indie publishing

From Backstory to Battlefield: Creating Characters for a Tabletop Wargame

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If this is your first time here, Grailrunner is an indie game and fiction house with a signature IP called Salt Mystic that exists in a tabletop wargame, illustrated flash fiction hosted on this site, and a growing line of novels.

And sometimes apparel and art, but that’s because of our short attention spans.

We’re in the home stretch of finalizing a floor-to-drapes refresh of the starter set card art, tuck box design, rulebook, and landing page for the Salt Mystic game. Proofs came in Friday and there are a few places where the text is too small on the box and on one card, so we’re going to fix that and make it perfect before going live. We’ll keep you posted.

But we thought we’d offer another freebie to keep the conversation going, as many of you seem really interested in embarrassing mistakes we made along the way and the thinking behind how some of the characters or mechanics came to be. We’ll put a download link at the bottom of this post for a new lore card featuring the two war marshals for the respective factions included in the new starter set.

OK, who are those two guys in the intro art?

The bearded fellow in spikey armor is Karak, also called the Hammer of the Red Witch, and serves as war marshal for the mountain city of Alson. The tattooed guy is Segmond, also called the Loreblade, serving as war marshal of the twin cities of the Salt Flats. They’re like generals for the two starter set factions and defeating one of them is how you win the game.

What’s the big deal about them?

Guys, it isn’t like I’d ever built a wargame before! We’re talking 7 or 8 years ago, decades if you include some of the core ideas that I wound up tying in to them. I was practicing art after being out of that game for half my life, learning Daz Studio and Photoshop and Indesign at the same time, all while building out lore and game mechanics. Playtesting was a disaster, either with hand-cut card stock placeholder cards and begging family or friends or begging on Tabletop Simulator. My point is I go WAY back with these two characters. Way back. They’re probably the first two I developed for the game.

I thought today it would be interesting to tell you where they came from.

That sounds fun. Start with the spikey armor guy.

There isn’t much about Salt Mystic’s aesthetics that didn’t begin with this painting. It’s called Lost World by Sorin Bechira. Seriously, I’ve stared at this thing for hours. It’s gorgeous and sends my mind soaring. What eventually became Karak’s mighty mountain fortress city of Alson started right here. I’d say at first, all I knew about a character I needed to develop was that he came from here and he fights for this place.

I met a guy named Karak in Dallas many, many years ago – just introducing myself around some offices in an asphalt paving business and shook a guy’s hand. That was all, but the name stuck with me so I filed it away to use one day. It came immediately to my mind when this fellow first formed on the screen in Daz Studio. I’d bought some cool spikey armor on the Daz shop and tweaked it in Blender to dump some weird appendages, squeeze some things a bit, and modify the texture some. I bought a gladiator set of hair, facial hair, and body hair on the Daz Shop as well, specifically for this character. Honestly, I was just spitballing for a good look.

There’s an extremely well-titled John Wayne movie called ‘Wake of the Red Witch’. That’s another name that, for whatever reason, I just couldn’t shake. So again, I filed it away.

I was dreaming up a vile race of people who spoke in a language distinguishing only shades of pain and torture. With terrifying needle guns, they inject a computing solution into your neck forcing a trance able to make a day asleep feel like 100 years of rage-filled torture. They changed you overnight from a normal person on any street to a drooling lunatic.

Anyway, I needed a cool name for them and thought of this movie title again. Instead of the Red Witch being a boat or even a person, it’s a race of people. One you’d not care to meet.

As all that came together, I knew this fellow had spent time down there with them. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what kind of dark pact he’d made with them or how he survived their black, smoking towers. I just knew when he needed to call on them, they would reluctantly answer and bring terrible vengeance to a battlefield. In Michael Moorcock’s Elric series, the lead character occasionally calls on elementals and demons for aid (usually at a cost). I also had that in mind though these folks aren’t supernatural. You’ll see Karak’s final back story in the lore card at the bottom of this post.

How about the tattooed fellow?

That’s Segmond: the Loreblade. I’ve told the story here of Salt Mystic’s earliest stirrings in my imagination, all the way back in 1997 in Oman: a lone gunslinger, in from the salt flats, slamming open a saloon door and terrifying everyone inside. Not because of his own gun, but the fear of those he had as snipers outside or even infiltrating at those very tables. The truth is I was devouring the first three Dune books by Frank Herbert and wanted the vibe of a wasteland with sci-fi vehicles and didn’t want to rip off Herbert’s desert. So I went with salt flats. (The deadly unseen companions idea came from a scene in the 1988 action movie, Off Limits – “We’re never outgunned!” but also ninja movies).

These many years later, for Segmond’s character, I only knew I needed someone to fight for the twin cities located in the salt flats.

I had just learned how to stack png images onto skin textures in Daz and give characters tattoos. It looked great in renders so I kind of lost my mind doing that. Way too many of the card art pieces have exposed skin so I could flaunt those cool tattoos I was building. In Segmond’s case, I snatched a public domain alien rune png file and plastered it over his chest and shoulders. I had also bought some dreadlocks to gain access to woolier hair assets in Daz and thought I’d like to see dreads on the guy.

I knew he needed to be the opposite of the grumpy Karak. I pictured him grinning in battle and wondered why he’d do that. And for whatever reason, I thought of an amazing experience I had back in the late 1980’s at a friend’s house playing Call of Cthulhu.

Our party had come across a Necronomicon book that drove you mad if you looked at it. It amused me to tear off a page and stick it in my pocket (can’t believe the game master let me do that!). Later, we needed to get past a door and the NPC manning that was being a jerk. I remember knocking again, and when the guy stuck his face back in the open slot, I showed him the page.

It was hilarious and worked. Anyway, that idea of a book of stories or something that had crazy power stuck with me. Segmond carries one locked to his belt and uses it for incredible persuasion to turn opposing soldiers.

You really do stitch random things together, don’t you?

“To invent, all you need is an imagination and a pile of junk.” Thomas Edison said that. Wonderful quote.

What’s the freebie today, then?

Our Story Arcade houses a growing library of illustrated flash fiction which we call ‘lore cards’. You can peruse the artwork and brief pulp-magazine style teasers to find something that catches you eye and spend less than five minutes with any one of them. It’s a way we experiment with the over-arching narrative and build out the world brick by brick.

We’ve just added a gorgeous single-page lore card depicting Karak and Segmond alongside their canon-locked backstories. Smash the image below to download the pdf version for free. And make sure to let us know what you think!

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And that’s what I wanted to bring you today. I really wish we’d gotten the typography right the first try on those proofs of the new cards and tuck box but everything will be fine. It won’t be hard to fix, and we’ll come back and let you know when everything’s live and available for sale.

