Just a quickie - news flash!

A couple of things:

1. Ignore my last posting - DO BUY THE EBOOKS!

2. But wait for my next posting - I've finished all five of the series, but I'm in the process of re-editing. Should be done in a week or so, and there will be all new, lower prices, and a new cover for Return.

So rush right out and - er - come back in a week or so! (Ha ha ha!)

I'll send out notices when they're all done.

BTW, let me know what you think - comments are possible, so don't be shy....

DON'T BUY THIS EBOOK!

What? Has he gone crazy? You may well be wondering....

I figure I've already told you why you should buy my story, so let me play devil's advocate for a few lines here and try to talk you into buying by showing you why someone else should not. (Did I lose you? Stick around, it will become clear enough.)

1. You don't really like fantasy adventure stories.

Good enough for me - what are you doing here anyway?

Oh, heck, I can't give up that easily. Have you ever read a fantasy adventure story? A classic myth? A fairy tale? If you have and you didn't hate it, give Return a shot. Ebooks are not that expensive, and you can read them on your computer, your laptop, your netbook, your ebook reader, or you can do it the hard way: print it out and read the hard copy. (Okay, that pun was not intended, but it's there, I'm not deleting it!) Now, if you have an inkjet printer, this could take some time. Even my laser printer takes a while to print the whole book. "But it's 232 pages!" you protest. Yes, it is. It's also a PDF, so you can print it out in multiple pages per sheet, though I wouldn't recommend anything smaller that 2 pages side by side unless you also have high quality magnifying lenses....

2. You don't like ebooks.

It's available in print, too. Come and visit and follow the link! I should warn you, though, it's a lot more than the ebook (I have no control over the publisher's price). If you want to wait another month or two, it will be available from Amazon.com, probably at a discount. I'll announce that here and elsewhere when it is (big time!). If you don't mind a wait, I'll be collecting orders for discounted sales in a few days - visit the web site and check occasionally.

3. You don't like game-based books.

Frankly, I don't blame you. In the more usual case, you're entering a fantasy world created by one or more other people, then reading someone else's filtered view of that world. It's like reading a story that takes place in Middle Earth, not written by J.R.R. Tolkien, or a Narnia story written by someone other than C.S. Lewis. Sometimes this works, but....

Fear NOT! This is different. I wrote the game, and only about a dozen people have ever played it! Not only that, it isn't published, so the only point of view you are stuck with is mine. In fact, the game has little to no impact on the story - you don't need to know anything about the game to enjoy the book. I could just as easily have written the story without the game, it just so happened I wrote the game first.

4. You don't like series stories.

Me either. "Oh, right! You always write things you don't like!" you say. Let me ask you this - do you think that The Lord of the Rings is a series story?

The Zentek Ascendant series is really one, long story broken into five reasonably sized, conveniently separated volumes, and you don't even need to read all five (although it is best as a whole). You could buy Return and stop there. You could start with Minx and stop there. I'll admit that the last three really do depend on each of their predecessors, more than the first two, but, if you don't mind starting or landing in the middle of a long story, they're all good on their own. In my (not so) humble opinion, of course!

5. "So, you think you're as good as Tolkien, or Lewis?"

You tell me - buy the book, or the whole story (all five books), and tell me. I wouldn't undertake such a comparison - I've been told that my writing is good, but that's from a fairly small, pretty friendly and sympathetic select non-group of readers, and a lot of it is NOT about these books at all. I could tell you that my books are the best you'll ever read, and they might be, but I have no illusions on that score. Again, you tell me. Please. :-)

6. Why should you feed my ego?

Not one good reason comes to mind. I didn't write the books to get an ego boost. I wrote them because I couldn't NOT write them. There was a story inside me, bursting to get out, and I had to write it down. I enjoyed it so much, I wanted others (like you) to have the same experience, or better. For all I know, your imagination will take your experience of the book way beyond where it took me.

You could also hate it - not all fantasy is for everyone, and I may just not be your cup of fantasy-tea. The nice thing about books is that, if you don't like one, you can pass it on to someone else (maybe with a little compensation for your initial expense in buying it). You might not like it, but you have a friend or two who might.

