Sorry, It Has Been a While...

I know, I know. I should update the blog more frequently than once every couple of years, but school has been keeping me busy. But I think a quick update on where things are at would be in order.

I am still alive, and I do want to make some content updates-- at some point. I have been saying that for years though with not much to show for it, but there it is. Maybe I will just curate memes or something. Low-effort stuff haha.

The short story I mentioned in my last few posts a couple of years ago did get published in the Vintage Worlds 2 anthology (i.e., that Kickstarter was successful). If you missed the Kickstarter but still want to buy the book, it is still available at Founder's House.

Regarding use of the blog itself, the Numenera 2 Character Creator still sees a decent amount of traffic, though because it has been a few years since I updated it, it is slightly out-of-date, lacking data from the Torment: Tides of Numenera Explorer's Guide and possibly other sources. Regardless, it has over 22 thousand all-time views currently. For reference, it passed 10k all-time views in May of 2020, and 17k in January 2021, so 2020 was the big year for it, but it's still getting quite a bit of use. Actually, I am slightly surprised it still works-- I half expected the changes Blogger has made to the site would break it, but apparently not. Looking at the graph, use of the generator seems to have peaked in March/April of 2020 and dropped off since then, but still mostly remains at a higher level than when I was actually updating this site.

And speaking of the website, the site overall is at about 58 thousand all-time views. Two years ago (January 2020), it had just passed 17k total views. Biggest month ever for the blog was April of 2020, with 2,731 views that month. Guess the lockdowns and so on that were going on at the time encouraged people to play around with rolling up Numenera characters.

Anyway, that's all for now. Happy New Years, everyone.

57 Hours Left for Vintage Worlds Kickstarter

The Kickstarter for Vintage Worlds 2 & 3 has a little over two days left. It is coming down to the wire as to whether it will fund or not. Cross your fingers, tentacles, pseudopods, or other equivalent appendages!

Vintage Worlds is a series of anthologies of retro-style sci-fi short stories. By retro sci-fi, I mean rockets and ray-guns, sword-fights by the light of the twin moons on the canal-banks of Mars, dangerous forays into the humid jungles of Venus teaming with ultra-tropical alien life, unscrupulous smugglers and pirates haunting the Asteroid Belt, and so on. That is to say, the Solar System as it should have been, as opposed to the one we actually got. It is a really interesting sub-genre of science fiction if you ask me -- and who wouldn't want to ask me?

Volume One of Vintage Worlds turned out really well, I thought. Help us bring Volumes Two and Three to life!

"The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" To Be Published in Vintage Worlds 2

Very exciting news! The long-awaited Kickstarter for Vintage Worlds volumes 2 and 3 has begun at last. My short story-- actually closer to novella length-- titled "The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" will appear in volume two. If you have read the first installment of VW, you may remember my story, "The Headless Skeletons of Mercury". Two characters from "Headless" appear in "Sarcastic," but it is not necessary to know the story of "Headless" in order to understand and enjoy "Sarcastic." I mention it only because if you liked plucky heroine D.J.'s Mercury shenanigans, you'll probably enjoy a much longer story seeing her get into trouble on a trip to Neptune.

And perhaps I am a vain person, but the awesome cover art of volume two could very well have been inspired by "The Sarcastic Snake-Men of Neptune" (which does contain a scene on a moon of Jupiter), although in my mind, D.J. doesn't look at all like that haha.

Updates and Milestones: April 1, 2020

Hello, I'm still alive. The 'rona ain't got me yet, and I ain't even April Foolin'.

It is heartening to see that the blog gets a lot of use still. I know I say that every time I post, but what can I say? It feels good to be of service, in whatever capacity I can be. And March, interestingly enough, set another record for the blog with 1,908 views, a substantial increase over the previous record, which was 1,716 views, set in December. (Since I didn't do a February or March update, I guess I should mention that January had 1,487 views, and February saw quite a big drop-off, with 1,178 views, which was the lowest since June of 2019.)

