I am extremely happy to announce that thanks to the generosity of my Patrons, we have achieved a new goal on Patreon: 100 bucks per month.
And as I promised back when I launched my Patreon page, reaching this target means I’ll write a 12.000 story on demand for my patrons, based on their choices and preferences. Continue reading
Yes, Kindle users can now get their copy of the second episode on *AMARNA** directly to their device through this link.
I’m designing some material for the roleplaying game side of AMARNA and I thought I’ll start with a set of character sheets for the main characters.
Go for high-quality PDFs,to be distributed for free as a gadget.
I was highly impressed by the recently discovered Achtung!Cthulhu handbooks, in terms of overall quality and look, and I’d love to do something similar, creating a file folder or memorandum-style booklet for the good guys and one for the bad guys.
Or do a “fake documents” trying to copy the style of the French Call of Cthulhu handbook.
And I’ll also steal the idea of “statting” the characters for a variety of systems.
I’ll certainly go for Call of Cthulhu/Basic RolePlaying (with provisions made for Pulp Cthulhu), and for Savage Worlds, but I’d also try and add other systems – Ubiquity, for instance, to be used with Hollow Earth Expeditions, and maybe the old reliable D6 system. I’ll have to cram a lot of numbers and tables in those files.
Something for the weekend, but also an important first step in putting together the AMARNA campaign.
It will be fun.
And it will also be a good opportunity to revisit a few old systems, in view of my (slowly growing) catalog of pulp roleplaying games.
The second episode of AMARNA, my new pulp adventure serial, is available on Gumroad as of now.
The zip file on sale on Gumroad includes the epub, mobi and PDF versions of the second episode of the story.
Looking for answers to the mystery of Amarna, Valerie Cazaret and her unlikely allies stumble on something far larger than they suspected, and as the Nazi Thule Society steps in, the supernatural suddenly rears its ugly head.
What next?
Right now my Patreon supporters in the Five Bucks Gang and the Ten Bucks Brigade have already received their copy or the discount token to save on the ebook.
And in a few days – hopefully – the second episode of AMARNA will also be available on Amazon1.
The second installment of AMARNA is going through editing, and we’ll be back on schedule, and release it in February as planned despite having wasted ten days being sick.
What is not going as planned is the development.
As originally dreamed up (what got into me?) AMARNA should have been six 8000-words episodes.
But the first episode was over 12.000 words, and the second will clock over the 10.000 words mark. Which means that the planned 50.000-words novel will be closer to 70.000 words by June.
And yet, I’m having lots of fun, and hopefully the readers are having fun, too.
And things are going to heat up in the next weeks. With the second episode, now all the pieces are on the chessboard. The next four episodes will floor the accelerator.
Now it’s time to start working on the rest of the spin-offs, the new Curse of Fantomah episodes, and hopefully the roleplaying material. And I’ll have to see if my Italian readers are interested in kickstarting a translation and Italian single-volume edition.
That would be good.
As they say, no rest for the wicked.
The second episode of AMARNA is about to hit the shelves, and I thought I’ll do a series of posts, over the next few weeks and months, as the other episodes come out, about the characters, the good guys and the bad guys and all those in between.
There’s a bit about them in the press book I created for the launch of the series, but as it usually happens, I am finding out more about my characters as I write about them.
That’s the way I work – a quick sketch, a photo reference, a list of details, and then I let the guys run away with the story.
And when it comes to running away with the story, nobody beats Valerie Cazaret. Continue reading
Writer, journalist, earth scientist, world traveler, opium smoker, primates expert, the self-proclaimed “bad girl” that started her autobiography with the phrase…
Not long after my family moved from St Louis to Chicago, I ran away from home.
… died on this day in 1997.
One of my projects for this year (and maybe the next two) is to read every one of Emily Hahn’s 50-odd books.
Karavansara 