So, to sum up, don't buy this book.

Really.

Buy the whole story! Share it with your friends!

Most important of all, enjoy yourself.

What's so great about this series?

That's a presumptuous question. How can I tell you why my own work is so great that you just have to put everything else down, get it, read it, enjoy it, and spread the word?

Heh, heh - I just did! :-)

Seriously, I looked over an article yesterday that talks about what's wrong with modern fantasy epics - mostly series, game based, badly written, old plots, flat characters and so on. For what it's worth, these are not particularly specific to fantasy epics at all - pretty much anything that has been written can have these flaws. They do tend to be more pronounced in fantasy epics because, in these, you're entering a different world, one that is fairly close to the author's heart and most likely quite personal, even if it takes place here and now on Earth.

Little things like consistency of the world, the scenes depicted therein, how complete the world creation is or was, can make a novel more or less worth reading depending on their quality. If the world is internally inconsistent, or there are holes in the presentation, these can hurt worse than just bad writing. If the author is just spinning a tale to make some money, or for any other surface reason that is not related to a deep commitment to a good story on a world that is as real to them as they want it to be to you, the reader, it won't fly.

One of the most sensitive of these sore spots is old plots. Even the greatest works of fantasy literature use or reuse old plots, some older and more used than others. J.R.R. Tolkien used themes from mythological bases and older works of fantasy, in addition to the very real experience he had just completed, having lived through the most horrendous event of his day, World War II, in creating the Lord of the Rings. C.S. Lewis used one of the older and more popular themes in western civilization for the background of the Narnia series - Christianity. The successful writers in fantasy epics find new ways to tell old stories, mixing them in different ways with new approaches, etc., etc.

You already knew all that, right?

What I've been beating around here is my own work (surprise!). My primary work so far is a five book series, collectively entitled Zentek Ascendant. If you've been reading any of this, you already know that this is a game-based series of books. Uh, oh, that's two of the potential pitfalls of a good fantasy epic. I'll get to the others shortly.

The world I used for my backdrop was from a game I wrote. That's just how it happened. My original intent in creating the game was to play a really good game that had some new features in it I hadn't seen in other games, and eight or nine other people helped me play-test it for almost seven years. Then I had this crazy idea that if I wrote a book based on the game, I might have better marketing luck with the game. (That has nothing to do with marketing - don't try this yourself!) The advantage that this created for me was a consistent world with "natural laws" I could follow when creating a story about it. The game is not published, or even available in any form right now, except these books. As much as I like it, I like the books far, far better.

I've also found that series can get really tired after a while. I've burned out on several of them myself, mainly because I became accustomed to the author's style and didn't see enough in the continuing (never-ending?) stories that was of value to me. There were a few that I stopped reading because the stories went off in directions I didn't like.

So, why on Earth would I write my own? Am I nuts? Maybe. Originally, I just wanted to write a story that followed a game-driven adventure, and it was awful - really, truly awful. It was hard to read, hard to follow, stiff, contrived and so on. I wouldn't even consider trying to sell that - thing - now. It was so bad that I had to try another story, one that would be easier to read, even for me. I started writing something else - a continuation of the first book, but from an entirely different perspective. This time, I was just going to tell a story, from my head onto paper (okay, into a computer), and see where that took me. Six books later, I had a monster on my hands. I wanted a trilogy and instead wound up with seven books of widely varying lengths and content. I've reorganized, edited and re-shaped it several times, and the pentology it now comprises is the best way to read it.

In case you're worried about book 1, you can rest assured that I have edited it for years, probably close to a hundred times. When I read it, I enjoy it - I think it reads well, is interesting enough and paced to keep your attention all the way to the end, even though there is more ahead. It has none of the original flaws any more, and editing it for publication was more fun than I expected. (Yes, it's available in print.)

