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There are actually quite a few side stories.
I have another series I am working on called “The Chronicles of Astlan” that are shorter novels that cover the side stories that tie in to the main book, but require so much detail that it would be distracting in DoA.
The first CoA book, “Into the Wilds” will be coming out shortly after Book 3. I am working on it now as well as book 3, and hope to do a lot more writing on it during the beta and editing of book 3. I would expect it about 3 months after book 3 if all goes well.
Additional books in CoA may or may not continue previous books in CoA. I.e. they may be completely different side stories.
Tizzy’s garden is contained in one of these side stories of CoA.
As an FYI, I have thoughts/plans for other related series, but those are not yet at a writing stage.
Seas of Astlan would basically be the Asmeth story along with the rogues that stole the book for Lenamare.
The Oak Orcs of the Antilles covers Trig Bioblast and crew as they seek to rid their universe of the influence of the Alvaran Empire and other nasty deep space baddies.
Yes, the Grove adventures would be amusing…I am pretty sure they must have happened a long time ago. I will have to ask him to detail them to me so I can write them down.
The problem with releasing the first chapter is that it may not be the first chapter after the beta…..although I suspect it will be.
I might consider it, though I am not entirely sure how satisfying it will be on its own. Chapter 116 is rather short; there are two parts, the first is new and it is an alternate PoV of someone who is/was watching the battle; and the second part is a reworked version of a scene that was deleted from Book 1; the story of what becomes of Lilith’s army.
[SPOILER]I think the biggest reveal is the answer to whether or not Bellyachus manages to pull his head out of his ass. You may recall a rather unpleasant D’Orc put it up there during the battle (while still attached to the rest of Bellyachus)[/SPOILER]
I completely skipped missed the social development part too.
Funny because it was about one or two weeks ago when I explained exactly why there are so many shared cultural references across planes, and that has less to do with mana sucking; but everything to do with the gods and which sets of gods are plying each other.
[SPOILER]The gods like to use cultural templates to play their games.[/SPOILER]
You don’t need to be too disappointed.
Beta Demonhood is not for everyone. As I explained at the last one, and will again, Beta Demons are creatures that travel alternate timelines.
For example in various places, but in particular book 3. I talk about how it’s easy to plane travel to different worlds, but swapping timelines, getting to alternate Astlan for example is very difficult. It’s a minimal frequency shift sort of thing. Plane traveling spells don’t work, however some time spells can force you to swap to other timelines.
Beta Demons live and breathe in alternate timeline space. They see and experience things that might have been, might never be.
I.e. they are privy to other versions of reality where things might turn out differently, some things never happened, people make different choices.
And this can be very disconcerting for some readers.
For example, Beta Demons from the Heavenly Host know what is happening with Captain Asmeth and the people who stole the book; no one else does. Yet.
They also saw a timeline where the Knights of Chaos did not attack at the same time as Lilith’s troops. Where Jenn and Gastrope’ snuggled on a roller coaster ride through the mountain. Something they don’t even remember now.
So, for story purists, who don’t like seeing how sausage is made, Beta Demonization can “spoil things”
On the other hand, Beta Demons are also like gods in that they can shape the destiny of characters and the story.
My point being is, it can be fun, but it’s also sort of like seeing actors acting on a green screen set instead of the Death Star. Or seeing a different cut of a movie. (which is literally what it is)
Yes, very much so. And intentional.
Being There, which I had completely forgotten about brings up the fact that in very complicated times where people are seriously overthinking things, are too serious with themselves, it is often hard to tell the difference between the fool and the Zen Master/Guru. A lot of it is about being hyper “on message” the first does it because he/she has no other message and the other does it because he/she does, but does not want to distract listeners with all that the simple message implies. Get them to accept the base principle and then, eventually everything else will follow.
But it also comes back to mental/political jujitsu, saying just enough for your opponent to hang themselves. In the US, Obama used this strategy very easily on the Clintons and then McCain. Bernie is doing it again, but a bit more subtly. He doesn’t need to say much to cause his opponent to overthink, overreact.
Of course, on the other side, there is the fool who says very simple things because he has nothing else to say. And urges people to blame “the other” for their problems.
And then of course, the Fog of War was a series of events that were interpreted by people with way to much baggage who saw the world through a very specific prism, jumping to conclusions using overreaching assumptions that become self-fulfilling prophecy.
