This used to be my blog. I’ve since outsourced that function to Livejournal to tap into the community there, but this site remains as a central information point for me and my work. I am Alexandra Erin, and I’m an author. A professional one… my work as an author is my sole source of income. Unlike most professional authors, though, I work almost exclusively in the area of self-published cyberfunded ongoing literature.

Some people would hold that this means I am not a “real” author, or at least not a published or professional one. They may have a point, as professional published authors don’t make a living from their writing.

I do.

Over the years, I’ve been advised to strike the phrase “aspiring author” from my vocabulary, for two different reasons: one is the idea that it’s the language of the wannabe, a hopeful sounding euphemism for “unpublished” or even “failed”. The other reason, which I heard more often as I wrote more, was the idea that since I am in fact an author… one who auths on a regular basis… I should not describe myself as “aspiring” any more.

Well, I am an author, but I still have aspirations.

Thus, I am an aspiring author.

It’s a good phrase. “To aspire” literally means “to breath for”. Isaac Asimov is reported to have said that he wrote for the same reason that he breathes: because if he stopped he would die. He was an aspiring author to the end.

I am currently at work on the following stories:

Tales of MU, a story set in a world that resembles the modern age in the same way that the standard issue fantasy setting resembles the medieval age. The main story concerns one Mackenzie Blaise and her day-to-day college life, but there are many side stories woven in and around it. This story has strong erotic elements and an overarching plot whose progress may be difficult to discern without use of time-lapse photography. It’s a very character-driven piece.

Star Harbor Nights is a mosaic story set in a superhero world. The focus in most cases is personal and emotional, with occasional adult elements. Again, very character driven.

Void Dogs is a comedic fantasy space opera with a plot held together by bailing wire and duct tape. It does include sexual references, but little in the way of explicit depictions.

Tribe: Fantasy In Miniature is an ongoing literary experiment set in a city that harbors many secrets. Each installment is exactly 333 words long. More or less appropriate for all ages.

The 3 Seas is a nautical fantasy adventure story. More story-driven than my other work, and also more or less appropriate for all ages.

My work is supported partly by advertising, but mostly by the generosity of reader patronage. If you’d like to contribute money either in a one time donation of any amount or by signing up to be a recurring sponsor, please visit this page. The idea is for each reader to pay what the work is worth to them, modified for what they can afford to give. If that’s too much, you can take 50% and pretend you found it on sale. But ultimately, no one person has to pay anything, so don’t feel guilty if you can’t… just point your friends to a story you think they might like.

Even if none of them have anything to contribute, if they bring in their friends, and they bring in their friends, then sooner or later someone will come along with five extra dollars in their pocket who will say, “Yeah, this is worth five bucks.”, and that’s what keeps me going.

Anyway, thank you, and enjoy the stories.

If you’ve never tried reading by candlelight… it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially if you don’t have anything like a reading desk that’s set up for it. I have a lot of candles, and it took four of them with an aluminum foil reflector behind them for me to be able to read comfortably in my easy chair.

A flashlight might have been easier, but I have more candles than I have batteries and lightbulbs.

I’d like to note that Catherynne M. Valente’s novel Palimpsest is going on sale this week. Pre-orders are available through Amazon.com. I’m looking forward to meeting her and SJ Tucker next month during the New Orleans trip… it should be quite the ride. Even though I’m going along as a passenger/participant/audience member, I know a few of my readers will be on the train, too… it’s exciting, scary, and humbling to consider that. I’ll bringing along a few goodies to help break the ice.

Thank you, everybody, who offered feedback on the More MU post. Obviously with opinions divided, no solution is going to make everybody happy, but I think I’ve hit upon what will work for me and what will be a decent compromise for everybody else.