I guess folks are stuck at home spending their time rolling up Numenera characters. No judgment -- I do the same sometimes (which is, in fact, why I went to the trouble to set up that character generator). And as usual, a bit less than half of this last month's traffic went to... drumroll... the Numenera character maker. The old Cypher System character maker and the Revised edition Cypher System character maker nearly tied for second place last month though, which is a slight change from how things normally are. Those three pages together account for about three quarters of the site's traffic. In a very distant fourth place is the printer-friendly Numenera character sheets index, with a whopping 36 views in March. No other page or post cracked 20 views for the month.

Other news: if you recall my poem "Come Home Ere Falls the Night" and the Love in the Ruins anthology project it is a part of, that seems to be moving forward at last. The publisher has sent out contracts to the various authors, so hopefully that book will see print at some point. (No doubt the 'rona will delay the timetable on that, as it has everything else.) Not sure what the status is of Vintage Worlds II, but hopefully that will get off the ground this year too.

That's all for now. Don't let the 'rona getcha -- as the Good Book says, "wash your hands, you sinners".

Updates and Milestones: September 4, 2019

I am very happy that people still come to this site to use the Numenera 2 Character Generator. In addition to that, the vanilla Cypher System Character Generator has started to blow up in a big way as well. August, in fact, set another record for Troy Stories, with 1517 views, a truly massive increase over the previous month's record of 1217, set in July. (And weirdly, the difference is exactly 300. This is Spartaaaaa!)

Most of the traffic was, of course, to the character generators. An interesting stat though: about half of the Cypher System character creator's all-time hits came within the past 30 days. That indicates to me that my CS character creator is only just now really catching the attention of the Cypher System community and/or Google. Pretty neat.

Some news: I have heard back from Zendexor, and he indicates to me that the story I submitted for Vintage Worlds 2 has been accepted for publication. The formal announcement has not been made yet, but should be forthcoming soon. I will post here when that happens.

A personal note: I am going back to school now, trying to finish up my bachelor's degree after a long hiatus. That is part of the reason I have not produced any content for the blog lately. At some point I would like to get it going again (although I say that every month...).

Updates and Milestones: August 1, 2019

For some reason, July was a huge month for the site despite the lack of updates, with 1217 views for the month that honors Julius Caesar, straight-up demolishing the previous monthly record of 818 (set this past April). If you're curious-- though I know no one is-- the months intervening between my last monthly update and now (that is, May and June) had a bit over 600 views each, which at one time would've been huge, but compared to the expectations set in March and April, were kinda lackluster. (I'd thought perhaps interest was waning in my character generator, or even that interest might be waning in Numenera more broadly. I guess not haha; maybe the announcement of a new Numenera source book and novel has rekindled interest?)

As one might expect, a bit more than half the Troy Stories traffic in the month of July was to the Numenera 2 character creator. Another 20% or so of the traffic went to the generic Cypher System character creator. Another ~2% of the hit parade marched on over to the relatively new Numenera 2 Character Sheet index, and about the same number of hits to the Scrabble Two-Letter Word List. Other hits were scattered around the site here and there, with little apparent rhyme or reason. (Must have had a ton of hits on the front page; visits to the site's main front page count toward overall stats but doesn't have its own individual views stat that I can find.)

One announcement: though I have not had time for blogging lately, I did manage to get a story finished in time to meet the deadline for the Vintage Worlds 2 call for submissions. I sent in an 11,000 word novelette, the longest I have ever submitted to one of these contests. I don't yet know if it will be selected, but I feel pretty good about it.

That's all for now...

Updates and Milestones: February 1, 2019

Some updates pertaining to Tears of the Gods, blog milestones, Vintage Worlds, and Love in the Ruins. Feel free to ignore the bits you don't care about.

The Tears of the Gods

I am sad to report that the GM of the Tears of the Gods PbF game has discontinued it, and doesn't anticipate ever restarting, due to personal real-life problems he is having. I am hoping to get a summary of what he had planned for the remainder of the adventure so that I might finish the Tears story, but that may or may not happen. In any event, for now, with the game on hiatus, the Tears story updates are on an indefinite hiatus as well.

