Tag: release

New Wandering Fortunes Chapter 22: The Pearl Kingdom

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

About a year and a half ago our protagonist friends arrived at New Zhopolis, and discovered a seedy hive of wretched folk out for no one but themselves. (A few months later they found some good folk though.) Now we’re now and they’ve arrived at a new kingdom on a new planet. What will they find at their new home? It’s as big as New Zhopolis, but warmer, shinier, more colorful–but is it nicer? Join them as they explore their new home in Chapter 22: The Pearl Kingdom.

If you want to read the next chapter in a hurry, they go up a month early on my Patreon, which also has weekly updates of what I’m currently working on and other behind-the-scenes odds and ends for people who give monthly pledges. You can also give a single donation at my Ko-fi and get the next chapter early.

Darmenzi is one year old today!

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Well, in about a month it will b…

…

Wait, really? I released it one year ago today??? I thought that was next month! Well, fig!

So yeah, one year ago today I released the Darmenzi as an ebook on Smashwords. Maybe the February date was me thinking of the physical book’s release, which came a bit later on Lulu. This was all a little over a year after I’d put an in-progress version up for free online; you can still read that, too! It’s nowhere near as good as the final book, which is like, only a dollar on Smashwords anyway.

So, yeah, that’s a thing! You know, legally, this book is eligible for awards. Which awards? I don’t know I honestly have never paid attention to any awards for anything ever. Okay that’s a lie I paid attention to the Nintendo Power awards but there’s no way those weren’t rigged. In terms of books… not really. I should maybe fix that. It doesn’t help that I’m generally about 30 years behind on books. But I digress.

I’d wanted to have a special preview of something for this date, but that was when I thought it was in February! So, uh, an audiobook of Darmenzi is still planned to be made. So far we have only hit one major snag. And that’s… that… I haven’t… made… Dangeresque 3 yet. No but for real I apparently talked about doing some initial recording well over a year ago now and that’s just absolutely INSANE. So much gets in the way–my forgetful memory, which I’ve tried to alleviate with a gigantic two whole lines in my agenda of nothing but AUDIOBOOK over and over, but eventually even that just kind of… becomes part of the noise. Even when I do remember, well, both I and the guy I’m recording it with run into problems, schedule conflicts, technology issues, and general low spirits and sickness. Even if it’s a bit past the exciting time of release, this audiobook is going to be produced… even if it might not be until the second anniversary.

Wandering Fortunes Chapter 18 is up

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Here’s Wandering Fortunes chapter 18: At Odds and Endings. Alden and his friends have been imprisoned for discovering corruption in the city, but even if they manage to get out of jail can they escape the cold arm of the mafia? Plans have to be made, and Top’s a wild card–which might work in their favor.

If you like this chapter and want to read more, you can help me out at my Patreon or Ko-fi. A dollar a day keeps the–wait, sorry–a dollar a month keeps the… thing… thinging. I dunno. gimme money.

Wandering Fortunes Chapter 17 is up! Ride of the Domestic Device Drover (etc.)

~ Duth Olec ~ 1 Comment

Ride of the Domestic Device Drover, but I Guess There Are More Important Matters at Hand! Now how’s that for a title? Following on the disastrous last chapter, Alden is out to get some answers, but he’ll find a lot more than he intends! Will this spell disaster for him and his friends? I referred to the previous chapter as the one where things start to go to hex; this is the one where everything firmly and completely goes to hex. The action is rising quickly now, and the first half’s climax will be soon!

Of course, once you’re finished reading this chapter, if you want to get a jump on everyone and read chapter 18 sooner, you can donate to my Ko-Fi! As an added bonus you’ll get a copy of Slubes or Darmenzi, whichever you like–not that you need to this month, because both books are free in the Smashwords Summer Sale! Grab both, read free books, read free in-progress books on this website–I love free stuff!

Wandering Fortunes Chapter 15 available!

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Wandering Fortunes Chapter 15: For a Friend’s Benefit is now up. It… it, uh…

Okay, I’m gonna level with you. This chapter is about sex work. There’s nothing explicit, but things are discussed. I actually went back and forth some on if I should include it, and this chapter was written much later than the rest. I also tried to treat the profession with as much respect as I could muster. I don’t know how I did on that, but feel free to tell me what you think and anything I can improve on that front because honestly this is about as far removed from my own experiences as possible, as someone probably asexual. But I tried to write based on what I’ve read people say about the work and with the assumption that it’s just a job and people probably shouldn’t actually freak out over it so much.