It is what I described as the “mosaic” approach; turning More MU into an anthology series. For those of you who like reading Jamie and don’t want to see his story abandoned, don’t worry… that was never in the cards. He’ll be a recurring feature, in a similar capacity to what I described as an option for keeping things “Jamie-centric”: focusing on the more important, pivotal parts of his school life. In between those episodes, I can use the space to develop the same sorts of things I’ve done as Bonus Stories/Other Tales, that require a little more space to take off: Lucinda Blake’s interviews and the developing drama at the student paper, the intrigue and politics of Dee’s folk down below, Teddi Lundegard’s sessions with the students, etc.

Basically, Tales of MU will remain Mackenzie-centered while More Tales of MU will let me fill in the rest of the campus (and world) in a way that another single viewpoint and the occasional Other Tales never could. It’ll also let me develop the overarching plot more… so much of what’s going on is not happening in Mackenzie’s eyesight. To cover it all in Other Tales, I’d have to stop doing myths and legends, history, etc.

There won’t be any immediately noticeable change, though, since I’m in the midst of the skirmish

There won’t be any immediately noticeable change, though, since I’m in the midst of the skirmish plotline. I’ll be finishing that out before jumping viewpoints. I plan on making a poll post late Monday to gauge interest in various “features” I have in mind for the expanded More MU… the comments on that post can also be used to put forth ideas/characters I’ve overlooked.

Edit-dendum:

Here is a news story about the power outage… looks like I lucked out in terms of having the power back on relatively quickly, as some folks were down for much longer.

Conclusion: something’s gone wonky with the Wordpress installation. I’m going to reinstall it. Shouldn’t take long, shouldn’t affect the stories. Website may be inaccessible for a small period of time. After that, I’ll get on with completing the week’s schedule.

In particular, I think I have to say that it’s MOARMU that trips me up. It’s frequently the last thing I write in a day, and if I try to hold myself to writing it earlier I end up not getting to the stuff after it.

When I first started it, my hope was that being less invested in the character than I am in Mackenzie would make it easier to write, but with how many times it’s ground to a halt, I think the opposite is true. I just don’t have the character down as well as I do her. It takes me longer to write a shorter story with him. Having a challenge, stretching myself as a writer, etc. is a good thing to do sometimes, but my satisfaction doesn’t equal your enjoyment if it doesn’t result in words on the page, does it?

If I get stuck on a character’s viewpoint in Void Dogs or Star Harbor, I can flip around to somebody else and then come back (and when I remember that I can do that, it’s much easier to do multiple updates a week). MOARMU doesn’t work that way.

I haven’t wanted to face this because my goal was to have the two stories following parallel tracks; MOARMU is coming up from behind as it is, so updating it less often than the parent series would just make it fall further and further behind.

So, I’m thinking I’m either going to have to change the schedule or the format or both. I haven’t decided where to go with this. I don’t want to abandon the characters and the plotlines I have in mind, but following the skirmish match it may go from the day to day story of Jamie’s life at MU to an anthology of important episodes in his life at MU (more like a traditional novel) or maybe even a mosaic of interlocking serials from different peoples’ point of view; after the skirmish match, change to another character, come back to Jamie for the dance, etc. It is, after all, “More Tales of MU”, not “Jamie’s Tales of MU”.

I know there are people who prefer MOAR to the original recipe MU and this might disappoint them; on the other hand, for those who prefer it because it gives a wider view of the world, maybe making it a mosaic story would make it even better. In any event, there are still significantly fewer people reading MOAR than reading the original, and with more frequent updates, the audiences for Void Dogs and Star Harbor are creeping up towards MOAR’s levels; cutting back on my commitment to telling Jamie’s story will allow me to nurture those.

I don’t know. I’m thinking about it. For now, I’m going to strike the remaining Mores off this week’s schedule and finish everything else that’s on it.

(You can give feedback on this at the Livejournal mirror.)

