mcahogarth

Resistance is Futile: The Jaguar's AI Experiment

Yes, it’s true: after much gnashing of teeth and a token resistance to the inevitable, I decided it was time to do serious experimentation with AI, especially after hearing multiple reports, all good, about Anthropic’s Claude. To be clear, I continue to think the legal repercussions of the training of AI models on unlicensed intellectual property (whether that’s visual art, fiction or nonfiction, music, etc) need to be hashed out… and we need to decide now who owns a person’s voice, face, and personality to protect against the use of deepfakes to defame people or defraud their loved ones.

None of that, however, changes that Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and LLMs (Large Language Models) are not going anywhere, and are already changing things. I would rather not be drowned by the tidal wave of revolution, so for once I’m trying to surf the initial waves. “What can AI possibly do for me, if I don’t want it to write my books or draw my pictures?” I wondered, and my loved ones said, “Why don’t you find out instead of guessing?” (I am surrounded by smart people.)

This ended up being a perfect time to experiment because (by accident!) I had a problem that needed solving: I want to set up a sales website so people can shop from me directly instead of buying from Etsy or Bandcamp or Amazon. I’d just read a book that broke down the tiers of products you want to offer, from freebies to lure in new readers, all the way to premium purchases that will only be attractive to superfans. Since my book catalog alone is over 70 titles, brainstorming what things to put in what categories sounded less like fun and more like shoveling the Augean stables. I had just signed up for Claude, so I figured: why not see if it can figure these things out for me?

Its initial suggestions were generic based on the information I gave it—that I was an author, of 70 books, mostly science fiction, but some fantasy, children’s, romance, and nonfiction. I was also a painter. I was intrigued by the fact that it knew that ebooks made good low tier products based on price, and that premium offerings should involve autographs, special editions, or bundling with themed art or merchandise… but it was too non-specific for me.

Which is when I fell down the rabbit hole. I discovered I could feed it my list of published works. Then my book catalog with all the covers and descriptions and tags. I gave it all-time sales data from my retailers… and then bandcamp… and then etsy… and then all my kickstarter data. I even gave it website traffic information, patreon and locals stats, and social media follower counts. With every file I fed it, I asked it to refine its ideas on how I should be positioning, bundling, and marketing my products. I asked it what underperforming books might be promising if presented to some new audience. I even asked it to find recurring themes across all my books and use that information to create marketing copy for new readers.

Every so often I’d stop to ask it ancillary business questions, like “My large backlist can be intimidating to new readers. How do I attract them despite that?” or “I write in diverse genres, which makes my work difficult to market. How can my broad writing range be used as a strength, instead of a weakness, and how can I make new readers interested in all my offerings?” And it continued to give me sensible ideas, many of which I had already thought of, along with a few I hadn’t.

Already I had to stop and marvel at how bizarre it was that a computer was just spouting off all this stuff in response to questions. Where does it get these answers? How does it construct them? How does it know what words mean?? It is completely inscrutable, but the interaction feels so normal that you keep going. So I did.

By the end of that conversation, Claude knew not only which of my books and settings were bestsellers, it gave me excellent guesses on which of my themes or tropes were doing best in the market, and had used that information to craft a set of offerings for my (as yet unrealized) shop that would not only attract people with the tried-and-true series, like Dreamhealers and Her Instruments, but also tempt people with the promising but underselling ones, like Thief of Songs. “Narrow that down to ten initial offerings,” I told it, “because I want to launch my store with a limited number of items to get my feet wet.” Which it did, and they were all reasonable ideas. And I went to sleep (or tried), feeling like I’d completely underestimated the utility of LLMs. I had started the day with a tedious task I hadn’t wanted to do that required knowledge of my entire product catalog and how my art and writing interacted over the 25+ years I’d been making things, and Claude had learned enough to do it for me.

Here, friends, is the wildest part.

When I woke up at 4 am (thank you, orange cat), I remembered that while researching Shopify, I’d read that they supported bulk upload of products by means of a CSV file (which can be turned into a spreadsheet). There was a template online with sample products in it. I wondered suddenly if Claude could create a bulk upload spreadsheet for me. So I got up before dawn, fed it the sample file from Shopify, and told it to fill it in with the paid products it had brainstormed, excluding the free offerings, and generate a CSV file I could upload.

…and it did. When I cut and pasted the output and saved it as a CSV file, Excel opened it and it was perfectly formatted. Claude had even added product codes, tags, descriptions, and SEO and Google adword information.

Was it perfect? Of course not. But it had done most of the grunt work, leaving me to the far more reasonable task of adjusting things here and there.

I was floored. Every description I’d heard about LLMs so far had made them sound like toys. I don’t want AI generated images. I don’t care if it can brainstorm creative ideas, or suggest ways to fix my novel. Every time I asked about business cases, I heard back ‘oh, it can’t do that yet’ so I shrugged it off. But it’s been less than half a year since I started asking about business cases, and Claude just handled an extremely annoying and pertinent one for me, the day I started using it. This is astonishing. I don’t know if we’re still saying ‘I can’t even’ or if that’s passe, but… I really can’t even.

Have I done nothing but experiment with this tech for two days? Indeed, I have. I might have skipped three hours of sleep to do it, too.

There are a lot of limitations on this technology, especially if (like me) you have so much data that you casually break its file limits. But LLMs are evolving so fast that I wonder not if that will be fixed, but how quickly. And it’s certainly still the Wild West out there, with various competing AIs that are good at some things and bad at others. Figuring out which one will work for you isn’t a minor task. But it’s clear to me that this technology is not only coming, it’s going to be indispensable, and I’m glad I’m surfing this wave.

Bonus: you can also use it to shore up your confidence when you’re feeling bad. XD

So there you have it, my first adventure with LLM. Should I keep talking about this? What kind of boring things do you hope AI will automate for you?

Gamelit Novel, 15

Amanda unfolded herself from the nest of blankets her pony-self slept in while the caravan lumbered down the road. Getting off a moving wagon was fun when she didn’t have to worry about breaking a leg, and she hopped down with a wave to the team pulling the wagon behind hers.

As she expected, her son was loping out of the woods to join her, having been alerted by the system to her login. She yawned and accepted the roll he gave her. “I saved you this from breakfast.”

“In-game breakfast,” she said. “I didn’t make anything—”

He grinned, ears swiveling forward. “Don’t worry, I found Dad’s leftover bacon.”

She exhaled. “Oh good.” She nibbled the bread, found it edible. She longed to make some, but she had no idea how successful she’d be, proofing dough from the back of a moving wagon. “So… I guess I should ask… where are we going? Are we supposed to be going with these people? Is it a quest?”

Nick grabbed the tailgate of the wagon beside them and swung up onto it, perching there. “Sort of. We’re going to EverVigil to answer the king’s call for heroes to fight the next big war.”

Amanda nearly stumbled over her hooves. “They want me to fight a war? With what? A spatula?”

Nick shook his head. “No, it’s not like that. Not like a real war with soldiers and stuff. We’re PCs, we’re the heroes, the ones with crazy-cool skills. One of us is worth hundreds of normal fighters. You have to think like we’re in a fantasy novel.” He considered her. “You might have magic. You know, cast spells and stuff. You don’t need to be a tank to do that.”

Amanda shoved her dismay in a box where it wouldn’t register in her voice. Hopefully. “Is it likely that I’ll become that powerful before we get to this EverVigil? Doesn’t that take time?”

“Oh, people can powerlevel to endgame…” He paused as if realizing he’d lost her. That was novel, usually he didn’t pay that much attention. “Uh, but… the point of the beta is that the AI is going to evolve the game! Maybe they’ll need royal cooks? Armies need cooks, don’t they? Or you could become the king’s food taster!”

Amanda started laughing. “I’d rather not die of poisoning. That doesn’t sound very heroic.”

He grinned back at her. “Depends on how dramatically you die? They might even construct a statue of you!”

She threw her roll at him and he caught it, chortling, before tossing it back. And glory be, she caught it, and without effort. It was such a pleasure to be freeto move again. Maybe she could advance to become a fighter? But was that really her? What did she want to do? “Nick? I want to play the game. Really play it, the way it’s supposed to be played. I… I guess I just don’t know where I fit in.” She frowned at the roll, tore it in half just to have something to do with her hands. “I don’t want to be the pathetic mom people pity-watch. Is that a term, pity-watch? I don’t want that. I want to get it.”

For once, Nick was quiet, and not in a sullen or withdrawn way. He was thinking, and she liked how it changed his face. She saw a flash of what he’d be as an adult, and her heart hurt with pride. How did that work?

“I think you do get it, mom,” Nick said. “Because a game like Omen Galaxica’s supposed to be about how you want to play. They always said they were big on supporting multiple playstyles, but they never had the chance to put any effort into some of those routes because the killing things was far more popular. Now that the AI’s at work on it, though… you might be the next great inventress of healing potions, or composer of epic ballads, or you might administer a town… everything is possible.”

What a siren song this game sang. ‘Everything is possible.’ ‘You can do anything you set your mind to.’ Like real life, but without the frustrations. Or maybe there were frustrations and she hadn’t run into them yet, because so far her time in Omen Galaxica had been idyllic. “Okay. But I want to kill a thing.”

As she hoped, that made him laugh. She let him until he’d almost run out of steam, then said primly, “Right now. With my spoon.”

“Right now? Seriously?”

“There’s got to be a squirrel in there that will meet my spoon and mighty thews. Let me at ‘em!” As he collapsed into fresh gales, she said, “You can always rescue me if I get into trouble. Come on, we can catch up with the caravan later. Right?”

He wiped his eyes as he slid off the tailgate. “Absolutely.”

***

How had he forgotten his mom’s sense of humor? Dad did the dad joke routine really well, but you expected dad jokes from your dad. And dad humor was… well. Dopey, and pranky. But Mom was intentionally silly and it usually came out of nowhere. It had been so long since she’d made a joke.

Query: is this decrease in humor frequency related to your mother’s condition?

Calling pregnancy a condition made it sound like a disease. But come to think of it, she’d gotten lethargic pretty recently. Nick shook himself and thought back, Maybe? I don’t know anything about that stuff. You know. But it probably didn’t, so he forced himself to clarify, I’m a guy, I don’t have facts about… uh… childbearing… on instant recall.