If you think my writing is good and want me to write more and also live and be alive and exist, you can help me out and get cool stuff in return at my Patreon or Ko-fi! You can see behind-the-scenes updates, early chapters, or get special copies of my books! And then maybe someday I can make a comic and we can play a game.

Physical Darmenzi book! Patreon changes! KO-FI!

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The physical book version of Darmenzi is now available for purchase on Lulu.com! It’s even better than my first book Slubes, and I’m excited to finally have a second book in physical form. Now I can show people TWO things and they’ll go “whaaaa, you’re dedicated to this??” It’s $12 on Lulu and it’s amazing and formatted and just take a look at what the critics may or may not have said!

“I laughed! I cried! I ate a banana!”

“If you only read one book this year, you should read more. What’s this about a Darmenzi story?”

“The title character is truly the greatest villain of our time. Even if Duth is a charlatan who skews how I–I mean, he looks.”

To go along with this announcement there’s been some changes to my Patreon, although some of it is just cleaning up. The most immediate change is to the $2 and $3 reward tiers, which no longer has the “give for a million months and get a name in book”. I really don’t like having rewards that require someone to sustain giving over a period of time, because not everyone can do that.

Instead, those are now a part of my Ko-fi page! I’ll still be on Patreon but they will generally focus on different things–Patreon in the prog chapters I post for free each month (you can see them early or see excerpts from what I’m working on at the time, for example), and Ko-fi on the final products:

$3 gets you an ebook copy of one of my books, $18 gets you not only a signed physical copy in the mail but also an exclusive bookmark, and $30 gets your name in the next figgin book, wow!

Think of Patreon as helping fund my creative process, and Ko-fi as being closer to me. Somehow. I also plan to add goals to Ko-fi that I feel are things I don’t necessarily need to make a monthly income as the prerequisite for doing, although I can’t guarantee that none of them are going to be jokes.

That’s about it for now! New Ko-fi, continuing Patreon, physical Darmenzi book. See you in about a week for the next profile (and don’t forget that $3+ patreons get to read the next chapter early).

Wandering Fortunes Chapter 13: Testy Wills is up!

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Chapter 13 of Wandering Fortunes is now up! Alden, Top, and Ropak continue to try to join the Zhopian Guard and have to run an obstacle course in the process. However, there’s more than just the course working as obstacles in their way. They’ll have to work together to get through it… or, perhaps not?? Perhaps there will be delicious cake, though.

Don’t forget about Darmenzi, though! The ebook released just a couple weeks ago, and there’s going to be more news about it soon! Keep watching for that.

New book, Darmenzi releases tomorrow, January 17th!

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

Oh dang! It’s the second book release! Darmenzi is finally here, tomorrow! I’m excited, and definitely not just woke up and wanting to get all this stuff said before it’s too night and everybody normal is asleep!

It’s a sequel to my first book, Slubes, which is still available and stars an anxious pile of frayed nerves pulled into an adventure where he tries to prove himself to his love while dealing with his ridiculous world while an intergalactic invader sends destructive, sneaky, and ridiculous enemies to steal a crystal of immense powers. Darmenzi features the return of that anxious pile of frayed nerves, a little braver, a little more confident, still a flopping jitterbug, face off against the authoritative conqueror’s return and a manipulative force of chaos. It has slugs, giant crabs, robots, mechs, magic, caves, ghosts, pirates, ancient ruins, monsters, a dragon, silliness, seriousness, a library, insanity, deep-sea exploration, space exploration, a hotel, a bratty kid with a gun, jail time, a car crash, and sad magma!

The final preview chapter is here, and you can see where all three are at the Darmenzi page. The book will be available at Smashwords, and it has been pre-ordable or whatever at Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and Kobo. I hope you like the book!

Also, work on a physical copy is under way, I should have more information on that next week.

Duth Olec’s 2017 Retrospective

~ Duth Olec ~ Leave a comment

It’s cool to do this, right? Actually I might have done these sort of things in past years too. I don’t remember. But let’s take a look at what I’ve done this year, assuming I do remember!