Edit-dendum:

Good feedback. I’m hearing a lot of people endorsing the mosaic idea and a lot of people saying they don’t want to lose Jamie or see his plotlines left hanging. I guess I can clarify a little that giving him the axe (doesn’t he already have that?) is not in the cards… what I’m looking at is ways to keep the story going forward when it keeps threatening to die on me. To the people who are saying that they would rather have more sporadic updates of Jamie’s story than lose it… that’s pretty much what the mosaic would be, except for the fact that during the times it’s “sporadic”, there would be something else to read.

I’m probably going to end up doing a combination of the things that have been mentioned. The mosaic focus would come around to Jamie when something interesting/important is going on from his side, and then move to somebody else when it isn’t, so if you read Jamie’s stories it would be a bit more novel-ish.

Yes, this is the same laptop that betrayed me so cruelly before, but it’s been well-behaved since then, and I’m a bleeding-heart liberal at heart. I believe in rehabilitation. I don’t see any benefit to not engaging with rogue computers.

You get the idea.

When I’m writing on my laptop, I usually don’t bother connecting to the internet until I need to. It’s distracting and it drains power much more quickly broadcasting wirelessly than sitting there typing does. Since I was already running late on my schedule, I decided to sit down and really focus… just write. Everything I need to do, in one marathon session.

And so I didn’t figure out until after I’d done about seven hours of writing that Vista had decided it wasn’t interested in allowing any internet traffic, Vista and Ubuntu still aren’t speaking to each other, and when I finally got hold of a writable CD, I found out my CD drive doesn’t want to write, either.

Fun tiems.

So I started copying the stories by hand. If I were typing from a print-out, this would be annoying but okay as I am pretty much a goddess of data entry, but my Windows Vista also doesn’t want to talk to my roommate’s printer. Trying to type from my laptop to desktop involves doing things with my field of vision that it wasn’t meant to do. It’s possible, but… irritating and slower than it should be.

I figured out halfway through Tales of MU that it’s easier to rewrite than retype, reading a paragraph or two and then copying what happened rather than transcribing word for word. In the process, I think the story got richer as well as longer. It ended with me having a seven-thousand word chapter (my target is 2,000-3,000… my “ideal” is kind of like 3,000).

So this got me thinking… right now I’ve got nothing scheduled for the weekends, and I’ve now twice made a great start in the first half of a week and then blown my schedule to hell trying to keep up after a late day. Here I am, with the possibility of posting two MU chapters today (one as a make-up for Friday)… or saving one for tomorrow. Essentially, having written one over the weekend and one today.

I’ve still got to copy the other stories, but I have no doubt I’ll be able to similarly expand them.

The problem with the “buffer” that people have previously proposed I adopt is that it would not be self-sustaining; if I had a three day buffer, the first three times I needed it, it would be gone. If I make a point of getting a day or most of a day’s writing done spread out over the weekend each week, though, I’d be starting the week with a head start. If I stumbled once a week, it would be built in, and I’d pick it back up. It would be essentially what I’m trying to do now, except instead of always trying to play catch-up, I’d already be ahead.

So, yeah. Last Friday is a bust. I failed to deliver. I’m going to call it a “Pyhrric loss”, though, because I can learn from it.

Even with the misses on the schedule, I’m feeling pretty good about the last few weeks. I’m getting better at holding to deadlines again. It is not a good thing to have items on a list that are never delivered, but when I don’t look at the list and look at how much I have produced, it’s a good output. I just need to smooth it out, so to speak.

And from the way money’s been coming in, I think I have some satisfied readers. No, I’m not on target at the moment to hit my goal for the month, but at roughly two weeks into February I’m at roughly $500, which is roughly… well… it’s not where I want to be but it’s where I can live in the short term.

I’m going to need that to be stepped up in the near future, because I’ve got moving expenses coming up, I’ve got taxes to pay, etc. But I understand there’s a two-way street here, which is why I’m stepping up my performance.