Till next time,

Bad graphic design and an unfortunate addiction to lore-dumps

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Last week, I told you about some questionable art decisions I made in the development of Grailrunner’s Salt Mystic tabletop skirmish game. That wasn’t my favorite thing to do, re-examining art I felt really great about back in the day but which hasn’t stood the test of five years of studying, getting critiqued, and practicing. In that case, I told you about my obsession then with the Blender 3d graphics software and a workflow involving Daz Studio and Substance Painter with Photoshop finishing.

Basically, I was doing things because I’d learned how to do them and thought they were cool rather than because they were the right tools for the job.

Anyway, I’m just waiting on final proofs now for the revitalized Salt Mystic starter set and thought it would be interesting and informative for anyone out there intrigued by indie game design to hear some things I learned from designing, playtesting, and managing art direction and graphic design on a tabletop game.

Sound okay?

Cut to the chase – what’s the biggest lesson you learned?

Graphic design isn’t about making something look cool. It’s about communicating visually. That sounds nice and plain vanilla but I’m telling you that it’s crucial. It’s everything.

Let’s talk about the original rulebook. Here’s the cover design I commissioned from a wonderful artist named Omer Tunc:

I am entirely responsible for the art direction: the composition itself, the text and placement of it, even the lighting. He did what I asked. Grailrunner hadn’t yet put out Salt Mystic: Book of Lots to define the world’s lore and setting and I had all these amazing weapons, vehicles, creatures and people I couldn’t wait to tell everyone about. Let’s call it Founder’s Disease where you’re carried away with your own ideas and can’t throttle them down, even shoving them at a saturated audience who don’t have a reason to care yet.

What’s the matter with it?

It doesn’t clearly communicate anything, really. That’s supposed to be an underground dimensional gate to a pocket world showing a plasma gunslinger adventurer about to step down inside. But you’d never know that as it isn’t immediately relatable or recognizable as such. And it communicates precisely nothing at all about this game, major dynamics that make it unique, or even that it is a game. And this game doesn’t even emphasize exploration – it’s a wargame!

In fact, I included the sourcebook because my Founder’s Disease took over my soul and forced me to spend weeks on the art and copy to provide the mother of all lore dumps in hopes of people with wandering imaginations caring and immersing themselves in this setting. That’s a key dynamic of the game in fact, to craft a narrative for the battle using battlefield dynamics and the cards and tell a story immersively with the game’s rules. My thinking at the time was to provide the raw materials with the sourcebook so people could do that.

Yet this cover focuses on a purple-blue scene that fails to ring any recognizable bells. I gave no resonant hook and trusted to curious, imaginative people to dig inside and get excited on their own.

I see what you mean. How’d you fix that?

The original Sourcebook and Core Rules was a paid product for the last five years. I remain incredibly proud of the work that I and some very special people put into that. It just needed to come off the market and be replaced by something that knew what it was trying to do and focused on doing it.

Download the new rulebook

I requested critiques pretty much page by page this time and the overwhelming direction was to simplify and streamline information. Every time I thought I was leaving too much out, I was told to strip out more. Leave white space. Let the eye breathe. It’s better to have another page that’s clean and readable than a cramped one. Just communicate what the game is, why someone would care, and simply how to play. Show examples.

How did you handle the art, then?

I’ve got four art pieces in the rulebook.

The cover is designed to do one thing and do it with emphasis: show a ball lightning carbine duel. It’s a core combat mechanism in this setting, involving a forearm-mounted weapon that fires ball lightning but can also be used to deflect incoming fire. This art hopefully looks cool too, but it exists to communicate that.

Inspiration for the composition was the original 1990 cover of Mars: The Red Planet by Mick Farren. The artist was David Schleinkofer.

What I couldn’t resolve visually for myself until I saw Schleinkofer’s piece here was how to cleanly show two guys gunfighting without a flat side-by-side scene.

What he did in this piece blew my mind, honestly. I can’t say enough about the idea of the larger, looming figure up front and how readable it is what he’ll be reaching for. The tension. The depth. The overall mood.

Just fantastic.

The other art pieces we included were similarly added for specific reasons. A distinctive vehicle used in this setting uses a vortex engine and articulated mechanical legs, able to ride up vertical walls. We included a splash page showing that to quickly communicate there is more to the combat mechanics in this game than two guys blasting each other with lightning.

We included another splash page to introduce the Towerlock scenario included with the rulebook to get a player started. In that case, the image exists to communicate the distinctive nature of the battlefields in this game and how they can be much more than a flat pieces of ground with a hill on it. The reader sees dudes and a robot climbing up a mountain face in combat and has learned something quickly and instinctively about what they’re about to see in the suggested game play.

The final splash page is a character scene showing this isn’t a dueling game but rather has multiple fighters in combat simultaneously. That one closes out the rulebook.

What did you learn designing the game packaging?

Take a look at the header image for this article. That two-deck starter set on the left was the very first offering for Salt Mystic made available back in 2020, maybe early 2021. I remember being so excited that I’d figured out how to make rust in Substance Painter that I jumped up from a hotel bed to sit down at the laptop again after midnight and genned up that cover image of the two war marshals.

I put rust all over the packaging because I thought it made the box look like metal and industrial, not because it said anything about the game or the setting. Instead, it looks brown and ugly. The overall design of the side-by-side decks with a rules pamphlet inside was way too expensive for what I was offering. I couldn’t make money selling that and it didn’t look as great as it did in my head.

What did you change?

Somewhere, I came across this packaging for The Witcher: Old World and thought it was beautiful. I’m an unfortunate fan of wrap-around imagery like this and felt this was sophisticated, atmospheric, and a good model for the packaging improvement I wanted to make. This was my inspiration for whatever I was going to do.

I hired a Lithuanian artist named Roman on Fiverr to design two tuck boxes for me, one for each of the two initial factions. I provided some inspiration art and thorough briefs, and I may have even showed him this Witcher packaging. He did what I asked, so remember that. I had in mind the idea of Magic: The Gathering offering dedicated card decks for a Plainswalker and thought my war marshals might be interesting sold that way since I was planning to generate another five or six factions at least.

There’s the wrap-around imagery and the individual decks for war marshals. Their names were supposed to be intriguing, their facial expressions eye-catching. The tech and cityscape behind them was supposed to draw you in to wonder at the worlds they came from.

Instead, I believe these designs don’t communicate much at all that is really important. I’ve learned that imagery like this isn’t immediately relatable, doesn’t sell anything distinctive about the game mechanics, and doesn’t distinguish it from anything else on the shelf beside it.