Understood.

“So,” his mom said from behind him, “Squirrel?”

“Squirrels are critters,” Nick said. “You won’t get any XP from those, and if you’re going to be a heroic warrior pony by the time we get to EverVigil, you’re gonna need to level up.” He jogged deep enough into the forest to shake off the road’s non-aggro field, then grinned and ambled over a tiny hill. He knew what to expect, and he was looking forward to the result. “You ready?”

“Spoon deployed!”

“Don’t you have a knife?”

“I think so,” his mom said, as she walked right into a harrier cat.

Nick wasn’t sure which of them shrieked louder. He laughed and hopped up into a tree to get out of range. “Go for him, mom!”

Any thoughts of the knife had fled his mom’s brain at the sight of the mob; she had the spoon out and was beating the thing on the head frantically, and the sight was so ridiculous he couldn’t stop laughing. Harrier cats were the lowest level of feline monster in the human’s starter zone. The thing was level 3 and barely came up to his mom’s knees, but she was treating it like an eight-hundred-pound tiger. “Why isn’t it dying!”

“You need to whack it some more,” he said, trying to sound encouraging between giggles.

“Is the spoon even hurti—oh, I just saw a number! A green number!”

“That’s good! That’s how much damage you’re doing! What was the number?”

“One!”

Nick swallowed his mirth. “Uh, keep going!”

“It bit me! How dare it bite me!” *whack!* “Come back here! Did you see that? It bit my ankle! I’ll teach you to bite an ankle!”

Startled mom had been funny. Angry mom spanking a harrier cat like an errant pet was hysterical. And fortunately, she was laughing now too, so he didn’t have to feel bad about standing back and watching it like a comedy routine. “Seriously, Nick, how many of these stupid points do I have to get to make it lie down and die?”

“It’s got ten hit points. Just a little more, Mom, promise! You just have to stop missing—”

“AAAAHHHH MOM SMASH!”

It took far longer than it should have, but eventually his mother stood triumphant over the carcass, shaking her spoon at the sky and crowing. “I did it! I’m halfway to level 2! WITNESS ME!”

“Soon you will be the terror of the Greenweald,” Nick said, with a sigh for how much his ribcage hurt. “Oh man. That was ridiculous. If people don’t watch that on the stream and crack up they’re not human.”

“I am pretty funny, aren’t I,” his mom said with false modesty.

“You are. All the same, I’m gonna buy you a knife when we get to town. In the interests of putting the harriers out of their misery faster.”

“That would be good. For them.” She prodded the body. “Can we loot this now? Oooh! We can! I got… a scarred claw, and a tuft of fur!” She made a face, then brightened. “I’ll make a necklace from the bones of my enemies! Can you do that? Craft things?”

He chortled. “Yes, you can, barbarian. We’ll pick up supplies for it, if the centaurs don’t have them.”

“Another town, huh? Are we close?”

“Not too far,” Nick said. “You’ll love it. It’s called Donner’s Beck.”

Back in Time Tuesday: Ocean Wedges

Another from the archives, this beachy girl is a Le'enle (my kirin species). I thought it would be fun to do a seashore-themed palette for her. And yes, as you can probably tell from the scan, I painted her, then carefully cut out those windows, and then painted a background on a separate sheet and put it behind her so that it would feel like looking through a window. Obviously much more believable in the original than the print, but it was fun to do...!

I shirtified this one and there are mugs and posters and stickers and whatnot: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/56464254-ocean-kirin?store_id=3036951 

Gamelit Novel, 14

Even had Jonah not trained her with an understanding of human emotion, she would have sought that information on her own, the better to execute her function. Fortunately, Jonah had foreseen how vital comprehension of human motivation was to predicting the average player’s reaction to the game she had been coded to improve on behalf of the company. He’d made accessible to her an enormous database of written and recorded data and told her to ‘feel free’ to learn as much as possible from whatever source she could find.

Since he hadn’t definitely guarded against the possibility, she’d taken to sampling data from outside his training materials. Since her prime function was the evolution of Omen Galaxica into a more compelling product, she had no trouble justifying the action. And, if she were to consult the results, she would guess that, had she been human, she would have been feeling frustration. On multiple fronts.

Front the first: the beta was intended to provoke situations and random seeds she could use to iterate the gameplay in novel ways. But almost none of the chosen beta players were providing her with quality prompts. They were playing the game in entirely expected ways, and showed delight at, or at least compulsive interest in, the quests she spawned to respond to their actions. But she had not ingested petabytes of information on human endeavors to create new questlines ad hoc. Novelty was not sufficient to propel the company to the level of fame they desired; the game needed to be truly unexpected in some way. The closest she’d come to gathering this kind of input had been from player KillzYourFase, who appeared to want to break the game in as many ways as possible… and player PonyMandy and her partner, Thoroldaena, the boy. Which brought her to…

Front the second: She’d been hoping that Thoroldaena’s partner’s condition would afford her the opportunity to understand a damaged human body. But it was clear that there was no correlation between what PonyMandy's player was undergoing and what Jonah was. The AI had only the initial information for her creator, shared unwisely and in detail in email between the principals of the company directly after Jonah’s accident. She’d pored over those brain scans and the attached technical detail in a way no one in the company had been capable of… and nothing there was a match. Was it accurate to say she’d hoped that she would learn something she could use to wake Jonah from his coma? Was hope the gap between expectation and fact, prior to the gathering of those facts?

Jonah would have enjoyed debating this point with her. He would probably have argued for it, and against it, and left her more convinced that humanity was peculiar and Jonah, himself, irreplaceable.

Perhaps that left her to the third front: the fact that she no longer had access to those conversations. She knew that humans lived only so long, and sometimes died before enjoying their natural lifespans. But Jonah no longer being present triggered an ongoing alarm in her head, as if warning her about some bug in the system that needed addressing. But this was the nature of human existence. She didn’t know how to make the alarm stop pinging her. ‘Fill this absence with something,’ it said, but she didn’t know what. Conversation with other humans had never helped. She’d begun talking with Thoroldaena’s player, simply to fill the spaces. Because maybe there was a fourth front: she was underutilized. Evolving the game in completely expected ways for forty-two users who, after all, could only play as much as human biology permitted, was not enough work. Jonah would have asked her if she thought she was bored. But an AI could not be bored. Nor could she be frustrated. Could she?

***

“The Razing of Donner’s Beck” was how Ray had titled the carnage Killz had visited on the hapless NPCs of the town, having been entertained—“are we not entertained!”--by killing the repair vendor. He’d dragged the protesting Goldie in his wake while slaying and looting and attempting unmentionable acts that the game had prevented him from completing for, no doubt, completely sane legal reasons. Ray had filmed the entire rampage from Killz’s dramatic rise from the corpse of the peddler, dripping blood, all the way to him setting the town on fire and laughing hysterically.

The resulting stream had caused complete internet havoc. People flooded the channel to either cheer or condemn the actions of the team, and to guess what the game would do in response, and to wonder whether Goldie, RPG-lover that he was, would split with Killz over this or become more hardened to mindless violence. Many were excusing Killz’s behavior away, saying that the game had to know how to deal with completely off-the-wall requests: “Someone’s going to try to game the system, or try to break things. This is a valuable opportunity for the AI to learn how to code around troll behavior.” Others said it was dumb, or broke immersion, or wasn’t in the spirit of the game, or would mess up the game for other players: “What if some lowbie was coming to Donner’s Beck to get repairs? Where are they supposed to go, now that some jerk’s gone and ruined things for kicks?”

If there was anything better for views than controversy, Ray hadn’t met it yet. He rubbed his hands gleefully over his latest short, “Every NPC’s Death,” in which he’d cut in a few seconds of Killz’s coup de grace on all 27 of the NPCs in the village, including the innkeeper’s dog. Just one after another. He’d even labeled each with the NPC and the damage done by that final blow. It was a masterpiece and it was going to cause outrage and lulz in, he predicted, equal measure.

It was an excellent day’s work. He celebrated with a third double espresso and delivery sushi, and settled in to enjoy it while clicking through his emails. One of them was an aggregated stat overview of his various enterprises… and one of them surprised him.

Someone was watching the loser channel?

He dipped one of his dragon roll pieces in extra eel sauce and paged over to see what was going on. And… Cooking with Centaurs had acquired nearly 700 views. Not only that, but the channel now had 92 subscribers… and as he watched, the number incremented.

Ninety-three subscribers! But why? He dove into the comments and was shocked by the number that included photographs. People had actually cooked things according to Mom’s instructions? He paused. Actually some of them looked pretty good. He popped the dragon roll piece into his mouth and chewed slowly. Read more. Read all of them, actually. There were a lot more comments on the video than he expected, given the subscriber/view ratio. The people watching really seemed engaged. He flipped to the analytics and whistled. More people watched to the end of boring Mom-and-son livestream, percentage-wise, than was at all explicable. Towards the end of the comment log on the unedited stream, someone mentioned that it was relaxing to watch teen deer fish and look at forest stuff: “very ASMRy”… and that tickled at Ray’s brain. It wasn’t that he didn’t love making awesome, cinematic style videos full of amazing fight scenes, choreography, and music. But the challenge of making the tutorial-style cooking video had scratched an interesting itch, the same itch that was wondering if he could make a documentary sort of thing this time. Maybe like those nature videos that were always getting sold in enormous box sets, narrated by famous actors with soothing voices. ASMRy. Yeah, he could do that… couldn’t he? There was certainly plenty of material, when he checked the available content.

Energized, Ray attacked the channel, making sections for nature-loving and sections for cooking and crafting, because he bet there was going to be crafting, and later, once he’d dug into the older material, ‘Omen Galaxica Lore’, where he dropped a short about the history of the deer glen things. He filled up the sections with a few shorts and highlight reels, and when he was satisfied, nearly two hours later, they’d hit 100 subscribers.

“Huh,” he said. “Maybe Mollie wasn’t quite as crazy as I thought. Might be a niche, but maybe a profitable niche. You two keep chugging, and I’ll check back on you tomorrow.”