I’d also like to bring to everybody’s attention once again the ongoing sponsorship option (note to self: update the sponsorship lists immediately after posting this). On the contributor page, there is an option for Ongoing Support. It functions like a subscription or a pledge. By signing up your Paypal, you commit to giving $5 a month. You can cancel this on your end at any time, but for as long as it’s there, you’ll have the option of having your name (nickname or otherwise) appear on a roll on the Tales of MU, Void Dogs, or Star Harbor Nights website. These lists aren’t very prominently displayed right now. My next progressive tweak of the layout is going to have a prominent link when people are looking at the main archive page, along with a more prominent listing of the story title.

If you think you can spare $5 a month and you think the entertainment value you get over the course of the month is worth that $5, it doesn’t take long to sign up. You can choose to remain anonymous if you don’t want to participate in the sponsor thing and just want to simplify the process of contributing.

I set the goal for reader contributions as being $1500 a month. All it would take is three hundred readers to sign up as sponsors to make that happen like clockwork. I don’t expect to get there this month. But then… I’ve been surprised before.

I know your name on a website isn’t necessarily a huge incentive, but it’s a start. I’m open to suggestions for further incentives. Things that have been put forward include stickers or other affordable mailables (probably have to wait until after I move) and access to insider tidbits like little snatches of world background or character history (probably via email). I’m open to discussion on that.

And if you don’t have $5 every month or you don’t think it’s worth quite that much, you can still kick a buck or two over if you feel like it. No amount is going to insult me.

And as always… if you don’t have any money and you feel terribly guilty, relax. I still appreciate your patronage. Your page views in some way contribute to my advertising value. And if you tell a friend, or a bunch of friends, or put a link up somewhere, you’re contributing even more.

Wow. I need to keep up on my blogging. That got pretty long.

For the first few days after meeting him at the studio, I kept checking my e-mail to see if Matt the record guy had forwarded the list of people to me so I could start interviewing them about their impressions. The e-mail never came, though, and other things came up, and eventually it slipped from the back burner to the little shelf over the stove and then finally all the way behind it.

It was a serendipitous coincidence that reminded me of the case, when I was shifting some shit around in my storage unit and dislodged a box from the top of a pile, sending a bunch of my old college papers down on my head. These included a book report on The Demolished Man that I’d written for Professor Sandberg, complete with a tiny sand dollar doodle in the corner by the grade and three bigger ones on the back of the last page.

The sight of them jarred my memory and got me moving. I tore off the top page, dug out all the Sandberg papers from the pile, and hit the bank. The pages, minus the one, went into a safety deposit box. Paranoid? Maybe. Only a few people had any reason to think my old college papers might be valuable, but if there’s anything in life that should strike you as sinister, it’s serendipity.

When everything comes together like the cogs of a well-oiled machine, look out. There’s just no telling how much damage a well-oiled machine can do before it breaks down.

Once I knew the other papers were secure, I gave Larry a ring on my cell . He picked up so fast I thought I’d been dumped straight into voice mail.

“Larry, hi,” I said. “It’s Marnie, I’ve…”

“Marnie,” he said. “You got something?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, listen, did you ever give Matt my address? I never got the list of…”

“I took care of them,” he said. “Did you find any sand dollars?”

“I’ve got one,” I said. “I’m not sure how good it is, but…”

“Just one?” he repeated. He said it like I’d just told him he could have just one kidney or just one lung. He said it like an addict who was told there was just one pill left in the bottle. “Jesus, Marnie… I thought you saved all your college shit.”

“I might have lost some when I moved,” I said. “Trust me, I tore my storage unit apart looking for them, and this is all I came up with.”

“Okay, well, bring it in to the studio,” he said.

“When can…”

“NOW,” he said.

“Are you there now?” I asked.

“I’m always here,” he said. His voice seemed to punctuate every sentence with “(you stupid bitch)”. I needed to get close to him, to get a better idea of what was happening to him before he managed to do it to a bunch of other people, but I had a feeling if I walked in and gave him the useless tiny scribbling, things would go from ugly to horrific in no time flat.

