From My Brain to You

  • Whimsical Death Origin Stories

    Promotional banner for Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers, The Misfits of Carnt Volume V, by Aaron Frale. A pirate stands in front of a tall ship with kraken tentacles rising from the sea. Reader quotes say: 'I ADORE the magic system in this series. The inappropriateness is HILARIOUS!', 'This book is just fun.', and 'Next book, Next Book, and yes, Next book!' Select to get your copy.

    Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers came about from a couple of things. The first was that I went from never having been on a cruise ship to now having three under my belt in just a couple years. When you’re a fantasy writer on a cruise ship, you can’t help but think about how a kraken attack would go down.

    Also, pirates are actually really scary. I know popular culture has made them handsome and heroic, but read about real pirates from real history, and let’s just say I’m glad to live now over back then. It’s funny because the past sometimes gets a rose colored hue when we are entertaining ourselves with fiction. Watch five minutes of One Piece on Netflix and pirating looks kinda fun, cool, and an adventure.

    Read about a real pirate from history, and it’s grueling, torturous, thankless existence that most likely ended in violence with the only question being how much torture happened during the shuffling off the mortal coil. Look up keelhauling, it doesn’t sound like a fun way to go.

    Because fantasy pirates and real historical pirates are so vastly different from each other, I kinda wanted to write a book that bridges that gap Whimsical Death. Jack was needing to take a vessel anyway, and I could have written a chapter or two about him chartering a ship, but what we have in this book is so much better than a quickly how he got from point A to point B. It’s entire mashing of the brutal reality of humanity’s past when we weren’t as nice to each other as we are now, and the whimsy and fun worthy of One Piece jaunty adventure on the high seas.

    It’s a good blend of reality and fantasy that it’s worthy of the Carnt series that’s smashing a fantasy world and ours together. Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

    Get your copy of Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers!

  • Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers

    Promotional banner for Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers, The Misfits of Carnt Volume V, by Aaron Frale. A pirate stands in front of a tall ship with kraken tentacles rising from the sea. Reader quotes say: 'I ADORE the magic system in this series. The inappropriateness is HILARIOUS!', 'This book is just fun.', and 'Next book, Next Book, and yes, Next book!' Select to get your copy.

    The Misfits of Carnt strikes again and we are now officially on book 5, and I’m just finally getting to the apocalypse I’ve had planned from book 1. This one is called Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers, with quite a hunky pirate on the cover. I’ll let you all figure which character that is depicting. For those of you wondering, is this it? Is it finally the end of the series?

    Nope, I still have 1-2 more books left. I hedge my bets on the number of books left because it might be one long book, or one really really long book that really should be 2 books. After this book, all the characters will be where they are supposed to be for the end of the world and a final confrontation that will leave a broken world and some bodies along the way.

    If you’ve been following this series, my hope is that the ending is as satisfying as all the parts that got you to book 6 or 7. Too often endings are neglected. Writers, (and I’m guilty of this too), often get so wrapped up in what is currently flying from their fingertips to the page that they often lose focus on the ending. And it’s easy to do, when you start a story, it’s more fun to discover it as you go along.

    Most writers I know are pantsers not plotters. I can see the allure of pantsing a story. You get to experience it like a reader would, it’s way more exciting, and if you’re a dedicated and critical editor of your own work, you can cut out all the boring parts in the second draft. However, pantsing becomes harder and harder to do once the volume of books get larger and larger.

    Take a trilogy for example. Those are easy to write by the seat of your pants. Just start with book 1. Then at some point (maybe even after book 1 is published), you’ll think of an idea for book 2. Then you’ll bumble, plow, write, (pick your verb), way through book 2, and at some point, you’ll realize that you need a book 3 just to finish the story because it’s just getting good by the end of 2!

    But a 7 book series (or six), that’s hard to get right. At some point, it will be a challenge to keep it going as well as the earlier books. Perhaps the story ended in book 5 and because you signed a 7 book deal, you now have to drag something out beyond its natural conclusion. Or maybe by book 5 you realize the story was not what you thought it was and really just missed out on a bunch of foreshadowing opportunities. Or maybe you just tried to thread together a bunch of plot elements that just don’t want to wrap up nicely by 7 (or 6)

    I’m not saying that writers can’t pants 7, 14, or even 21 book series, but to have it done in a way that is just as satisfying on book 1 as it is 7 is hard. Knowing where you’re going helps. So while I may not be a plotter with a formal outline for every chapter. I’m a plotter in that I at least try to think of the ending. Where’s this story going? How will it end up? Will it feel deserved and natural, or convenient and forced?

    As an enjoyer of fiction, I always tend to enjoy complete stories. Ones that go on too long eventually feel like they are wandering in the dark, just trying to get to an ending because the real ending happened earlier. Take Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Stranger Things. Both shows were such a big hit, they went on beyond their expiration date, leaving the ending limp rather than me wanting more. They both had seasons that ended with me wanting more and thinking it was the best television ever made.

    And then they made another season, and they slipped from a show that I was excited to watch, to just a show that I was getting through so I could just say I did it. That’s not to say the later seasons of those shows were so bad that it was torture. Some of my favorite episodes were in season 6 of Buffy and the nerds were the best villains ever, but the show naturally concluded on 5, the rest was just squeezing more commerce out of a show that could have just blown people away.

    Spoiler Alert! Skip the next two paragraphs if you plan to get to the end of Stranger Things one day.

    Stranger Things did the same thing with Vecna, while one of my favorite characters was introduced with Vecna. (Eddie Munson, those of you who’ve read a lot of my books will see Eddie-like characters appearing in my stories over and over before Eddie appeared on TV.) But the show started the downhill slope in the Vecna season. The strange cool world of the Upside Down, just turned out to be a construct of another psychic. It felt to me that there were three seasons of building mystery, and then we got to the reveal where “Oh yeah, it was just a Freddy Krueger like guy all along, and all that weird shit was just a dream.”