The revitalized Salt Mystic is a balanced starter set, not including the kitchen sink like before, designed with exactly what a player would need to get started. The rulebook is accessible via a QR code or URL. Much more details on the game on the back, including hooks but also with player count, age, and contents included to smooth the buying decision and set expectations.

This set includes terrain cards and a starter scenario as well as measuring cards if needed. All you need is dice. It’s just a simpler ramp for onboarding into the game. The QR code leads straight to the same cover image to avoid disorientation.

I mean, that’s the challenge, isn’t it? This template is what I had – a crazy-looking blob of lines that I had to print off, cut with scissors, and ask my wife to help me fold into the box itself so I could label for myself what faces were where to make sense of how to fit the artwork onto it. Tuck box design isn’t for chumps, I can tell you that.

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But anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. I hope it was as interesting to hear about as it was to live. Wish us luck on the revitalized game and positioning. It’s exciting to see this thing culminate after so many years.

Till next time,

Slowly writing a novel when AI could’ve knocked this out already…

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Are you using AI to write your novel?

I’m not against AI as a better Google. For example, I needed to know recently whether crickets still croak at night in late autumn and what wild mustard would smell like if you sat on it. These are the kind of weird questions writers come up with and – if you’re me – completely block the ability to progress with the work until they’re answered.

Here are some others (and trust me, all totally legitimately asked in the context of feverishly trying to complete a science fantasy novel):

  1. What are gorilla boobs called?
  2. Where exactly do blind people place their fingers on someone’s face to read their expression?
  3. What is the difference between a glyph and a sigil?
  4. What causes the black streaks beneath a crying woman’s eyes: eyeliner or mascara?
  5. Say a man’s arm is severed and cauterized by a sentient cablesword – would it steam, bleed, smoke, or all three?

Forgive me. I like odd details when I’m reading books so I want them in my own concoctions. And I want them to be right. Something like Gemini or ChatGPT can handle these iterative conversations to answer questions like these better than a Google search. Far better and much faster.

Okay, what about the writing, though? The creation of the work itself?

I’m also not against AI handling the monotonous and thankless task of resolving thorny punctuation issues. My kryptonite punctuation errors so far have been:

  1. I join two complete thoughts with commas rather than semicolons. I never liked semicolons. They look weird but whatever.
  2. I forget to add commas when I use introductory phrases (“Beneath the plaque Mazewater noticed old carvings.” – missing comma after ‘plaque’
  3. …

You know what – let’s leave that topic. I did a search for punctuation goofs I had to fix and it’s embarrassing. You get my point on an editor that can quickly resolve where a comma goes and whether to bust up a sentence is awesome.

But the writing?

Well, somewhat more controversially, I’m very much in favor of quick and dirty concept art by AI to help me visualize a character or backdrop I’m dreaming up in the way that George Lucas used Ralph McQuarrie and so many others in his own worldbuilding.

Meet Uncle Ong, for example, based on my descriptions (if you read Mazewater one day, this guy will break your heart – I promise):

So what are you saying?

Yeah, I’m writing this myself. No AI for that. As slow as I am, I still want to say I built something with my own hands. It’s why I’m in the gig in the first place.

Still, a lot of people are avoiding AI because they rightly have concerns about intellectual property and diminishing quality of work that is increasingly produced by software. Legit concerns, yes, but neither is insurmountable. I also feel that, as a creator, failing to have cutting edge AI tools in your kit is like trying to hold back the ocean with a kitchen knife.

Maybe it makes you a person of principle. But it puts you behind your competitors for sure.

I’m Brian Bennudriti, creator of the Salt Mystic universe, and I’m several years in to writing the next novel in that setting. It’s to be titled MAZEWATER. In February, I told you here about my plan to speed up how long it takes me to finish a novel. My record, unfortunately, is 7 years. I’m getting old, man. My kids are practically grown. How likely at this pace is it I finish even a handful of novels like I planned? The ideas inside my head are exploding into life but I can’t capture it in the words quickly enough. Still, it’s the same fire now that lit up my mind as a child…the love of creating an imagined world.

What I told you in that February article remains true and I believe I’m moving with more focus and less backtracking. But I saw a headline the other day that led me down an unpleasant and depressing rabbit hole.

“Nobody plays video games anymore.” That’s what it said. The reason it hit me hard was I’ve long speculated that future storytelling frontiers would be in gaming: tabletop and in large-scale video games. Much like Walt Disney and those early anime illustrators made a true art of cartoons long perceived as childishness before them, like Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman made true literature of comics, again long perceived as childishness, I’ve been convinced that games like Tainted Grail and Elder Scrolls were the future of storytelling.

Yet the article cited research by Matthew Ball, which you can learn more about here. To boil it down for you, there are too many things competing for our attention. We struggle to care about anything new, so gamers play Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Roblox, and Minecraft because it’s easier to just stay where you are. Switching costs are high to learn a new world, even if they are amazing. Everything else is high-dose dopamine in Tik Tok bursts of frenetic nonsense.

You write science fiction & fantasy! What do you care about video games?

The National Endowment for the Arts found that the share of US adults who had read any novel or short story during the preceding year declined from 45.2% in 2012 to 37.6% in 2022. The share reading any book fell from 54.6% to 48.5% over the same period. A separate analysis of the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans reading for pleasure on a given day fell by approximately 40% between 2003 and 2023—from roughly 28% to 16%.

Yeah, it’s not just video games, man. We’re all hooked on dopamine from our phones, killing our attention spans, and the economics and psychology of dealing with the learning curve and investing in new worlds is stacked very much against something new coming into the literary universe. If I make the most perfect setting and the most interesting characters with dialogue and action that pops, who will read it?

You’re depressing me.

Hold that thought. That same American Time Use Survey said those who still read spent considerable time doing so: approximately 97 minutes on days when they read in 2023. Publishers Weekly reported that US print sales rose slightly in 2025 and remained above pre-pandemic levels, while romance and romantasy experienced strong growth. Audiobook revenue rose 9% in 2025 to $2.43 billion, and fiction accounted for approximately 71% of audiobook sales.

The folks who ARE reading are still voracious about it. If you’ve ever been to a comic or pop culture convention, you’ll meet the most incredible people in the world. And they’re all dreamers who want to enter worlds like this. What I’m saying is they’re still out there, and they’re still consuming massive amounts of content. What is weakening is the audience’s willingness to enter a long work before it has proven its value. People still devote hundreds of hours to stories they love. They are less willing to devote six mediocre hours to finding out whether they might eventually love something.

