Good morning!

Last week I celebrated one year(ish) of blogging. This week I celebrate… moving! That’s right, most of my family’s stuff is packed up and Saturday we’re gone. Except to come back and patch up the place for a few weekends, but as far as living here is concerned, Saturday spells curtains. (Except there’s no “c”, “i”, or “n” in “Saturday”…)

Fortunately, the internet exists everywhere (that I’m willing to live…), so you can continue to expect to hear more of me in the meantime. But I do have every reason to believe that my schedule will be a bit chaotic for a while, since my wife, baby, and I are moving into my parents’ basement while the place we want to buy is getting finished. Life will be crazy, but at least grandma will be available to babysit more often…

Anyway, before the writing updates, this week I wanted to give a shoutout to Cassette Beasts¹. This is not a Bloggyness Review because I haven’t finished the game, but after playing several hours and having an excellent time I really wanted to talk about it and recommend it.

Cassette Beasts is in the “Monster Taming” genre, of which the most popular example—by miles and miles—is Pokemon, but that isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of other examples of games that at least have cult followings: Dragon Quest: Monsters is one example, and Monster Hunter: Stories is another, although both of those are spin-offs of larger franchises; Temtem and Coromon are examples of new franchises that tried to carve a niche into this market.

Anyway, of the above titles that I’ve played, Cassette Beasts is quickly solidifying itself as my favorite. The game has a strong visual style (including very odd, but intriguing, monster design), a wonderful pun game, an engaging story with lovable characters, and its innovations on the genre range from a completely new approach to the type-advantage system that’s nearly ubiquitous in the genre to extremely enjoyable local couch co-op. My wife and I play this game together on Switch and are having an excellent time. Definitely expect a full review when it comes out.

And, of course, don’t forget… The Failed Technomancer, chapter 8, is posted!

Writing Updates

I don’t plan on providing Betrayed Technomancer updates unless I hit significant milestones (and I should probably start doing that for Inner Demon, too, even though that one is in a publishing stage rather than a drafting stage), so there may or may not be a few blog posts before that story gets mentioned again.

As for my current project, I can tell you that I’m extremely excited, extremely motivated, and wrote over 9000 words in roughly a week. Considering I rarely write more than 500 words a day with the time I currently have, that’s a significant feat. I still want to hold off on more details until I get closer to the end—maybe when I finish the first draft, but it’s a short story so that won’t be too long—and then I can share a scene or two.

Sorry for the secrecy, but I’m keeping this one a little close to the chest for now!

Send-Off

What stories (be it in books, games, movies, etc.) have surprised you recently by how good they are? Why?

¹_{As a reminder, I leave hyperlinks because I like hyperlinks and I think it’s polite to, at least every once in a while, leave a link directly to what’s being talked about. I’m not getting paid or sponsored in any way for this. I’m just sharing stuff I like.
Also, a significant chunk of these links are to Wikipedia anyway, and I highly doubt that anyone gets paid by Wikipedia links. They are too beggy for money in the first place to be paying people.}