What's a fair price for a 500-page trade paperback?

[Elok]

I already put up the Nurayah doodle for today. I think I'll give it a few more days before I try putting up anything else. I found a decent pic of a regular hexagon I can probably subdivide into a hakamyette board for illustrations. And the first letter is written. Yay! Thanks for your help, folks.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

You've done a very right thing this evening - engaged a commenter. You happened to have caught me in a talkative mood, but I'm not reliable about that. -Just saying that when you get comments, try not to be the one to drop a non-offensive, non-annoying conversation. That bumps the post in both people's timelines, yours and the other persons, and Big Brother Facebook notices that ****, and it's more likely that any 'friend' of either party will see it.

I'm FB 'friends' with self biased, and do I ever know MORE about his LARPing than I want to, because those nerds are friends, and they have long conversations in each other's post comments, which boosts the posts in my timeline a lot once self had commented or 'like'd. HE doesn't post at any insane volume, but he 'likes' stuff frequently. And he's 'friends' with Patrick Frevald, a published author -and apparently, judging from the descriptions of his four published books, a big Buffy fan. And Patrick is very nearly as bright as he thinks he is, which seems pretty darn bright, and he's apparently fairly active on Facebook talking about whatever - and you may imagine that there's a sort of self-promotion going on, whether that's part of his motivational set or not, by talking about his beekeeping and the crap he takes over the time he had to kill a bear in his yard or whatever - because he's thoughtful and witty and interesting, I've made his acquaintance and know his books exist...

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Do pace the actual originating/content posts to whatever schedule, though. That's just sensible, as TCOL needs to not be mined out until at least you've got another book out, even Byzantium for Children. Mylochka once gave me the BEST advice about fiction writing, applicable to this - "don't blow all your ideas at once".

[Elok]

I'm not sure anybody wants to know the rules for Hakamyette anyhow. I've got them worked out, so maybe I might as well?

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

I. MADE. A. JETAN. SET. -A reasonably nice one that involved casting molten lead, at that.

You've read the John Carter Barsoom novels, esp. Chessmen of Mars, haven't you? Google Jetan, if not. If Hakamyette is actually a decently playable 'space chess', getting word to the right people -and there are groups like that findable on the nets, SF nerds who like chess variations- you could become a GOD to a small circle and have a lot of free promotion happen...

[Lorizael]

I'm not sure anybody wants to know the rules for Hakamyette anyhow. I've got them worked out, so maybe I might as well?

My gaming group has attempted to design several board games over the years. This has involved a lot of playtesting. Also a lot of erasing.

[Elok]

It's not remotely chesslike. It was invented many years ago after a conversation with my father, and modified many times over the years. You've got a board shaped like this:

With the three "balarbei" pieces for each side as marked in the most common starting configuration. Each side gets up to three moves per turn, one for each balarbei (assuming all are at liberty to move that turn). A balarbei can use his turn to either move to an adjacent triangle of the same color (at touching corners, so each has up to six spaces to move to) or to place a soldier piece at one of his current triangle's three corners. Placing a soldier piece at that corner claims the intersection for your color; opposing balarbeis cannot move through it without first removing the soldier. Soldiers are removed by being outflanked by other soldiers; if two corners of any given triangle, white or black, are occupied by soldiers of the same color, an enemy soldier at the third corner is instantly removed, without consuming a turn. Nor may soldiers be placed at such a "controlled" corner in the first place. A chain of adjacent corners controlled by your own color, however, may be treated as one space for the purposes of movement. That is, a balarbei may effectively teleport across the board in one turn, provided he has only controlled intersections along the way. The final object of the game is to immobilize all three of the enemy's balarbeis, by blocking all his corners with soldiers. A blocked balarbei may be liberated at any time, but obviously having even a single balarbei blocked is a major disadvantage to recover from.

Those are the untested rules as I've devised them. I've never been able to make a board or test it, however. It may actually play quite poorly for all I know. Also, if the word "balarbei" is annoying or hard to remember, I could just call them generals, as they mean roughly the same thing.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Oh, and Elok? Why doesn't your sig have a link to where your book's for sale on Amazon? Your blog is worth a read -and never going to make you a red cent. Add "Read The Curse Of Life" to your sig -it don't matter if it's in one-point white type, because people don't click sig links much- and that there's north of 16,000 copies of the title and Amazon URL for Google to find, depending on when you first had a sig and if the way this version of vBulletin handles it hasn't changed.

Say something controversial on face book (not something not PC) and generate some discussion.