(And, yes, I did say in the last update that there's probably enough material for another chapter, but the point at which the game stopped is not a natural stopping point for a chapter, let alone the story as a whole, so I am not working on chapter 11 of Tears for now either. I may make an effort to finish it at some point, with or without the GM's notes, but for now I am waiting for the GM to decide whether to part with the rest of his adventure notes.)

Blog Milestones

January was another record-setting month for the blog, with 528 page-views. That's only the second time the blog has topped 500 views in a given calendar month, the previous time being September of last year, with its 506 views. Since August of last year the blog has not fallen below 200 views in any given month.

Much of that traffic is the Numenera 2 Character Generator, of course, which is up over 900 views now (total over its lifetime), well over a fifth of this site's total traffic (about 4300 views total since the blog started in 2014).

Unfortunately though, historically, a lot of the traffic to the Numenera Character Generator has come from a forum post I left on hub.cyphercast.net, the CypherCast online forum, which has been down now for a week or two. And, while it has been a long time since there's been any non-spam activity on CypherCast Hub, it was still ranked pretty high in search engine results, so people were still going there looking for information, sometimes finding the link to my character creator, and coming here. (And presumably they looked for and perhaps found other information on that forum as well.) But, sadly, the owners/moderators of CypherCast Hub seemingly abandoned it for the last couple of years, allowing it to be overrun by spammers advertising everything from basketball video games to industrial equipment, and now it's down altogether, so I am not exactly holding my breath for it to come back. With it gone, the only way people will discover my character creator now is through organic search engine results. This blog's position in a Google search is decent when searching for, e.g. "numenera character generator", usually around the sixth result or so, but we are ranked much lower on Bing, Ecosia, and other search engines. (Though people do find us occasionally via those search engines.)

I could probably drive a good bit more traffic to the character generator by posting the link elsewhere, but I have an intense, visceral hatred for spam, and I am very reluctant to undertake actions that may come across as spammy to other people. Besides that, it's not like I make money from folks using the character creator (or looking at anything else on this blog). It is purely a labor of love. I don't want to sully my love with anything so crass as spam!

Vintage Worlds

Speaking of spam, it's been a while since I have shamelessly shilled this book that I had a small hand in creating, namely Vintage Worlds: Tales from the Old Solar System. The story I wrote for it, "The Headless Skeletons of Mercury", is, in my opinion, my strongest short story to date (though "Tiny's Legacy" from Merigan Tales is a close second).

Since VW has been out for a while now, I guess it's as good a time as any to give my overall thoughts on it. Vintage Worlds, honestly, has a solid ratio of good stories to mediocre ones. That may sound back-handed, but for me it is high praise. I read quite a lot of short fiction-- I have since I was a kid-- and I'm a pretty harsh critic of stories that don't meet my standards. But Vintage Worlds exceeded my expectations-- not counting my own story, there were seven pieces I loved, four that I liked pretty well, and five that didn't really grab me. That is a better good-to-mediocre ratio for me than any anthology of amateur writers I can remember reading (and yes, I am saying it is better than Merigan Tales, in my opinion). Does VW compare to, say, The Best of Leigh Brackett or to any given year of Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction? No, not really. But, a few of VW's stories are worthy of such comparisons, or nearly so. In my opinion, the book is well worth the price if you like short fiction at all.

Also in Vintage World news, the call has gone out for submissions for a second volume of VW, owing to the success of the first volume's kickstarter. If you are an aspiring writer, short fiction is a great place to start, and a decently good short story is honestly not hard to get published in something like this. They want short stories (2500-7500 words), novelettes (7501-12500 words), and have space for, at most, one novella (12501 words or more). Volume One of VW also had a poem, so they are probably willing to consider poetry for Volume Two as well. All tales should pertain to the "Old Solar System": think ray-guns and rockets, Martian canals, Venusian jungles, Asteroid Belt pirates, etc.