He already had enough of the sand dollars to do an album. A few more wouldn’t make things worse.

“Hey, this is only one page of a paper,” I said. “I just got an idea where the rest of it might be. If you don’t mind giving me fifteen minutes…”

“No, I don’t mind!” he said. “We need these, Marnie!”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll get the rest and come right there.”

It didn’t take fifteen minutes to head back into the bank and get the rest of the book report out of the vault, but when telling an impatient crazy man how long something is going to take, it’s always better to pad things out a little bit.

Safer.

When I got to the Echo Creek studio, Matt was in the booth with a couple of guys, arguing. I assumed they were a band. There were no instruments in sight, but they had that look. Larry was at the computer desk, fiddling with something on a piece of paper. He had the headphones on. There was something like a snowdrift of Pepsi bottles, empty noodle cups, and energy drink cans around the desk.

Nobody had noticed me coming in. I crept over to the sound board mixing thing. Inside, Matt was yelling something that looked like “I don’t know!” He looked angry and frightened and sad. I looked for a slider that said “turn on volume on microphone in other room without being obvious so you can eavesdrop”, but I didn’t see anything like that. I did see a thin layer of dust on the board.

The argument could have been about anything… money, promotion, editing decisions, money… but my guess was that the single-minded pursuit of the sphere-music was causing Matt to neglect the rest of his business.

I cleared my throat and then started walking towards Larry, making as much noise as I could with my footfalls. When I was halfway there, his head whipped around and he glared at me.

I held up the back page to show him the sand dollars.

“Oh, thank God!” he said, tearing the headphones off and lurching from the chair to stumble towards me and take it out of my hands. “You don’t know how much I need these.”

I didn’t, but it was disturbing to contemplate how much he needed.

“Why? Are some of the others not working for the album?”

“I’ve heard them too many times,” he said. “I’ll get these decoded and Matt can start setting up the instruments.”

“So, they get old after a while?” I said.

“No, but I want to hear something new,” he said. “Something more. I want to know more.”

“Know more what?” I asked.

That one was a stumper. He stood there, his face scrunched up like a constipated chipmunk, and then he finally said, “More music. This will do for a start, but we really need to get in touch with the others and find out if they have any more. I’ve been trying to write down everybody I know who was in our astronomy class.”

He handed me the paper he’d been working on and I saw it wasn’t just a list of names, but a seating chart written in Larry’s own brand of chicken scratch. All the spots from the front row on back, up to halfway across the third row from the back, where Larry had put his own name, were filled in. Other names were filled in haphazardly behind that.

“Where’d you get the names from?” I asked. They were mostly first and last. Some of the ones that were past him were only last name or first name.

“My memory,” he said. “We did go to class with these people. Help me fill in the rest.”

I would have bet money that Larry hadn’t known that many people his entire time at college, the antisocial git.

“I don’t know anyone you don’t have here,” I said.

“Well, that’s no good!” he said. “I did most of it… I’ve done most of the work so far. Can’t you help at all?”

“I brought you new sand dollars,” I said, looking at his chart.

“Three of them,” he muttered, but I ignored him. His chart was bugging me out.

I recognized enough of the names to be pretty confident that he’d gotten it right. Where had he pulled the names from? They weren’t likely to have been encoded in the music, which meant they really had come from his memory. It was possible he’d recovered buried memories while under the influence of the music, but for that to work, he’d have to have had the memories to begin with. You couldn’t reconstruct what wasn’t there, and I doubted that many of our classmates had just happened to introduce themselves to him. He’d gotten more names of the people in front of him than behind… had we worn nametags one day?

Nametags on our backs?

I probably would have remembered that.

A lot of people want to believe that the brain would work like a combination of Daredevil and Sherlock Holmes if only you can unlock its hidden potential, but there would be no evolutionary survival value in an organ that functioned like that. It would be like building a massive supercomputer to run a DOS emulator. He had to have seen all these names somewhere, in some context where they would have been matched with the seats, like a list or a roster or…

Or a seating chart.