So what does that mean for storytelling?

I believe I’ve mentioned Yu-Kai Chou and his mind-bending framework for leveraging gaming psychology for human motivation and change management which he calls Octalysis. Read about that here. He’s the first guy I ever heard talk about the steps of game design:

  1. Discovery (how players find your game at all)
  2. On-boarding (how players overcome a learning curve & achieve quick wins)
  3. Scaffolding (how players gain a sense that the game is going somewhere so they invest more heavily)
  4. Endgame (how players receive a sense of accomplishment and reward)

I’m seeing parallels for this set of steps in the future of storytelling, honestly. I see an increasing importance on merchandise, art, and social media interaction to draw people in with the hook for the imagined world. I see that future storytellers may have to be more visual thinkers and incorporate strong, intriguing visuals that can be sticky in the minds of people who chance across them. Maybe more than that though, I’m struck by the increasing importance of the opening. That first five pages. If you don’t hook someone there, then you won’t hook them at all. Too much is waiting to steal their attention away, and much of that is optimized through algorithms with their big, pointy teeth to be better at stealing attention than the writer is.

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Just a few thoughts as I round the corner at about 80,000 words in the work in progress. I thought I’d be ending the book around this word count but I will very likely push it to ~100,000 words. It feels more correct at that length. I promise I’ve trimmed and cut all the fat! I’m not rambling. It’s a tight and intriguing ride in my opinion. Just needs to simmer a bit for these wonderful paper people to feel real and for the world to shake like it needs to.

Anyway, I hope this has been food for thought. I’ll share more about Mazewater over the coming months as things finish up. If you have any questions about it, feel free to let me know.

Till next time,

It takes me seven years to write a novel – and I plan to fix that!

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Oh, wow, if you could have been with me at a rainy beach in New Hampshire in 2015! I had a half-day to myself, off from work with a rainy New England afternoon free. I drove from Portsmouth where I was working down to Hampton Beach. It was cold, gray, and everything was closed for the winter. There was one couple on the beach trying to make a romantic walk of it, but it was the slow, drizzling, mean kind of cold rain that soaks into your bones.

Most of the framework and plot of the novel I’d been writing for years had been rattling around in my head since my time in the Navy in the late 90’s. That’s a long time to cook the soup! I get that. And I’d been writing that book, my first one, for over 6.5 years. Almost 7. But I was close. All the threads I wanted to tie up were pretty much tied. I was planning to see if I could just park near the beach, prop open the laptop there in the car to the pat-pat of light rain, and see what I could do to carry things over the finish line.

There’s a statue of a lonesome woman staring at the sea there. I was down the beach some from her, facing the water same as she was. It was a great vibe, honestly. Not physically comfortable, but amazing for creative inspiration. And I did it! That last image…the last conversation…the final closeout I’d been looking for…it went onto the page all by itself. I couldn’t believe it! No one in the world to tell about it, and no one would probably even understand what a big deal that was for me, but it was truly done. Not rushed and not compromised.

Done, the way I wanted it.

What’s the big deal about that?

Writing a novel is challenging to every aspect of your life. Time spent writing is time away from your family. It’s time not working on your day job. And it’s hard – ridiculously hard! Stories grow more complex than you wanted, and characters change from what you made them to be. Dialogue that sounded awesome in your head repeats back as strained, alien, and as plot dumps when that wasn’t what you intended at all.

I was trying to earn my way, be a husband and a father, but still turn visions in my head into something real that could say something meaningful and outlast me: a world people could step inside. But I felt selfish every time I wasn’t playing a game with my wife or watching a movie with my daughter or taking my son fishing. Writing a novel is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but also one of the most life-altering. It changed me for the better.

Okay, so what are we talking about here?

It takes too long. That’s what I’m saying. Need to fix that. I’m over 4 years in to the novel I’m writing now. Not cool if I’m still banging away on it for three more years.

Talk to me, Grailrunner – how do we speed up the creative process?

If you’re a novelist, like the kind of folks who might read Grailrunner and nod, you feel the tug of two opposing forces:

  • You want your story clean, logical, tight, like a well-made blade
  • You write in spirals, rewrites, loops, hollows — messy, intuitive, iterative

Tell me I’m not alone in that. Anyway, it feels like a flaw to rewrite because it feels like starting over. I’m thinking in layers, but trying to polish before I’ve built the foundation.

But it struck me recently that concept artists have figured this out!

Many visual artists, particularly concept artists, work in ways that seem counter-intuitive. They don’t sit down with a crystalline vision of what they expect the final image to look like. Instead they check the brief and then:

  • Lay down marks, then react
  • Let accidental shapes guide the next decision
  • Build texture before form
  • Play off of unexpected accidents
  • Iterate forward, not backward

I wondered for myself then – this idea of a visual artist pressing ahead with abandon, careless of the final picture, knowing there will be revisions later but enjoying the process for itself and riffing off what they lay down – could that help me?

And?

Here are five principles I’m locking in for myself – maybe they’ll be helpful for you:

1. Generate the back cover text now

I built the entire cover for the book, including the artwork, but more importantly the back cover text. I printed it off in glorious color and even folded it into the size and shape of the final product so I could hold it in my hand. I needed that kind of focus on the story I’m telling (and why) to help me trim shiney bits and bobs that kept raining down from the sky. It’s a laser beam now. Anything not feeding that back cover promise is out!

2. Tell someone the one-line summary of what the book is about

My brother surprised me with the question when I was hip-deep in an action sequence and I hated my ill-prepared, off-the-cuff answer so much I called him two days later with a sharper and better one. Now, it’s like a mantra in my head helping me stick to that promise too. Like the back cover exercise, but even tighter!

3. Get to know the characters better before forcing them into a pre-defined plot

I spent some quality time just extrapolating for myself on what the main folks care about, what they’ve been up to when they’re not “on screen”, and some great backstory that might never make it to the page. AI tools like ChatGPT can accept your work-in-progress manuscript and engage with you in full conversations in those character voices. Crazy way to create a work of art, but an interesting way to immerse yourself in your own story!

4. Draft without editing – for real this time

I press ahead now on the chapter at hand. Just blast it out as intended, almost in a rush, to lay out the skeleton of what’s supposed to happen and let these people do what I know they would do. Tomorrow, I’ll go back over it again and catch the nonsense and the plot holes, the contradictions. Like the concept artist checking the brief, but then just laying down random marks according to what seems right, I’m applying that to the written page. The difference is the freedom now to avoid stopping constantly, in real-time, to worry over whether something makes sense right now and stop to fix it immediately.