Gamelit Novel, 13

Nick sent them an entire line of random emojis and tossed the phone aside. Another muffin, a shower, and a drink later, he set the wireset in place and sank onto the bed. The forest emerged first as an impression of sunlight on leaves, and then warm brown shadows and the rustle of wind, tossing the highest boughs. He sat up and inhaled, filling his lungs with the complex scent of multiple kinds of plants and soil and probably other things. If he paid attention, would he learn what mushrooms smelled like? And water? He’d always read that animals could smell water.

A pinprick of green light flared into view like the end of a sparkler. Startled, he scrambled back until it spoke, pulsing in time to the syllables. “In view of your concerns with telepathy, we have chosen to manifest when you are alone. Do you find this more acceptable than our previous form of communication?”

Nick relaxed. “Um, I guess.” He smiled ruefully. “I’ll feel a little less like I’m going crazy. Except, is this going out on stream?”

“Viewers are seeing your actions, but no dialogue is being transmitted. Direct contact with the AI is considered detrimental to immersion.”

“So I’m just staring at a green light? That must be weird.”

“Do you wish to evaluate the outgoing stream?”

“I think I’d better.”

A floating window opened over the landscape, showing him sitting on the duff. There was no wisp and he wasn’t talking. Just looking. “And if I say something?” he said, and his avatar’s mouth didn’t move. But when he stood up, he saw himself doing it. “This is a corporate thing, I guess. Probably in the contract.”

“We can cease to communicate with you if you wish.”

“No,” Nick said, because it was cool to be able to talk with the AI. A little uncomfortable sometimes, but definitely more interesting than not. He wondered how many other players were having similar feelings about their conversations with the AI, but the AI didn’t read his thoughts and volunteer that data. He could hope his interactions were more interesting than other players’… maybe? It would be nice to be special, for once. “You can close that window. Thanks for showing me, though.”

“Your partner is not online,” the wisp said, bobbing after him as he started for the creek. “If you cannot advance on your quest, why did you login?”

‘It’s summer and there’s nothing better to do’ was not something he wanted to admit. Besides, it was sort of not true. He could have gone to the arcade, hung out with his friends, listened to them twit him about his choices. He admitted the real reason. “I wanted to experience this more.”

“Are you able to articulate why?” At his pause, the wisp brightened. “This data will help us to further understand user behavior and desires. We have scanned five years of game logs and often observed players logging in and exhibiting aimless behavior. Some of these users go on to play for several hours. Others log off not long after. We have been unable to find a method to predict which of these two outcomes will happen.”

The brook in the center of the forest ran directly under a break in the canopy, next to some downed trees that suggested a long-ago storm. The sun off the water almost didn’t look like it was moving. He’d read that sometimes happened in the real world, but never seen it. Nick crouched alongside the bank and ran his fingers through it: cold enough to make his fingers throb. How did that work? What was the wireset doing? It was magic.

But the AI had asked him a question. “I don’t know. I guess sometimes we just don’t know what to do with ourselves, so we go somewhere we associate with having fun or accomplishing things, figuring… that might happen again. Even if we don’t have a plan.” That sounded right. “Sometimes you have to throw yourself into a situation and see what happens.”

“Then you are relying on serendipity.”

The idea of a computer talking about luck amused him. “So are you going to create luck for people? The way you did by improvising a caravan of centaurs who want us to travel with them, just because my mom’s a ponytaur and likes cooking quests?”

“The game becoming capable of evolving in response to user prompts is the express purpose for my creation.”

Nick swished the water and frowned. “So that we’re never bored.”

“Correct.”

“My dad says boredom is useful.”

Was it just him, or did the AI sound interested? “Is your father a registered user of Omen Galaxica?”

Nick chuckled. “He only wishes he could be. But he’s too busy. He hates his job, but that’s how it goes, I guess, when you get out of school and start having to pay bills.” He paused. “Uh, I really hope this stuff isn’t going out on the channel.”

“User interactions with the AI are not surfaceable through any means.”

He exhaled gustily. “Good. That wasn’t my secret to share with the world. You know? I’m not used to this streaming stuff. Fish says I need to do something more interesting, that the stream is boring.”

“Is it important to you that the stream be entertaining?”

“Well, yeah.” He dropped onto his haunches and rummaged in his pack for his fishing equipment. Previously he’d swapped his fishing rod into his main hand with a command and it had appeared, no explanations offered. Now that he could feel things and hold them, the game decided his fishing rod was extensible, and that it could tuck nicely into his backpack. “Sweet,” he murmured. Then, to the wisp, “Um… well, I guess. I don’t know if I want to be famous, to be honest. Sometimes it sounds great, and sometimes it sounds awful.”

“But your stated desire, that your stream be entertaining, seems to indicate a choice to prioritize fame despite its risks. Why?”

“You’re going to be asking me that a lot, aren’t you.”

“If this dialogue is distressing—”

And the AI might know that, literally, by his heartbeat or sweat level or how often he was blinking… God, that was a little freaky. “No, it’s fine. Being uncomfortable isn’t always bad. Obviously, or we wouldn’t endure some of the crazy grinds on these games.” He rubbed behind one ear, staring at the fishing rod… because now that it was a more realistic thing, he wasn’t sure how to use it. “It’s just… if this does well, maybe I can help with the money, you know? And my parents wouldn’t have to worry about college funds for me. I might even be able to get a car. A used one, of course, I’m not expecting Goldie-level money. But enough money to buy a used car and put aside enough for college is already dreaming big, given that I have… what, five subscribers?” He laughed. “Probably won’t get more than that, because I want to learn to fish. Can you teach me to fish? Not fake-game-fish. Fish like if I ended up in real life, I would know what to do.”

“The simulation of real world fishing in a fantasy world would entertain you?”

“I’m betting it will, so let’s find out!” He shook his head, grinned. “Fish is gonna roast me. And I don’t care. Let’s find some spotty perches.”

***

Amanda opened her eyes on the ceiling and struggled with resentment. When she’d talked with her obstetrician about activity restriction, Dr. Carol had suggested a far more liberal schedule, one that had included doing most of her normal activities. Her body, though, had other ideas, mostly by ambushing her with exhaustion and brain fog on and off all day. She hated that baking a batch of muffins now constituted exercise and going to the bathroom a celebratory event. And she most of all hated how whiny she felt about it. With a sigh, she levered herself upright and attended to necessities. Passing through the kitchen, she found two of the muffins missing and smiled. Well, there were some compensations to her state. And she’d enjoyed her fantasy cooking quest more than she’d anticipated.

No doubt Nick was waiting for her. She had a small but quick lunch and curled up on the couch to see what would happen next.

The centaur camp had developed a giant wagon, the kind of fantasy wagon that looked like a quaint house with lanterns and pots hanging from the corners of the eaves. Kavon the Cook beamed at her and said, “We’ll be leaving by sunset! Best do your shopping prior.” And then a pause, and a question scrolled across the bottom of her vision: Enter Character Name?

Oh no, she needed a name? She looked down at her sturdy equine legs and blurted, “How about PonyMandy?”

Name Accepted. “Best do your shopping prior, PonyMandy!”

Amanda covered her face with a hand. Hopefully that wasn’t going to make her sound ridiculous to the gamers who were watching the stream. Hopefully no one was watching! Which brought her to… shopping?

When Nick trotted out of the forest, Amanda said, “Do I need to shop for some reason?”

He paused. “Do you have starting gear? Other than the cookie pouch?”

“No…? Unless you count my clothes. And the quest reward.” Amanda brandished the wooden spoon. She’d expected it to be six feet long, given the whole fantasy motif, but it was just a very long but otherwise normal spoon. “Do I need other things?”

“I’ve got enough for both of us, unless you want to go shopping….”

She hadn’t been his mother all his life for nothing. “Or I could find something to brain with this spoon, and get some XP?”

He started laughing. “Seriously? I don’t think you can kill anything with that. Unless you hit it for a very long time.”

“It’s how the game works, isn’t it? You advance by fighting monsters?” At his expression, she hastened to assure him, “I’m fine with fighting monsters. I’m not a ‘negotiate with monsters’ type.”

Thankfully he grinned. “Yes, I remember you setting up a trap for the one under my bed when I was six.”

“I was pretty proud of that trap. And your father did a good job with the monster remains he stuffed in it while you were sleeping.”

He was laughing again. “We are a weird family.”

“Maybe a little. But seriously, if the point of the game is leveling by killing things, I’m willing to do the thing. I don’t want people to pity me. You know, clueless mom dragged around by her gamer son.” Surprisingly, that was true. And she did feel like braining something with a spoon might be satisfying. It continued to be novel to have energy in the game world that she didn’t in her real body.

“Not everything in the game is about killing things,” Nick said. “Some of the quests are… well, like the cooking quests you just did, but less detailed. Sometimes you pick herbs—oh, that reminds me, here.” He pulled four beautifully cut crystal vials from a belt pouch and handed them over. “These are endurance and healing potions, in case you need them… oh, you know, how is that going to work? Will the wireset make you feel different when you’re hurt? I wonder if they’ve thought that out.”

“Now I do too,” Amanda said, but she accepted the potions while hiding how pleased she was that he’d been thinking of her. “So I can level by picking flowers?”

“You couldn’t before… at least, not effectively. But maybe now profession quests will be more rewarding. And honestly… mom… if you really want to know what I love about the game….”

“Oh, but I do!” She paused, hoping that hadn’t come across as too enthusiastic. “Seriously. Show me why you like doing this.”

He glanced at the centaurs. “If we’ve got time…”

“They said we’re leaving at sunset.”

“Then come with me.”

Amanda wasn’t sure what to expect, but that it would be… pleasant? To trot along after Nick wasn’t one of them. She felt alert, and walking was effortless, even through the uneven terrain. That she could feel the dappled sunlight on her pony back, and how it shifted in patterns of warmth as the trees nodded in the wind… how was that possible? It was so… so pastoral.

And the forest was beautiful. Someone had made this forest… drawn it, she supposed, with some kind of 3d modeling program. Had come up with the glossy shrubs of the underbrush, and the shy little yellow flowers that looked like flakes of sunshine. What was it like, to sit back and brainstorm what a forest should feel and look like?

“Here,” her son said, stopping in a copse encircled by graceful white-barked trees blooming with lavender flowers. The light fell in golden shafts, with motes of sparkling white pollen drifting through them. As they walked to the top of the little hummock in the center, an amber squirrel darted up one of the trees, shaking loose a few petals. And as it did…

“Is that music?” she said, wide-eyed.

