Michael F. Haspil, alongside fans, has been waiting for this day for quite some time. Come see how easy it is to follow your dreams and write a novel.
Fans of the Long War, today is the official release date of his novel Graveyard Shift.
Hey, everyone. Mike Haspil here. Yeah, that title is mock click bait and I’m sort of trolling. However, if you put up with me, I’ll tell you how you can get my audiobook free!
As you may or may not have heard, I have a book coming out today. It is the culmination of a lifelong dream and this particular work took the better part of nine years to get to the finish line.
The adventure still isn’t over. As I came to realize while I was at Denver Comic Con, I hadn’t made it to the end, I’d leveled up and was now at the beginning of a new adventure.
So why am I here, sharing this on a wargaming website?
Well, first, I scored a huge victory, maybe the largest of my adult life, and I wanted to share it with my friends. You are the ones who sing the song of my people. Yes, you’re all my friends, even if we’ve never met, because we all decided that we wanted to partake in this insane hobby of miniatures wargaming and that alone makes us kin.
Even the ones who play Chaos forces; you’re heretics, but still my friends.
Second, believe it or not, my style of writing and gaming do intersect. In fact, it’s not unusual. You’d be amazed how many science fiction and fantasy writers overlap with gamers. George R.R. Martin famously plays G.U.R.P.S. and Chaosium’s role-playing system. James S.A. Corey’s Expanse books started out as role-playing games. That’s not even counting the hordes of books that come to us through the venue of tie-in fiction. Many of R.A. Salvatore’s works. A score of others — almost too many to count. We know all the Black Library authors also play games for the most part.
So yeah, if you’re interested in becoming a commercial fiction author, play an RPG. I would suggest running the games, players will give you instant feedback on whether your plotting skills need honing or not. If you don’t have a regular group you can game with, try running a game online. Sites like Storium will let you run a literary style game with full control of setting, plot, and characters. It’s worth checking out.
The other way I use gaming in my writing is that I often roll out what will happen. Some of the old grognards here might remember the old gaming books. GW put out some a few years ago. Legacy of Dorn is one of them. Think of it like a Choose-Your- Own-Adventure book but instead of just turning to the correct set of pages for each decision you make, you roll dice to resolve encounters against creatures with stats. Oh, you have a character sheet too.
So it’s more like a single-player role-playing game. They are great fun and if you can’t get the original books, Tin Man Games has them as iOS and Android apps. They’re on Steam too.
I don’t get that crazy with it, with stats and everything. I use FATE dice with plus symbols and minus symbols. More minuses are bad; more pluses are good. It’s a simple system but keeps things exciting when I’m writing out a heavily plotted action scene and I want to keep my characters and myself guessing. It keeps things fun.
All you have to do is play some role-playing games until you get amazing at inventing and changing plots on the spot, and creating them well enough to keep folks entertained. Roll out some results of encounters to throw in the random element of chance. Then write it all down. Secretly easy. Oh, sure there’s mountains of other stuff like editing, multiple drafts, finding an agent, getting a contract — but those are just details.
Anyway, I told you that if you put up with me, there was a way you could get my novel, Graveyard Shift, free. Follow this link. It will take to you to Audbile.com where you can sign up for a 30-day trial and get my novel’s audiobook free! Pretty cool, huh?
Trust me; Michael Kramer does an outstanding job narrating it. Don’t take my word for it, go here and listen to the first 30 minutes!
If you’re not into audiobooks, you can pick up the hardcover at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or fine booksellers everywhere.
I feel like if you’re on this site, there’s a good chance you might enjoy it. It’s a crazy urban fantasy story that reads like a thriller, with a lot of over-the- top action, mysteries, conspiracies, secret government organizations, vigilantes, shapeshifters, vampires, and a mummy.
Yeah, it’s like that.
More from Michael F. Haspil
About the Author: Michael Haspil