5. Accept it when cool things need to die because they no longer fit

Oh, it’s hard! I liked Ilianore a lot, but you’ll never meet her. The climactic spearing from the sky – pretty sure that’s gone too. A midnight flight on a train – also gone. I’m trying, man. I’m trying to turn things loose now when they seemed so amazing but just don’t match up with where things are going or what these people would do. I’m considering short funerals for some, but for sure I’m pasting some of that old text into a document to save in a folder somewhere in case it ever needs to come back to life. Director’s cuts, sort of.

Anyway, that’s what I wanted to bring you today. These principles are speeding things along for me, at least. And I’m noticing a lot less hair growing on the plot these days. Less massive revisions are even necessary. Let’s hope that’s the process working its magic and not also my imagination.

Till next time,

Merry Christmas from Grailrunner!

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Best day of the year. No doubt at all. I love Christmas in all its crazy-train, circus-riot, flashing chili peppers. I’m sorry if it’s not your jam, and I completely get that for some people. But for me, it’s a warm, crackling fire and pumpkin pie, making the dog wear a goofy sweater, eating at Harvey’s in Kansas City at Union Station, snacking on exotic candy and cookies from World Market, and just enjoying family.

I hope yours has in store for you whatever warms your heart.

2025 was another fun building year for Grailrunner. We published our bibliomancy RPG Salt Mystic: Book of Lots in the Spring and submitted to the Ennie Awards. No dice on the Ennie’s (see what I did there, bibliomancy fans?) but a good experience nonetheless. Following that, we rebooted the Grailrunner store, including the Discovery Series of t-shirts and also started selling our first art prints there. Click the “Shop Now” button to check that out.

Upcoming, we’ve got two Grailrunner novels still in the works: Mazewater (set in the Salt Mystic universe) and a horror novel likely to be titled Line (set in what we hope to launch as a series of blues-saturated highway terror stories we’ll call Highway of Ashes).

We’re also refreshing the art on the Salt Mystic tabletop skirmish game. That’s particularly exciting because feedback has always been that people wish we hadn’t gone with the 3D art of the original. We’re fixing that, so be patient. So far, they look fantastic – there are just a lot of them and only so much time in the day (and budget).

I’m hoping in 2026 we can at least get started on a marvelous idea that’s been bubbling around the Grailrunner creation station for a few months now: a fantasy fishing roleplaying system to be called Dreamwater. If we can get this put together, and if you at all see the attraction of sitting by a beautiful lake with a fishing rod in hopes of catching a magical fish that speaks and possibly changes into a fighting beast, then we’ve got your back with this one. Will be amazing.

Anyway, thanks for hanging around with us this year and stopping by to see what nonsense we get up to. I’m always interested to see where people are that read our posts – drop us a note here or on the Facebook page to stay in touch. Let’s hope we can keep finding novelties of history to tell you about, fascinating creators to interview, great pulp science fiction of the past to highlight, and amazing freebies to send your way. Have a look here to see if you missed anything cool.

Anyway, in celebration of the year and this holiday season, I wanted to point you to some beautiful and nostalgic Christmas illustrations to enjoy.

To honor Christmases of the past, I came across a few vintage Christmas illustrations and links to their sources that sent my mind reeling. I love the windey-turney path by which we got so many of our Christmas traditions, and these really caught my eye:

In 1821, a small illustrated paperback titled The Children’s Friend: A New-Year’s Present, to the Little Ones from Five to Twelve was published. It contained quite possibly the first mention and illustration of Santa’s reindeer and sleigh and predated Twas The Night Before Christmas by 2 years. It may have even inspired Clement Clarke Moore to write that poem, which of course gave us the core of our modern Santa Claus.

Here’s that image (if you’re curious), and a link to the entire book in which it was published.

And of course the famous cartoonist, Thomas Nast fine-tuned the Santa we know and love today in his wonderful illustrations, many of which are compiled in a book titled Christmas Drawings for the Human Race. Here’s a link so you can take a look at the entire book. It’s a real treat to see some of these masterworks and know as you appreciate the craftmanship and warmth that these very pictures are what taught us how the jolly old elf looks and makes his way. In many ways, Nast described all this for us, and he did it to help heal America from its wounds from the Civil War.

Here are a few of those gorgeous illustrations, which are hilarious and charming. You really should take a few minutes to go see the full series of art pieces. They’re important history, but also just magical.

That’s what I wanted to bring you today. I wish for you all the joy that you can wish this Christmas and for a shining, prosperous new year.

Till next time,

Yes, there’s a Grailrunner theme song now

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Since we kicked off Grailrunner around 2016 or so, I’ve intentionally left out references to me personally or the contractors I work with. My thought was to keep this super professional and focus on inspiring ideas and cool tools or giveaways that prod other people’s imaginations. Grailrunner Publishing is just a network of like-minded folks that help me put new things into the world, with the potential for other like-minded folks to (hopefully) catch a spark here and unleash their own.

I’ve noticed, however, that a lot of Youtubers are finding these days that their audiences seem to want to know more about them personally, beyond whatever terrain building tips or historical curiosities they talk about. Then occasionally, we get asked the magic question:

Who is Grailrunner?

So for giggles, I’ve rewritten the ABOUT page to tell the origin story and shed a little light on that, specifically recounting the strange experience I had in a rock gorge in Oman in 1997 that poured jet fuel into what became Grailrunner and our signature property, Salt Mystic.

No fairy tales. No gimmicks. That happened. Go read it to see what I mean. Over a decade later when I read that C.S. Lewis had a similar experience that turned into the Narnia series, it struck a chord with me big time. But anyway, in order to celebrate this slight shift in the Grailrunner approach to you guys, I thought it would be awesome to have something cool and free for you to enjoy.

So I wrote a Grailrunner theme song.

I was going for Springsteen/Bob Dylan-style poetry with a modern rock vibe, and I wanted to include a variation on our slogan: “Dreams are engines. Be fuel.” Not an easy task, I’ll grant you. It wasn’t a pretty process. I’m also bad about mixed metaphors, so if you detect any traces in the lyrics of shifting imagery, just be cool about it.

Here’s a link to hear it.

Here are the lyrics, by the way.

And no, that isn’t me singing. I used Suno, an AI app, to take the lyrics and generate a bunch of variations – all in a rock & roll direction but with some tweaks on other styles to get something nice that didn’t sound like everyone else. I think it turned out fantastic.

Anyway, let me know what you think about all this. And if you liked the song, I’d especially appreciate hearing that as my wife thinks it’s too loud and fast. We kind of all need to tell her how wrong she is about that.