Duh.

On the first day of class, Professor Sandberg had handed a piece of paper to Ms. Jaclyn Higginson the corner of the front row and had everybody fill in their name and pass it on. Larry had recreated it, in the state it had been in when he’d seen it, and then filled in the few names he remembered from other places.

I picked it up and held it like a menu, so he couldn’t see it.

“Let’s see what I can contribute I said,” I said. “Well, the front row looks right. You’ve got Jackie Higgins, Carol Anders, Bill Hicks…”

“I know I got the first row right,” he said.

Okay. As Mr. Hicks had definitely not been in astronomy class with us, that narrowed things down. Either it had been a one-time boost, or it was only his visual memory that had been stimulated… his visual memory and his ability to reproduce things visually. That was interesting. What had he looked like when he’d drawn the chart? I imagined it was a lot like Professor Sandberg, doodling his sand dollars.

Alternately, though, he might not have been listening.

“Can you make me a copy of this?” I asked. There was no copy machine in the office. There might have been a scanner somewhere under the pile.

“Why?”

“If I take it with me, I can start calling around while I’m trying to think of more names,” I said. “Start pulling my weight.”

“Yeah, okay,” he said, and he pulled out another double sheet of paper. “You take that one. I’ll make another.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I watched him start to work.

Yeah. It was a lot like Professor Sandberg. He wasn’t even watching his hands.

So the “music” did something more to his brain than make him think it was wondrously transcendent. Of course it would. What was the point of making itself appealing? Plants grew big bright fruits with delicious and nutritious flesh so that animals would spread their seeds far and wide.

Why did I have a feeling that metaphor was more apt than I wanted it to be?

Leaving the studio, I decided I would start calling some school chums… but a teacher, not my fellow students.

No, I wasn’t about to call up Professor Sandberg… if a suicide didn’t leave behind a ghost to begin with, that was pretty much the equivalent of a “Do Not Disturb Any Further” sign. But I thought another one of my professors who was still very much among the living might be able to provide me with some insight, in a way.

During my stint in the honors program, I’d taken an interdisciplinary course co-taught by a professor of comparative religion and one from the music department, called Sacred Songs: The Intersection of Faith and Music. It had been about the intersection of faith and music. It was one of the best classes I’d ever taken. Every class, we listened to recordings or watched videos, and then discussed. Everything from gospel music to Buddhist chants, with indigenous dance from every culture that ever danced indigenously in sight of a video camera.

The class had mostly been sociological in focus, but Professor Rowena Booth had been very interested in the science of the mind and how music could affect it. She was religious, but also of the opinion that not only could the sublime and the mundane co-exist together, they couldn’t exist apart from each other. Studies about “belief centers” in the brain and explanations of spiritual experiences as neurological phenomenon didn’t frighten her or threaten her beliefs. She took them as confirmation that the world fit together neatly.

I didn’t agree with everything she believed in, but her digressions on that subject had had a huge effect on the course of my life.

Even on-topic, she’d been pretty damn enthralling. Not quite transcendent or wondrous, but close. She could talk forever about the way music affected the human mind—the human soul—and not get boring. I didn’t think she’d know anything about alien brainwashing melodies encoded in doodles, but she’d always been good at getting me to see a piece in another light or consider another dimension of it. I was hoping that if I could get her talking, she might say something that would trigger some idea or insight for me.

After all, if things were going to go all serendipitous on me anyway, I thought I might as well let it work in my favor. Sometimes magic was just a matter of figuring out where to stand… putting yourself in the path of good fortune and staying out of the way of bad. You could have some incredible runs of luck in that way.

It was a risky game. A sucker’s game, maybe. If you just sit back and leave things alone, probability says the good and the bad will tend to average out. Once you start messing about with things, you’re taking your life out of the hands of probability and managing things for yourself.

