Furniture Thieves of the Cloud Nebula

That is my name for the latest patch of Starbound, which has finally delivered the last character wipe and set us free.

For those of you who have not heard of the game, it is the same genre as Minecraft, but 2D with adorable pixels, a science fiction theme, and most importantly a focus on exploration much more than construction.  Alien races have towns, tombs, castles, abandoned space stations, prisons, temples, and things you can't even identify on every planet.

To me, most importantly, those alien habitations have furniture.  Furniture I can steal.  In this restart I just ran across a giant steel pyramid, mostly underground, filled with high tech goodies like computer mainframes and plasma globes.  Almost none of this stuff does anything, but now that the player wipes are over I can start collecting it.

My goal:  Build a giant museum in an asteroid belt somewhere, a dragon's hoard of decorations from a thousand thousand races.  The imminent player wipe was in my way, but now I can go full-scale space pirate.

I'm a little ticked that lanterns on a stick, the most essential item for deep underground mining, is not available until Tier 2 equipment.  On the other hand, there hardly seems to be any ore underground in Alpha Sector.  I guess I didn't need it.

Pardon me, I must loot that pyramid, maybe steal the beautiful metal walls, and then run off to Beta Sector looking for more prey.

MLP - Flash Who?

I am told that Flash Sentry's appearance in this week's MLP episode is spreading chaos and despair.  I don't get it.  It looked like a giant middle finger from the studio to Hasbro to me.  They haven't been shy about saying they didn't like making the movie.  Assuming that was Flash, he shows up for five seconds and Twilight doesn't even give him a first glance.  Sounds like a reminder that EQG did not officially happen to me.

The Final Cover

I got the galleys for Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm A Supervillain this morning!  For all of those non-professionals who don't know what a galley is, and also for me who didn't know what a galley is, that's the finished version of the book ready for printing.  Of course, I got electronic versions.

They came with the final version of the cover!  The marketing team has been engaged in a violent scrum over fonts.  What they finally came up with is gorgeous, and focuses attention on the title exactly where it needs to be.

Observe!

The Big Announcement But Not The Bigger Announcement!

I have a release date for Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm A Supervillain!  It comes out on February 15th, and the official announcement is here!

Oh, and here's the ad copy I came up with.  Whatcha think?

Penelope Akk wants to be a superhero. She’s got superhero parents. She’s got the ultimate mad science power, filling her life with crazy gadgets even she doesn’t understand. She has two super powered best friends. In middle school, the line between good and evil looks clear.

In real life, nothing is that clear. All it takes is one hero’s sidekick picking a fight, and Penny and her friends are labeled supervillains. In the process, Penny learns a hard lesson about villainy: She’s good at it.

Criminal masterminds, heroes in power armor, bottles of dragon blood, alien war drones, shape shifters and ghosts, no matter what the super powered world throws at her, Penny and her friends come out on top. They have to. If she can keep winning, maybe she can clear her name before her mom and dad find out.

And Back To The Cute Book

Apparently 'fantasy and wonder' and 'light toned YA book' together become 'diabetes-inducing cuteness'.  There's some adventure coming up in A Sidekick's Tale, but right now Sandy's still getting to know Here.  That means beavers in love with water sprites, and meeting her first dargon.

A dargon, of course, is what you get when you take a dragon and take out all the dragon.  They're short, tubby, and can just about breathe enough fire to light a match.  But they DREAM.

Chapter four of A Sidekick's Tale in pdf format.

Cover Art Update!

The marketing team is still fighting over the lettering, but the art came in for Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm A Supervillain.  Check it out, because it is SWEET.

I want this book to come out, so bad.

The Lightning Thief

I thought I should check out the Percy Jackson books.  All I'm going to be able to review is the first book.  If that sounds bad... yeah, the second book started out with a 'Insert MacGuffin and random encounter here'.  Not good.

But the first book isn't bad.  Not great, but I enjoyed it.  Greek mythological monsters make for great bad guys, the Cronus and Ares twists were very satisfying, and the 'son of Poseidon' thing was played well.  A distant father who helps him on the sly when he's in water.  Sure, that's how a son of Poseidon works.

The bad parts were mostly that the book is kind of generic.  Misunderstood boy finds out he's a hero and goes on a quest to find a MacGuffin.  The ADHD and dyslexia elements are handled clumsily, although I don't have anything against them existing.  I understand they were put in to help Riordan's son empathize.  There is almost no content outside of the central plot.  Characters are okay, but underexplored.  I had one nitpick that bugged me the whole way.  A major character is a daughter of Athena.  Athena is a lesbian virgin goddess.  She has exactly one child who's one of those freaky magical origin things, not the result of sex.  Daughters are not an option.

So, book is kinda so-so.  I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not enthusiastic about the experience.  #2 immediately dropped below that mediocre standard.

There is an interesting epilogue to this.  It made me think about why the Harry Potter books are better.  The concepts really aren't very different, and the paragraph-to-paragraph writing isn't all that different.  What made Harry Potter's uninspired idea cool was the depth with which the books explored the magical world.  Harry Potter lives a magical life, with magical people, with lots of time spent developing everyone's personality and having cool magical things happen outside the central plot.  Those gave the plot itself meaning, made it gripping.

That's a good lesson for a writer to learn.  I hope I can hold onto it, but I worry that my books are overstuffed just clinging tightly to the plot.