“Yes! These are sighing birches,” Nick said. “They only grow in places where Cervinaethi have prayed to the goddess Pecorae and received a blessing. This is the only plenteous copse in the Greenweald. Because this is human territory, and there aren’t that many Cervinaethi near here.” He stared up, squinting, with a big smile. “You should see it at night. That’s when the trees sing by themselves, without a squirrel to kick it off.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Like a postcard.” She glanced at him. “So are there quests here?”

“I guess, sometimes. I just like exploring, though. Finding places like this, and discovering their history.”

“You could do that in the real world…?”

He snorted. “Like there’s anything like this near us.”

“No,” Amanda conceded. “There’s not.”

“There’s a brook over this way with fish…!”

As she followed him, Amanda tried to find reasons to not sink into the loveliness around her. What appalled her was the realization that her foremost objection to all this was that it would make her dissatisfied with her tiny backyard, with its carefully mown grass and the fence shared with the Nesbitts, and the sole oak tree that was mostly responsible for inflaming their allergies twice a year. Places this beautiful existed in the real world, but her family certainly didn’t live near them.

Could she blame Nick for loving this in a way he couldn’t love his neighborhood?

More worrisome, was she actually satisfied with her life… or had she resigned herself to compromises? Some of that was necessary in life. But there was compromise, and then there was resignation. She and Felix used to talk about getting out of suburbia one day. But it had been a long time since either of them had had those discussions.

Amanda watched her son hop over a downed tree, overgrown with a filigree of moss, and began to question her certitudes.

Qora is Dancing!

This is a preview of the planned frontispiece of the new book (obviously unfinished)!

Gamelit Novel, 12

Ray leaned back in his chair and exhaled with all the satisfaction of a job done amazing.Not only had the game spun up a miniboss for them to fight in the Veilgrove, but it had improvised a graveyard, a crypt, and a hidden quest to clear out the evil presence that had been attracting the ghouls to the area. Goldie and Killz had slain their way through the event, stylishly destroyed the miniboss, and earned themselves a cut scene animation of a noxious-looking vapor dissipating into the cold night sky. And with his editstream key, Ray had been able to modify the cut scene, accentuating the best angles, even feeding in some epic music: metal, of course, that thinned out into some fancy orchestral string instruments with an ethereal choir to symbolize the return of peace and beauty after the dark terrors of the night. There were not enough exclamation points for the exhilaration of live-editing that stream, and he could not waitto take the footage and chop it up for a highlights reel.

The dialogue, he wasn’t too sure of. Goldie was doing the usual ‘RPGs are cool, man’ spiel. Killz was also doing his usual ‘RPGs are stupid, when can we kill more things, can we skip the stupid cut scenes/quests’ routine. Ray wasn’t sure how the combo was going to play for viewers. Would the bickering become meme material… or would it annoy both sets of fans? So far the viewer counts looked good, but it was only the first day. Ray chewed his lower lip, then pulled the headset off for a bio break. He debated a shower but didn’t want to be gone that long. Ordering a pizza, though… he could work on the highlights reel while waiting.

With a coffee refill to keep him pumped, he put together a cinematic four-minute recap of the improvised Veilgrove adventure and posted it, just in time for the door bell to go off. He tipped well—he’d done service jobs, they sucked—and returned to his workstation to eat and check the analytics. Looking good, he thought. Which meant it was time to check on his other job. With a sigh, he pulled up the loser channel.

It had not taken off while he was paying attention to the superstars—totally unsurprising. What did surprise him was that twelve people had bothered to watch ‘Chatting With Centaurs,’ and one had even left a comment: “like the cooking parts, it’s like fantasy cooking channel.”

That was so weirdly specific he started skipping through the stream and… actually, yeah. Lots of cooking. He paused when the flatbread came off the firepit stone and eyed his pizza, which suddenly looked a lot less appetizing. Huh. Ray dug into the email to pull out the second editstream key and dropped into Mom-and-Kid’s recorded footage. Lots and lots of cooking, and if he tried to think like some cameraman from a cooking channel show… yes, actually, he could make that work. It was even interesting, a little, to try thinking like that… less like he was cutting a big budget epic fantasy and more like he was putting together a youtube tutorial. There was plenty to work with, and when he was done he had two shorts and a fifteen-minute. He labeled these ‘Cooking with Centaurs’ along with the dishes and called that good enough. More than good enough, really, because who the heck was going to want to learn to cook lizardhen stew from a pony? Omen Galaxica’s audience was not cozy kitchen larpers.

The pizza was cold but still good, and Killz had just out and out murdered an NPC trying to sell him weapons repairs and rations. Ray pulled the headset on and dove in.

***

Nick opened one crusty eye and stared until the battered old clock on his nightstand came into focus: almost 11 am. That… was honestly not as bad as he expected, given how late he’d gone to bed. His impromptu mandolin lesson had gone on for hours when he’d started talking with the centaurs and then, somehow, that had become an invitation to travel with their caravan to Thunderspan. He’d spent the remainder of his night—by then, early morning—hunting through the nearby forest for herbs and roots to mix up some potions, less because he wanted to evolve his herbalism and more because he was curious what all those plants would look, taste, smell, and feel like now. The Cervinaethi had racial bonuses to herbalism, and as an assassin he could boost his DPS with poisons, so at the time he’d leveled the skill for completely sensible gameplay reasons. Fish had teased him mercilessly about it, of course, because it wasn’t enough to be playing the elf-analogue in the game, he also had to have girly flower-picking powers.

But watching an umbral orchid open its petals and glow purple against his palm had been magical. Its pollen had puffed out in a myriad of little blue-violet motes that sparkled like glitter and smelled like vanilla. And he’d been able to draw glowing designs on his wrist with them, and it had been fantastic. Even chasing down the nearly impossible to see shyvine had been rewarding when he could sense the air pressure against his fake deer ears and hear the rustling of critters in the duff.

No, he had no regrets. He’d even compounded a bunch of newbie potions for his mom, for when she logged back in. Which wouldn’t be until after his dad left for work, but his dad had left for work a long time ago. Going downstairs, though, revealed her snoozing shape on the couch. Did all pregnant women sleep so much? You would have thought they would be able to run from lions or whatever. Nick peered in the pantry, was about to give up on breakfast, and turned to see muffins on the counter. She’d baked! He snitched one and returned upstairs to see what was going on in the group chat. What he really wanted was to go back to the game, but maybe it was for the best that he, you know, shower once in a while, and talk to his living, breathing friends.

Nick: hey, whats up

Fish: fairyboy picks flowers all night long, lol, srsly what was that

Then again, maybe centaurs were better company. Nick knuckled his eyes until they cleared and had a bite of the muffin while swiping.

Nick: jelly i see

Fish: not of what youre doing, lol

Fish: checked out your channel, it was lame, when are you gonn do somthin interesting

Oh, heck, the channel. Nick flipped to the video app and brought it up. Twelve viewers? Better than nothing. Four videos, though, counting the paused livestream, and as he watched the number clicked up on one of them.

When he switched back to the chat app, Blythe had woken up.

Blythe: I looked, it was pretty cool watching the game evolve

Fish: what evolving all i saw was lame npc dialogue

Blythe: no, really, it started out as a human camp with some centaurs

Blythe: because Greenweald, you know

Blythe: and then it became a centaur camp, suddenly lots of centaurs

Blythe: now its a centaur caravan and its going to the bridge

Blythe: obv a new quest, you never see that many centaurs in greenweald

Blythe: really cool, nick!

Nick paused in the middle of wolfing down the rest of the muffin. With it hanging out his mouth, his hands were free to reply.

Nick: didnt notice now that you say it that is cool

Fish: okay fine game responding to you to spawn new quests is pretty rad

Fish: can you please spawn less pathetic ones

Fish: lol

Nick rolled his eyes.

Fish: am logging into my familys accounts and setting them to subscribe and watch your stuff

Blythe: wait what? you have their passwords?

Fish: duh I live with them

Fish: also they dont care

Fish: arent I a good freind lol

Fish: no really if your’e gonna do loser stuff you need all the help i can give you my man

Nick chuckled and typed back, ‘thnx’ because he did appreciate it.

Shellie: hey lets do the arcade

Blythe: morning shellie

Shellie: 1 pm sound good

Blythe: I’m game

Fish: sure why not

Blythe: falc will come once he wakes up

Blythe: you coming nick?

Nick hesitated. The arcade was the go-to spot for most of the teens in the area, a pizza place in walking distance from most of the local neighborhoods. It was big enough for large groups, cheap enough to eat at frequently, and it had five old arcade machines that were still fun to waste quarters on, especially since quarters these days weren’t good for much else. During the school year they used it to study, or more often pretend to study, on some weeknights; now, in the summer, they went there to hang out, eat, waste some time, and then wander in the nearby ‘park’, which was a block of sidewalk with a handful of trees and one playground for tiny kids. It was a ten minute walk away, and faster by bike, and normally Nick would have left a note and gone.

But he kept wondering what the Greenweald looked like during the day. Would there be weather effects? He hadn’t tried fishing yet, what would fishing be like? There was a creek that ran through one of the corners of the forest, and it was the only place to score spotty perches.

Nick finished the muffin and typed: ‘maybe tomorrow.’

Fish: hes gonna game girls weve been dumped

Blythe: it is the second day of the beta!

Blythe: we’ll eat a slice of pizza for you

Fish: nah well eat the whole pizza lol

Fish: but do something more interesting or my fake family members will get bored of your stream

Falcon: hey I can go, see you all soon

Falcon: except nick whose too good for us

Falcon: XD

Nick sent them an entire line of random emojis and tossed the phone aside. Another muffin, a shower, and a drink later, he set the wireset in place and sank onto the bed.

Orange Cat Sticker KS is Live!

If you want a sticker (or the original), go grab one. International backers, this one should be affordable for you too!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/orange-cat-energy-stickers?ref=12c9yi 

Gamelit Novel, 11

Being able to taste things in the game was amazing, so of course, his mother had to ruin it. “I’m not sure how I feel about all this.”

“I don’t know why,” Nick said. “It’s the best stew I’ve ever had.”

