Today, they removed both rows of staples from my hip, and I felt bad for the staff. Both the doctor and her assistant are not only smart and degreed, they are both pretty young women who deserved better than to yank hunks of metal out of my flabby old ass.

In the meantime,I have been working with Forhad Israfil, a/k/a Forhad Motions, and we released our first video teaser this week. What’s cool about working with new people is seeing what they think is important. In this case, Forhad wanted to focus on the Cybers from Goptri of the Mists since I had focused so much on the organic creations already. When you click that link, you’ll see the result is a spot-on look at some important characters that I tended to shuffle to the side.

Yes, the pic below features human girls. Their names are, left to right, Cassie and Anne. Whether they are really at a beach party somewhere warm or naked in their kitchen using one of those new cell phone apps to create a background, I couldn’t tell you. I can tell you that Cassie ordered that shirt featuring Pearl from Goptri of the Mists the day it came out because, and I quote, “Squid girl makes me hot.”

As squid girls do from time to time.

Bonus? The Pearls, a/k/a Squid Girls, aren’t just mutants, they’re clones!

Head on over to Azoth Khem to find out more.

Last week I posted an update on my progress with the new books. Nothing much has changed, but if you missed it, here it is again. I am down to the last 6,000 words or so for Darkling.

The Darkling Wind will be in the hands of the editor around Valentine’s day, and The Plato Wars is on pace to hit this summer. While Darkling is a stand-alone story, Plato rips you face-first back into The Brittle Riders universe. And, finally, just in time for the holidays, you get to meet Edward Q. Rohta and his merry band of hedonistic sycophants, who will bring about the end of all things, as far as humans are concerned, in the gen-O-pod() Wars.

The Darkling Wind – As diplomats, military officials, religious zealots, and desert spies race to understand what’s happening, the line between gift and weapon begins to blur. Is this benevolence from the stars – or a biological first strike wrapped in pheromones and pleasure? Satirical, outrageous, and deeply human, The Darkling Wind explores how society, aging, and power unravel when faced with a technology that bypasses logic and speaks directly to desire.

The Plato Wars – The Plato Wars take place in a world where philosophy has outlived humanity and become digitized and weaponized. The ultimate cybernetic goal, a unified global interface, has been created, and its name is Plato. Ideals once debated in lecture halls are now enforced through territory, and war, as rival factions interpret ancient philosophies as doctrine, destiny, or justification for conquest. As tensions escalate, alliances fracture along ideological lines rather than species or geography. What begins as localized conflict soon expands into a global struggle, where the question is no longer who or what deserves to rule, but whether the ideas guiding this rule were ever meant to survive contact with reality. In a world programmed into Plato which has been shaped by inherited dogma and living consequences, The Plato Wars explores how belief hardens into law, law into violence, and whether any society can escape the shadow of the thinkers who imagined it.

the gen-O-pod() Wars – Earth’s alien guests, The Sominids, proved that faster-than-light travel was a myth. One that made civilizations rise and fall. After they accidentally split the moon in half and killed most of the settlers there, they left. Denied AI thanks to The Plato Wars and denied the stars thanks to science, humanity started to fade away. Into this slurry of dismay came Edward Q. Rohta. He created chimeras he called gen-O-pods() that people could fuck, kill, or do whatever they wanted with. Humans were proud again. Proven rulers of all they surveyed. Until the chimeras rose up and killed every man, woman, and child on the planet. This is their story.

That’s enough for now. I don’t want you to over exert yourself. Have a day twice as wonderful as you.