Till next time,

A resurrected Harlan Ellison helps settle the question of shock value in storytelling

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Harlan would hate this. With a bullet. But it’s happening.

We’re making hay while the sun shines, trying out a premium ChatGPT subscription and bringing all sorts of people back to life or mashing them together into alternate realities for our entertainment. And honestly, some of these simulations of literary or artistic geniuses are surprisingly accurate to how they thought and spoke. So far, we’ve hosted a hilarious debate about conciseness in storytelling with Stephen King, Hemingway, Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Professor Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, and Homer called Verbosity & Vine and had Professor Tolkien write a new 2,000 word King Arthur short story with an evil grail titled The Black Chalice of Broceliande. There is absolutely going to be a Seinfeld Season 10 post at some point, once I pipe Modern Seinfeld prompts into ChatGPT and let the horses run.

Anyway, welcome to a series we call:

Since the King versus Hemingway debate wound up so funny, we thought it would be a hoot to smash some more genius creators together and have them argue the merit of shock value in storytelling. To remind everyone: our policy at Grailrunner is to consider AI as powerful tools but to always call out their usage. This is for pure entertainment. Nobody’s selling you anything here.

This simulated argument was entirely written by AI with prompts from us, but really took on a life of its own. We decided who joined the conversation, and some of those choices really wound up fantastic. In fact, things really surprised us when we had Professor Tolkien join this conversation as well, as he kind of cleaned everyone’s clock on the matter at hand and got suddenly inspiring. That just happened – we can’t take credit for it! Ellison, at least for our part, stole the show though.

The conversation is called Fire Beneath the Ink:

Key players (all deceased) from left to right are:

Professor J. R. R. Tolkien – author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy and master craftsman of worldbuilding.

Harlan Ellison – a fiercely imaginative and outspoken American writer known for his prolific work in speculative fiction, particularly short stories, television scripts, and essays that challenged social norms and literary conventions. Also one of the finest writers to ever punch a typewriter.

Antonin Artaud – a radical French dramatist, poet, and theorist best known for developing the Theatre of Cruelty, which sought to shock audiences into confronting the deeper truths of human existence. He once threw meat at his audience.

Charles Dickens – a celebrated English novelist and social critic whose vividly drawn characters and dramatic storytelling captured the struggles and injustices of Victorian society. Nobody has ever been better at generating pathos and character empathy than this guy.

Jonathan Swift – an Irish satirist, essayist, and clergyman best known for his sharp wit and scathing critiques of politics and society, particularly in works like Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal.

Random? Maybe a little. They all seemed to suit the topic at hand though, and Artaud and Harlan got along famously! See for yourself by smashing the cover button below!

So funny! We hope you enjoyed the debate. Somehow, it was nice to hear from Harlan again, and with him in good humor, poking at people and enjoying himself. If you’re familar with him at all, surely you see how much he would loathe this entire idea and likely drive to my house and tell me so.

And what about that Professor?! Did you get tingles at the end? We sure did.

Anyway, come back often and check on us. We’re unleashing the creative hordes here.

Till next time,

One Month Into Book Launch: How’s That Going?

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It’s been a month since we published SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a solo roleplaying game based on our multi-media Salt Mystic setting. There are some bright spots, some hopeful notes, and a world of pain. Overall, we’re still incredibly proud of the product and seeing and hearing people appreciate it in the wild is an experience like nothing else!

We thought it would be helpful for anybody thinking of putting your own book out to see what we tried: what worked, and what didn’t…and what still might. Care to come along?

Way back in 2016, I wrote a short article defining some indie publishing principles based on lessons from the launch of my first book: TEARING DOWN THE STATUES. The principles were consolidated into the acronym “MCGRAW”, suggesting the key elements necessary for publishing success (Mainstream recognition, an eye-catching Cover that looks like it belongs with books like it, a popular Genre, as many Reviews on major listing sites as possible, Awards to add validation that the book merits attention, and Word of Mouth.) We kept these in mind this launch and tried to incorporate what we could, although the genre of tabletop roleplaying is so saturated and so dominated by Dungeons & Dragons that we were working uphill and digging holes from the beginning.

Still, hope springs eternal, and this is a product we believe in mightily, knowing from its ideation that nobody else was doing anything like it.

What was the pre-launch like?

February was a hot mess, finalizing the proofs and shaking trees to try and get attention from bloggers and gaming news sites. Short of providing free pizza delivered by cosplayers who do magic tricks, I’m not sure what else we could have done to get mentions from some of these guys – we reached out to 20 and got one “No, Thanks” and absolute crickets otherwise. That’s offering a free physical copy for review, by the way. Local gaming store wasn’t interested, and I didn’t have the heart to cold call others. My ego can only take so much bruising!

I pushed my Photoshop skills to the breaking point generating ad assets to use in social media and ad campaigns, stirring up some images that I think really popped! Here’s my favorite, though we had to switch it out to juice the click rate after things got rolling.

I’m a big fan of Absolute’s 3d cover generator and Envato’s PlaceIt – both to generate mock up’s of the cover in various places. We generated this one below for banners through RPG Geek and some other sites:

We came SOOOO close to hiring an artist we’ve been targeting for years now, and he might yet come on board for a promotional poster, so I won’t jinx anything by saying more. That would be amazing, so wish us luck! Anyway, he was swamped with other things, so the heavy lifting on graphics was still in-house.

How did you handle distribution setup?

The book is available at booksellers globally through Ingram Spark, and also on Amazon thru Kindle Direct Publishing, as well as the pdf on Drivethru RPG. We got the barcode direct from Bowker to retain full distribution rights – there are strings attached to the freebies. Honestly, setup was fairly painless for Kindle Direct, but I thought at one point Ingram was going to leave me with facial tics!

The cover file was a high res jpg I’d built in Adobe Illustrator, and it included some transparent png images (the title and the Grailrunner logo). The art was done with Daz Studio for the figures, some Blender and Photoshop filters for the forearm weapons, and some AI help for the background, everything composited and color graded in Photoshop then dropped into Illustrator for the text and placements. This is what that looks like, front and back:

Weird white outlines were appearing in the digital proof around anything that was a png in the image. Maddening! Nobody at Ingram Customer Service was responding, and internet advice was kind of all over the place. I tried various export presets and never resolved it, at last approving the digital proof even with the outlines in hopes that it was in fact a screen artifact only (as some advice suggested). Thankfully, the issue didn’t show up in the physical version.

