other artists or writers. To this day, I still have fans of that body of work. I hear from them periodically or see them leave favorites on my artwork or stories.

Being able to draw scenes from your stories is a big selling point.

Well, time rolled on, and Sonic’s shine wore off a bit. My husband got me into the videogame Destiny and Destiny 2. I didn’t know where to find the fandom, so I poked around on pinterest and finally landed on Tumblr. Destiny 2 was big on Tumblr. So I joined there and started posting stories and art.

Again, I gained zero traction in the Destiny fanfiction fandom until I had posted 10 fanfics. On number 10, I started getting comments and likes. I don’t know why 10 is a magic number, but it is. All I did was the same things I did with Sonic, which amounted to:

I have cool art. Look at it!

I have cool stories. Here are excerpts! Read them for free! It’s easy!

Here is art of stuff from my stories! Look at them! Click over and read the story!

I love my characters. Here’s what they look like! Here’s a few emotional drabbles with them! Now you can love them, too!

Eventually I started creating my own original work, and again I started over with 0 fans. I tried following the “experts” and their advice to join all social media. Join the screaming mob until you feel like butter scraped across too much bread! Trust us, we’re the experts!

Spoilers, social media is the hardest place to build a fanbase. The systems are designed to bury everything you post. Feeding the algorithm has become a meme, and it’s just as soul-sucking as it sounds.

So I quit most social media and went back to places I knew how to use, like deviantart and my blog. My work has exactly 1 fan, and that’s me. So I’m going to do the same thing with my own stories that I did with fanfics years ago. I’m going to write the stories and draw the characters. I’m going to publish the books everywhere, and make sure that everything is on the library systems like Hoopla, so people can read them for free. The art is free. I’m going to adapt books into comics and give out the comics for free. (Eventually they’ll go into a paperback, once the books are finished!)

After Atlantis is finished at 10 books. (Notice that number 10 has cropped up again.) I wanted to promote it, but again, book promotion is kind of like screaming into the void. There’s a lot of books out there, lots of screaming authors hawking their stories. Plenty of advertisers willing to take your money and give very little in return. So that’s why I started turning one into a graphic novel. You want eyeballs on the internet? Use pictures. I know not everybody can draw their own graphic novel, but by golly, you can commission artwork of your characters. There’s a lot you can do to capture eyeballs.

And after almost 3 years, it’s working. On deviantart I’m attracting followers and readers. On Comicfury my level of daily hits is flirting with triple digits. I’m trying out Substack and gradually gaining some traction there. I’ve had people tell me that the comic intrigued them so much that they ran out and bought the book to find out what happens next. Sometimes I do some promotion on Xtwitter but the void-screaming effect kicks in over there and I don’t get much response. It’s nice to try every so often, but it’s not a good place for creators. I recommend Tumblr and Pinterest before any other social media network. Build a blog and write fan-things about your work on there. Link back to it from other online places.

I see a lot of people who write a book or draw art, and then bury it. “Oh, I wrote a few books,” they’ll tell you, then change the subject. When pressed, they only talk about all the reasons why you shouldn’t read it. “Well, it has triggering content,” they’ll say. “My hero is a bad person at first and assassinates his evil uncle, then has to go on the run from the fairies. Oh and the fairies suck out people’s life force really graphically. You wouldn’t like it.”

And I’m over here like, “Why don’t you tell me what you DO like about it and not what you DON’T?” It’s like the opposite of how you SHOULD talk about your book. You are the first fan of your work! Act like it! Don’t be ashamed!

An introduction to Heart and Crown

Heart and Crown is a book I wrote on a dare.

A friend and I had come into contact with a small press, and we liked the editor. We dared each other to write a book and get it published with this press. So I wrote this sprawling epic fantasy romance scifi … thing. My friend is still working on hers. Then I sat and read a bunch of books published through this press, and all of them were far more steamy than I’m comfortable with. (For one thing, it’s in your contract that you promote everything the press releases!) Also, Heart and Crown isn’t steamy. It’s more occupied with slaying demons. So … I decided not to submit it.