    Sure, I was happy to get Hopper back, and I certainly enjoyed Eddie Munson, but over all the plot felt as if I had watched three seasons of an unrelated show. It felt as Vecna was not an idea baked into the very beginning of the story, but rather plot shoe horned in to keep it going past the original story arc, a pantser who had to write more after season 3. I could be wrong on that assessment. Maybe Eleven’s classmate was where they were always going. But it didn’t seem that way, at least from an outsider who pays way too much attention to the writing in a show.

    With my personal writing, I try to avoid that when I can. For me, the simplest way is to think of the ending before I write the beginning. I do modify and adapt my endings, and haven’t thought of the ending for everything I’ve written (for example the Time Burrito series, I thought I would just endlessly write new books in the series and never formally end it. Then I got to book 4 and realized that I ended it and then teed off another book when it was already over. Time Burrito 5 was my Vecna, which actually turns out to have spawned something new which will excite Time Burrito fans).

    But I try my best as a writer to end things when they should end, and make those last books just as exciting as the first ones. With that Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers I feel is exactly that, if you enjoyed them all up to this point, you’ll like this one too. And you’ll finally see something I’ve been foreshadowing for a while now, but I promise you, it’s not quite what you think, but it has been there since book 1.

    Enjoy the book!

    Get your copy of Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers!

  • JRPGs and Carnt Mini Game

    Promotional banner for Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers, The Misfits of Carnt Volume V, by Aaron Frale. A pirate stands in front of a tall ship with kraken tentacles rising from the sea. Reader quotes say: 'I ADORE the magic system in this series. The inappropriateness is HILARIOUS!', 'This book is just fun.', and 'Next book, Next Book, and yes, Next book!' Select to get your copy.

    I’ve been playing jrpg’s since I was a little kid. I loved Final Fantasy I and II. And I remember having an iPad over fifteen years ago at this point where I realized you could buy all the Final Fantasys never released in the US that happened in-between I, II, and VII. They were translated into English and they brought me back to Saturdays in my parent’s basement watching BONK the fighter waggle his sword at a slime. The time that I started to check out of final fantasy was around seven. While the storyline was good, the feature that I hated the most creeping into my Final Fantasy games was the elimination of turn based combat (with that being said, I have played the ones with Yuna and the ones with Lightning, though I didn’t enjoy them as much as II, my all time favorite).

    I started picking up the Fire Emblem series that thankfully hasn’t tried to eliminate turn based combat. The main reason, I loathe rpgs without turn based combat is that I have a naturally slow reaction time. For example, I do bad in buzzer based trivia games. I generally know the answers, but I can never hit the buzzer fast enough. There was a game called Fable that I gave up playing because there was a level that was just too challenging for me because I couldn’t mash the button fast enough. I played the entire Mass Effect series on its easiest setting because I loved the story line, but on easy it was one of the hardest games I ever played.

    It’s the same reason why I was so bad at sports. When there is a ball flying towards me, my hand goes up after its passed and if I try to anticipate and raise my hand early and I’m lucky enough to have my hand in the right spot, the ball bounces off it. My brain is wired with slow thinking, slow moving, and if a movie or a game requires me to go too fast, it’s impossible for me.

    But that slow thinking helps me be pretty good at strategic games where you have all the time in the world to plan your next move. I’ve been playing Star Wars Shatterpoint and Conquest lately and realize that I’m pretty good at it. I win more than I lose, though for me its never about winning. I’m a very anti-competitive person and will honestly throw a game if it means the other person will have more fun. It’s pretty easy to blunder in strategy games without looking like you blunder (I mean I’ve also blundered for real too where a turn later, I realize my mistake).

    For me, turn based games with vivid worlds and story lines are the top. A good story and time to think through your next move is where I have the most fun. Which is funny because you’d think I’d like logic puzzles, but I don’t, mainly because they derail the story line for me. If I spend too much time puzzling what lever to pull in what order, it gets tedious and boring where as turn based combat progresses the story, and each turn progresses you toward the goal. A logic puzzle just involves a lot of restarts and iterations that makes me want to just do something else.

    The reason I mention this is because I realized that AI is capable of making a video game that is perfect for me, and also can bring my books to life in ways that previously would be inaccessible to me because I’d either have to have a lot of money or be famous, two things I don’t have. But now I can. I created with the help of Claude for the coding and Gemini for the graphics. (Here is my AI disclosure statement if you want to know how exactly I use it).

    I’m proud to share with you the Misfits of Carnt V Mini Game. It’s a game created from real chapters from the new book. Now, if you don’t want spoilers, play the game after you read the book. But if you’re okay with learning some things about the characters give it a try. Claude did a fantastic job in a process that only took me three days.

    I’m interested to hear your feedback, because I think I want to go bigger and make a similar game for Office Maxi. Of all my books, it has a RPG system baked into the story. I plan to create a system with turn-based combat where you can get loot, raise levels, go on quests. The whole game shebang.

    This mini-game I made for the 5th Carnt book is my toe in the water for what I’ll eventually do. So let me know your feedback. For those of you who’ve been here for a while, you’ll remember an Office Maxi email game I created. Where you get emails from Terry and depending on how you click, Terry will send you another email. It was pretty dumb, and nowhere near as sophisticated as what I can do with Claude, and what I plan to do with Office Maxi.

    Either way, I hope you enjoy the mini game, and if you want more games like that, there will be more!

    Get your copy of Whimsical Death and Other Pirating Dangers!