As for offering a physical version through Drivethru RPG, I basically gave up. They seem to be saying they use the same print house as Ingram, though a different division or something? I dunno. Anyway, much worse issues with anything that was a png, including the interior art! A true disaster! I’m sure they would say it’s my fault, but I bailed entirely and just offer the digital version through them. My blood pressure thanked me immediately!

How did you advertise?

We ran campaigns on Facebook, through Google, Amazon, and on RPG Geek. The book is also listed this month on Ingram’s home page and in the World Reader, iCurate Connection, and Indiewire newsletters, all via Ingram (~28,000 circulation for the newsletters). Through the Independent Book Publishers Association, the book will be represented at the American Library Association conference in Philadelphia this June. We’ll see how all that works out, but here are some initial experiences:

Meta (Facebook) started at 2.1% click rates with tens of thousands of impressions as well as loads of shares and likes and bookmarks. It all felt great until we saw that precious little of that was converting to sales. Internet research was suggesting a good click rate was 2% for search ads and 0.1% for display ads like banners, but for us it was just a lot of activity with poor conversions. By changing the graphics out to a grinning gunslinger and tweaking the copy a bit, we doubled the click rate to 4.2%. We’ll see if all those bookmarks and shares pay off down the line!

Google Ads was impressive, as their algorithm learns as you go, tweaking things to improve the reach. We wound up with a 5.1% click rate by the campaign’s end, which we view as solid. We even had one day peak at the end at 8.1%! All campaigns led to the same Amazon listing, so we can’t separate sales by campaign but I thought a lot of this experience overall.

RPG Geek was a little disappointing. Multiple banner and display ads dominated the site for a month. The thinking here was that this site entirely specializes in roleplaying games, so you couldn’t find a more on-the-nose target audience! Still, click rates flatlined at 0.1% for two weeks, till the same changes as above doubled that to a paltry 0.18% by campaign end.

Amazon: We only launched the Amazon ads in the last week or so – it’s a little early to report any results. I’d also never added any A+ content to a listing before, so that was new. Of course, I added that gunslinger since he seems to catch eyeballs, along with a very short description of the book.

So, was it a good launch?

Could have done more on pre-launch to get some mentions, honestly. We need to work on a solid email list and social media following though the new content required for that is a bit threatening when everyone has day jobs. Reviews remain super difficult to get, though some favorables have popped up that we didn’t arrange. Overall, sales are ramping up very slowly. Glacially, you might say.

What’s next?

I submitted SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS for consideration in the 2025 Ennie Awards, which is the Super Bowl of RPG’s! Any mentions at all would be high octane fuel for me. That’s a long shot, of course, just because of the ridiculous amount of talent in the field these days. Still, you never know…

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I hope some of this was helpful or at least entertaining. Warts and all, this is how things have gone so far and the plan going forward. I’m sure the outside observer can find all manner of beasties and stinking swamps herein, but from the inside, it’s a wild, crazy bucking bronco we’re just happy to hold onto!

Till next time,

Science Fantasy Adventures Fueled By A Bibliomancy Oracle

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Back in October of 2023, we celebrated being at the halfway mark in completing a thrilling new project at Grailrunner. Incredibly, and I can’t believe I’m finally typing this, we’re finished! This puppy is ready to run!

March 1st, 2025, we are launching SALT MYSTIC: BOOK OF LOTS, a roleplaying game & supplement aimed at the solo player providing western-themed science fantasy adventures through a bibliomancy oracle.

Who are we?

If you’re new around here, we’re Grailrunner, an indie publisher of science and speculative fiction fiction and games. Our driving passion and special emphasis is on the creative process – innovations in immersive storytelling. Read about that here.

What is the BOOK OF LOTS?

The spirit behind the whole project was to provide the thrill and danger of exploration and adventure inside the cover of a book and to open a fully realized world accessible through the fortune-telling mechanics of bibliomancy.

Contents of this 265 page book include an introduction to a far-future setting (western-themed, so plasma-gauntlet dueling cowboys delving pocket worlds), a simple, streamlined set of rules enabling a player to use no ruleset at all or even dice outside of the book, and a 40,000+ word set of short passages, consulted via bibliomancy to judge outcomes and events, adding story prompt flavor to judgements. Also included are a map and atlas descriptions of locations in the setting, 13 traditional nested oracle tables to further drive events in the story and a detailed index.

How does it work?

We walk you through it in a prologue with a detailed Quick Start example, but the general idea is to use the setting descriptions, the atlas and map, and the oracles tables to build out the skeleton of a character and story following a framework we call the Five Questions. Then, either use the roleplaying game rules of your choice (like D&D or Free League’s Year Zero system) or use the barebones, streamlined rules of this book to start experiencing your story.

Either once per in-game day or as you see fit, consult the lots by holding a specific question in your mind and turning to a random passage on a random page, locating a 1 -3 line passage (called a “lot”) and its number. A question might be “What will I find on the other side of this hill?” or “What happens when I try to climb the walls of these ruins?”

The rules provide for YES/NO answers as well as more sophisticated outcome judgements, but, more importantly, add a layer of story prompt-style chaos and randomness to what happens.

Where will this be available?

Available on Amazon here. Available globally through Ingram, so hundreds of booksellers around the world (though all in English). On Barnes & Noble here. On Drivethru RPG here.

How about the cover?

Here are the front and back:

What next?

Shoot me a comment here on this article if you’d like to know more or if you’re interested in a review copy.

Since we’re a teensie little indie publisher, it’s super hard to get attention and drum up interest in new products, especially if they’re very different or not related to dungeons. If you’re willing to post something for yourself linking to this announcement, it would be tremendously appreciated!

Every little kind word helps!

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Anyway, that’s the big announcement. I hope you can feel some of the excitement here on our side. This has been an incredible and life-changing amount of work. It’s nice to start telling people about it.

Till next time,

Outtakes: A Way Forward For Writers That Can’t Let It Go

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I’ve had a couple of weeks worth of a pause in a very hectic year so far and managed to dig back in to a novel in progress. This week, I had some mind-expanding epiphanies that set the whole novel on fire for me again: the exhilaration and thrill to see this story play out on paper burning with the same heat it did when they were all just ideas.

When they were all just ideas, that is, before words went to paper to ruin my dreams.

Thought I’d share that with you in case writer’s block or a blank canvas is staring back at you, or if the plot that made so much sense suddenly crumbled like burnt toast in your hands.

Mazewater: Master of Airships is a standalone story set in the Salt Mystic universe, existing at around 38k words of a planned 70-80k. The original notion was to introduce a new war marshal with the novel, which would lead the introduction of new playing cards in the Salt Mystic wargame for his faction. “Read the book, love the guy, go buy his cards.” Right?

