It’s Halloween season! Finally! My favorite holiday! Time to go hunt down some haunted corn mazes…

Welcome back to my newsletter! If you end up enjoying what you’re about read, or if you want to keep up with my writing projects, consider subscribing. Or, if you don’t want to wait, I’ll put a Subscribe button right here for you.

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Writing and Publishing

At the time of writing, Inner Demon‘s audiobook is not out yet—but I’m hopeful I’ll be able to change that before this post goes live!

I did finish Halfwhisker revisions last month, specifically for Part 2, and have begun work on part 3. Halfwhisker Part 2 ended up being about 70k words—I think Part 3 will be shorter, but we’ll see. We’re still at over 100k words between Parts 1 & 2.

And speaking of Part 3, that’s my primary objective this month. I’m setting a loose goal of finishing my draft 2 revisions by the month’s end.

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The Blog & Etc

In September… I got cancelled! Well, that actually happened late August, but I wrote about my experience in September—getting cancelled just isn’t what it used to be. Or, perhaps, riding the wave of cancellation to increased notoriety (rather than eliminated) wasn’t as commonly known back in the day? I don’t know.

In addition, I reviewed Glitch’s newest series, Knights of Guinevere, and Cosmere Roleplaying Game (Stormlight setting).

• Cancelled, and Lessons Learned: When I got cancelled for supporting Jordan Lee, I applied some lessons I had learned from observing other authors, and I documented my experience—and the lessons I learned or applied along the way—here.
• Cosmere TTRPG: Have you ever taken a bite into a sweet, juicy apple, then had to spit it out because you found a massive, foul worm inside? Well. That was my experience here. The game mechanics are an excellent evolution of the direction Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition took d20-based gameplay, while the world and setting indulges too much in Sanderson’s modern sex and sex identity politics.
• Knights of Guinevere: A Pilot episode for a lovely sci-fi modern fairy tale that I went into hesitantly interested and left extremely enthusiastic.

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What Am I Reading?

I thought I was going to finish out The Bartimaeus Trilogy with Ptolemy’s Gate… Instead, I discovered Comanches: The History of a People (TR Fehrenback) and ended up reading that for so long that my library hold for Ptolemy’s Gate ran out.

Comanches is a really interesting, raw look at the Amerindians and their history, with a particular emphasis on, as the name of the book would imply, the Comanche tribes. I’m not reading it solely for the sheer joy of learning history, though—I’m taking direct, intentional inspiration from the Comanches as I’m developing certain rat clans in the world of Halfwhisker. Little peeks at what the end result will be arise in Halfwhisker, but most of this work will be paid off in future books.¹

Deathbringer… I only read the first chapter before I got sucked into Comanches, but it has a lot of promise and I’m excited to return to it. Here’s the general premise: on the day of her wedding, a young woman and her fiance are murdered. The young woman then wakes up, revived by a magic sword, and is told she has only a little time to avenge herself and retain her new lease on life before death claims her again.

If that sounds fun to you, the book was unfortunately pulled from Amazon because the ‘Zon mistakenly flagged Blake Carpenter for having multiple author accounts:

So this is a fun way to start the weekend: Amazon just terminated my KDP account due to having multiple accounts…which is news to me.

— Blake Carpenter (@BCarpenterBooks) September 19, 2025

It’s also available on Kobo, which is where I bought it, and a few other sites, if I’m not mistaken.²

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Anything Else I Recommend?

Love Letter is a fun, light card game where you compete to deliver a love letter to the princess. It’s incredibly easy to learn, plays quickly, and facilitates a fun social experience—meaning, I wouldn’t play this game with strangers solely to get the opportunity to play the game, but I really enjoy playing Love Letter with existing friends and family so we can talk and spend some quality time together.

Fun fact: My wife first learned of, and played, this game in Russia, so our copy is entirely in Russian. I can’t read a lick of it, but she still was able to teach me how to play; I’ve since gone on and taught other people how to play, using our Russian copy, and we’ve all had a grand time.

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1. I really enjoy “horse-riding, plains barbarian” as a fantasy archetype—the Dothraki from Game of Thrones being one of the best-known examples (and a favorite of mine), but also the Thrithings-men from the Osten Ard books (Tad Williams). After thinking on these and how to apply this archetype into my world, rat-barbarians riding lizards captured my imagination, and developing that into a people has been really fun. ↩︎
2. I encourage everyone to, where possible, not buy from Amazon. Yeah, it’s not always easy or convenient, given how sticky Amazon’s ecosystem is, but buying from other sites (especially direct from an author’s website) may result in the author getting a higher royalty, and may result in you getting a DRM-free copy of the book that you can download, giving you true ownership—far better than Amazon’s effective indefinite lease system. ↩︎