Changes

So it’s been a few years, and I’m still paying for this space, and it’s time I started talking a little more.

A lot has changed. Surely you noticed. The last two years feel like ten years or two months, depending on the view. It’s worth updating you about some of these incredible changes, and what they mean going forward.

Photo courtesy of Allison Van Liere. She makes music too.

1) Manetowak. I have been sending out query letters and samples to prospective agents and publishers. While I’ve gotten a few bites, nobody has been ready to commit to the project as of yet. Which is okay! I think I have a good idea of how to revise my approach and market the book to the right agents. Moreover, some other changes (listed below) may give me more of a platform to get the book out.

Additionally, I have plans to contact the Menominee Nation for feedback on the themes and fictionalization of certain historical elements used in the novel. Menominee mythology and background is essential to the story of Manetowak, as is the struggle of the Menominee people. I’d like to make sure to put the story in front of the right readers, and also work with the Menominee to contribute a portion of the novel’s proceeds going forward.

And by the way, I have been sitting on a gorgeous cover I commissioned Theo Ellsworth to create back in 2019. Here’s a small preview of the work:

Manetowak, art by Theo Ellsworth.

2) Fantasy Flight Games. In the spring of 2019, I worked at Fantasy Flight Games as an intern, and designed the Mythos Pack A Light in the Fog for the Arkham Horror LCG. I had the privilege of getting a lot of creative influence, even as an intern, on the look and design of that mythos pack, and the process and intention behind that is worth its own blog post. Additionally, I worked with FFG’s RPG department to co-write the Gen Con 2019 scenario The Highwayman for The Legend of the Five Rings roleplaying game. (The other writer, Alexis Dykema, has continued to do some excellent work on the line).

Since the internship, I wrote some more fiction for the L5R game line and other projects with FFG. This past August, I got offered a position as a Game Designer with Fantasy Flight Games. You can see me previewing an expansion for the Lord of the Rings: Journeys in Middle Earth here. My sixteen year old self would lose his shit if he knew what I get to do every day for work now.

Going forward, I’d love to discuss the design process further on this blog, and unpack some of the lessons I learn about story and gameplay here.

Deep One Hatchling © Fantasy Flight Games. Art by Álvaro Calvo Escudero. I’m proud to tell you this lil’ guy came from my brain originally.

3) Day of the Beast. Dovetailing with the game-talk up above, I’d like to also share some info about a nearly-3-year campaign I ran for some great players that wrapped up this past July. Day of the Beast is probably one of Chaosium’s weaker campaigns for their Call of Cthulhu RPG (the revised edition really just serves up monster-of-the-week episodes in a story that often retreads better material from Masks of Nyarlathotep). 

I ran it as a way to just sit back and have fun with some pulpy, silly elements, but the campaign quickly turned into a very involved, emotionally-charged serial that put the characters and their growth (and trauma) front and center. In the coming months, I’d love to share the story of this campaign, how it developed, and how it went from a fun one-and-done to one of the most emotionally impactful stories I’ve worked on.

4) Samwise the dog. Between the plague year and my ambitions, I’ve gotten very fixed on future what-ifs. I’ve predicated romance, career, and personal well-being on tenuous future hopes for a while, and this year I’ve learned to watch my dog, this sweet derpy companion, just take each day as it comes. This may merit a separate post, but if you get the chance to just sit in the moment today and appreciate how you got here and the person you’ve become (not who you will be, or who you were) I hope you take it. There’s a lot we could learn from our furry friends.

Thanks for reading. If you’re curious, here’s a list of some of the writing and work I’ve put out over the last few years.

The Highwayman (Legend of the Five Rings 2019 Gen Con Scenario)

A Light in the Fog (Arkham Horror LCG, released Spring 2021)

A Bloody Harvest (Legend of the Five Rings Fiction)

The Stained Cup (Legend of the Five Rings Fiction)

The Yogo Curse (Legend of the Five Rings Fiction, co-written with Katrina Ostrander)

Heroes of Legend Part 4 (Legend of the Five Rings Fiction)

A Letter to Hurricane Sally

Jeremy Gardner in After Midnight (2019)

You torrid maskless wonder.

You blew in from the south and battered down every door, wall, window, hutch and sill; you stripped storm drains from the bones of this shotgun bungalow home.

Your wailing and moaning frightens and excites me. The lawn is strewn with battered branches.

Your voice is silent but your memory haunts these walls. They told me never to build on sand, and now my foundation is gone.

You took your 90 mile winds and constant foreboding to water rain-parched deserts; of course they need you more than me. These cypress roots can only drink so much.

Your eye conjures rain like a waterlogged cherubim.

You, the constant flux. You, the orchard Moses. You, the Alabama Jesus.

I knew I would reap your whirlwind.

