Month: November 2020

We just watched “Queens Gambit” on Netflix and “Lovecraft Country” on HBO Max. If you wanted to pick a single theme for either, it would be “diversity.” Queen’s gambit focuses on a female chess prodigy when the game was dominated by males. Lovecraft country focuses on blacks in the Jim Crow era and the raw deal blacks had in 1950.

So why was Queen’s Gambit so interesting, whereas I bailed on Lovecraft Country on the second episode? Because Queen’s Gambit had nuanced characters. Beth Harmon was not a perfect individual; in fact, she had a number of flaws beyond the addiction and abandonment issues that were a driving force in her life. Likewise, the men who arrogantly dismissed her early on overcame their own biases as she continued to demonstrate her mastery of chess… but even that wasn’t like flipping a switch. The men had their own share of issues, be it narcissism, ordinaryness (ok, that’s not really a word, but I mean they had some role early on in Beth Harmon’s development but didn’t have the ability to keep up), or other things.

All in all, it was the believable, nuanced characters that made Queen’s Gambit work so well, whereas Lovecraft Country was so bludgeonee about the entire racial dissemination thing it felt completely contrived.

I like books where the hero is the hero. But heroes with no flaws, with no self doubts, with no inner demons… just aren’t that interesting.

Book 5 in the Kethem series is in final edits, and with that, finishes out the main story arc that “The Fair Elaine” started. Somewhat accidentally. I think it’s pretty obvious that the Kethem series was launched from a Dungeons and Dragons campaign; a few separate ones, actually, but all running in the same universe.

Those campaigns were story driven, with the players trying to find out the secrets of the collapse of the human empire and the origin of the story of the twelve swords of power. And they never quite made it to uncover the full history of Kethem and the other nations around the Lanotalis sea.

The books did that, finally finished stories that I thought would come out in the campaign. It’s been a multi year journey.

And now comes the hard part. Marketing. There’s a bewildering array of services and suggestions out there for how to sell your books. Time to dive in.