What does all that mean? I have one story to offer, it just takes five books to tell properly and completely. Is it well-written? Of course! How can you ask? However, I can't judge my own work from a sufficiently impartial objective to say. I can tell you that I've read it through dozens of times, and I enjoy it all the way through. When I go back and look at one of the books and say to myself, "Ugh - another edit? Why do I do this?" that feeling goes away within a page or two, and after that it's hard to stop and make a change.

Are there old plots? Almost certainly, though I made no conscious effort to include any. I've read enough mythology, fantasy, fairy tales and science fiction that some of this comes out in my writing. That said, this work is all original, both in the themes and the way the characters handle them, with enough connected subplots to keep the story grounded in (a fantasy) reality. Life is not just one simple story that fits together end-to-end. Are the characters flat? Not to me - they are quite real, and they are not based on any other characters in any other stories. (Okay, there are a number of conventional inter-character relationships that have been used before, but all in new ways. Trust me! :-)

Zentek Ascendant means "zentek on the rise," which does kind of encapsulate the main thrust of the story. I also thought it was a catchy name. The five books are Return, Minx, Festival (which are all available as ebooks), Metamorphoses (which should be finished this month, I hope) and Reckoning (which is awaiting a final proof-read once Metamorphoses is done). Take a look and see how much you like them. Return is priced low so you won't be out too much money even if you hate it, and you won't.

Enjoy!

What is a zentek?

So what is a zentek?

A long time ago, near the dawn of the fantasy role-playing game era, there were essentially three kinds of characters - warriors or some variant thereof, religious spell-casters and secular spell-casters. In EPT, they were warriors, priest and magic-users. Being a big fan of "Ill Met In Lankhmar" by the great Fritz Leiber, I also rather liked the idea of a thief character class. D&D picked that one up a long time ago, so even though I used thieves as one of the primary classes, I wanted something new, something I had not seen in any game I'd researched. I liked the ideas of spell-casters whose extraordinary capabilities came from divine worship (priests) or from incantations, with or without some kind of "power word," or magicians.

However, I also wanted to see a rare but occasional type of character whose abilities, or powers, came from within, who had fairly clearly defined abilities that still had flexibility, and whose beginnings were modest, but built up through experience (and survival) to become quite powerful in the advanced stages. They also had to have some kind of behavioral constraints, if for no other reason than that with enormous power comes enormous responsibility. These characters would be loosely based on a mix of mutants (a la the comic-world's X-men and Inhumans), martial arts practitioners (along the lines of Shao Lin priests), zen monks and the insatiably curious who devote their lives to the study of how the universe works.

Thus was born the zentek - a "warrior of the spirit," one who takes life as it comes, who prefers to avoid violence even though they are quite capable of delivering it, who preserves nature but has the curiosity and drive to explore and develop as much as possible along the way.

The official description from the (unpublished) game rules, slightly paraphrased, is this:

The Zentek Order acknowledges the fundamental harmony of all things, and they study skill disciplines which center around their development as human beings interacting with and, ultimately, controlling forces of the physical and transphysical universe. Zenteks use neither weapons nor armor, they have no guild language like other [guilds], and they are philosophically opposed to combat under almost any circumstances, although they can be very good at it. Zenteks do not feel themselves to be in competition with anyone for anything, thus making them generally friendlier than sorcerers to other [characters]. However, they are just as much unique individuals as any other characters, and personalities will vary (as they should). Zenteks must have exceptional intelligence, extremely high life force, with all other character attributes above average. The potential zentek must apply at a Zentek Sanctuary (their meditation and education centers, which are usually easy to locate, since the Order is always looking for new members and such are somewhat scarce) to be admitted. The novice must then spend four years at that center learning the first three of the Zentek Order disciplines. Learning the first discipline normally requires two whole years of study, but it results in an immediate increase in self-awareness and control, thus raising the zentek's life force.

Zenteks study sixteen clearly defined disciplines, a cross between straight skills and spell-like powers, that range from self-awareness and control at the beginning to amazing energy powers towards the mastery end of the spectrum, with certain absolute restrictions that keep them viable as characters of interest. This may seem to be limited, but the ways in which these disciplines can be applied can be as creative as the players or, in this case, the author.

