So, a writer buddy of mine whom I’ve worked with before reached out to me yesterday, mostly to chat. However, it being the two of us, naturally we started talking writing. Long story short, we were discussing our current projects (mine being my LitRPG novel and his being book 15 in his urban fantasy series) and the idea came up between us to do a collaborative work again.

It’s been ages since I’ve worked with him, so naturally I started getting the brain juices going. He suggested science fiction as a genre, since we both dabble in it but haven’t done a lot to focus on it. I suggested a format: correspondence between two characters over relativity-necessary timelapses. The thought mostly stemmed from my irregular schedule, trying to think of something that would be manageable to eke out time for. But I also have tried collaborations before, and one of the places where I most notice issues for me is writing style. Unless one person is focusing on the writing, things can get distorted due to multiple writing styles between authors. Even if one goes back and rewrites everything to be cohesive… it’s still something I wanted to avoid. So two different people corresponding… that would make more sense.

Our brainstorm developed from there and… I think we’re going to at least give it a shot. We have basic framework, basic plot, and even a friggin’ working title already. 

So… I guess we’ll see!

"Stalker" is one I wrote back in college and... from what I can gather from my files and stuff, it was written during a short period around 2004-2005 when there was a tiny community of people doing a writing contest called "First Line Fiction." Each month-- or it might have been weekly, but I don't think it was-- the competition runner put up a single sentence. It was meant to be the first line of the story. I believe the word limit was 500, so these were flash fiction stories.

Once the submission period was up, each contestant was given a few other entries to rank. I'm wanting to say it was 3-5 entries. So it was a ranked voting/point system. The winner got like $50 or $100. I won once with the first story I did there, "Triple Homicide on Train FA-7."

"Stalker" wasn't a submission for the FLF contest. But I do know it was inspired by one of the first lines. How do I know? Because I have another story, "Pickup at The Join" that has the same first line, and it's less than 500 words. That was my entry for that contest.

"Stalker" is what I did when I didn't have the word count limit. Still flash fiction, but not short enough for the contest.

Anyway, enjoy!
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“She’s a local. The number’s in our area code.”

“What makes you think she’s a ‘she’?”

“Who else would text you this late on a Tuesday to tell you you’re cute? Unless you came out while we were at the club this weekend and didn’t tell me.”

Cal opened his phone and pulled up the text again. You’re a hottie. “Beats me,” he said, snapping the phone shut again. “How drunk did I get?”

Monty shrugged. “You think I remember how drunk you got? I was the one who passed out, remember? After throwing up in your lap on the bus home.”

Cal did remember. Nasty. He hadn’t even tried to clean those pants-- just threw them away. “So I probably gave my number to someone. Maybe a few someones… and now one of them is actually texting me.”

“I thought girls usually called.”

“This is the texting age.”

“Maybe she's a hottie. You tend to have pretty good taste, even when you’re drunk.” Monty grinned. “Text her back. Ask if she has a sister.”

“I don’t even know who she is!”

“Why should that stop you?”

He shook his head, stuffing his phone into his pocket. “I’m not going to do anything. If she-- whoever she is-- isn’t just messing with me, she’ll text again. Maybe then I might reply.”

Cal’s phone vibrated, rattling against the glass of water on his nightstand. The clinking woke him up. 

New Text Message

He flipped it open and opted not too look at it right away. Instead he checked the time. 2:57 stared at him. Cursing, he opened the text, looking first at the number. It was the same one.

​On my mind on my mind!

Grumbling, he closed the phone and went back to sleep.

Monty stared at the screen on Cal’s phone, looking at the texts Cal had saved in the memory, all from that same local number. “They were all sent late, like after midnight.”

“Except for that first one. That one was at quarter till. Big difference, I know.”

“She’s texted you almost every night for three weeks. And you’ve done what?”

Cal shrugged. “Been jerked out of sleep for every damned one of them.”

Monty thrust the phone at him, pushing it into his chest. “I’m telling you, this girl’s got a thing for you. Text her back!”

“No way, man! This is kinda creeping me out at this point. I mean, look at some of those last ones. Check the one from Monday.”

Sighing, Monty opened the phone and pulled up the text. “Baby you there? I like tomatoes and bagels,” he read aloud, trying hard not to laugh and making a strangled snorting sound instead.

"She does sound hot.”

“This isn't funny, Monty. I’m starting to get weirded out by this. I mean, I haven’t answered a one of her texts, but she keeps texting me almost every night.”

In Monty’s hands, Cal’s phone began to vibrate. “I’ll check it,” he said, flipping it open. Cal peered over his shoulder.