So now I have this book that I don’t know what to do with. It’s a lovely standalone, it bashes genres together like nobody’s business, and the characters are near and dear to my heart. It needs a few extra scenes toward the end, but I haven’t had much motivation to write them.

Then I got on Substack and went … you know, I could publish it here as a serial! So that’s what I’m going to do.

A couple of notes about Heart and Crown:

The chakra-based magic system came from my research into both chakras and chiropractic. In fact, there’s a lot of crossover between the two. The various chakra points correspond to nerve points in the spine to an eerily accurate degree. It made me wonder if the whole chakra thing wasn’t actually ancient chiropractic knowledge that passed into mysticism when the original medical knowledge was lost. I think a guru in the chakrams could converse quite intelligently with a chiropractor, though I think they would greatly annoy each other.

So, in Heart and Crown, the kind of magic you can do depends on how good you are at drawing magic up through your spine and casting it through the various chakras. The higher you can get it, the stronger the magic and the better you can control it. However, you can only work magic sitting down … unless you have the mechanical mage wings wired into your spine.

Second note:

The rest of the magic system came from musing on Jupiter’s magnetic field. I already messed with it in In a Mirror, Darkly, but I couldn’t leave it alone. No human has ever been outside of Earth’s magnetic field, which encompasses the moon. Jupiter’s magnetic field is so strong that it destroys probes we send to orbit it, unless we give them huge amounts of shielding. What would happen to a human being sent into that field? Humans have magnetite in our brains, the same as animals and migratory birds. They don’t know exactly what it does. Probably, spending any time in Jupiter’s field would send humans insane, because that’s always what seems to happen.

But what if it gave humans superpowers instead? Especially if a few generations were born in the field? Or maybe humans could wield the field like magic, until it just became known as magic?

So, combine this idea about a planet emitting a magical magnetic field that humans control via their chakras, and you have Heart and Crown. It actually refers directly to what chakras the characters learn to control, even though it SOUNDS like a romance. Hee hee! I love hiding the worldbuilding in plain sight.

Anyway, the chapters will be going up weekly on Substack if you’d like to take a look. Once it’s all posted and finished and polished, I’ll publish it as a proper book.

Constraints in writing (and why they’re a good thing)

Have you ever wondered why the most popular, the most influential books and movies, are the ones written for children? Children’s classics have endured past adult classics, which are mostly only kept alive by the universities. Children’s classics (A Little Princess, Little Britches, Swiss Family Robinson, Lassie, etc. etc.) are passed on by word of mouth by people who loved them as children.

Children’s books are written inside of constraints. They might talk about topics of interest to adults, but always it must be in a way appropriate for children. Lately in publishing, publishers have grown lax with the constraints, producing books not only inappropriate for children, but inappropriate for anyone. (I was recently reading a thread of a dismayed mother who wanted some YA mysteries for a teen book club, and couldn’t find any that didn’t have huge content problems. YA is now just as raunchy as any adult romance bodice-ripper. Only it’s underage!)

Look how happy this tomato plant is inside its constraints.

Recently another blogger summed it up beautifully. The eloquent Man of the Atom wrote a long blog series on the history of American comics. Marvel, DC, where they came from, how they peaked, and how they declined. It all came down to them refusing to write within any kind of constraints, and then putting raw filth within the reach of children. Today you see the same lack of constraints in the comic industry, to the point where comic books must be treated like pr0n and kept far, far away from children.

In his final blog post, Man of the Atom had this summary (emphasis mine):

Some general thoughts on constraints:

Left unchecked, Man’s imagination and creativity falls to the lowest common level—violence, blasphemy, pornography, perverse thrill, and the obscene in general. Call this the Lowest Energy State of Creativity, or LESC, relying on base emotions and primal drives of self-satisfaction over all else.I like this diagram — you can call LESC “thinking with your crotch.”It can become similar to an addiction, for both creator and consumer, in that the dosage has to ever increase to deliver the previous highs.This continued focus on the self-satisfying base nature thrills can become a prison for the creator with what might become a nigh-inescapable gravity well of self-imposed darkness.On top of that, it is repetitive. The base nature of Man offers very little in the way of creative elbow room, and what little room there is filled up fast with very boring stuff.This is part of the darkness that consumes creativity. See this excellent series by Nick Enlowe for background on darkness that consumes creativity.2You are openly sharing more about yourself—the dark side of yourself—than you might think when you create from the LESC.Ask yourself why you really want to share this story or art that parades things from the self-serving portions of your soul, even with yourself.If you later recognize LESC work as a mistake, it will be hard to shake that stigma of having created it in the first place.Man is a problem solver, and very few problems come without constraints. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be problems.Limited physical resources and limited time are always drivers for Man to find better solutions.Creativity is different only in that the yawning pit of the Lowest Energy State is always there, always wanting to devour your creativity in repetitive primal desires.Your creativity is safer in the higher orbitals, striving for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, farther away from the lower energy states.Obscenity is not protected speech. Not even in the Good Ol’ US of A.Obscenity adds nothing of value to the social conversation, which is why we have free speech/expression, but obscenity has no protections.Obscenity only serves to excite the base natures of Man, and is thus valueless. The descent towards LESC funnels you toward obscenity.You cut yourself off from society and its language when you make obscenity your lingua franca. This can begin and end in your focus turning ever closer toward Evil, rather than maintaining a focus on the Good.

Source

I’ve watched countless creatives slide down into the Lowest Energy State of Creativity. When I was a teen, I ran a Sonic the Hedgehog fan site for other kids to submit art and fanfiction to. We all hung out on my web forums. I ran it for about 8 years or so. Over that time, I watched many, many of these kids grow into adults and their work slide further and further into depravity. The process is always the same–it happens one step at a time, a little darker and a little more disgusting. Eventually they stop creating altogether because they get bored. Like Man of the Atom says up there, LESC gets very dull and repetitive. Just look at Tumblr and see all the bored people on there cross-dressing their characters just for something to do.

It holds true in book publishing, too. Anne Elizabeth Stengl was a hugely popular Christian fantasy author, especially among the homeschoolers. Her books were imaginative, not doctrinally challenging, romantic, and fun to read. Her books are still on the shelves in every library I’ve ever visited. Well, apparently all this popularity wasn’t earning the big bucks. She threw away her fanbase, switched to a pen name, and now writes raunchy fantasy romance. I don’t know her pen name, nor do I care about her new raunchy books. It’s that slide into LESC because of the siren call of the almighty buck. And it’s a lie. I’ve heard from people who do this and they don’t many any more money than they did before, because competition is stiff and marketing is a beast. You sure can’t market to your hungry fanbase you just abandoned!

For myself, I’ve felt the call of the LESC many times. (We all have a sin nature, after all.) But I never indulged it. For one thing, the Wayback machine is forever. No matter how secret you think that one account is, someone will always find it and air your dirty laundry for everyone to see. I’ve seen this happen many times, too.

For another thing, I wanted to build a body of work that I could be proud of. I wanted to be able to display all of my books on my shelf and not worry about my kids reading them. Same rule for my fanfiction! So you can still read all of my NetRaptor fanfiction. I’ve never taken any of it down, it’s still on fanfiction dot net and archiveofourown dot org. I write my books under K.M. Carroll with no need for a pen name. My fairytale romance readers may not be interested in my pulp scifi, but they’re not going to choke on any disgusting content in anything I write.

Because I write within constraints.

The authors with the longest careers wrote within constraints. It encourages creativity and deeper thought. Diana Wynne Jones quipped, “If you want to write a book that is too difficult for adults, then write it for children.” Tighter constraints equals better stories.

Holding out for a Healer – the anthology

Remember my laments about my ill-fated attempts to find fantasy books featuring male healers? It’s super easy to find books about girls with healing powers. But guys with healing powers? Specifically, guys who are the main characters and not shuffled off to a side role? IMPOSSIBLE. In fact, as I was getting ready to write this post, I was recommended another couple of books with a male healer … who is a background character in book 2. Make my point for me a little harder, why don’t you?

Anyway, my writing group observed my struggles. After humorously assisting me in my search and realizing how difficult it was, they suggested writing an anthology of male healer stories. To my amazement and delight, they actually did it. And the anthology is actually available for other people to read!