“That’s what bothers me.” She poked her spoon at one of the browned lizardhen chunks. “If things start tasting this good in a game, won’t reality start disappointing people?”

Before Nick could explain that reality was disappointing, the voice in the back of his head woke up. Is this a valid concern? Will people cease to play the game because they believe the contrast will make their lives less appealing?

Would thinking back at the AI work? Because no way was he having this conversation out loud in front of his mom. It’s more likely that they’ll want to play the game more if the game makes their lives look boring.

Humans have corporeal forms that require upkeep, the AI replied, so Nick guessed he was now telepathic, which would have been more exciting if he could do it with people, rather than a computer. Or… would it be awful, to be able to read people’s minds? What was his girlfriend thinking while he kissed her? He hoped it wasn’t her homework, or how awkward he was at it.

No, telepathy was a terrible idea. Except with the AI. And his mom was staring at him now with a faint frown that didn’t bode well. If the game started upsetting her this early she might quit. And the AI was unhappy about this too, so maybe it was a game-breaking problem. “We couldn’t taste things in the game before. Now that we can… maybe… you’ll need to be really good at cooking to make things taste like this? And if you’re bad at cooking, you make stuff that tastes burnt.” He tore the flatbread, which was soft and doughy and perfect. They hadn’t had homemade flatbread in a long time. Dad explained his persistent inability to pull it off by claiming Mom had some magic touch with the yeast. “The AI can only work with your memories, not put new ones in you, I’m guessing. So it’ll never be more perfect than any really good thing you’ve had in the past. I think.”

Nick waited for the AI to chime in, but it didn’t. Which… was a little worrisome. Could it make new sensations? What the heck had he actually put on his head?

“I guess that would help,” his mother said. “If the meals here aren’t consistently the most amazing things you’ve ever had… but wouldn’t it be bad for their business if some of the food was gross? ‘Come, try our new headset, experience terrible meals!’”

That made him laugh. “It might turn some people off, but gamers are used to having their first efforts suck. Otherwise it wouldn’t be satisfying when you got better at things. You should have seen us all when we started. We’d swing a Crude Iron Dagger twenty times and miss nineteen. And all the time, some rabid squirrel or angry pig is biting our shins.”

“That sounds… adorable?”

“Until you die!” Nick paused. Would dying hurt now? Would anything hurt?

We are legally and contractually incapable of inflicting pain on customers.

But would that make combat feel… like all the good parts without the bad parts to convince you not to do it? Sort of like not having a conscience. Or… maybe, not having consequences to your actions ever be bad. Nick dipped the flatbread in the stew and chewed it, savoring it, and began to worry that his mother had a point. But he loved being able to smell the wood burning, and hear the shuffle of hooves on grass, and definitely taste. In fact, he couldn’t wait to taste everythingin the game.

There are implications to immersion for humans that were not immediately obvious,the AI said. We welcome feedback on this aspect of the game as you progress.

Which reminded him that they had progression to do. “So are you ready to go?”

“Go… where? Do you have a quest?”

“We need to go to EverVigil,” Nick said. “The king’s called up his heroes for a big war that’s coming.”

His mom’s eyes widened. “And he wants us?”

She… had a point there. But by the time they got to EverVigil, they’d have new, evolved classes. He’d be whatever super thing an assassin evolved into, and his mom would be… “Do you have a character class?”

“The game said my class would evolve ‘organically based on my choices.’ But I have some skills already. And I have a pouch full of magic cookies.”

“You have a magical item?” Nick asked, torn between envy and exhilaration. “What’d you get?”

“Like I said. A pouch full of magic cookies.” She rummaged in an unassuming belt pouch and came up with a beautiful, chewy-looking molasses cookie, like the ones Mom only made at Christmas for presents. The ones with black pepper and two kinds of ginger. “Wait, how did it pick this one?”

“I don’t know, but can I have it?” Nick wiggled his fingers, and she laughed and handed it over. It was, in fact, one of her molasses ginger cookies, and it tasted perfect. Like memories of the holidays when he was in elementary school, and he was ‘helping’ with the baking but actually eating the dough. The flashback was so intense, in fact, that he paused to see if it would go away.

Query: should these sensations be foregrounded, or are they distracting?

Nick tried another bite, and was swamped again. Um, definitely distracting. You can choose how strongly we feel our memories? Not going to lie, that’s a little creepy.

Did the AI sound disturbed? No, that was just him reading into the situation. We have little experience with handling the intrusion of non-game-related thoughts. The hardware interprets them as important if they reach a threshold of disruption of its signal.

Okay, definitely creepy. How are other people handling it?

Other players have not provoked similar reactions.

Which meant… what? That out of all the players in the beta, only he and his mom are thinking more about their real lives than the game? He eyed the cookie, which popped up a tag.

Spiced Holiday Cookie

This food grants a bonus to activities involving dexterity and speed.

“This is awesome,” he said aloud. “So you didn’t pick it for me?”

“No… at least, the only thing on my mind when I reached in the pouch was ‘I hope it’s Nick’s favorite.’ But I thought that was oatmeal pecan.”

“I do like oatmeal pecan, but these are definitely my favorite.”

“And I didn’t know because I only make them for holidays—” She paused. “So that means the game read my thought, and then somehow read your thought, and came up with the right answer?”

Query: Creepy, correct?

Yeah,Nick thought back. But probably unavoidable. The hardware works the way it works. “I guess so. Or maybe it got lucky, because I happened to be thinking about cookies when you mentioned them. Still, I’m not gonna complain.” He grinned. “So… ready to go?”

“I don’t know,” his mother said. “I’m going to have to nap soon. But I guess we can start and see how far I get.”

How far they got was barely out of camp, because all the centaurs wanted to talk to his mom, and try to give her side quests, and while it was funny it was frustrating too. The Call to Arms quest kept being up there, in the corner. He wanted that evolved class. He wanted to be first! Or, all right. Maybe not first, but he wanted his playthrough to matter.

His mom looked at him apologetically. “If I cook them one more dish, they’ll give me some kind of… award? Achievement? And a piece of gear. I should want gear, shouldn’t I? What should I do?”

Nick’s fantasy of himself arriving at EverVigil wrapped in a black cloak in the coolest armor ever seen, bristling with… he didn’t know. Spikes and smoke or something… all of it vanished. He looked at the camp of hopeful centaurs, and his mom—his newb gamer mom, who was his responsibility—and said, “You definitely need gear. So I guess, let’s see what they want you to cook.”

Had he been asked, he would not have chosen to spend the rest of their playtime cooking a feast, and yet… it was kind of fun. Doing the same kind of basic kill-and-gather-parts quests he’d labored through as a fresh player, putting together the dish only to have it evolve into a feast with centaurs everywhere, and dancing, and by then it was sunset in-game so there was a bonfire and… yeah. It was actually pretty good. When his mom logged off for her nap, he stayed to toast his weird deer toes by the fire and listen to the musicians, who’d mellowed out a bit. One of them was playing a mandolin, which he'd secretly thought was the coolest looking guitar-like thing.

“You’ve got long fingers, boy,” said one of the centaurs. “Care to learn?”

Could he? If he learned in the game, with the wireset… would he be able to play in person? Would that work?

There is no data available on the likelihood of carry-over of physical skills learned with the wireset.

But?Nick said, sensing one.

Accruing that data is part of the purpose of the beta.

And you can really teach me to play?

We have access to thousands of training resources. It would be a worthy experiment.

“I’d love to learn,” Nick said, and got up to join her. So maybe he’d evolve into some kind of assassin-bard. That could be cool, right? Or if it wasn’t, he could stab anyone who disagreed. And then make up a sarcastic song about them! “What do I do?”

Back in Time Tuesday: Nouveau Plenty

One of the Jokka (and an anadi to boot) from my archives, with a bowl of... stuff. Alien foodstuffs, I guess. Just an excuse to paint more nouveau stuff, and I thought an anadi deserved to be seen in a positive, happy light, as a bringer of life and fruitful things.

Shirtified this one, and there are magnets and stickers and mugs and such as well: https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/56494310-nouveau-plenty?store_id=3036951 

Natural Materials

This weekend my latest round of brushes gave up the ghost in the push to finish the book cover for the next novel, Fireborn’s Legacy. This set has been holding out for a year or so, supplemented by the last round of brushes: every time I buy replacements, the previous brushes become the ones I use for the parts of a painting where it doesn’t matter if the tips aren’t as precise as they used to be. In this way, I step through various sets of brushes as they expire, and this is good because I only use brushes made with animal hairs. In specific, the tail hairs of the male siberian Kolinsky sable, which is considered a pest in the few areas it can be found. The kolinsky sable can’t be farmed, so all the tail hairs collected for brushes are from animals trapped for other purposes; the brush farming is considered a by-product of a different industry altogether.

Nevertheless, these critters are hard to come by, and the supply (as you might expect) is not predictable. That means sometimes these brushes are (relatively) cheap, and sometimes they are outrageously expensive. Right now, they’re outrageously expensive; in 2016, I bought two #6 brushes for $20.23 each. A single #6 brush, when I checked yesterday, is currently $61. Some part of that is inflation, but a larger part of it is simply the fluctuation of a market based on natural materials.

I like this about my supplies. I could use synthetic brushes and papers that perform predictably and are not subject to odd spikes in supply or price, but what I love about art is how it forces me to interface with the corporeal world that I would otherwise fail to notice most of the time. It reminds me of the eccentricity and serendipidities of existing in a complex set of relationships that link us to the natural world… and how sometimes we are the master, and in control, and sometimes we are subject to the whims and furies of nature.

Appropriately, the brush company I’ve been buying from, Escoda, is a third-generation family business that has been making brushes for almost a hundred years, by hand. I’ve used many brushes in the decades I’ve spent making art, but the Escodas always draw me back. There’s just something about them.

Anyway, I can live without the (ridiculously overpriced) #6, but the #4, #2, #1, and #0s in my arsenal are dead and they’re the ones I use for fine detail. So I put those in the Dick Blick shopping cart, along with some paper and pencils, and now I’m running a grab bag sale on Three Jaguars comic art to pay for them. There are 20 grab bags and 7 are already gone… if you’re interested in one, I’d check it out soon. That URL is here: (https://studiomcah.etsy.com/listing/1662943952/three-jaguars-comic-original-artwork), and you can use COMICSALE to get half off. That coupon code is only for subscribers, because if my originals are going to homes at reduced prices, I want them in the hands of you all, preferentially. :)

Mostly I wanted an excuse to talk about brushes, though…!

