Recovery, New Articles, New Short Stories, and More!

This week was one of recovery and rest. I had to go to work in order to get it! That’s funny when you go to your place of employment to recover from the weekend.

Of course it was all due to the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, but now that it’s over for another year, I can return to my usual blog. This time I won’t be talking about the expo or anything involved in it, other than this brief mention.

Work – ah work. We had a minor change at work last week and as a result I was on the road the whole week, taking care of the pickups and deliveries. Hey, it is exactly what I wanted so in that regard I am very happy! But as is the case, due to that I had only one day that I was able to work on ‘100’.

Chris Van Deelen is the author of the Skirmisher Publishing LLC sourcebook Creatures of the Tropical Wastes sourcebook, co-author of its Wisdom from the Wastelands game supplement and contributor to the 'Sword of Kos: Hekaton' Anthology.

This week was one of recovery and rest. I had to go to work in order to get it! That’s funny when you go to your place of employment to recover from the weekend.

Of course it was all due to the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo, but now that it’s over for another year, I can return to my usual blog. This time I won’t be talking about the expo or anything involved in it, other than this brief mention.

Work – ah work. We had a minor change at work last week and as a result I was on the road the whole week, taking care of the pickups and deliveries. Hey, it is exactly what I wanted so in that regard I am very happy! But as is the case, due to that I had only one day that I was able to work on ‘100’.

It’s so damned close to being done! I will be able to finish it at long last this week, but I should have had it completed last week. I only have a few hundred more words to write and then I will be able to go back and start an edit on it.

Once that is done I will end up posting it over two weeks instead of in one shot. The reason is very simple… the story is at 16,000 words in length. Oddly enough that is the longest short-story (bit of an oxymoron, isn’t it?) that I’ve written so far set in my never to be published (at least in the foreseeable future) zombie novels.

I’ve stated it before but I’ll say it again. The reason I said what I did was because the market is absolutely saturated by zombie novels of all caliber. Some are great; others are far from good and should never have been written. Yes that is harsh and yes that is why I am not mentioning any titles!

It could be said about all genres, from Fantasy to Science Fiction to Mystery – really, all genres are saturated at the moment, but I feel that this particular niche is overloaded and my novels will not bring anything new or interesting or revolutionary to the genre. They’re survival novels, all dealing with friendship, family and loyalty.

I bet if you did a search on those particular topics a dozen or more novels will come up in regards to zombies.

So I’ll shelve it for now.

As for my other work, I will be starting on either ‘The Hunt’, which will involve the Half-Orc Jarem, or ‘Hunger’ which will be all about the Tiefling Viya. Once I’m finished with ‘100’ then I will begin work on one of those two. I’m sort of leaning towards the former since I already wrote one story that was all about the Tiefling.

Also I am hoping to finish off the Alternate Advancement Options issue for my series Wisdom from the Wastelands. After that I will probably start compiling an issue that was inspired by ‘Borderlands’ for the Xbox 360.

That particular game has an unreal amount of firearms and explosives, and it was the explosives that inspired me. I will end up writing an issue dedicated to different types of grenades and explosive weapons for a future issue.

Speaking of that periodical - I also want to write up two that I mentioned in past blogs, one on harvesting toxins and other items from monsters to make into weapons and armor, as well as one on different types of poisons.

And sadly, my Alternate Radiation issue has been pushed back again until June, but this time it is because of Comicpalooza, which Michael Varhola is hard at work trying to get three other publications ready before the big convention in Houston at the end of this month.

A few weeks ago a gentleman named Eric Fabiaschi began to write up little encounters using the creatures that I have converted and posted on the D-Infinity site. He has created quite a few now and has expanded from using the conversions from Deathlands and Outlanders to several of the others that I have done.

Talk about making my day! It’s great to see someone taking the time to use the material that I have created and posted for free in such a manner. All I can do is say ‘Thanks!’ to this gentleman and ensure that I post his creations on my author page.

That reminds me, over the next week I will be posting the conversions I wrote up from the game ‘State of Decay’. I posted the first one today, the Rotter, and will follow up with another on Tuesday, Thursday and the final on Saturday. After I’m done posting those I will go back to working on the creatures I have the images for from Deathlands and Outlanders.

Also if anyone has a conversion from a television show, movie, video game or novel they would like to see me write up, let me know in the comment section or drop me a line at chrisv@nucleus.com or contact me via Twitter or Facebook.

Yes I finally broke down and got a twitter account. I did so strictly because I wanted to get a couple of photos from Michael Rooker and Garrett Wang that they took during the expo last weekend.

As I am a writer and I really enjoy when I see someone writes a review for one of my publications, I realize that I have to take the good with the bad. Of course I would love to see all my work receive a Five Star review, but that does not always happen. In fact, quite often people will give a four star or even less. There are two of my issues that come to mind, Wisdom from the Wastelands issue 4: New Races and issue 6: Factions. Both were less than well received (and I have mentioned this before).

However, I have recently discovered that there is a group on Amazon.com that is going out of their way to bully and attack certain authors, particularly those who are into self-publishing.  It’s gotten so bad that Ann Rice has started a petition to see what can be done about this group.

If there is one thing that I hate more than anything else in this world, it’s a bully. I was the target of these people growing up, as were pretty much the majority of the people on this planet. Due to the net, they have a whole new field to play and practice their less than honorable tactics.

Here is the link to the original article. Take the time to read it and form your own opinion and judgment on what you read. It is pretty sad that this has happened, and it is even sadder that the folks at Amazon seem to have decided to allow the bullies have their way and are not doing anything about it.

So much for their rules in regards to malicious attacks and reviews.

And that is pretty much it for this week. As usual I would like to invite you, my readers, to like my personal Author Page on Facebook. I’m currently stuck at 88 and would love to see that finally break the 100 count by the end of the month.

So until next Sunday, peace!