Love in the Ruins

And, speaking of calls for submissions, the Love in the Ruins project looks interesting too (you'll need to scroll down to the long row of asterisks to see the announcement). For this one, the editor is looking for about fifteen short stories, a novelette or two, and four to six poems, preferably of a traditional form (e.g. sonnets). Tales for this work should be love stories set in the "deindustrial future", i.e. after the disappearance of industrial civilization (whether due to peak oil, climate change, the natural geopolitical decline of the U.S.A., or some combination of these or other factors), though not necessarily "dystopian" in the sense that that word is normally understood. So basically it's another "Space Bats" / After Oil type of project, but with a love and romance theme this time.

Some Updates and What-Have-You

A few updates for the handful of people who follow the blog.

Tears of the Gods: The play-by-forum game this is based on is still ongoing, but there was a long hiatus over the holidays. Hoping the pace will pick back up this month. Regardless, I believe there's enough material already to fill out chapter 11, and I have started on it. I expect the next Tears installment will be ready before the end of the month.

Scrabble Two-Make-Three Words: Part Two of this is about half done, maybe a bit more than half. Probably it will be ready some time in the next couple of weeks. (I know no one cares about the Scrabble posts except me, but I care, and that's the important thing, right? Just be thankful I don't subject you to Esperanto posts, ĉar mi tute povas.) I'm estimating that there will ultimately be four total posts in that series (A-D, E-K, L-Q, and R-Z).

Character Creators: I do still want to add Flavors to the Cypher System character generator. Don't have an ETA on that, however. No plans (for the time being) to add any new features to the Numenera character generator.

Goodreads: I have an official author profile on Goodreads now. Does that mean I've "arrived" as a for-real, honest-to-goodness published author?

Fiction(al) Projects: I want to contribute a story to Vintage Worlds 2. Deadline for that is July 30th, but the idea I have in mind may end up novella length (i.e. over 12,000 words), so I reckon I'd best not wait 'til the last minute. I'm considering also making an attempt to contribute something to Love in the Ruins. Deadline for that is May 1st. I may also do a post with tips for would-be contributors to Space Bats and Vintage Worlds-type projects, something I have long threatened to do.

Blog Milestone: Troy Stories has reached over 4,000 page views as of today. My thanks to the many bots and handful of real people who suffer through reading my trite chicken-scratchings.

Milestones and Updates

Two milestones of note. Number one: this blog had just over 500 views last month (506 to be exact), the first time that threshold has been reached. The previous biggest months for the blog were August 2018, with 366 views for the month, and May 2017 (coinciding with the initial launch of the Numenera Character Generator) with 239 views. These are the only three months since the blog's inception in 2014 that have ever broken 200 views. So, that's encouraging.

I promise it was not just me refreshing the page in September! In fact, I have set an option on the admin side that says my own page views of the blog should not be counted in site stats. (I'm not convinced that option actually works as intended, but whatever. I tried.)

What are people coming here to see? The most popular thing to look at on the site, by a substantial margin, is the Numenera 2 Character Generator. No real surprise there; it is the only thing of its kind on the web, so far as I know. Coming in at a distant second are the various chapters (and Table of Contents) of the Tears of the Gods serial novel. TOTG posts consistently rack up more views over the long run than fluff posts such as this one. That indicates to me that there's an actual readership for that work, albeit small, not just random bots or whatever crawling the web and stumbling upon random bits of my blog. For some reason (if you are curious), the most viewed TOTG chapter is Chapter Four - Demons of the Deep, with 157 total views since its initial publication in March 2017. Must be the intriguing chapter title.

(Yes, I know no one cares about these minuscule numbers. But I care, and that's the important thing.)

While I'm on the subject of the N2 character generator and the Tears of the Gods, I suppose updates about both are in order.

Character Generator update: The code to have the generator show page-references for your chosen descriptor, type, and focus has been added, and seems to work, but I have not yet added the actual data. Currently it only displays page references for your type. I will be working on it this week, and hope to have all the data in before the weekend.

TOTG update: The play-by-forum game it is based on is still ongoing. Frequency of Tears updates here at Troy Stories of course depends upon the pace of that game there at BoardGameGeek. That said, it is very likely that the "Winter Lightning" chapter will be ready to publish some time in October.