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

  • Began posting the prog version of Wandering Fortunes online: on my website, on Wattpad, and for the first time on Medium. At the rate of one chapter a month, I’ve gotten twelve of these chapters up. That puts me at about a third through the story. This story is actually somewhat special to me–the first two novels were partly based off ideas I had years and years ago, but Wandering Fortunes is the first story I came up with after I decided to go into noveling (authorial term). Furthermore, the main characters, and many other characters, are based off characters I used to use in collaborative stories I wrote with some old internet friends. Were it not for those pals I would never have gotten into writing, so I thank them profusely. (Also some characters in Wandering Fortunes are inspired by some of their characters, too! Don’t worry, I got their permission.)
  • I continued the Pokecomic, which started when Pokemon Sun and Moon released last year. The first comic of this year was 39, and on the 30th I’ll post number 89, so that’s fifty comics this year. At that rate I’ll finish it in 2019, probably sometime after the 8th generation of Pokemon comes out. I’m actually rather surprised and proud I’ve been able to keep this comic up, considering these side projects involving art usually peter out for me pretty early, but this is something I’d wanted to do for over 5 years, probably since the 5th generation of Pokemon games came out.
  • In April began a new Twitter account for the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos where theoretical tweets from major CCC characters are made, using trending hashtags or responding to other tweets or simply posting about their lives. Shortly after announcing the Darmenzi release date I started posting theoretical messages from during the story. It’s been fun! I like coming up with stuff for the characters to say, such as on Thanksgiving, every character I’m using posted what they’re thankful for. Here’s a few highlights:
  • I released two pieces focusing on the premise of the character Top from Wandering Fortunes interrupting an existing story, with Lord of the Rings and Magic Banquet. (See also Wattpad here and here, and Medium here and here.) This is a premise I’d actually come up with earlier while reading a different story (which is yet to be used) and I was just like “man what if Top just showed up instead and distracted this bad guy”. I really like the idea because I really like Top and they’re basically the poster child for the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos, but it turns out I’ve had a bit of trouble coming up with more scenes to use, though that’s mostly because I don’t think about it while reading a book and then afterwards I don’t remember the book well enough to fit Top somewhere. But gaddfern it, I am GOING to find a way to shove Top into Charles Dickens one of these days!
  • I announced the ebook release date of Darmenzi, which isn’t until 2018 but still I announced it in 2017. This involved a lot of stuff that’s stressful for me. That press release? I tried to send it out to press places. I actually contacted people, trying to promote it. I still have more time to work on promoting it. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DOOOO but I’m going to try anyway. I’m not expecting a miracle but. like. you know. a burgeoning fanbase would be nice. Whoa! This 2017 retrospective just got real…ly dumb. uh.
  • I posted a super special Christmas-themed “short story”! It’s a giant satire of religion and the bible. I could definitely being the most controversial thing I’ve posted, but I also see it as one of the best because I get to be oddtastic and write nonsense. There’s even some Seuss-esque rhymes! It’s on my website here, Wattpad, and Medium.

DISASTERS

  • well most of the year for everybody and everything but ME SPECIFICALLY…
  • The beginning of the year sucked because as usual I was working at Bloom Insurance Agency, but even worse, it was customer service! For an incompetent company (not Bloom, they contract with insurance companies to do sales, it was the client who was pretty bad) in a badly-set-up system and also this is all redundant because it’s health insurance. The exception to health insurance is a company that’s not garbage in all ways. However, this wasn’t much of a disaster so much as par for the course over the past several years because I always start the year working since it’s their busy season and then after the first of the month I go on furlough when there’s not as much work and I can do good work. However…
  • I returned in mid-August and it was… weird, at first. I was put on a program without a lot of real training, but it was a program winding down, we were calling insurance agents, not customers, and again, it was winding down, so for the most part we just called answering machines, calling people who were called before, or just waited for no one to ever call. There ended up being so much downtime that people could often go home early. However, that ended, and then I went to an actual program for actually selling health insurance… and… oh Gourd, what was that company called? I’ve forgotten! Hang on… Aetna, I think? Pretty sure it was Aetna. DANG, did I get a pompous vibe from them. Anyway there was so much garbage terrible and finally I snapped at work. I described it at length here. As I say there, there was just a lot of really skeevy capitalist garbage that is totally legal and fine and okay but makes want to figgin PUKE, and I hate health insurance, I hate talking on the phones, I hate sales (making it all the harder for me to promote my book, but I’m still tryin’!), and I finally realized I could not help this rude person, and not just they were so rude, but my being there was a figgin detriment to every person who called and got me. To survive in capitalism I was having to make the world overall WORSE.
    I would rather die.
  • Continuing the theme of I Can’t Hold Down A Job Anymore, Basic Guaranteed Universal Income Or I Will Be Forced To Make The World A Worse Place To Survive And It Will Be You Stupid Conservative And Libertarians’ Fault So Good Job On That, Would You Rather I Die, at the end of November I applied to a job with my local paper as a night mailroom inserter or something or other. It was basically just placing newspapers in machines so they get sorted and ads and papers are placed in them right. Turns out because I have a garbage body I can’t do physical labor, certainly can’t do it at any decent speed, absolutely not at a decent speed needed for most jobs, and therefore just cross out physical labor with Talking to Customers on the list of jobs I can’t do. I forget how much I talked about this but basically the job was about 5 hours a night and after half of that I was nearly faint and couldn’t continue. I had to quit. After half a night. So that little experiment failed.
  • net neutrality repeal but again that’s something regarding the entire country, you don’t need me to tell you about that. Although after the repeal vote I actually called my reps about it, and note that after the calls I wanted to curl up under a chair so yeah phones suck die die die phones
  • Oh I guess the Patreon debacle was a slight disaster but Patreon walked it back so I think it’s gonna be okay.
  • Aaaand that’s really all the disasters of the year, my personal disasters totaled two, everything else was fairly fantastic, and those two disasters were both ME TRYING TO WORK A REGULAR JOB. Seriously, what do you want from me, world? But let’s move on from these sad parts and look forward to…