'Lok, if you contrived to bring absolutely anything you say about current events or issues to the attention of the right people -it's the internet- and don't mind ugliness with strangers -it's the internet- you don't have to do anything but that, not try to be controversial or anything. -Alternately, try Patrick Frevald, because it would be HILARIOUS to see you two have a Battle of the Thoughtful Guys who Think They're Being The Voice of Reason...

[Elok]

I looked up Freivald on FB and promptly found out that:

A. One of my friends is a fan or acquaintance, and
B. Jerry frickin' Pournelle just died.

(also, am horribly offended by your suggestion that I am not, in fact, The Voice of Reason)

EDIT: As an experiment, I just looked up "The Curse of Life" in quotes. On Google, it's pretty high up on the first page. On DuckDuckGo (which I use more commonly), it's farther down the first page, and it takes you to the book's page on Brazillian Amazon for some reason.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Both of you say a lot of terribly, terribly reasonable things about current events and issues - and I've seen both both of you letting the fascists off the hook for being fascists, -you, over and over- which is not reasonable, but very foolish and part of the problem. I am willing to fight on this hill and I can hold it, but let's not.

[Elok]

Fair enough (wasn't actually horribly offended, forgot to use sarcasm smiley). I think I've an idea for a post or two; the trick is to tie it in to the book, or to sci-fi.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

It's not remotely chesslike. It was invented many years ago after a conversation with my father, and modified many times over the years. You've got a board shaped like this:


With the three "balarbei" pieces for each side as marked in the most common starting configuration. Each side gets up to three moves per turn, one for each balarbei (assuming all are at liberty to move that turn). A balarbei can use his turn to either move to an adjacent triangle of the same color (at touching corners, so each has up to six spaces to move to) or to place a soldier piece at one of his current triangle's three corners. Placing a soldier piece at that corner claims the intersection for your color; opposing balarbeis cannot move through it without first removing the soldier. Soldiers are removed by being outflanked by other soldiers; if two corners of any given triangle, white or black, are occupied by soldiers of the same color, an enemy soldier at the third corner is instantly removed, without consuming a turn. Nor may soldiers be placed at such a "controlled" corner in the first place. A chain of adjacent corners controlled by your own color, however, may be treated as one space for the purposes of movement. That is, a balarbei may effectively teleport across the board in one turn, provided he has only controlled intersections along the way. The final object of the game is to immobilize all three of the enemy's balarbeis, by blocking all his corners with soldiers. A blocked balarbei may be liberated at any time, but obviously having even a single balarbei blocked is a major disadvantage to recover from.

Those are the untested rules as I've devised them. I've never been able to make a board or test it, however. It may actually play quite poorly for all I know. Also, if the word "balarbei" is annoying or hard to remember, I could just call them generals, as they mean roughly the same thing.

You've got something here - that appears to be a good representation of a board, and the rules/description carefully thought out. -But if it was me, before I put this out there, I'd see if I couldn't run off a big copy of that board on a printer, glue it onto some card stock, mark some checkers, and try to have some bad games with Shelok. (Well, if it was really me, I'd likely make some nice pieces out of sculpey, and probably end up making a more substantial board, but I'm a sculptor without a life.) Something in me worries about releasing it without any playtesting. But this appears to be solid gold book-related material to post...

[Elok]

I take heart from the example of JK Rowling, who made a sport with terrible balance, that can't even be played as described in the real world, and makes you look like a cretin when you try to play it anyway--and still got scads of people to play it just because they liked the books that much.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

There is definitely that. Spinoff stuff like a game can be where the money turns out to be, too - just ask toy billionaire George Lucas. You should actually bother to edit that post to add Copyright 2017 Elok or something to the bottom, just to make sure no lawyer can ever argue that was a release into public domain.

-Also? When you post anything on the author account, don't forget to annoy all your 'friends' by sharing it on your personal account. Seriously. That's part of getting the word out, I swear.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

And #Tags. I haven't seen you using tags on your author account posts. You've seen the crap I plaster ALL the AC2-linked science articles with - that's an internal Facebook search thing. All your TCOL posts should have, at absolute minimum, #ScienceFiction, maybe #Fantasy, too, on them.

Yesterday's post might well have also included #Art, #Nurayah -not because anyone is searching that anytime soon, but Google sees all- and #Hot -because Google sees Nurayah and Hot together, and I don't think I have to explain why that's good for Moving Some Books.

-I have a notepad file open at almost all times -it began as where I keep the new member greeting boilerplate, and expanded because it was always open and that wasn't the only thing I was tired of typing over and over- with 14 lines of tag sets starting with #Science that I copy/paste according to the subject and add things like #NASA #Curiosity #Mars where warranted...