ALWAYS POSTED A WEEK EARLIER ON PATREON

Podcast Updates

This past Tuesday Dirk Stanley came back on the show and chatted about his newest game, ‘Mere Anarchy’.  I had a lot of fun talking about his simple and elegant game design and the strategies and benefits of creating a strong and supportive community.

On Thursday, Alethea Kehas came on and we chatted about her book, “Labyrinth: Warriors of Light”.

It was also an educational experience where I learned more about the Visionary Fiction sub-genre.  She also had some great tips and advice for other independent authors.  I am looking forward to seeing her sequel book come out soon.

Project Updates

I hunkered down this past week and finished formatting my dad joke book.  Now the next steps are putting in the pages for the front part of the book and having fun with coming up with a title and a cover design!

I also started experimenting with my branching novel outline again.  I found a new online program called Inklewriter that is a great way to put it together.

What I’m reading

Because I’m falling back into working on my branching novel project, I decided to read one of my favorite solo roleplaying books from when I was younger: The World of Lone Wolf series.

Although I did not have Lone Wolf book 1 available, (sidenote:  it is super expensive now to find) I did find and read Book 1 of Grey Star: “Grey Star the Wizard”.

Nostalgia abound! Much like other branching novel books, this is written in second-person point of view. How this is different than other books, this is also mainly a solo roleplaying game.  The reader first creates the character statistics.  I love how this particular branching novel roleplaying adventure makes it extremely portable and accessible anywhere.   

For example, there are no dice needed, it comes with a random number table that replaces the need to roll dice.

As the story goes, I played the character Grey Star who is a wizard on an epic adventure to stop the Wytch-king from taking over the world.  It takes place in a standard high fantasy world.  There is nothing overly unique about it, but I would say that the setting is more reminiscent of a Conan-style world than a youth-oriented Dungeons and Dragons campaign. There are some violent descriptions and the story is very unforgiving with the battles as a solo roleplaying game.

Personal Updates

Omicron Case counts in our area have been dropping like a rock which is very exciting. To put it in perspective, on January 18th our county had 423 active cases.  On February 10th our county now has 59 active cases.

Also, because I needed more to do, I volunteered to be a part of our local school district’s capital improvement committee.  It was fun exploring and creating new social networks locally while providing some help for the neighborhood. 

As of this writing, we have 1 hour and 29 extra minutes of daylight compared to our darkest day of the year, December 21st.  Here in Vermont, it was also a bit of a thaw in the weather this past week.  We lovingly call this time of year ‘Fool’s Spring’.