My pockets are greasy.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Some new weird stalker pickup line?”

The phone vibrated again. Sorry baby I forgot something.

Again. There’s a taco in there.
Ow! Stop it!
I’m stealing your pillow.

The phone was receiving texts faster than they could read them.

C’mon let’s go upstairs.
I’ll tell u when i’m finished.
u don’t like me
nononono

“I think she just lost it,” Monty said. “I’m calling her.”

“Monty, don’t!”

Cal heard the phone ring three times before a voice picked up. “Hello?” She didn't sound to alert.

“Yeah, hi. Um… I keep getting texts from this number. Really weird ones. Mind explaining?”

There was a pause, and Cal heard a yawn on the other end of the line. “Who is this?”

“Cal.“ Monty made a face at Cal as he said his name.

“I don’t know a Cal.”

“I think we might have met at The Cave, on Third Avenue, maybe three weeks ago? I can't think of anywhere else I might have given out my number.”

“Oh! Oh my god, I’m sorry! I think… have I been texting you?”

Monty rolled his eyes. “That’s kind of what I said.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I… I’ve been known to sleep-text. I’ll delete your number.”

Before Monty could respond, she hung up the line. Monty slammed the phone into Cal’s hands. “Guess you’ll have to find a new secret admirer, bro.”

On May 16, I had the good fortune to be able to attend (and work) the Parade of Horribles release/launch event at its Nashville, TN.

As much as I want to describe in detail like every freaking moment of the event and what I was doing (no kidding, working an event is a great way to interact with other fans) that’s not what I want to be doing here. I worked my butt off, sweated, got in way too many steps, and was up far too late with way too much adrenaline.

I have no regrets.

What I did see behind the scenes was the reality behind a dream.

I would absolutely love to see something I created be such a draw to so many people. There were something in the ballpark of 1000 attendees at the event, plus the author Matt Dinniman, his moderator Maude Garrett, and of course the venue staff and event workers like myself.

I’m no stranger to performing. I’ve been involved with some form of performance since I was a child. I’ve gone through countless theater productions, musical performances, podcast creation and editing, guest appearances, interviews, livestreaming, conventions, and I’ve done game mastering for tabletop RPGs for decades. These events are draining physically, emotionally, mentally, and socially. And there can be additional trials: you may be away from home, traveling, surrounded by strangers. You may not be able to go home every night to recover.

Fatigue is real, and I saw that in the people around me at the event. I was exhausted being feet on the ground at a single event. I wasn’t doing any coordinating, organizing, ore administrating. I wasn’t the center of attention doing talks and autographs. I was a one-time performer for a few hours, and it was performing the sense that it was sales and fan interactions.

What I did was like… 5% of what Dinniman was doing. Sure, he’s the center of attention and gets the “star treatment” as far as it goes for something like this. He gets the adoration, the attention, the questions and compliments, the interview, and the money. 

But I saw a man who was just shy of halfway into an absolutely draining two week tour. The Nashville event was stop four of like 9 stops, and the tour dates were May 11 - May 25. Literally two weeks or cross-country travel, hotels, and tons of people. At Nashville alone, multiple hundreds of people were in line for individual personalized copies of the book (or other autographed items). So on top of travel and being away from his home and personal comforts, he had setup and arrival, preshow interactions with fans and crew, then the interview, then a few hours of autographs and photos with a line that never seemed to end. 

That’s a long time to be “on.”

The man was exhausted and still had over a week to go. I mean, as of my writing this (May 25) he still has the final event to go tonight. Even after Nashville, he had to get up early to catch a flight to Florida to do it all over again the next night. Then the next day, a flight to Philadelphia to do it AGAIN that next night.

It’s so easy to attend something like this, a concert or release or other big event, and think it’s the dream. I want to be a big famous author and do stuff like this.

Reality is intense and exhausting. Rewarding, absolutely. I know when I’m a stage performer or panelist at a con or GMing a game session, I love it while it’s happening, but I get burned out after. Multi-day conventions have an energy all their own, but wind-down and recovery time are a very serious requirement. 

I can’t imagine what kind of crash Matt Dinniman is going to need when he gets back home. 
​
I guess what I’m really saying with this is just… be kind to your favorite content creators and performers. They’re tired.

​Once again, this is not a first impression of this book. I’ve listened to it MANY times and it’s part of one of my favorite series.

Here we go, the last of the Dungeon Crawler Carl books that I’ve already listened to. The next one will be A Parade of Horribles, and I cannot wait!

