brichibiwritesthings:

Here it is!  The pre-sale for the anthology I wrote for is now up!  Follow the link for prices on the entire anthology and/or the individual stories.  Yay!

To celebrate, here’s a fun snippet:

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This next game, Lukis realizes, is a rather strange one.  He doesn’t bother trying to play.  Instead, he watches as Aaron fights against someone else.  Lukis wonders, as he watches the intro video, why high school students are even allowed to fight with swords and strange monsters that they summon.  Don’t they have parents?  And since when can bears talk, fight, and smoke cigars?  Was that a robot just now?  With an axe?  

“Told ya it was completely different,” Aaron says, picking some kid that uses a gun and has some sort of fly as a monster friend.  

It’s still exciting to watch, Lukis thinks.  Aaron’s fighting against some tall, buff guy who uses a folding chair as a weapon — that makes no sense, either, who brings a chair to a gun fight?

***

Follow the link to see how you can get a hold of this story and others :)

YAY!

brichibiwritesthings:

Hey everyone, check it out!  This is for the short story I wrote in Dreamspinner Press’ upcoming sports anthology.  It’ll go on pre-sale next week, so I’ve been given permission to share the cover image and the story blurb.

Lukis Singleton’s once-popular sports column is fading fast, thanks to the terrible track record of the local football team. In an attempt to save the column, Lukis’s editor, John, decides he needs to go in a different direction. Video games are all the rage these days, so John insists that sending Lukis to a huge video-game tournament in Los Angeles will shake up his current readers and bring in new ones. Lukis isn’t thrilled about reporting on games with impossible powers or gamers who still live in Mom’s basement, but then he meets a tempting flaw in the gaming stereotypes of unwashed man-children. Aaron Sanders is a gorgeous breath of fresh air at the tournament who takes Lukis’s less-than-stellar view of gamers and turns it on its head, leaving Lukis to wonder if it might be worth being Aaron’s player two.

It was a ton of fun writing this.  There are quite a few geeky nods all throughout the story, from Marvel vs. Capcom, to Street Fighter, and even some Persona 4 Arena.  Fighting games are one of my favorite video game genres, so as soon as I saw “sports theme” I thought “fighting game tournament.”  

Lukis is the naysayer, the “games are stupid” character.  But Aaron is all “games are awesome” and breaks all of Lukis’ stereotypes since he’s attractive and social.  The main point of this story is to show that us gamers aren’t just a bunch of anti-social children who can’t function, who still live with mom, and who waste their lives with a controller in their hand.  There’s so much more to video games, especially in this day and age, and on top of the gay romance is the theme of, “Don’t make assumptions about people because of what they do.  Don’t make assumptions about something until you try it yourself.”

I’ll post a link when the pre-sales start.  Until then, enjoy this snippet  :)

On top of my book “Treat Me Kindly,” there’s a short story coming soon! Remember to follow my writing blog for up-to-date information  :)  And yeah, Persona 4 fans you read that write, there’s a nod to the game in the story along with a bunch of other fighting games  ^^  I just couldn’t hep myself!

brichibiwritesthings:

You know, there’s something quite odd about dreams.  We all have them, you know?  We all have things we aspire to be “when we grow up,” and we spend so much time working to make those dreams come true.  We work hard to make things happen, and we face rejection, and we cry and we get up and we try again.  We’re told to keep trying, and we do, we keep going.  

The confusion happens when those dreams actually start coming together, when they start to come true.

It’s an odd feeling, really, for this whole writing process to be going somewhere.  I’ve had a lot of rejections, to the point of just, you know, being prepared for them.  I always prepare for the no, so much so that I’m not quite sure how to comprehend the yes.  I’ve been hearing “yes” a lot lately, and I’m not quite sure what to do.  I’ve been getting a lot of “congratulations” and “it’s about time,” and it’s not like I don’t agree — I do — but… I’m so use to “no” that I feel at odds when I hear “yes.”

Dreams are coming true now, and I’m typing this feeling really emotional, and it’s frustrating because I don’t know how to explain it.  I mean, I know this is just a blank author’s page, but… it’s the start to something, something big, something I’ve always wanted and have worked so hard for…

… now that it’s here… what does one do?

Here’s the link to my Dreamspinner Press Author Bio.  Nothing is up yet because the story won’t be available until June, but it’s a big step.