If you can do a better job than the law of averages, bully. If not, watch out. An incredible run of bad luck is incredibly bad.

“Hi, Professor,” I said. “I don’t know if you remember me, but my name’s G.M. Masterson.” That’s what I’d called myself in college. “I was in your honors…”

“Oh, G.M., how could I forget?” she said, with a weak laugh. “Sorry, I’m a little burnt out… I’ve had old students calling me all week.”

Oh? Had Larry been in touch? I didn’t know if Larry had taken any of her classes. He certainly hadn’t been in the honors one.

“It’s just so senseless, so sad,” she continued.

Ah. Somebody was dead. Many things were sad, but few things were as senseless to a living breathing human as the sudden and unexpected cessation of life. I had a pretty good idea what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, and you’d better believe it still gave me pause.

“Oh… I hadn’t actually heard,” I said.

“You hadn’t? Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I assumed that’s why… I mean, I only had you in one class, and that was the one with poor Professor Warwick…”

She choked up and trailed off. I felt a tingle run down my spine. Professor Warwick had been the music professor for the honors course.

I had an apprehension. Not quite a premonition. Nothing supernatural about it, and it wasn’t very “pre”, but there was an image in my head of Professor Warwick, bleeding out while scribbling on the walls like Professor Sandberg.

“How…?” I asked. One word questions was all it took in a case like this.

“They say it was a prowler,” she said.

Oh. No music of the spheres. It was a total, un-serendipitous coincidence.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m terribly sorry. I’ll call back another time, okay?”

“Thank you,” the professor said, and I hung up.

“I took care of them,” Larry had said. Not it… not the list. Them. The people on it, the people who’d heard the music. Took care of. Who had been on it?

Matt’s acquaintances. People in the scene.

I was suddenly even more curious about what the subject of the fight in the recording booth had been. “I don’t know!” Don’t know what? What happened to Bob and Fred and Other Bob… whoever else was on the list?

And could that list have possibly included an old teacher of Matt’s? Mightn’t he have chosen to share his great find with a man more knowledgeable, someone who was interested in the transcendental power of song?

I didn’t know where Matt had gone to college, or even if he had gone. I certainly didn’t know if he’d been in any of Warwick’s classes. It was all speculation… speculation and coincidence.

Considering those were the things I’d built my career on, that wasn’t reassuring.

Discuss this story.

I just got utterly confused as to whether the Void Dogs story segment I’m about to post is going up a few hours late or really early in the day, and then realized I’ve managed to utterly confuse my self about what I have and haven’t written and what day it is. I was so excited about getting back to Star Harbor I ended up writing that on Monday somehow and… oy.

So, schedule is a good idea. Better idea: CHECKLIST. Labeling the schedule as a commitment in my head doesn’t do much good, since calendars are apparently on the Department of Headland Security no-fly list. I guess I’ll keep alternating SHN and VoDo (which I’m told is a better abbreviation than “VD”) this week. Next week, I’ll look at the schedule each time I’m writing a story and I’ll mark it *done* right on the page when it’s done.

See, one of my nitpicks of the 4th edition lies with a side effect of the designers’ approach towards keeping the game equally playable all the way through. The Monster Manual has roughly as many enemies at each of the thirty different experience levels… as many 1st level monsters as there are 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, and so on, and all the levels in between. Great, but when a party is 10th level, they could be fighting large numbers of monsters of several levels lower than them and/or a few monsters of higher levels. At 1st level, there’s quite literally nowhere to go but up, so the choice is somewhat restricted.

I don’t blame them. The alternative would be to double up the amount of weak monsters and end up doing extra work for creatures that will become “obsolete” fairly early on in a campaign. And frankly, the way monsters and combat work in the 4th edition, there’s a lot more to an encounter than the name at the top of the stat block. (I approach them as short-short stories in their own right.) And it’s not like there aren’t plenty of options for customizing.