But then, I think many wars are that; at least when you have an otherwise stable level of detente (ignoring the accent). Obviously many wars are simply cases of naked aggression and invasion to steal territory or resources. But in an otherwise stable system, it’s usually over amplification. WWI was a series of overreactions, WWII was interesting in that it was a series of reactions spawned by the end of WWI, that led to acts of hatred/violence and naked aggression and a desire to seize territory and resources as retribution.
Since then, most have been the result of a series of incidents that spun out of control, people over thinking the chess board.
We start to get into this in Book 3. It’s the first truly multiversal volume of the series.
There are a lot of things similar to what you describe happening. Although it is not exactly that straight forward, at least not on every world.
It is not all gods that do this mana sucking, but as has been hinted that is what happened on the Earths, and there will be more discussion of that.
But as has been stated, there used to be a lot more Magic on the Earth variants. The gods were there but left.
Technology and Magic are two different ways of looking at the multiverse. So there are pure tech worlds and pure magic worlds at the extreme, but there is a lot in between. Places where magic and tech can coincide, and places where one is easier than the other. A full spectrum. And how this relates to gods sucking things up??? Not clear yet.
But to get to that, we will have to get to the workings of Law and Chaos and the Gods of Law and Gods of Chaos. Not completely sure DoA will ever get to cover all of this, but there will be hints.
ROFL
This is great stuff!
However, the one thing I found rather implausible about the show is that apparently, they expect us to believe that Melbourne doesn’t have HD TV in 2016!
I’m sorry, but this anachronism clearly stretches the plausibility of the entire episode, calling everything else into question!
Going to binge the other 5 now!
Thanks!
What desktop browser are you using?
Fonts look fine to me in Chrome. They should scale by resolution and browser settings since I use relative Font sizes.
Yes Mobile is something of a problem, particularly for phones. I need to work on that. Particularly for Kindles.
The system that I use DNN and YAF (Yet Another Forum) have some mobile customizing features that I will look into.
> 2560×1440 screen
That I understand. My notebook has that resolution (on a 15″ screen) and it’s a huge problem for older applications that can’t dynamically scale fonts.
I actually pull out a magnifying glass in some cases and hold it up to the screen (too hard to figure out that stupid regional zoom tool program)I really need to go in and edit the CSS files for the whole site.
For the front page, I can change the relative font size on a box per box (section by section basis). However, it would take me forever to do that on all the pages, which is why I need to make adjustments to the CSS.
I will probably hold off on that until beta season starts again and I am waiting for comments. Right now I’m trying to avoid too much distraction from writing, since I am actually getting stuff written.
Fortunately, one thing you can do in Chrome is Zoom the page; that is something I do on my laptop all the time.
For years, my folks only used Opera on their iMac because that was the only browser that let them magnify the page. Although they magnify to a level that layouts are all zonked…I can’t stand that.
Well, I had a lot of this stuff up in the 90’s as part of the RPG I wrote with a friend while writing book 1. And that was painful static content
So then I went and moved it all to DNN.
However, it’s not that big of a deal; there is a master CSS file for this stuff. It didn’t take that long to go from red to blue with font changes. That’s not going to be that hard, once I figure out what styles need to be adjusted and play with them. It’s the learning how to customize for mobile that will take me more time.
The system allows you to define settings on a per device basis; I just have to read up and play with it.
I actually have several of my sites in DNN because I got tired of maintaining custom sites and yada yada.
Unfortunately that’s something this CMS doesn’t support, permanent log in. Or at least I haven’t seen how you would enable it.
Yes, most authors are stuck with whatever huckster comes along.
I have had for a long time a server sitting in the Internet, I’ve moved around a few times. I started out as just a hosted site with a SQL backend then moved to a dedicated server about 15 years ago.
I’ve got my personal sites, my business sites, and some development/demo sites on it. I’ve also got a backup mail server running on it.
So I can do about whatever I feel like. In this case, I am using an open source CMS call DNN (DotNet Nukem) and YAF (Yet Another Forum) for the forum. YAF is open source and has a DNN version as well as standalone and some other CMS system.
Godaddy and a lot of the hosting companies will sell you a site only relatively cheaply and give you some tools to design a site. You often don’t get things like forums, just static pages and an email link.
I think a number of authors also use WordPress sites; that’s what many bloggers use. You can get those relatively inexpensively.
If one understood Tumbler, that actually would be good. I don’t do much with my book tumblr; when I started using tumblr I really didn’t know how to design tumblr websites…but you seriously could use that for an author site. And you can of course use Facebook as long as you are a glutton for punishment.