You said you would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, but you never stuck around long enough to see it finished.

You are the soft-handed savior,

the timorous fisher of men. You are the eternal promise,

the never-coming messiah.

I wonder if the wind will blow you back to me.

On Sleeping in Unfinished Churches Out in the Jungle

I can’t forget the time I saw stars in the ocean.

When I was a kid, we lived in Papua, Indonesia. I’d homeschooled up in the Baliem Valley for a year, and my parents decided to send me to the coast, to Sentani, to take my SATs and go on the intense 2 week excursion that was to come. I was a round, fudgy teenager at the time, and I played too many games and stayed holed up in my room smelling the sweet spices that would drift in on the wind in Wamena. I was sheltered, even in this remote wonderful place, and I didn’t get out much. I was basically Bilbo Baggins.

The night the entire high school left for our Outdoor Education foray, we boarded a large passenger freight in Jayapura. I got very seasick. After an overnight voyage, we stayed in Nabire, my childhood home, nestled in the crook of the bird’s neck. I slept on the floor of my childhood beach house and saw the school where I’d gone in 4th grade much changed: a single school house, air conditioned, overflowing with books and toys. We flew up to Yapen Island the next morning, then took a 4 hour bus up winding roads to a remote point inland, then hiked two hours to the site of the village, Warironi.

The villagers all greeted us with a celebratory dance, took our feet and had us smash a ritual plate with crossed machetes and palm branches. They were dark skinned with pearly teeth, and their voices were beautiful. Every one of the 40 kids in our group was carried over this ritual threshold and welcomed in.

We stayed in an unfinished cement church with mosquito nets strung up on tarps, and were divided into groups. We sang and talked by lamplight most nights, and dug and shat in a pit out back. The river ten minutes away was where we drew our water and did our laundry and bathed. The stars overhead were crystalline, and the jungle was on our doorstep.

The school engaged in different projects: building a cistern for a remote village, teaching VBS to the kids, learning how to make Papaeda and how to harvest cocoa. The villagers would pick bundles of cocoa fruit and leave them drying on long white and blue tarps in the sun, letting the fruit dessicate in the heat to leave just the cacao seeds we prize so much for making chocolate.

It was magical, and I was so uncomfortable. I hoped—secretly—I’d shed my baby fat and come back from the jungle looking markedly more badass, but of course that didn’t happen. On the way back, I did end up contracting measles, which kept me bedridden for two weeks while I watched pirated James Bond films back in Wamena, slowly gaining back any weight I might’ve lost. 

We took a boat out across the waves one night, hiked up a steep incline and looked down into a bottomless pit. There was a full underground kingdom down below, filled with shivering bats. The kids stepped up to the edge and looked down, afraid the rock would give. I stayed at the back. Our guide led us down a pathway through the winding jungle to a secret entrance and led us inside. Within the cave were mounds of grey guano, smelling of spoiled yogurt. Sightless white insects scuttled over the dunes of refuse, and overhead, the ceiling was covered in coiled wings, chittering. Some of our friends laid down in the guano and made guano angels, and complained of the stink all the way back to the boats later on.

As we came back to the docks in our outrigger boats, the sun set and I looked beneath us. The water was filled with shimmering bioluminescent algae, but the effect was constellations: living stars spread out in a panoply beneath us. I felt small and in awe in that moment.

When we reached the docks, the tide had gone out, and a good quarter mile of mudded salt flats stood between us and dry land. Everyone in the boats disembarked, and we sloshed and walked our way to shore. Every step sunk my legs in 3 feet deep and sucked the sandals off of my feet. Midway to shore, A sharp, biting pain tore through my right foot, and I knew I’d snagged my foot on a piece of glass or sharp coral. The salt in the mud invaded the wound, stinging and cauterizing it. I walked gingerly to shore and pulled myself up, limping, to examine my foot in the dark. Jim, a classmate, twin with large bottlecap glasses, shone his light on it. A long angry red cut ran laterally from the back of my foot to my big toe.

“Don’t walk on it if you can help it,” a teacher told me.

We walked an hour and a half back to the church, and I went the whole way with my right foot on the tip of the toe. I’d look around to the silent forest, loud with animals and sweet with decaying fruit, and then up to the stars overhead. I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. This is really happening, I told myself over and over, and then prayed, and then looked up to the stars again. Despite the pain, it was really one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

The Buckeye

I once knew a philosopher
who contemplated seeds
so long he took root
and grew to impossible heights.

As the seasons changed, his hues
turned from green to brown
and the hair fell from his head
in piles around his trunk.

He dropped a buckeye, and I picked it up,
turned it over, gave it a bite to make
sure it was real. It was hard and knotty
like his face. And though I saw
he was old now, he seemed to be smiling
but it was just a trick of wood.