Hello, fair friends!
Hope you’re having a good month. I’ve been off on holiday for a bit and laid low with a tremendous stonker of a cold for a different bit (probably related, though, since I spent a fair bit of time in a pool hundreds of other people were also in), so it’s been a little slower. Been nice, though!
Wot I Wrote
I’m making progress on the LitRPG I mentioned last time, with the hopes of being able to launch it soon! The plan remains to publish it for free, one chapter at a time, so keep an eye out for that. Currently trying to work out how much of it I need to have written before I start pushing chapters out – I want to make sure I’ve got a comfortable backlog so I’m not rushing to stay ahead of schedule! I think maybe a couple more months and we’ll be there.
Although I didn’t actually write it this month, I do want to flag the Backerkit pre-launch page for Chronicles of the Crossing, which will feature a novel by yours truly! Follow that page now to get updates – the actual crowdfunding campaign is due to launch in October, at which point you’ll be able to back the project to get a lot of awesome works set in the world of the dead.
Wot I Enjoyed
I am still playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, and most likely will be until at least, like, September. That’s a long game, and I don’t have an awful lot of gaming time. There’s a lot of depth to it that I hadn’t remembered from playing it as a teenager, and rediscovering all the systems is proving a lot of fun.
I did pick up 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim on the recommendation of some friends whose opinions I trust, though, so perhaps I’ll have to start having FFXII as my, like, home game on the PS5 and then 13 Sentinels as a more portable experience on Switch?
I’ve just finished reading Thunderstruck by Daniel Quigley, whom I know from his endeavours with Lost Boys Press and the Don’t Make It Weird podcast. It’s pretty much exactly the book I’d have expected him to write, which I mean as a compliment: thoroughly silly, and it knows it’s silly and leans into that.
This month, I also took delivery of my copy of Break!! RPG, which I backed on Kickstarter. It’s a genuinely lovely book that’s really nice to read, which obviously is less important for an RPG than how it is to play but I like it nonetheless.
In music, I’ve mostly been listening to my usual fare, which is to say either very nice calming ambient neoclassical music or metal so heavy you feel like your insides are going to liquefy. In the former camp (albeit a little quicker and sharper than a lot of the more chilled-out stuff), I’m really liking Fragmente by Felix Rösch. The track “Driven” in particular really does something for me. It just keeps… well, driving.
And in podcasts, I’ve been listening to Rationally Speaking, which I think is now defunct – it’s not had a new episode in a long time. I’m always interested by topics around rationality, and I think most of this show’s episodes are thought-provoking and useful insights into a range of topics crammed into a pretty digestible runtime. The main thing it makes me think about, perhaps interestingly, is the limit of rationality: do we always want to be optimising our thought processes and being right about everything? Is it possible for something to be useful and not strictly true? If I remember, I’m hoping to maybe put together a short blog post on that topic soon.
Other Bits Wot I Done
I mentioned I went on holiday this month – me and me wife and me babby popped up to Center Parcs, where I’ve never been before. It’s pretty good; we managed to spend five days there without ever really needing to leave the site, although they do charge you for pretty much everything you could do while you’re there. (Except the aforementioned pool.)
I liked a lot about it, especially the woodland setting, but my God, the Longleat one is hilly. Apparently the others aren’t as bad, but the site at which we stayed is a lot of steep inclines with hairpin turns. We hired bikes to get around the site while we were there, and while neither of us is unfit, we had no chance of cycling the whole time. Lot of pushing!
And that’s about it for the month, so take care and see you again soon.
Oh, one more thing: if you sign up for my mailing list, I’ll send you five completely free short stories you can’t read anywhere else. So do!
Chris Durston 