PLANS FOR 2018

  • Obviously I mentioned Darmenzi releases next year. It comes out Wednesday, January 17th. If I can get some selling I’ll be happy. I’ll pretty much take any number over zero, but I’d like double-digits. (I’d be ecstatic over triple.) Currently only the ebook is set; I don’t want to use Createspace because it’s owned by Amazon (which is why I’m reluctant to do anything related to Goodreads), so I’m going to try out other self-publish websites. I’ll keep you posted on that. I do truly believe this book is better than the first, and it begins to bring up questions about the creator and narrator with the antagonist, Darmenzi. Some closure, some sadness, and some some fantastic villain interaction. But with a few weeks left I still need to work on promoting it…
  • I want to start a new daily project in 2018. I don’t want to reveal too much yet, for some reason, but it’s totally ripped off from inspired by something KC Green is doing. It also means this blaargablog will pick up by about… Whoa wait I had at least one post a day from the 15th to the 20th! That’s pretty good. anyway lotsa %.
  • I’ve gotten a Mastodon account! I really would like to stop Twittering but whoops I need to build an online presence and using websites that have traffic is a slight requirement, sorry. I’m still not sure how I want to do this but I might just give up and post at both places equally with the same things, which would also involve making a second Mastodon account equivalent to the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos Twitter.
  • Might get a Ko-Fi. A cocoa-wifi. After the Patreon thing happened I was like “huh, maybe i’d rather make my goals just flat amounts to reach towards instead of monthly givings goals.” Now, I changed that idea because most of my current Patreon goals are actually recurring things that I would want a continuing stream of income to help with (posting more chapters a month, the Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmail which to be fair I mostly want to wait to do because I want a big enough fanbase to get a steady stream of questions but I’d also like to pay my artist friends for drawing the comics so yeah), but there are some that could work as an accumulation of everything donated (special stories, comic/graphic versions of short stories, that Cloudy Cuckoo Cosmos Online RPG idea I wanna do someday), kinda like mini-Kickstarters except there’s no guarantee and you give money even if it takes 5000 years to reach the goal, since it’s more of a “thank you!!!” than an actual end goal. Maybe. I dunno.
  • There are at least one or two short stories I will post here next year, and I’d also like to write more and maybe finish some and maybe even finish some that I could submit to publications! I’ve sent one to a few places but it hasn’t been accepted, though to be fair it’s a character-centric story that probably works as being posted here first anyway. I have an idea for a short story I’m going to begin working on soon that might work.
  • Continue Wandering Fortunes! Continue the pokecomic! The former I hope to pass the halfway point on in 2018, and the Pokecomic to, who knows, maybe get to the 3/4 point.
  • Darmenzi audiobook. Work on it is a bit slow because I’m a bit slow, but the idea has been in the making for a little while now and some recording has been done. Some more recording needs to be done and then editing will be discussed. No promises or predictions on when this will start–I can only give myself a deadline.
  • Some freelance writing/editing? Look I clearly suck at holding down a Regular Job, and selling books takes more time than society will allow for survival, so I might have to look to that to have an income.
  • Be the best Duth I can be.
  • And at least a functioning Jeremy.

I think that about wraps it up. See you in a few days for my Clichemas post, and come January 1st I should be starting that new daily project I mentioned.