Mid-November Updates (Patreon)

Hey ya'll. The Rukhsana-vs-Bruiser set is 95% complete, I'm just adding finishing touches on PS. Expect it over the weekend. I'm 20% into writing Book Three: Ruin and it's shaping up to be dark AF! This is the first book in the series that is explicitly NC-17. Some important characters are killed off here, patrons and fighters alike. I'm introducing a couple new patrons and focusing more on Brian Kahn here- the first two books gave you the rise of Brett Olafsson, the pot-smoking, Ivan Drago-looking Scandinavian tech behemoth. He fired the first shot of the oligarch war, and Kahn, reeling and growing paranoid as his alliances falter, strikes back in Ruin. And in the middle of all of this is Tamora. Speaking of villains, we see Atzi growing more unforgivable, Phaedra facing her inner demons, and Seon Mi becoming a more human, understandable villain, despite the horror she left us with at the end of Reckoning. The Cabal ups the ante with demonic incantations and we see Belial in his first form- as a wandering spirit, speaking evil into the minds of the oligarchs, fanning the flames of war.

Ruin also gives us some romance- Ming Hua and Spektra, seeded in Reckoning, and Rukhsana and Bruiser, albeit how deep this goes remains to be seen. There are some vivid, graphic scenes involving the oligarchs (maybe more cannibal dinners) that push the boundaries of dark humor (think Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho). We're seeing some strange-bedfellows moments, a stronger, more human character arc for Bruiser (especially after what happened to him in Reckoning) and some explosive geopolitics. It will probably be longer than the prior two books by 50-100 pages give or take.

A note on Reckoning and Carnage. I've written chapters as I went along and a lot was disjointed, both on Patreon and in the early iterations of the books available on Amazon. I still comb through the books now, despite having the proofs of the latest updates in physical form, and find little formatting errors here and there. Self-publishing can be extremely expensive! Line editing can run you several thousand dollars, for instance. Plain old no-frills editing as well. And this isn't counting having to do multiple drafts. It can cost a fortune to publish a book through one of these houses, hence I used Kindle Direct Publishing (and forget big publishers, they won't touch this- too much gore, too much erm... unsafe... politics, too much suggestive themes, etc). And so, I will be making little adjustments here and there to Book Two: Reckoning (Carnage is done and good) as I find more formatting errors. But I will say content-wise, both books are ready to go and I'm already getting feedback on Discord and elsewhere. I truly appreciate all of you guys making this dream come true.

My daughter's hospital bill came in and it's pretty crippling. Hence, I decided to release the books I wrote over the past couple months to get some money off of royalties, and I'm plugging away with giving you all more content on Patreon! Any sale helps here, and even suggestions on what you'd like to see in the books would be greatly helpful. I hope to keep getting more people interested in Bloodblade and while I'm not looking for it to get big or anything, just being a cult sort of thing in a corner of the internet for fighting game fans and people into transgressive literature and art could be enough to help things out over here and make me happy.