Artwork by yours truly

Available on Amazon and all other retailers

The stories within:

Of Blood and Stars, by P.M. Argent. Humanity is at war with the fae. The fae occupy one side of a giant rift in the land, humans occupy the other. But the fae are hungry for more territory and magic, and their attacks grow ever more relentless. The heroine, a healer for an elite mage unit, meets their new replacement healer, and he’s a cold-as-ice professional with incredible powers and knowledge. But of everyone in the human military, this healer may hold the key to ending the war.

A Song and a Blessing, by Shari Branning. A young soldier returning home from fighting a war happens across a gang of men about to murder a fairy for no reason he can see. He rescues the fairy at great personal cost. As a reward, the fairy gifts him healing powers. But upon his return home, he finds that evil fairies have been ravaging the land, and it’s up to him to rescue those captured–which would be impossible without his new powers.

Spellbeasts by K.M. Carroll. The princess of Brand has fallen ill, and the king has put out a call for all healers in the kingdom to come try to heal her. Answering the call are a couple of summoners who were banished for practicing illegal magic. However, the master summoner is confident that his healing powers, combined with the power of his spellbeast, can sort out whatever sickness lies upon the princess. His apprentice is less confident, but they smuggle their dinosaur-like beasts into the castle and havoc ensues.

Suntala, Shard Therapist, by K.M. Carroll. In a world of superheroes, whose powers come from shards of magic inside them, Jayesh Khatri is a healer who works in a hospital. His shard was turned into a tiny dragon named Suntala (it’s a long story, told elsewhere in the After Atlantis books). Anyway, one night in the hospital, Suntala hears the shard of a wounded man calling to him. It tells him how the man was wounded trying to save a woman from being kidnapped, and asks Suntala’s help in saving her. Suntala proceeds to drag Jayesh into all kinds of mischief, first hunting down this girl, then fighting off the thugs trying to capture her for nefarious purposes.

Unable to Get Hired As an Adventurer Because I’m a Healer, I Set Out to Become A-Rank! by Aaron DeMott. A light novel inspired by popular isekai anime, a young healer tries to find work with the adventurer’s guild, but gets turned down. He teams up with a catgirl who isn’t very good at fighting, and together they take the lowest missions in an attempt to earn some money … and discover that healing magic can be used in offensive ways, if you’re creative.

Combat Medic, Pocket Edition, by Heather M. Elliot. Imagine a gritty World War II novel of soldiers fighting in the rain and mud in Italy. Our hero, Medic Caffey, is trying to bind wounds while avoiding sniper fire, when suddenly a portal opens and a well-dressed woman steps out. She drags him and the rest of his squad into this portal just as a bomb drops, saving their lives, but endangering them at the same time as the pocket dimension begins to collapse. Caffey begins having flashbacks of lives he never led, and healing powers begin to flow from him at a touch. The woman takes them from pocket dimension to pocket dimension, fleeing the evil forces chasing her, as the reluctant soldiers try to wrap their heads around the magic affecting them.

Synergy, by Alexandra Gilchrist. In a world of superheroes, our hero is just a medic, the guy who puts supers back together after someone has been thrown through a building … again. But today as he mends a young woman, she binds him to her with psychic powers and tries to compel him to help her defeat a villain. Naturally he’s opposed to this, but she discovers it’s not that easy to undo a psychic binding. Now they have to work together with this uneasy push and pull between them … and maybe use it to their advantage.

Bloodthirsty Healer, by Bogna Jordan. Another videogame-inspired story. Our hero is a very good healer, but he gets passed over by adventuring groups who only want cute girls as healers. He finally persuades a group to hire him, and naturally they all don’t like each other very much, but they have to work together to kill a chimera. Sometimes the healer is the most bloodthirsty one on the whole team…and sometimes that’s a good thing.

Healer of the Wolves, by Janice Verhoog. An assassin with medical training goes to rescue his source’s daughters after they get kidnapped.

These stories are about the coziest of cozy reads. Happy endings, good guys, bad guys, and loads of hurt/comfort. Grab a copy and curl up with a nice cup of tea!

Available on Amazon and all other retailers