This is crossposted with my newsletter.
Hey all,
February has come and gone. Spring is right around the corner.
I spent the month working on the new chapter of You are the Chosen One. I took a chunk of February off of it, so that I could do some concept art before diving into all the pages. But now it’s ready to get the ball rolling. When I’m working on Chosen One stuff, I have the whole thing written as a script. Then I go through and mark what are new areas and characters that need to be designed. This time around I sat down to make sure the characters had more than one outfit. There are only a few new locations in this chapter, so switching to that now seemed like a good idea. Like I always say, it’s available to read for anyone who backs my patreon.
Speaking of my patreon, I’ve been considering making a discord server for Patreon backers. Is that something that you all would be interested in? It’s something a lot of the patreons I back have. They are nice. I might use them to do movie nights once a month or something. Maybe a monthly q&a? Anyway, chime in if this appeals to you.
While working on all these new pages, I’ve done a good job stay ahead by doing art streams with Alina Pete and Jose Pimienta. It has been a pretty fun time. I put Alina and I’s streams together on a youtube playlist. So if you want to check it out, you can watch archives of Alina and I chatting here.
We mostly talk about what we have been reading and watching. Alina is in the middle of playing Cyberpunk 2077. I talk about whatever I’ve been watching or reading that week. We also go off on a lot tangents about whatever comes up, whether that be furries, opinions about different writers, and anything really.
One of the things I mention is a novelle Psalm of the Wild Built by Becky Chambers. It’s about a world where AI was created and when the robots rebelled they didn’t kill all the humans. They simply stopped doing their assigned buts and ventured off into the wilderness to find their own meaning. Now centuries later the monk main character is traveling to an abandoned temple to find the reason for her unhappiness. She runs into a robot and the two travel together and learn about each other. It was very quiet and introspective. The bulk of the book is the two leads on a road trip through the woods. They trade assumptions humans and robots have about each other. There is discussion about finding purpose in life, burn out, and taking care of yourself. It’s kinda short which I think helps the pacing. It’s long enough to really dig into its themes but if it was longer it could easily ended up dragging. I found it because I was looking for some books exploring Solarpunk, a more hopeful and pro-environmentally friendly view of the future and sci-fi worlds (in contrast to the bleakness to cyberpunk dystopias)
I’ve also been getting into Mythic Quest, a comedy on Apple TV that is about a game studio. It’s really funny. But I especially like that both seasons so far have an episode in the middle which is a self contained story that is only tangentially related to the rest of the season. But it is tied to it thematically. Like in season 1 you get an episode that follows the rise and fall of an indie game studio in the 90s. You see it through the eyes of a couple that made a successful game together, but when they try to make a sequel there is a clear clash of art vs commerce. That is spilling into the couple’s romantic relationship. It’s very bittersweet and connects thematically to the clash between the creative director of Mythic Quest and it’s head coder. It was a nice poignant story that added some more emotional depth to what is at stake for the employees of Mythic Quest.
Then the second season has its own one off episode. It follows the early career of an old fantasy writer who writes the lore of the Mythic Quest game. He’s trying to break into scifi and fantasy writing in the 70s, but his talents aren’t suited for prose. In the episode, his short story is critiqued by two other newbie authors. He takes their criticism badly and spirals. However, after drunkenly seeing pong in a store window, he has an epiphany about the future of writing. When he tries to explain he basically explains open world games and games with variant endings.
The thing that I appreciated (and maybe it’s something I picked up because I write) is that the criticism he gets makes it clear that he’s a writer that is frequently distracted by making things different with his world and explaining why. And because he is so caught up explaining why the world developed a certain way, he is forgetting to make the reader invested in the plot and characters. That’s bad for prose, but is well suited for an open world game where the gameplay is more the focus than the backstory. The player’s investment is in their character because they made themself. Then they can engage in world lore as much or as little as they want.
Anyway, I’m gonna keep my nose to the grid stone in March. The City Between and You are the Chosen One are staying on track with their weekly updates. But I also have a graphic novel to write. Blue Moon by me and Meredith McClarren is go. So I’m sitting down to write a bunch for that. 
That’s all for this month. Thanks for your support! Please back my patreon or get something from my store if you can. Have good month!