It's not always easy for zenteks, and it shouldn't be. Otherwise, zenteks would dominate the game, or the world, and become boring really fast. So, they cannot use weapons or armor of any kind. They are sworn not to initiate or provoke any kind of violence, though they may defend themselves in any way they feel necessary to survive. Above all, they may never harm natural animals - those which have no innate, rational, "human" intelligence (as if humans actually had any), and are both alive and unaltered by any kind of magic, even if the zentek's life is at stake.

In game terms, they are rare, and a tricky combination of player imagination and referee discrimination. For characters in a book, they may be completely unnecessary. Of course, in the Zentek Tales, they are the author's delight.

I like to think of them as sonnet-characters - there is a specific form into which they must fit, but within that form, they are unlimited.

What are Zentek Tales?

You may be wondering, what is a "zentek tale" and why should you care? Actually, you're probably also wondering, what is a zentek anyway?

The easiest part of the above multi-part question is the caring part - because it's fantasy-adventure material!

In order to explain this properly, a little history is in order. I promise to keep this short.

Back in 1977, I was in the Navy, on a ship that had just steamed up to San Francisco for a 2-3 year stint in drydock. As a navigation specialist, I can assure you that being in drydock is like being bored out of your skull - what kind of navigation does one need to do when the ship isn't even in the water?

(Answer: none - we do grunt work, like sandblasting the hull, and boatloads of paperwork!)

My best friend at that time came to invite me to this really neat thing going on down in one of the other crewmen's room - a game unlike anything else I'd ever heard of. It was called "The Empire of the Petal Throne," and he said it was a lot like D&D. (I wasn't really up on most of this sort of thing, but I knew roughly what that meant.)

To keep this short, let's just say that, as a long-time fan and avid reader of fantasy fiction, I was completely captivated. I took this game home (which, by the way, saved my sanity, or at least I think it did) and continued to play and referee (act as the dungeonmaster) the game, convincing my fiancee and some college buddies to join me as well. (We even once did a 24-hour scenario involving 100 player-characters - crazy, eh?) When I graduated and got my first job as a software developer, I found other allies in our quest for adventure, and some new games.

For a while, I toyed with the idea of taking some of the concepts I found in several of the games and combining them into EPT, but the more I worked on this, the more it became clear that I was doing what I saw as "other people's work." So, I invented my own fantasy role-playing game, containing elements of many of the games I'd seen, read and played, but with a heavy content of as much original material as I could dream up.

A large portion of that original material was devoted to the invention of the zentek character type, and upon this the idea of the Zentek Tales is based.

Okay, you say to yourself, got that much. Now, what is a zentek? A zentek is what I called the spirit-warrior character type in the game, but they are neither spirits nor warriors.

It's late and this is getting kind of long, so I'll explain that in my next post!

Web page caught up to reality - sort of...

My web page is now caught up to the most current state of ebookage (including prices, print editions, updated previews, etc.). Come on over and take a look.

Recommendations for other really good books welcome, too.

Editing can be fun, too

Editing can be fun, in addition to improving the content of one's writing. I have found a number of places where little improvements popped up at me as I was going through my list of words to check. Of course, as I went, the list also began to grow. Initially, I found three words that I saw "too frequently" (to my eyes) that I thought might need to be altered in the content of each of the five books in my series. That list quickly grew to seventeen, and now stands at more than double that, with some grouped into categories. Many of these are fairly simple, consistency checks, to make sure I use the same style for all references to a particular character's name or title.

Some of them are kind of abstract, and the list just keeps getting longer. It now fills almost a whole page in what I think of as my deep background file, which contains my references on what should (or should have) happened when, changes I've made, back stories that aren't in the books, and the like. It could be viewed as a kind of outline file, but it was constructed mostly in reverse - after the stories were already written.

What does this mean? Delays in making the works available. I'm beginning to understand why Ms. Rowling took SO BLOODY LONG to come out with Deathly Hallows - getting it right doesn't come overnight.