Mutant Pizza

Howdy, Falling Leaves & Pumpkin Dreams;

Happy Fall! Autumn is my favorite season of the year. It’s not because of the pumpkin spice, although I do enjoy pumpkin pie. I love the crunch of leaves under foot, the color changes as the trees prepare for their winter slumber, the chill of the air. The rain. I love the heavy fall rains and the petrichor that follows. And as a fan of our distant fungal cousins, I love the mushroom hunting that fall brings.

I finished reading the graphic novel Lost at Sea, an early work from Bryan Lee O’ Malley of Scott Pilgrim fame. It’s a coming of age story of post high school graduates who decide to take a road trip, one of them believing a cat stole her soul. I think back to my life during that time. I don’t enjoy talking about my personal life much, so I’ll just say that my childhood and early adulthood were quite different, although I was lucky enough to go on a cross country trip with a friend in my early 20s. Lost at Sea reminded me of that, and because of that, I’m grateful to have read it. It brought back one of the few good memories during a long, tragic time in my early life. (Don’t worry, y’all, I’m doing well now.)

I’m playing through two interesting games, Seasons: A Letter to the Future and Tunic.

In Seasons, you play someone who decides to leave her seculded mountain village to record the world in audio, photo, sketch, and scrapbook. You visit areas and can take polaroids and capture sounds, and sometimes sketch structures. A war went down some time ago and something similar to the 1916 sleeping sickness (look it up, it’s wild), but instead causing people to freeze in place as if stuck in time, swept the lands. It’s a fun exploration, discovery, and historian/scribe type of game where you actually get to put the photos, sounds, and sketches you make into a scrapbook however you like. It’s an amazing experience that teaches observation and patience.

In Tunic, you’re a lil fox in a lil tunic. Okay, there’s more to it than that, but it’s cute, no? This is a game inspired by the classic SNES Zelda (Ocarina of Time) style of gameplay that combines combat and puzzles in an isometric view. Visually, it has a toybox artstyle that heavily relies on geometric shapes. It’s quite beautiful. But as cute and beautiful the game is, it is also merciless at times. I think of it like a deconstructed and revamped Zelda-like game, but with a “meta” twist. The signs, descriptions, and even menus in the game are written in a made-up language that you can’t really understand. There’s a digital manual with pages scattered throughout the game that you find, which reveals more information about how your items and attacks work. Some manual pages also contain maps of areas, and information on how to secretly interact with certain landmarks in the game. There are a lot of secrets and fun puzzles. The game is quite addicting!

Okay, if you’re still reading this, it’s time to talk about what I’ve been working on. This is an update for September AND October, which means you likely won’t see another Monthly Crust until Nov-Dec.

Board games, y’all!

Let me make a no-nonsense bulleted list of the projects I’d like to get out by the end of this year:

• Graphic Design is My Passion: An 18-card party game. I’ve got tweaks to make and things to test, but I’m confident I can get this ready for purchase by the end of this year.
• Yes, My Queen!: A one-page ant colony survival game. I recently published my first design jouranl on this, progress is zooming on this game so far (knock on wood).
• Nine Muses, 2nd Edition: I’m turning Nine Muses, my debut board game, into a card game with new mechanics but the same vibe. I’m the least confident in being able to get this ready by the end of the year, as I’m illustrating all new artwork for it, all hi-res and resembling the art styles used in Ancient Greece, and this is a massive undertaking. I don’t have a design journal entry on this one yet, as I haven’t even started on the prototype. But expect more on this in Nov-Dec.

Digital board games, y’all!

Okay, this is really, really early stages but I’ve been learning how to use Blender and, eventually, will learn how to develop in a games engine like Gadot or Unity. My goal is to make digital versions of all of my board games that I’ll release on various app stores. This is me dipping my toe in the waters of video game design, with the goal of eventually developing my own video game.

I’m telling you this now, but don’t expect to see anything specific about this for years. I mean, years. (Learning how to develop and then developing a video game takes years, folks.)

Reading is mental, er, fundamental

I’ve got a few stories that I’m editing. I have a goal to have at least ten short stories fully edited and polished up by the end of this years so next year I can submit them to be promptly rejected by various publications. I’m going for 100 rejections (yes, rejections) in 2026, let’s see if I can meet that goal. I don’t want to talk too much about these stories but let me give a few synopses.

• A haunted carousel promises to resurrect a man’s dead granddaughter, but a great sacrifice must be made.
• A captain is mutinied from their ship, can they reclaim their pride and joy despite the emasculation and stress shits?
• A kid possesses a rare magical talent, even amongst established magical families. When the wealthy, popular kid wants him to use it on something ancient and dangerous, will he use his power and be tossed aside, or make the popular kid regret trying to use him?
• In a post-war future, robots gained their freedom but face distrust and scrutiny amongst humans. A man and robot, masters of masonry, are hired to restore a church in a town that was hit the hardest from the war. Old wounds are reopened, but maybe this is needed for them to heal properly.

I’ve got many other stories in the works, but these are the furthest along.

WE WANT THE AETHER

…Said no one. But I’m still working on it, chumps! I’m about 60-70% of the way through editing the 2nd edition of The Aether. It takes effort to strike a balance between how I write now and how I wrote then, while I add a bit here and there to bring more detail and weight to the world. After I finish the 2nd Edition, I’m going to begin work on the next novel in this series. I haven’t fully decided yet, but I think this is either a three or four book story with all that I have outlined. More on that later, when I have more to share.

Thanks very much okay bye now

That’s all I have to yap about for now. I’m thinking abour reducing the cadence of Monthly Crusts to Every-Other-Month Crusts, as the projects I work on tend to need time to cook. Or maybe I’ll just call this “The Crust” and publish it whenever I want. Yeah, that’s right, your timetables can’t hold me. I can do whatever I want!

Anyway, goodbye for now. Take it sleazy.