But when it came to putting together encounters with “off the shelf” baddies, I found my options pretty limited. There are the tiny evil humanoids, there’s vermin like bats and rats and insects, there’s skellingtons… those are the basic options, and they’re all fairly clichéd at this point.

“You have to fight rats for a couple levels then you get to save a princess.”

So I thought, “How do you make rats interesting?”

And then I thought, “Lovecraft did.”

Boom. Horror campaign.

But even after setting on a theme that transformed a lot of the low-level monsters from stock fodder to pieces of a story, I found myself hungry for to work with. Sure, I’m a creative person and I could come up with new varieties of creepy crawlies, or rework some of the existing ones (and my campaign is going to involve a good bit of that), but the appeal of using something like D&D… especially the new edition where each monster comes in several varieties to serve multiple combat roles… is having ready made pieces to assemble a story. It’s like the difference between sculpting something from scratch and building it from LEGO brand bricks. Not all of us can be Michelangelo, and in terms of time cost vs. amount of fun had, LEGO does me just fine.

So, I had high hopes for Open Grave… specifically, I was hoping that it wasn’t just going to be Harryhausen skeletons and fantasy liches. I was not disappointed on that score. It has rules for plague zombies and zombie apocalypse-style throngs and it has a category of monster for Pet Semetary-style “came back wrong” undead and it has disembodied body parts and it has suggestions for hauntings that are resolved as something other than “beat the ghost into submission”… hauntings as hazards, as difficult terrain, as skill challenges. The “fluff” section is all about “how undead work” and it’s not terribly interesting to me but the meat is so much meatier than that of Planes.

Now, I’m not going to be doing Dawn of the Dead in my campaign, but the fact that they thought to include it shows that they took the right approach to the material. In 4th Edition D&D, your character is a Big Damn Hero from level 1 and is pretty close to a physical god at level 30. Characters like that demand cinematic-style challenges.

The adventures seem to be well-designed, and easily insertable into an ongoing campaign.

Even if you’re not running a horror campaign, it’s got monsters you can plug in to your evil wizard’s lair or your dragon’s den or whatever. Many of them are expanded varieties of existing monsters (i.e., more zombies, more skeletons, more wraiths, more ghouls, more vampires), so chances are you’re already using them and this allows you to shake things up a bit. The other that monsters are new and unique (in 4th edition, anyway) are all interesting and well done. They also thrown in such iconic baddies as Strahd and Vecna, for people who care about them.

I’m going to wrap up my review of the book’s positives here because it’s likely that some or all of my players are reading this and I don’t want to spoil anything for them by emphasizing anything in particular.

Negatives:

No player content.

I know this is essentially a DM’s tool, but since there aren’t any plans for an undead player’s handbook, I think they could have added some space for the players. For instance, I’m not a big fan of the “rehabilitation” that vampires have been undergoing in fiction, but I was surprised that there is no love for undead player character types. I was disappointed that there were no new rituals, particularly as I feel that rituals in the Religion category are underrepresented in the core rulebooks and this would have been an ideal place to rectify that a bit. I suppose the Divine Power sourcebook might take care of that, when it comes out. But a few paragon paths certainly would not have gone amiss (Undead slayers?) No new magic items, either, which are something I consider to be a DM’s tool as much as a player perk. The artifacts that are included are well-done, but artifacts are less “plug-and-play”… you pretty much have to design a story around them instead of including them in one.

Final conclusion:

I would strongly recommend this book to anybody who’s running a horror-tinged campaign, anybody who wants an expanded bestiary and can’t wait for Monster Manual 2, anybody who’s stumped for adventure/campaign ideas, and anybody who is dissatisfied for some reason with the way any of the traditional undead are presented in the core book. (In addition to having other varieties, there are suggestions on “swapping out” powers, and numerous templates that can be applied to modify undead and related creatures.)