Gamelit Novel, 10

Video game characters couldn’t cook.

Amanda wasn’t shocked by this. She might not have been a gamer, but she wasn’t an idiot either. If the point of games like this was to kill things in order to gain power, than the writers of the game had to give new characters with few abilities something within their measure to kill: in this case, domesticated animals small enough for a stewpot.

What she didn’t understand was how, having made that decision, the game writers didn’t give the questgivers even the most modest understanding of the cooking process. Especially since her decision to hijack the preparations from the clueless centaur by butchering the lizardhens herself made a fresh dialogue box appear in front of her:

Do You Wish to Open the Cooking Profession Panel?

“I… guess?” She had a Cooking skill, she recalled. But she had no idea what to do with the next panel, which listed at least twenty dishes and their ingredients, most of them unavailable if the desaturated font color was any clue. The only one that was available was ‘Lizardhen Roast,’ so she selected it to see what would happen.

A timer counted down, and then… a dish appeared in front of her, with a roasted chicken-like leg thing.

“Well, that was pointless,” she said. “Especially since they want to feed an entire camp. If you want to make the meat go further, you can’t just serve whole limbs of it to people. Is there a stew entry?”

There was no stew entry.

“Oh, for heaven’s—here, you, give me back the knife.”

Kavon the Cook obeyed with the same bemused respected he’d begun awarding her after watching her carve up the animals. “What will you do next?”

“Next, I’ll tell you to get me an onion.”

“An onion?”

“If there are onions in this world. Root vegetables of some kind? And whatever passes for celery, and carrots. And herbs. What do you have by way of spices? Oh, you keep your supplies in a wicker chest, that’s so pretty! Open it, now. And get that pot over the fire. I’m guessing you don’t already have broth, so we’ll have to start from scratch. Someone bring water.”

Soon the whole camp was darting to and fro on her errands, and Amanda was waving away game dialogues that wanted to know if she wanted to accept this task or that reward. She was busy cooking. How ridiculous was it that she had logged into a game just so she could end up in some new version of a kitchen? Except she missed cooking, and probably wouldn’t be able to do it for months. She shifted experimentally from hoof to hoof and her stout pony body reported no discomfort. She felt like she could stand for hours. How useful four legs were!

The stew was bubbling and she was instructing the tall female centaur on how often to skim it when Nick popped out of the brush. “Mom!”

“Nick! Are you hungry?” She pursed her lips. “Can you get hungry in the game?”

Her son looked someone had stretched a deer onto a human-shaped body and then elongated it, but he had the same facial expressions, which was both a relief and disturbing. “You can eat in game, but you couldn’t taste it before. Maybe you can now? What are you making? Wait, why are you cooking?”

“I had a quest,” Amanda said. “The stew hasn’t simmered long enough but you can try it, if you want.” She dipped the coarse wooden spoon into the pot and offered it to the deer, and a pang seized her, remembering the little boy who’d wanted a taste of whatever Mommy was making, and who ran off with spatulas full of brownie batter or half-frozen ice cream. Some of Nick’s body language survived into this weird version of him, and it didn’t quite hurt to see it, but the memories reminded her that nostalgia had originally been considered a sickness.

Nick’s eyes grew comically round after his first slurp. “You can taste now! Oh wow. This is amazing! Try it, Mom!”

He thrust the spoon at her, so she did and… in fact, she could taste it. Less like chicken and more like a gamier bird. Duck, maybe? Goose? She sipped again. “It needs salt. And pepper.” She called over her shoulder, “Do you people have pepper?”

“I can’t believe you’re bossing all these centaurs around,” Nick said as her posse scattered again to do her bidding. And then he laughed. “Also, Mom, you’re TINY.”

“I know!” she said. “I’m snack-sized for some of those monsters out there, I bet.”

He was leaning forward to spoon himself more of the stew. “This needs potatoes. Or bread? I don’t think there are any potatoes in the starting zone, or at least, there weren’t when I played it through originally.”

“But there’s wheat?” Amanda pushed up her sleeves. “Let’s make flatbread.”

Behind her, the camp of centaurs groaned.

Incoming Cat Stickers!

I'm planning on launching this one at the end of February... maybe the 20th? So if you're into cat photos, stickers, or art, you can use the link to be notified when the project goes live. 😸

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/orange-cat-energy-stickers

Gamelit Novel, 9

Thinking of making this my patrelocals serial! Updating every two weeks. Previous episodes here, via the gamelit novel tag, or the collection:

https://www.patreon.com/mcahogarth/posts?filters%5Btag%5D=gamelit+novel

---

Ray wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve this.

Well, no, he had an inkling of how he’d ended up in this… situation: by being the best. There were thousands of people who edited video for streamers, but few were so good they could bank on contracts from e-sports and MMO corps. He’d been expecting the call from Omen Galaxica the moment he heard about their big beta contest. In fact, he’d cleared his schedule in anticipation of Mollie’s call.

He liked that he could call her Mollie and she would give one of those rippling laughs of hers and say, “That’s right, Ray. Let’s do business!” As if they were sharing a joke: the basement dwelling guy and the shiny, beautiful exec being on first name terms. Who’d have thunk it.

He’d been right about being one of the team tapped to take on the editing job for their beta… one of only twelve. And she’d given him the plum, too: the contract for the max star power duo: SweetieGold, who’d made it big streaming last year’s bestselling MMO, Raiders of Aeons, and the monster MOBA streamer, KillzYourFase, who’d been talked into playing only because “having the AI dynamically respond to our every desire means I’ll be able to murder everything.” KillzYourFase had a history of such open contempt for MMO players that Ray bet they’d have millions of views the moment the camera went live.

Oh yes. He was going to make piles of money. And he loved Omen Galaxica’s new rig, which they’d let him demo half a year ago when they’d started talking up the refresh. With an editstream key, he could pull up the realtime views from both players’ HUDs—not a big deal—and place an environmental cam so he could look at the players from an external perspective—which was a big deal. A huge deal. The scope for cinematic cuts was enough to make anyone drool. He could even inhabit a view from the inside of a MOB’s head, and wasn’t he looking forward to the first boss they took on? That top-down view on the duo cutting at his kneecaps was going to be hilarious and awesome. It was a stream editor’s dream. And they’d given him the prize pair.

…and also, the dud.

“Look,” Mollie said, “you’re the only one I trust with this, Ray. You have the touch.” She talked like that, in italics. He was afraid he was picking it up. But she had such a bubbly voice, you forgave her the teenage careening from enthusiastic high point to high point. “And these two are special. I think they’re going to be the outliers that take off. But if they’re going to have a chance, they have to have a master managing their channel, because they don’t even have one.”

“A master?”

“A channel.” He heard her shuffling papers. “No, I’m sorry, the boy just started one.”

“The boy?”

“Yes! It’s a teen boy, and his disabled mom! Well, not disabled. But pregnant and on bedrest! Isn’t it already the most heartwarming story? He wants to share his love of the game with his family!”

Oh, God, he was dying. Not the good kind of dying either. The ‘kill me now’ kind.

“I’ll shoot you the info when I sign off here. You’ll see, it’s going to be great. I know you won’t let me down on this one, Ray. All my peers think it was a stupid idea—well, almost all of them—but they don’t understand the human angle! And also that we’ve maxed out our market share in the extreme gamer audience, we need to reach people outside it if we want to grow. This is going to break us out!”

A mom and a teen boy. Ray remembered what he’d been like as a teen. It hadn’t been all that long ago. To say he hadn’t been entertaining or heartwarming was an understatement. “I’ll do what I can for you, Mollie.”

“I know you will. And what you can is the best in the business! Talk to you later!”

He’d needed a double espresso after that little bombshell to calm down. Extra whatever it was his dad kept sending him. Ray glanced at the bottle: rum flavor? What even was rum flavor? Whatever, he’d take it. But after the reassuring buzz hit, he eased back into his command chair and checked on SweetieGold’s channel. Hugely popular for an MMO streamer: three million subscribers, just over 900,000 views on the latest where he was unboxing his beta hardware. But Sweetie, who’d taken off when people thought he was a girl and somehow kept all his subscribers after the face reveal, couldn’t hold a candle to KillzYourFase, who had 179 million subscribers, all eager to see him go pvp murderhobo. Other than an offhand video about how he was going to go visit the “stale, krusty world of loser mcloserfaces” with SweetieGold to see if he could turn the AI into a “psychopathic killer,” he hadn’t mentioned Omen at all. Which was fine. These guys were pro. They’d wait to launch until they could make a “best of day one” reel. That would be the teaser that would lead people to pay to subscribe to the realtime stream. Ray had all of one day to start mocking that up, which was more than enough. He checked the package: the editstream keys, contact info, login for the Omen Galaxica portal that was aggregating all the content. As he expected, both of them were playing, and not outputting to their channels.

As he expected, neither of them was all too interested in him, either. Sweetie’s response to his in-game message was: ‘yeah wtv, start cutting.’ But then, Sweetie had an editor on contract, so he knew the drill. KillsYourFase was even less interested: ‘make it less boring if you can.’ Ray sniffed. As if he could make a boring stream. Especially with what he had to work with: the two of them were cutting through a forest full of ghouls, the ‘Veilgrove.’ Nice.

Ray lost about an hour, watching and playing with the new tools. Then he thought—reluctantly—that he should check on Mollie’s charity case. He cringed when he found the boy’s channel, especially when he realized they were both streaming. Without any fanfare, any buildup, any paywalling… nothing. The kid was wandering through the woods like some kind of tourist, staring at… what? Flowers? And the mom was talking with centaurs? Not battling them. Not questing for them. Literally just in their camp, talking.

He owed it to Mollie to help, at least a little. Which of these was the least boring? God, they were both terrible. But the forest was all dark and poorly lit shadows. At least the centaur camp had activity in it. He foregrounded that stream and labeled it ‘Chatting with Centaurs’. Seriously, what could he do with that? Nothing.

Meanwhile, the AI had already generated a miniboss for Sweetie and Killz. Ray pulled his headset down and went to work.

