Confessions of an RPGer

Posted on March 6, 2018 by BR

I grew up playing Dungeons & Dragons, among other roleplaying games, with my friends. Perhaps that’s where my love of storytelling began, who knows. I still play these games today with a couple of good friends and my wife. We’ve explored all kinds of genres and settings, from various editions of D&D to Pathfinder, Shadowrun, Firefly, Dresden Files, and others. Yes, there are RPG rules based on popular franchises and book series. How cool it would be for there to someday be “This Corner of the Universe – The RPG!”

Some of the ideas and moments from these gaming sessions have leaked into my writing. As the This Corner of the Universe galaxy has expanded, naming the 100+ identified planets has been a challenge. Several clusters have been named after the RPG characters my group has created, mostly in the corporate-controlled systems. Seshafi, Lagrin, Syntyche, Sade, Ia, Ardea, and many others were all named after druids, fighters, and so forth that my friends created for game night.

Heskan himself is named after one of my own RPG characters from ages ago. He was not in a science fiction setting, nor any sort of captain. “Lord Vindicator Heskan Oskworlder” was a psionic religious zealot and it was open-ended whether the god he worshiped was real or not. Garrett Heskan only shares his name, I assure you!  Originally his first name, Heskan became my captain’s last name only after I realized in narration I was referring to all characters by their surname.

The secret twist to Confidence Game was also inspired by a detail from game night. My wife created a backstory for one of her RPG characters, a ship captain named Siren Smythe, for the Firefly setting. That character too had a ship named Zanshin, and we even went to far as to create a logo for her ship:

I won’t tell you more about Siren’s backstory in case you haven’t read Confidence Game yet, but it’s another example of RPG-derived inspiration.  (By the way, Confidence Game ebooks are on sale for only US $0.99 throughout March 2018.  You can find links to the major sites on the landing page, here.)

Playing RPGs is a great stress reliever for my crew of friends, a chance to escape “adulting” one night a week, catch up, and let our imaginations wander. I’m very lucky to have these folks in my life, and to have their creativity to lean on when I need a little help in my own made-up worlds.

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Building Dosi Station

Posted on March 1, 2018 by BR

When writing any novel dealing with specific locations, it always helps me to create a map or layout on paper (digital or old-school).  The extra effort makes for strong scenes and a consistent and real environment. In Confidence Game, the layout of Zanshin was constructed over a period of months but helped give real authenticity to the starship.

With Chasing Blue Dots, I not only used the computer program, Universe Sandbox, to create the Dosi star system (that image is an insert in the book and also on the book’s landing page here) but I also crudely outlined the very important space station orbiting Sahana using Paint.net. My quick sketch was far too primitive to put into the book (it was solely designed to help me keep the decks straight and so forth), but I’ll post it here so you can see how closely your mental image of Dosi Station matched my own.

(click for larger view)

Like I said, the orbital is a crude drawing not meant for the book (you can see where I deleted an entire deck). Jake started on Deck 3 and then relocated permanently to Deck 2. “Dos Cantina” was situated on Deck 4 and the space traffic control (STC) facilities were the subdeck below Deck 7 (the little knob with the antennae sticking down from it).

Chasing Blue Dots is available on Kindle, iBooks, Nook and many other ebook sites. If you might like off-beat romantic science fiction, please give it a try. It even has its first review on Amazon (Thank you, New Zealand!  Five stars!) and if you enjoy the novel, please consider giving it a review as well. Every independent author thrives on reviews and feedback from readers.

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About “Sosie”

Posted on February 14, 2018 by BR

In Chasing Blue Dots, Jake Marshall has a pet described as a “wandering scavenger plant” that he keeps in a terrarium. “Sosie” can move up to 10 centimeters a day, enjoys sprays of brackish water mixed with hamburger grease, and is an emotional anchor for her owner. (Sosie is a “her” in Jake’s mind!)

The inspiration for Sosie comes from the “walking palm”:

See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons


This real palm tree grows in rainforests in Central and South America. Sosie is much smaller, at 40 centimeters tall instead of 15 to 25 meters tall, but I imagine her to have stilt roots and a genuine ability to roam. The “walking” nature of the walking palm and the true purpose of its stilt roots is debated, but Sosie likes to wander in search of the bits of food Jake lovingly scatters in her soil.

Where did the name “Sosie” come from? It’s short for Sosipatra, a real philosopher in the 4th century.  The real Sosipatra was believed to be clairvoyant. The only reason “Sosie” is named after her is because I went searching for something that reminded me of the walking palm’s scientific name (Socratea exorrhiza) and I liked the name. It’s fantastical enough that Jake’s plant can roam, making her psychic as well would have been over the top!

Head over to the landing page for Chasing Blue Dots to find her and Jake’s story on your favorite ereader.

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