The trick in all of this is just knowing what to look for, and my bet is that most authors don’t. It would seem to me that it would behoove Amazon to improve the customization capabilities of their Author Page and add some features for authors that are in their Kindle Select Program etc. If they wanted to they could do all sorts of cool things, but it is like they aren’t thinking that much. They went out and bought goodreads and this other site, that I can’t think of the name of now, but the two are merging (it’s the place where you can fill out character data for the book and have it end up on the Kindle)
Anyway, they’ve got these two cool sites, they just need to put all the stuff together better.
Hi,
Unfortunately, as required by my contract, Oorstemothian officials conducted a “surprise” SSAE 16 Type 341.2324A-B Audit of the data center where the web server was located.
It failed, miserably, as I feared would happen. Thus the Oorstemothian’s fireballed it last night. Repeatedly. My apologies to any other clients of that data center.
So, since that place is now a burnt pile of rubble, I had to take my backup copy somewhere else. Moved it to an Azure VM (which was more money) but my hope is that Microsoft has sufficient [b][i]firewalls[/i][/b] to protect themselves and my server from Oorstemothian Audit Reconciliation.
Unfortunately we lost two days worth of discussion in the Forums. I meant to take another backup last night, but was hoping I could squeeze out another day before they decided to audit the place, unfortunately, they did not.
Sorry
T-A-G
Thanks.
I do think that too many characters that come from “peaceful” worlds adjust to quickly to the violence of worlds they get trapped in. I wanted to explore how a normal person with a relatively innocent upbringing would adjust.
One of the things, that I am unhappy with in book 2 was lack of time to explore Tom’s humanity more. I am working on that in book 3. Book 2 was just too busy, with too many other story lines and in fact, even later in book 1; things just start moving too fast for him to fully react.
In book 2, he has the start of anxiety, which is why he keeps going fetal. At some point, Post Traumatic Stress should have to kick in. However, he’s on a whirlwind and is basically on autopilot as the chain of events sweep him up and he simply reacts.
The thing I am trying to bring in with the day counts is that from the time of his summoning up until the end of book 2 is only 40 days. So in real terms he is still being swept up. Early on, with solo cave time and no sleep, he could sort of process things, but right now responsibility is coming on too fast for him to truly react emotionally, he is compartmentalizing and running on auto pilot. As book 3 goes on, the shit keeps piling up which will compound things.
One thing that I am sort of trying to work out in advance in the back of my mind is when the Orc/D’Orc Restoration of Glory clashes with Tom’s sense of ethics and morality. He himself is sort of blocking it from his mind.
The trick is to do it without becoming maudlin and self-absorbed to the point that it is agony for the readers. Still trying to figure that out, which is why beta readers are so important.
You really sound like a candidate for Kindle Unlimited.
It’s a pretty good deal. $9.99/month which is +/- a big publisher book or maybe 2 indie books and you get unlimited indie books and some publisher books. (Albeit, Amazon only Indie books; if an indie sells on iTunes, BN, Smashwords they can’t be in KU, unless they are a big name)
It is also unlimited Listening to the same books for books that have audible editions.
It used to be really painful for authors of long books because they charged per book read after like 10% had been read. Meaning a big book=little book, and a big book had to have had a lot more pages read. So I ended up getting about 30% of the amount I got for a sale.
Then last July they changed to what they call KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) which is a funky page count based on an average kindle page size; based on word count and pictures. Amazingly enough, it tied almost exactly out to my book pricing.
At list price I make about the same on a full read of my book as a purchase; and even if someone doesn’t finish the book I get credit for what they read (the first time). So it’s a good deal for authors who price at typical indie prices.
Interesting on the KU.
I don’t have KU myself; I get a book per month via Prime and lately that’s more than I can read with my “if I have time to read, I have time to write motto”
Plus, in addition to books I have a couple never finished shareware type programs I’ve been writing on and off forever with the goal of being self sufficient between writing books and programs that I could make a living doing those two things. It’s going slowly, but it is going.
I see a lot of books that look good that are on KU, that I would like to read. But I suppose that eventually I would run through them and be empty again. Particularly if I read like I did in the pre-Internet days. (A book per day). Of course the internet is another giant time-sucking thing that ensures very little gets done. Seriously, that thing is evil. Particularly if you get involved in any forum sites, or people on FB etc.
I also suspect that one historical problem with KU is that because of the old system where short books counted the same as long books, lots of KU authors were heavy serializing because they got as much money for short books as long books; thus there really isn’t as much out there as it looks.