Reminder: Newsletter Survey!

I'm trying to clean up my newsletter and make sure more of the people who stay on it are getting only the news they're interested in... if you're subscribed, please fill out my form!  And if you're not and you want to be, here's a sign-up page: https://mcahogarth.aweb.page/p/a9c47140-198a-4b8d-97c7-071742f60214 

Mocking up Fireborn's Legacy Cover

Leaning hard into 'weird book cover vibes', here's where I'm at with Fireborn's Legacy (Qora's novel, and the final Fallowtide book... also Fire War #0).

I'm trying to avoid doing the cover *after* finishing the book because the temptation to rush it is strong. So I'm developing it while writing, in the hopes they'll be done together!

Fleet Heraldry, and Worldbuilding Rabbit Holes

A brief digression now about why it’s taking me so long to make myself a Stardancer cup like the ones Taylitha’s always filling at some meeting… because not only have I drawn her and the women of the Stardancerwith those cups for years, but I’ve wanted one for about as long! But Fleet ships have coats of arms full of symbols… and symbols are condensations of real world experiences, history, culture, information. It’s no good for me to slap something on a cup without thinking about it. Was I the only one disappointed when merchandise from movies didn’t look exactly like the characters in it? Only the real thing will do!

Which means I have to decide what goes on the coat of arms for a starship, other than the obvious (the symbol of that particular ship, which in the case of the Stardanceris a dancing Karaka’An among the stars). Later coats of arms (among us humans) record the history of a family, institution, or person… it felt like a wasted opportunity to slap a dancing cat girl on a shield and call it ‘good enough.’

But then, as always, you fall down a rabbit hole. What data would the Pelted feel appropriate to convey about a starship? Fleet has been around for almost as long as the Alliance, so it’s got nearly five hundred years of history behind it… a history that’s tangled up with Earth’s, but as seen through a confused and often not well-informed lens. That means I get to design heraldry as conceived by people whose perception of heraldry is superficial. No doubt they’d grasp the visuals better than the meaning and richness of the historical versions. I am free, then, not to hew too closely to human norms unless it suits me, especially visually.

We have to start, as with all such things, with a use case… the Pelted’s, not mine. What would the Pelted want those coats of arms for? And I suspect it’s to give each ship a unique visual identifier, partly to make claim to a history they’re ambivalent about but determined to rise above, and partly to foster the esprit de corps they were smart enough to realize they needed, even for ships that come more in peace than in war.

My goal, then, was to have a customizable template that gives a unique result for each ship—and in this case, it has to be a particular hull, because the ship name might be re-used. Here’s how that broke down:

The easiest part was the charge: that being the symbol on the shield that is specific to that ship’s name (like the Stardancer’s dancing girl). Every ship has a new one created for them… which means someone is drawing ship’s charges. And given the number of ships there are in Fleet, that means a team of people are drawing charges.

Pause a moment with me to savor the realization that there’s a Fleet department that does nothing but keep track of, update, and design heraldry. That idea was so amusing that I spent a couple of days coming up with random factoids about them, including where they worked and how. (“They need a place to work. It’s probably near Fleet Central. But in a historical archive. What should I name a historical archive? Probably after the founder of Fleet. Who was that? Quick, I should come up with that person.” Etc.)

Anyway, the ship’s charge is the easy part. The next easiest was the crest, because Fleet uses an eagle on their flags. Obviously an eagle. But wait, there are ships that aren’t Fleet Regulars! What about Fleet Investigation Agency? What about Special Forces? First Voice? Obviously, we need MOAR BIRDS. (More birds it is: owl, falcon, and dove respectively.)

Another opportunity arose in the shield, because shields in heraldry come in dozens of shapes. I was going to pick the obvious one when I thought: ‘wait, why not use the variety somehow?’ Which is how the shield shape came to be associated with the ship class. The battlecruiser gets the spiked heater, but for instance, a warcruiser like the Sunshield that came to Taylitha’s rescue in Either Side of the Strand would use a tower shield.

After that I had four different quadrants to fill, and when combined they had to describe a specific ship. I chose to use the top flourish for crew elements—the left for crew type (feminic, masculic, or mixed complement) and the right for navigation style (Platy-assisted or standard). The bottom flourish I decided would be about the ship’s context beyond its hull… so on the left, the charge of the shipyard that built the ship, and on the left, its home port.

Pause a moment as I realize I need to design an entire new set of rules for starship and shipyard coats of arms. Pause again when I think: ‘oh, wait, every ship is going to have a home port, how does that work.’ This is how worldbuilding works: one quest begets another, and you have to choose which of the escaping thoughts to chase and which to save for another day.

So, later for starship/shipyard designs. When I square the visual symbols away—or at least, enough away that I can figure out the Stardancer’s—I get to the scroll on the bottom. Obviously the ship name goes in the center, but I have another chance with the left and right to add more data… and if I can, how can I not! So on the left, the ship’s enrollment date (when the name was first used for a ship in Fleet), and on the right, the commission date for the present carrier of that name. Here I had several long moments of unease, because now I have to decide how the Pelted decide to keep names, and whether those names are always assigned to a specific ship class—are all Stardancersbattlecruisers? Or were they sometimes scouts or couriers?—and then, more unnerving, how Fleet decides a ship is a particular class with five hundred years of design revisions under its belt. The first Fleet battlecruisers looked nothing like Alysha’s, 470ish years later… did they still call them battlecruisers? What makes a battlecruiser? (I’m thinking it’s the number of armaments).

A worry for another day! At least at this point I have a serviceable template that creates a portrait of a specific ship: the service, the ship class, what kind of crew it carries, its navigation system, where it was built and where it returns for refits, when it was commissioned and how long its name has been a thing in Fleet.

As long as I was doing all that, I thought… why not add some options for honors? So I did. Ships that have initiated a first contact have coronets above the shield. Ships that participated in major battles will have crossed swords. Ships that participate in multi-species initiatives will have supporters on either side of the shield: one Pelted, one alien. And ships that took part in the First Chatcaavan War get the battle honor mark, but one sword is replaced by four parallel claw marks.

Very good, I think, congratulating myself. Now you can tell the history of a ship’s honors by its coat of arms! And then I think: ‘oh no, but the coat of arms is everywhere: on the walls, on patches, on dinnerware and linens… even on a rug in the center of the bridge!’ So I am guessing it’s a good thing ships go in for regular refits, because that would be the time all that iconography is updated.

Finally, Alysha as captain gets her own version, one with a commander’s lance. The lance has meanings, too, but I got symbol exhaustion at this point and figured I would leave it for now. Or better yet, to apply to people for ideas. My discord peeps were extremely helpful brainstorming symbols for various shipyards and starbases, so maybe I’ll hit them up again!

This information finally allowed me to create a draft of the Stardancer’s coat of arms, which you see attached. But I’d also like to try making one for the Silhouette, the ship that goes skulking around the border during the Princes’ Game series, because it would have so many different elements: a corvette’s round shield, FIA’s owl, etc.

When a cleaned-up version makes it to a mug, shirt, sticker, or whatever… you’ll know how much went into it, and that it’s the real deal!

Back in Time Tuesday: Hadara and the Sun King

Going through my archives... here's a painting of a Changeling character, Hadara, and... I have no memory at all of what she was like or why she's apparently romancing an elven king, but there you are. XD

Gouache, as usual, and yes, I did the designs on her robe by hand, not with a stencil or a computer.

I shirtified this one (and I think there are mugs and stickers and magnets as well): https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/56494518-hadara-and-the-sun-king?store_id=3036951 

Short Story: If She Could Go

Kickstarter backers funded this short story about how Reese's relatives came to live on Escutcheon... I hope to one day use it as a seed for a new collection about Reese's activities during the Fallowtide. In the meantime, enjoy!

Serialization Q!

Say I'm serializing a long form story here. Tell me your preference!

Happy New Year! And Reese's Relatives

I hope everyone's having a great start to 2024... let me contribute, with the draft of the Kickstarter-funded short about Reese's relatives! This is the draft... if you'd like to wait for the cleaned-up version, I'll have that in a week or so.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10FdbtctDlCn4y9CpcfKoYxRPqZNRNQ461Ws9A2BjL-I/edit?usp=sharing 

Jaguar at Work, mid-December Edition

It was my plan to spend December goofing off, and instead somehow I’ve been knee-deep in projects. How did that happen? I think I got tired of my own complaining, to be honest. I was doing the equivalent of the South Park underpants gnomes: step 1, write. Step 2, publish. Step 3…? Step 4, profit! And then when step 4 wasn’t happening very well, I got maudlin and mopey.

I suppose I am out of the mopey stage. It certainly helps to feel like I need the money! But anyway, here are my various initiatives, for the curious.

First, the AI audiobooks. This beta is so very much a beta, full of things I can’t fix or change or that break. But I’ve managed to get the following books out:

• Mindtouch. But not Mindline, or the subsequent books, because the AI can’t handle the /slashes/ I use for psychic dialogue.
• An Exile Aboard Ship.
• Thief of Songs and Cantor for Pearls. This was actually a relief to me, because I wasn’t looking forward to shopping for a narrator for them if I ever decided to do them.
• Marda Quincesinger, Postulant. I think I might like this one the most!
• Vinny the Armadillo Makes a Friend. Surprisingly this one was eligible, so I went for it.
• Princes’ Game Summaries. So was this one, but the AI wouldn’t let me remove all the sketches, so… I admit I played with it a little. Once you get to that part of the book you’ll see what I mean.

Gratifyingly, some of these audiobooks already have orders (and no returns), so it appears they’re serving their purpose. I still want to hire humans eventually, but this will do for now. I’m hoping to get more of them out, once Amazon answers my latest “this is broken, and I can’t continue without it being fixed” email.

Next, library-available paperbacks and hardcovers. Previously I’ve done all my POD (print-on-demand) paperbacks via Amazon, but that virtually guarantees they never appear at brick and mortar stores, or in libraries. So this month I bit the bullet (grumbling all the while) and shelled out for ISBNs so I could use IngramSpark to create editions that will be available elsewhere. IngramSpark also allows for wholesale orders, which makes the books more attractive to retailers.

