Hey Everyone,
It’s Gene, thanks for checking in. I’m going to brief on the logistics of the releases so I can spend time on the thing that is currently most exciting to me. Let’s dive in.
We are at final copyediting stage for the stories. Beta reading and all content and development editing is done for the novella. We are working things out with a cover artist and cleaning up final edits and then this will be out. Look for a release soon!
Novel 1 is slated for an early 2025 release. As I stated in a previous update, we are not going to try and compete with the election. Our modest outfit will be completely drowned out on social media if we try and put this out between October and the new year, even if we tried all of the tricks in our marketing and promotional toolkit. So, we will begin the marketing at the start of the new year and get the book out in 2025. That’s the plan anyway. As stated, the content writing is done. I recently rewrote the last chapter I wanted to—just had to rework a scene to make sense from a continuity and theological standpoint. I can say it is much better.
And novel 2 is in drafting. A few chapters are already done. First drafts are always the best, for me anyway. I love free writing. I’m very loose on outlining. It means there is plenty of work to do for second drafts, but it’s my process, what can I say.
Now on to the exciting news (for me). I’ve been invited into not one but two Dungeons and Dragons campaigns! For someone who spends as much time as me consuming D&D content, I am presently in a shocking drought. I’ve only played maybe eight sessions in the last 2 years. Campaigns ending, others not really getting going...if you’ve been a player in the community, you know the difficulty. Back in 2020, I played every Friday night for a year. It was not the best year of my life due to other circumstances I’m sure you’re aware of. But the D&D was great!
As a part of one of these campaigns, we played a unique Session 0. For those not in the know, a Session 0 is when you meet before you start playing the campaign story to build characters, discuss setting, figure out house rules etc.—all the things you need to establish so that all the different players can be on the same page about how the game will go. We were tasked by the Dungeon Master (or DM) to have a character race in mind and a rough idea for how old we were relative to the other characters. We then played a prologue of sorts as teenagers. No combat but a few skill checks and a major inciting incident. Then we would build characters based on this, which some of us stayed to do.
For me, it was a completely new experience and one I may use in the future as it ties characters together in their backstory and gives everyone joint motivation. It’s also different, and I loved it. So I’ll be playing my first cleric with a setting-specific subclass (Humbelwood’s Night Domain), and I’m very excited!
Feel free to share some of your favorite D&D stories with me on social media. I’m always game to engage in fantasy nerd discourse.
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