But for now, This Inevitable Ruin. I’ve only listened to this one twice, maybe three times since it came out on audiobook in early 2025. The whole premise is complicated. Carl, Donut, and the crawlers have finally reached the ninth floor: Faction Wars. This is the dreaded floor where not only do the crawlers need to survive, but they’re in the middle of a war. Outside entities— players— are in the dungeon in the tens of thousands to play wargames. The only thing is, thanks to things Carl, Donut, the AI, and the game’s own NPCs have been doing, Faction Wars is no longer safe for the visitors. Just like the crawlers, they will now permanently die if killed within the game. 

It took me a while to really make a cohesive description of what I wanted to discuss about Dinniman’s writing here. Partly because I’m less familiar with this book than the others, and therefore was paying more attention as entertainment than with a wordsmith’s ear. Partly because this is book seven, and I’ve already discussed so many things about Dinniman.

This book really nails a whole humongous multi-book, multi-seed, multi-plotline payoff. He even did so while maintaining control over the narrative, seeding and advancing other plot threads, and twisting a lot of resolutions in ways no one could have foreseen.

The nature of this is going to make me have to speak in a lot of vagaries in order to avoid spoilers. So this probably won’t be terribly in-depth to help preserve my own sanity.

First off, this being seventh in the series means it has had a lot of time to build up expectation. Dinniman always knew this was a major destination within the grander narrative because we started hearing about it pretty early, in book 1. In fact, with the very first piece of equipment Donut got, we had a giant sign in the sky saying the ninth floor would require an in-game destruction of a family line.

So yeah, we’ve had this on the horizon for ages, with some notable events on that subject along the way.

Of course, the floor itself being just a giant war was a huge plot device, so we can’t forget that. This is where Carl and Donut’s efforts to break the game come to major fruition. They’ve been working at clearing this obstacle for a long time, both in ways the reader has seen and ways they haven’t seen.

We have the branches of minor plots that have led here one way or another. For some, this floor was always a “deadline” for action on the plot. For some, we literally only learned about it last minute. I’m talking “epilogue of the previous book” last minute. 

Then he draws in a lot of thin plot threads that are just sort of dangling every which way, gathers them up, and throws them into the ball of yarn. Or whatever this horrible metaphor is I’m not really maintaining well. But he absolutely does. We get a whole lot of resolution on some of the massive list of minor characters in this series. Dinniman doles out a schmear of closure on a lot of characters, which is sorely needed. 

This book turned out to be a great bottleneck, a place where the plot would condense and thin, go from a huge cable to a tight wire. Or like, we’ve peeled away the outer layer of setup that has been used, revealing the delicious banana of plot focus within.

He’s given himself more and less to work with from book eight on. I can’t help but think it’s by design. He may not have known how much he’d have to resolve when he got to this point, but he anticipated how much freedom he had with the initial scope of the dungeon to set up all kinds of plot devices. He made a pretty good open world for himself in the first couple books, all kinds of things and mechanics and character possibilities to play with. He had the freedom to pretty much set up any sort of character or background to suit his needs at any time, knowing that if he didn’t kill them before this, there would be an exit if he needed to get rid of them. If he set up a plot line and only found himself dragging it along behind him as an afterthought because he couldn’t find a place to resolve it, he had plenty of logical ways to tragically end it because WAR. 

And yet, he did so much of this in a satisfying way. He didn’t take the easy out on so much. He set himself up for success, and he delivered well beyond belief. There is definitely some value in planning for a ton of loss, of thinning the plot within itself. I’m frankly amazed at the planning process for this, even if Dinniman is mostly a pantser, as I believe I’ve heard. The foresight boggles me, but it’s totally worth applying to your own planning when doing a series.

What frightens me, though, is knowing that the events in this book are just stepping stones to the next big thing. Stakes are getting big, things are getting worse, and it’s getting hard not to get scared.

May was hectic but productive. I mean seriously.

Short Story (working title “Recalled”) - Officially on the back burner. I’ll probably put what I have on the Patreon at some point for you guys to take a look at.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. It’s been rough. Still mulling over the title.

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - That serious rewrite of chapter one is well underway! Well, let me back up. Last month I had 1445 words written on draft 1 on chapter 1. I got that up to 2159 and completed it, then started the second draft. Second draft is up to 1236 words, and compared to the first draft, I’m only about 1/3 of the way through!

June’s schedule settled down some, so it won’t be quite as insane and I should be able to dedicate more time to writing, especially since I’ll be on GM break from my usual D&D gig. I’m really finally starting to sink into Subscription Life, getting that itch.