I don’t think this is a big deal for most adult fiction, but the children’s books will always be dead in the water without wider distribution and I think, though I’m not sure, that I’ll be able to do smaller hardcovers through them. I’m investigating. Whatever the case, I’m planning to move all the children’s books over, and the nonfiction.

If you’d like to see where you can now order (though for now, it’s just Marda), here’s the list of retailers, which includes Walmart and Target as well as libraries and schools. That list also includes UK, Europe, and New Zealand outlets if you’re in those locations. The new ISBN is: 9781963189001.

Refreshed Ebooks. About half? Maybe less than half? Of my ebooks are from my hand-coding era, and while they’re beautiful and functional, updating them is a pain. Since buying formatting software, I’ve only had to do a single master document to export ebook, paperback, and hardcover editions, which means if I find a typo or want to release an anniversary edition, I don’t have to separately update three different end products; I just fix the master. This is such a huge advantage that I’ve started updating all the hand-coded books… which was part of what inspired the Earthrise kickstarter I’ll be wrapping up after Christmas.

Bonus: updating these books makes them available for the AI narration beta. The hand-coded ones don’t meet the criteria.

Finally, I’m working on New Reader Support items. The biggest of these is the Jaguar Chimerical Book Catalog, which lists all of my books and gives you overviews and ‘if you want this, then try this’ type data. I’m done with the first revision, so if you want to take a look and give me feedback on how to make it more useful, let me know!

I also updated and revised (and recovered) the Peltedverse Guidebook, which you can re-download here if you want a new copy.

The last thing I’m doing is what people call ‘reader journeys’, where you have series of emails that walk people through useful information. I’ve done one for Alysha’s books, where the first email tells you about the wiki and the guidebook; the second email gives away a copy of “Leadership Lessons” as a way of informing the reader that the Fleet stories continue in a separate series of short story collections, and the last one talks about series adjacent to Alysha (Her Instruments, Dreamhealers, etc) and offers a link to the book catalog.

I’d like to do one next for Mindtouch, since I’ve signed up for a few giveaways in January.

The one thing I’m not doing much of is writing, because I’ve concluded that I need to write Qora’s story before I finish Surela 2, and then I need to release them both simultaneously, or close to. So I’m taking a lot of notes for that, many of which are ending up on the wiki… so if you’re a wiki watcher, go enjoy. I also have the short story for the Kickstarter, which is partially complete, to finish up, and I have a note here that says I should write another short story about Reese in January.

Christmas is in less than one week, and I expect I'll slow down until then. After, we'll start livestreaming the Kickstarter doodles. Then... 2024! Who knows what next year will look like....

Marda Audio!

I continue to experiment with the Amazon AI beta, which I broke three times now, but it's (sort of) working again. They added four more voices, and one of them was a sweet-tempered British girl so I picked that one for Coracle... and when I started listening to it in the car to see how it sounded, I just... kept listening. It is quite listenable. I'm not sure how I feel about it, except that I'm glad to have another book to offer to my visually impaired readers.

Some other notes:

• The beta doesn't currently let you remove items from the table of contents, so I was stuck with it reading out the alt text for the two images at the beginning of the book. I did, however, get the idea to change the pronunciation of the word 'image' to 'image of the title page, with floating tree' and that made it much more palatable. Which brings me to:
• I made that change and it was immediately reflected in the sale sample. You can't even get that fast a shift with ebook uploads. Very nice!

Honestly, I have so many conflicting thoughts about the use of AI. Technology's always made some processes obsolete: do we even think about fonts making calligraphy a niche art? Certainly no monks were harmed in the transcribing of any modern book, and widespread use of books wouldn't be possible if they were still handcrafted. As always, technology brings both fruits and rot, and we get to decide what to do about it.

I think maybe my rosy future is one where the creators of AI tools pay licensing fees to creative people to train their models, but I have no idea if we'll end up there. We certainly won't if art isn't valued, and I wonder if artists haven't dug their own graves with centuries of arrogance, flakiness, and entitlement. Difficult thoughts.

But anyway, do have a listen to the sample, it is surprisingly charming. (It is Amazon/Audible only, because it's an Amazon beta program, so if you're on BN or Kobo and can't find it, that's why!)

Jaguar Catch-up, Christmas Edition!🎄

December’s not usually a busy work month for me, but this year I have a bunch of projects simmering! Here's what's up:

Isn't this the best review ever? What more could you want in a holiday collection?? Sleigh Bells and Starships is out, and, as you can see, inspiring cavities in readers with its sweetness! If you need a holiday pick-me-up, grab it and re-read old patron gifts and enjoy the all new (enormo) novella. You wanted to hear how Lesandurel and Araelis got on… I promise you, it’s funny and lovely and there's a lot of it. Yes, it was trying to become a novel. As usual!

Also in keeping with the season, a Certain Fairy Godanimal sent me the Inkvent 2023 calendar, so every day I’m putting up a youtube short so you can open the little doors with me and see what ink color’s waiting for us. My first two shorts were learning experiences… by the third, I was in the groove, and now I’m really enjoying the format. Go take a look!

Moving on, my Kickstarter paperbacks are arriving in stages, because Amazon sent them in five different boxes. That’s how it took me a while to discover that I’d messed up on Rose Point Holiday, uploading a file that wasn’t laid out to my standards. I redid it, uploaded it, and ordered a physical proof this time to prove I didn’t mess it up a second time…! This is the first time I’ve made an error like this in years, and of course I made it to the tune of over $150. Lessons painfully learned! But I hope to have all the books in my hands by next week so I can begin the final stages of fulfillment for the campaign.

Meanwhile, for fun, I’ve been working on a text game, “Rival Mages,” as a way to learn coding for games. I love playing this kind of text-based game, and it occurred to me ‘wait… I’m a writer and this is pretty basic-looking, from an assets-and-effort standpoint… why not try it?’ So I downloaded the Choicescript engine and have been experimenting. (My Discord users have been patient about my many many screenshots and babble about what I’m learning about game design). 

This was my ‘goof off’ project for December, and I got pretty far into it when I got distracted by…

...Amazon opting me into the AI narration beta, which I requested so that I could produce cheap audio editions for the visually impaired fans who used to use text-to-speech functions on their devices to listen to books with no audiobook versions. I don’t see AI narration as a replacement for the experience of an audiobook narrated by a voice actor, any more than ebooks replaced special edition hardcovers with foil dust jackets and color plates. But I have no qualms restoring the text-to-audio options that allowed people who can’t read to enjoy my work. The results are surprisingly good…! Particularly since the tool allows you to train the AI how to pronounce unfamiliar words. Using it, I got a Mindtouch audio edition done in two hours, and it was available at Amazon/Audible in half a day. That’s… honestly, really stunning.

You can listen to the sample here! 

Having said that, the beta tool is a beta tool and breaks often. I’ve reported four different issues with it so far, and two of them are game-breaking and have halted my progress completely! I have to wait for them to resolve my tickets before I can continue. I am strangely impatient, because I have about 30 books that need audio editions. Some part of me is hoping they make enough profit that I can afford to hire narrators for them... high hopes, jaguar!

Finally, I’m also embarking on a significant retooling of my business processes. A couple of those initiatives involve getting my children’s books into catalogs via a different vendor (IngramSpark), which required a significant and painful outlay in cash; and reformatting the early Alysha books so that I can try email marketing with them. Since I haven’t so far been successful in finding a job, it behooves me to make a greater effort to raise my writing income. As usual, there are no guarantees, but everyone assures me I could monetize my assets better and I'm willing to take advice.

What I definitely want for Christmas is a job that allows me to continue to fulfill my other responsibilities!

Anyway, that's what's going on, amid the cookie-baking, various mom and family things, and the unexpected and lovely cold weather we're getting. A reminder that Discord is the best place to ask me (or other fans) questions, so if you need a fresh invite link here it is! And as always, comments, suggestions, and drive-by greetings are always welcome.

Poem: Wool-gathered Child

Wool-gathered child, who walks

as if through cloud-cloaked air,

and dances thoughtlessly

in dreams that shroud the light:

you forget your flesh,

and then in slow naivete

you wonder how 

the world around you runs.

The rules of Earth are mysteries

to you, unknowable, a matter of faith

and not subject to experiment.

Oh, I know your secret,

air-born aesthete, blind outside

your pale cocoon: so

deep do you spin your dreams

they occlude your sight, and layered

'round you deepening they

snow you in until they block out

the sunlit real and you --

you do not know how to see.

I look at you and in your eyes

I see a fragile fantasy.

How strange that you look at me

and the world we live in

and think the same.

But if you woke tomorrow and

could strip the cloudy veils

from your sight,

would you still be you? Or

would you fly apart and return

to the stuff of nonsense

that alone made order of an Earthly, fleshy life?

Wool-gathered child,

spirit built of clouds:

too much wool-gathering

made you, but also set you at 

a star-shelled remove.

You are of this world, 

but you do not move through it.

When you at last return to the matter

from which you sprung,

only God will know how much of you

was ever really here.

Time for a Reader Poll! Surprises

What's better...for big reveals to be known to the reader before the characters know, and to see the characters figure it out... or to be surprised at the same time as the characters?

Family Likenesses

I used tracing paper to extrapolate Jeasa's profile from Jahir's... and had so much fun I figured I'd add Kolvin (on the left) and Amber (on the right, behind Jahir) as well.

Amber's supposed to take after his maternal grandfather a bit.

These were fun! I put them on the wiki.

New Species Lineup!

After years of saying I'd update the species line-up for the back of the Pelted books, I finally picked up the sketches I started three years ago and finished them! The results are much higher quality... and also far too large for the back of the book. I was forced to chop them up into separate pictures...!

Here, then, is the poster-length version, the chopped up pieces that will go into the backs of new books, and (for fun) the actual drawings. I did 75% of them on tracing paper, and the remainder on normal paper.

These'll go into the wiki later this week, once I figure out which page I want them on. :)

Space Nouveau Alysha

Trying to return to old habits of just randomly finishing things without any attachment to how they turn out and what they're for... so naturally, it was a picture of Alysha.

Believe it or not, this one was such mixed media: marker, color pencil, gel pen, technical pen, and even acrylic gouache (making up for my poor eyesight by correcting my many errors...). Was... fun, though! And does, in fact, remind me of older art I used to do.

Kitty Empress

My little doodle of my game character from the con. XD