Something… something about today feels oddly familiar… as if I’ve… experienced it before… Strange. Wonder what that’s about.
Welcome back to my newsletter! I’ve been reliably told that subscribing can free you from seemingly infinite time loops. Probably best not to risk it.
Writing and Publishing
Looking Back
January… was an all right month. I finished revisions on the shortest part of Halfwhisker (part 4), but I’m still not very pleased by how much I accomplished in general. This is relative to my writing time—work and family kept me pretty busy, but it was weirdly difficult to push myself forward and write when I did sit down to do so.
It’s good exercise, though—writing when unmotivated can be useful to find motivation, and if nothing else it at least ensures I’ve always got a little bit of something going on (and helps with rebuilding momentum).
I’m also a bit frustrated that Findaway Voices/inAudio hasn’t expanded Inner Demon‘s audiobook distribution yet, with no good explanation why.
Looking Forward
I’m taking a short break from Halfwhisker. Yes, I’m not far from the finish line (for this round of revisions), but Part 5 is arguably the most important part of the book—it’s the conclusion, the payoff for all that came before, after all. But it’s also the part that’s getting the most extensive rewrites, so I want to go into it feeling a lot fresher, a lot more enthusiastic.
That’s why I’m writing a short story this month. February is a short month, so a short story fits—but I’d like to get it entirely written and polished before the month ends, so I’ll need to carefully manage my process.
I also want to carefully manage the word count, both so this project doesn’t explode and so I can submit it to Writers of the Future—because why not?
Whatever happens, the short story will eventually end up here.
Oh—I also have an article idea that has been cooking in the back of my mind for a while. February might be the month it finally sees the light. We’ll see.
The Blog
If there’s one thing I didn’t struggle with in January, it was writing blog posts. The month started off with a bang, in my opinion, with a lengthy review of After Moses: Evensong, then kept on trucking without a slow moment.
- After Moses: Evensong: As the conclusion to the After Moses series, one that I consider an easy top favorite, a lot was riding on Evensong sticking the landing. And, I have to say, I’m quite impressed with this finale.
- American Paladin: Dust Sacrifice: A graphic novel precursor to Larry Correia’s upcoming American Paladin novel, I really liked this novel as an appetizer for what’s to come, but I probably would have been left wondering “Is that all?” if this really was all.
- Lifebinder: Ironically enough, I didn’t find as much life in Lifebinder as I did in the book that preceded it, Deathbringer, but I still found things I liked and I still plan on reading Bloodlust when it comes out.
My Reading List
I schedule most of my blog posts in advance, so I might have just recently finished Blake Carpenter’s The Way of Mortals at the time this goes out, but at the time of writing it’s my current read. There are things in this book that I like way more than even Deathbringer, and there are things that I’m struggling with—the review will say more when it comes out.1 Overall, I think this is an extremely well-done book, at least thus far, but it’s got some (tastefully handled) content that I’m not sure I want to put up with right now.
What comes next, though? I’m not sure! Life has been wearing down on me lately, so I’m tempted to pick up a childhood favorite for a near-guaranteed pick-me-up—the book is called Sea of Trolls, by Nancy Farmer, and it just might be my most-reread book growing up.
That said, my TBR list feels nearly infinite at times, so I also might just see what’s easily available and what piques my interest. On the traditional side of publishing, Red Rising (Pierce Brown) has been recommended to me by an increasingly large number of people; I’m also interested in reading Correia’s Academy of Outcasts, assuming the book can be purchased DRM-free off of Amazon (and assuming that by that point Amazon has lifted its anti-customer ban on downloading purchased, DRM-free ebooks). On the indie side of things, I’ve got a handful of books that are also in the Amazon limbo.2 I’m hopeful that Redlanders (EJ Free) and Pop Culture Heretic (Kristin McTiernan) don’t fall into that limbo, but they are currently the only indie books on my short list that I haven’t yet confirmed whether or not I can purchase them and actually own them.
Finally—What Else do I Recommend This Month?
This game is amazing.
The core story of Wingspan is that you are a bird enthusiast of some sort collecting these feathered creatures for an aviary—or, more of a nature preserve. In gameplay terms this translates to you collecting resources like food, cards, and eggs, and using those to play birds into your habitat and get increasing rewards for doing so. The game has a really interesting mechanic where you are able to do less and less as the game goes on, but if you played your cards right you get more and more out of each action—it’s a lot of fun!
As well, as is pretty much always expected from a game published by Stonemaier, the build quality of Wingspan is excellent. Everything has a premium feel to it. And the art… the art! It’s gorgeous. Every card is a unique bird, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone actually painted, in watercolor, every single card—all one-hundred and eighty (or so) of them. (Producing this game must have been radically expensive.)
If you enjoy medium-weight games—meaning, games that take ten minutes or so to set up and take down, and that take most likely around an hour to play—I can’t recommend Wingspan enough. And, if you end up getting more addicted than I was, you will also probably be excited to know that the game has plenty of expansions, including a new one coming this year, as well as two existing spinoffs (Wyrmspan, themed around dragons, and Finspan, themed around fish) with their own expansions. It… it boggles my mind. Most board games are lucky to sell enough copies to break even, let alone reach a level of success that allows for both expansion and spinoffs, and for those spinoffs to get their own expansions. It’s crazy.
Crazy fun.
- But the review is going to come out a lot later than this newsletter because, again, I’m scheduling things in advance as much as I can. ↩︎
- I’m not going to buy a license to “own” a book that can be revoked at any time. That’s just foolishness—and it also means that I’ll be forever yoked to Amazon, at least if I don’t want to lose access to the digital library I’m slowly building out. So I just won’t read books in this situation if they aren’t available elsewhere (to purchase and actually own), or if they aren’t in libraries ↩︎
Boo Ludlow 
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