New Pages

I finally posted about my medical condition.  Since it was so long, I put the post up as its own page under My Disease Rant.

I also put up a new page with a sneak peek at the first chapter of Fighter's Bane.  The book's finished at 107k or so words, but I'm having a bit of a formatting problem.  I didn't write the story in a single document, instead writing different parts at different times.  When I pasted them all together I realized that I'd used different formatting settings and lately I've been going over the document section by section and fixing the bugs.  A number of things I was able to fix with global commands, like changing all the text to the same font, but little things are still popping up.  (I miss the old days of WordPerfect where you could actually see every formatting code.)

I seem to recall already posting blurbs about the storyline in Fighter's Bane, so I won't do that again, but I thought I might explain a little of the "kookiness" (hum, is that spelled correctly?) that went in to writing the story.

When I was a wee-lad, a certain role-playing game came out.  I got hooked, big time.  I enjoyed the game with friends, and played for years and years until computer versions of fantasy-adventure role-playing games became popular.

I still don't know why, but when I was thinking about writing Fighter's Bane, I got this nutty idea that it would be fun to create a dungeon and some characters, and then write the story by rolling the dice and having the characters work their way through the dungeon based on how the dice landed.

For instance, I used an 8-sided die to determine which direction my characters took, e.g., a 1 or an 8 was north, a 2 or a 7 was south, a 3 or a 6 was west, etc.  Seemed fun at the time - but do you have any idea how many times I had to roll that die in order to finish the book?  But once I started, I stuck with it.  Like I said: nutty.

I also used dice to determine the outcome of battles, treasure, etc.  I kind of really got into it.  And most definitely some weird things happen to my characters as a result of "chance."  Someday I'll post more about the details, but for now you just need to know that I rolled myself up a 100k plus (word) book.

I'm still working on the cover, but one of the die I used is so old and so worn from the adventure, that I'm thinking of honoring it by sneaking in a small picture of it on the cover.

My fervent hope is that I rolled up a winner.  I enjoyed writing the book, and I hope you enjoy reading it when I finally finish all the silly formatting garbage (which is, unfortunately, an important part of actually reading the thing).