But it grew to be a lot more than that. A whole world more!

Taking place in a wild, unruly city called the Jagganatheum, it’s the story of a sickly, asthmatic young dreamer from a doomed family and the abandoned sentient weapon he steals. When a wheezing, sickly giant is unleashed at the city’s heart, it reveals intrigues that carry him into adrenalin-fueled adventures in a shattered world and, ultimately, to the heights of legend.

Here, there are lore cards to learn more if you’re interested, all relating to elements that will appear in the novel:

Anyway, I pretty much stopped writing on this back in February. Yes, I was busy with my day job, but the plot I had in mind just kind of fell apart for me. It stopped making sense. I really got the impression back in the dead of winter that all the dazzling imagery I had in mind, those flashes of plot points that made the book worth writing for me, they were just getting strung together with a discount plot that would obviously stall and get contrived in places.

I’m the first guy to complain about poorly written soap opera nonsense like Star Wars: The Acolyte and Amazon’s Rings of Power. Juvenile and inept attempts at high school level drama frustrate me: having lead characters just go be heroes because that’s who they are, people being angry with each other just for the dialogue the writer wanted to include, or sizzle reels glued awkwardly together with coincidences or by having characters do things they just wouldn’t normally do but need to for the plot happen, for a few examples. I truly don’t want to be associated with anything that even smells like that.

No offense if you’re into either of these, but craftmanship in plotting is an aspiration of mine. These two mainstream offerings are stinkers in my opinion.

I read three things over the years that have been screaming at me recently (only one of which I can cite so I’ll paraphrase):

  1. “The only thing worth writing about is people.” – Harlan Ellison
  2. “Villains are interesting because they are often the driver of the plot – they DO things.” -unknown
  3. “Marvel’s Magneto (major villain in the X-Men comics and movies) has one of the most interesting motivations in all of comics.” -unknown, but it was a writer for Wizard Magazine

What I take from all that is:

  1. Stick to realistic motivations and interesting, fleshed-out people who all have their own agendas and desires (not just plot supporters who don’t exist when not in the chapter)
  2. Have protagonists DRIVE the plot (versus villains) by their actions, which have consequences
  3. Make the motivations of villains make sense and be understandable and relatable, almost justified

It’s these principles that set the wrecking ball to the ideas I was holding on to. I’ll give you a few examples of what I’m talking about:

1. A train trip through the wild, jumbled Jagganatheum

Right after I started writing the novel, I caught the flu – it was a nasty one with a fever that wouldn’t go away. One night I had one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. I had been trying to envision what a city two thousand years old and comprised of a single enormous building strapped to a mountainside would look like from the inside (and getting nowhere).

Then the dream – I saw Mazewater’s entire day play out. I watched him get beaten up by a guy who posed as his bully so his mom would stop trying to toughen him up. I saw him in a complex series of barter exchanges and understood how the social networks functioned. I remember being in a subway-style train station with ancient broken marble statues and skylights, hissing through massive corridors like airport concourses. It was a genius picture and made the city make so much more sense for me.

I was enamored with those images for months before I came to realize the whole series of exchanges and even the trip across the city just burned the clock and didn’t move anything. They could be trimmed without cost to the plot, and that hurt tremendously to let them go.

But I had to. And I knew it. Finally.

2. Ilianore, the loose cannon brunette

Oh, I hated to let this one go! No fever dream this time, but still she showed up in my head fully formed such that I could almost hear her voice. She had jet black hair she kept in a pony tail and worked part time for a troll-looking lady chef right out of a Studio Ghibli movie. When the lead character (who had crushed on her since they were in school together) would accidentially get her fired, Ilianore would barge into his apartment in a storm of anger, light a match and drop it to the floor, and sit to demand of him what was he thinking while his carpet burned. Just to make her point.

I found myself cramming in a romantic subplot with awkward flirting, weird secrets she would bring to the story, and a terrible confrontation after you were made to like her where she would die to drive him forward.

All nonsense and didn’t fit at all. It just wasn’t the story the core ideas needed. By keeping her, it forced certain things to happen with her or risk distractions and clutter. Unfortunately, and I breaks my heart to say this, we will not meet Ilianore in this book. We’ll likely never meet her, and I miss her already.

3. An old conspiracy uncovered

I turned this one loose just this past week. Still hurts.

Again, almost fully formed, I saw Mazewater on a stylite pillar doing a vision quest, trying to commune with the sentient weapon he’d stolen for 3 days in the rain. I knew why the pillar was there and what that had to do with the founding of the city. I knew what the weapon would say when it finally spoke, and how that would unlock an old conspiracy that turned the whole story on its head. I could have told you what that had to do with the giant’s attack on the city, what was really going on, and what happened next. I mean, this part of the story was core to the whole remainder of the novel. I really….can’t stress this enough….really didn’t see even the NEED to let this go.

So I was taking a long walk in the woods this past Tuesday, pleased that I had rewritten the work done so far into a tighter, coherent narrative with dynamic characters and that, so far, this story matched what was needed. However, some things about the bigger picture still didn’t make sense for me and felt cluttered. I was really worried heading out on that walk, fearing things might crumble again as I thought them through looking for holes. My plan was to let this walk take as long as it took to iron things out.

At one point, almost audibly, I told myself nothing was sacred. Nothing at all. What would the story look like if I just stopped holding on to cool pictures or imagined moments and let the motivations and personalities decide the course? What was it, exactly, that made me want to write this thing at all?

It turned out, the old conspiracy didn’t add anything useful at all. The weapon needs to say something else entirely. Even the vision quest was just a sizzle-reel for me that I thought was interesting, to add flavor to the history of the city but was useless in the end.

Gone! All of it. I am fascinated with where this wound up though. It’s tight and hangs together like brickwork.

Anyway, what I wanted to offer you today is the wisdom of outtakes. I have entire an entire chapter of Ilianore that I’m keeping for my own files. I’ve got pages of notes about the old conspiracy and what I saw in that fever dream of the city, that will likely never see the light of day – but which I’ll keep.

I’m not going to delete or discard any of that, much like directors struggle to cut scenes from their movies to which they’d become attached. In their case, they might add them to Director’s Cut versions of the movie just to feel good about sharing them with the world. Whether scenes wind up in the world or not though, it was the cutting that made the difference. That’s what tightened the story and made it resonate enough with an audience that anyone would even want a Director’s Cut of it in the first place.

Turn them loose, then. Nothing is sacred. Move on, even if they’re gorgeous.

I had writer’s block for a reason, and it was because I was holding on to nonsense that felt like gold.

Let me know what you think about that. Till next time,