The other milestone (bet you thought I forgot there were two milestones to announce today): Vintage Worlds has surged past 200 backers and $5000 pledged since I last posted about the campaign. The final 48 hours of the campaign has, in fact, seen a big bump in support, as predicted. And as of this writing there's still one more day to go, so go pledge if you haven't already!

I Was Completely Wrong...

Vintage Worlds: Tales of the Old Solar System is funded! As of this writing it is at 105% of its goal. I was thinking it was going to come down to the last day or two of the campaign, but no. With 11 days still left to go, it has already blown past the funding goal by a comfortable margin. Woo!

Not sure where the big surge yesterday and today came from, but hey... whatever gets us over the finish line.

Vintage Worlds 90% funded!

I am pretty stoked that, as of this post, the Vintage Worlds Kickstarter has reached 90% of its funding goal. Better still, we are still less than two-thirds of the way through the campaign. So, VW is on pace to fund. Yay!

I still think it will be close though. Looking at the KickTraq daily data, it's immediately obvious that the big bumps for us came on September 5 and September 19, not coincidentally being days when John Michael Greer posted about the campaign on his blog. Those two days alone account for about a third of the total funding pledged; clearly, this project wouldn't have got off the ground without his support. But, we probably aren't going to have another big bump from that source-- probably most JMG fans who were planning to pledge have done so already. To make it the rest of the way, we'll still need to average more than one new backer buying the $25 book per day for the remainder of the campaign.

Likely it will come down to the last 48 hours. If you "heart" a project on Kickstarter, when the clock strikes 48 hours till the end of that project's campaign, KS will send you an email saying something to the effect of, "last chance to back x project." And for some reason, many of the regulars on Kickstarter wait until they get those 48-hour notices before deciding whether or not to pledge on any given project. As a result, many KS projects get a major surge starting 48 hours before the close of the campaign. I predict our 48-hour surge is what will take Vintage Worlds over the finish line.

Vintage Worlds update

As of this post, the Vintage Worlds Kickstarter has passed 100 backers and reached about 60% of its funding goal. Or, put another way, a bit less than one third of the way into the campaign it is a bit less than two thirds of the way to its goal. So, that's a positive trend, but I still think it's going to be really close in the end. If book Kickstarters are anything at all like board game Kickstarters, there will be a huge lull for the middle third (or so) of the campaign, and people will start asking if it's completely stalled out. Still, for now, it's looking pretty good...

Vintage Worlds Kickstarter

The Kickstarter for Vintage Worlds has been live for a few days. Not sure if Labor Day weekend is really the best time to launch a KS campaign, but what do I know? It's up there now; go check it out! As of the time of this post, three days into the campaign, it is 33% funded.

The campaign got a big bump today from being promoted on John Michael Greer's Ecosophia blog. Hopefully that will be enough haha.

Vintage Worlds cover preview

Cover art for the upcoming anthology Vintage Worlds: Tales of the Old Solar System was released a few weeks ago. Why do I care about that? Why, because this book will contain my own short story, "The Headless Skeletons of Mercury", along with sixteen other tales. Interestingly, VWTOSS will, in fact, have stories taking place on all the planets of the Solar System, plus Sol, Luna, Pluto, and the Asteroid Belt. It wasn't planned out that way, I don't think-- certainly I had no idea what anyone else was writing when I decided to spin a yarn set on Mercury-- but it is pretty cool nonetheless to have all the major points of interest in the Solar System reppin'.

Also, this cover art by Matt Forsyth is dope, y'all.

The Headless Skeletons of Mercury to be published

Happy to announce that my short story, "The Headless Skeletons of Mercury" will be published in the upcoming anthology Vintage Worlds Volume One, a collection of stories about the "old" solar system (you know, the one where Mars had canals and ancient ruins, Neptune was an oceanic world, and Venus was covered in lush, dangerous jungles). It will be my fourth published story.

The formal announcement is here: http://www.solarsystemheritage.com/anthology-project-2017.html