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Grrl Power #967 – After action cluck
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Grrl Power #967 – After action cluck

by on August 2, 2021 at 5:00 am
Chapter:
Characters: , , ,

There’s an extended fight scene going on while Dabbler is prompting Sydney for details. I thought about putting in a bunch of PUNCH, BIFF, ZORG, ETC sfx at the bottom of each panel but decided it looked cluttered.

Dabbler is a better enchanter than she is an alchemist, so she figured out how to enchant liquid. She’s certainly not the first person in the history of magic to do that, but she figured a lot of it out on her own, then went and did some research, stole a few ideas and kind of half-independently invented something others have already made. A lot of her inventing, magic or technological, is like that. Part of her inventions are scrabbled together or inspired by other’s work, and part of it done “the long way around,” often using mathematics that others would find unnecessarily boggling.

Dabbler doesn’t have anything against witches or alchemists specifically, but every profession has its experts as well as incompetents and charlatans. In her travels, she’s been tricked into buying a healing potion that was just Hawaiian Punch, or a healing potion that actually amplified the damage received (so the vendor could scavenge from fallen adventurers and stock his shelves with “barely used” gear. Don’t worry, Dabbler murdered the living fuck out of that guy.) So mostly she just trusts her own concoctions now.

Tamer: Enhancer 2 – Progress Update:

Second to last chapter is finished – in the sense that I’ve started working on the final chapter. There’s still some editing to do before it will be beta reader ready. I’ll save those edits for once I finish the book. I need that one character to have a little more time to simmer as I figure out their personality. The last chapter though… there’s an excellent point for a chapter break about 1,000 words in, but I like making my chapters about 5,000 words long. I don’t know why. It’s a totally arbitrary figure. I think book 1 had a 3,200 word chapter and maybe one of the action ones got up to 11K. If I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing, they’ll get up to around 17K, and that’s too much. There are novellas shorter than that. So I often have to go back and do a lot of renumbering when I break up big chapters that got away from me. Scrivener doesn’t seem to have a smart chapter numbering function that I can figure out.

July’s vote incentive is still up. August’s will be posted with Thursday’s comic. The nude version is done, but drawing lacy underwear is holding up the piece.

Nude version is up at Patreon.

 

 

 

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.

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130 Comments

Some more book recommendations

by on May 16, 2021 at 10:27 am
Posted In: Blog

An Orc at College

I’ve recommended this Liam Lawson series before. I love me some good xenoanthropology, and my favorite thing about this series is the “fish out of water”/”Tarzan in New York” bits where the Orc main character has to figure out all the weird cultural stuff humans (and other races) do.

Well, Book 8 is out, Trorm’s family is coming to visit, and the xenoanthropology spills out onto the front lawn in the form of fistfights and flaming maces, much to the horror of the hand-wringing and probably slightly racist HOA. Mmm mmm! Good stuff!

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Entangled Fates

A near future, proto-cyberpunk novel. As in, the main character is, through circumstances beyond his control, the first guy with a quantum linked AI in his brain. It’s kind of like he’s got “The Machine” from Person of Interest riding shotgun, only instead of being an enigmatic and vaguely creepy superintelligence, his machine decides it likes the human experience and adopts very anthropomorphic (feminine) qualities right off the bat. Corporations, governments, and organized crime antagonize, and eventually a bunch of ex-military female bodyguards are hired because they blend in better than burly dudes in suits and sunglasses. Yes, it’s a (slow burn) harem, obviously.

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Savage Ascension

There’s a lot of stories like this one, i.e., displaced hero makes good and grows his household and gets his revenge, partially by living well, but mostly with head chopping. I’m recommending this one because from among the similar books I’ve read recently, I thought this one stood out. I immediately bought the second book when I finished the first, which is a pretty good gauge of a series I think. I have a lot of orphaned Book #1’s in my library. This one is like, Isekai-lite. Instead of being from another world, the MC is a “Savage” from the north, forcibly taken to the “civilized” city where he proves that being a skilled hunter is advantageous in slave arena battles. So, it’s kind of a bummer at first, but then he finds out that if he wins, he gets to pick a wife from an assembly of female combatants, and the ruling class here has a way to combat a blight of infertility sweeping the land, so the MC is like, “I guess I’ll pick up a wife or two before I get my revenge on everyone.” So, yeah. As books of this nature go, I thought it was one of the better ones.

The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by [Jack Campbell]

The Lost Fleet

This series is a little different from most of my recommendations. It’s more akin to the early Honor Harrington books, which I quite liked, for their technical fleet battles. (I’m as surprised as anyone I enjoy that stuff.)

The hook of this series is; Guy wakes up from 100 years in cryosleep to discover 1) The war he was fighting is still going on, 2) Everyone thinks he’s some mythical super-tactician cause he fought in a famous, desperate battle before jumping in his pod. 3) He kind of is, because now, after 100 years of constant war, so many people have died that advanced fleet tactics have been lost as the war chewed up all the old captains and admirals, and most warfare has devolved into “charge forward and hit them harder than they hit you.”

Something I like about this series is that it recognizes that space is stupidly huge, and when a ship that is 10 light minutes away from you does something, it takes ten minutes for you to know about it. Fleet battles held at .1 lightspeed still take hours and hours when fleets start off in distances measured in AU’s.

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Some Book Recommendations

by on May 24, 2020 at 11:45 pm
Posted In: Blog

So I found some books that I really enjoyed, and I thought I’d make a separate post about them. It’s actually two series, both by the same author, Daniel Schinhofen.

The first thing I will tell you is, don’t worry about the covers. He’s kind of famous for having bad covers. The cover from Apocalypse Gates looks like a flat lit Doom 1 level.

Anyway.

The series I really liked is Binding Words, the first book of which is Morrigan’s Bidding. One of the things I liked about it was the book is very good at laying out the rules of the world the MC finds himself in. This might seem like a minor point, but the rules of this world are quite important, and some books don’t do a great job with set up. I will admit, I also like the fact that the MC is kind of OP, even though (and I don’t want to spoil anything) there’s not a lot of action in the first book. I’m sure some of you are like “How is he OP if he’s not kicking ass?” Ah, see? You gotta read it to find out.

One caveat – you guys know that I like the slice of life stuff, right? I mean, if you’ve been reading Grrl Power, you’ve probably figured that out. That said, by the time I got to the third book in Binding Words though, even I was like “I don’t really need to know what they eat for every single meal. It’s okay to skip ahead a few days.” But don’t let that dissuade you from checking out this series. I’m definitely snapping up the next book when it comes out.

After finishing all the released Binding Words books, I jumped straight over to a new series he’s working on called Aether’s Blessing. Or… the series is Aether’s Revival. Book 1 is Aether’s Blessing. It’s fairly different from Binding Words (though there is at least one common theme)

Some of you may be familiar with his other series, Apocalypse Gates and Alpha World. I have tried to read Alpha World on numerous occasions, and I can’t get into it. It’s not because the writing is bad, but I just cannot get into books that are set in video games. I just can’t bring myself to care about what happens, because no matter how it’s set up, whether it’s VR, or the character’s brain is trapped in the game or whatever, there just aren’t any stakes for me. If a horde of demi-liches are about to sweep the last bastion of humanity, I can’t help thinking, “Yeah, but what happens if some developer patches the game and now all the liches are covered in Mt. Dew branding like a NASCAR driver, or are accidentally flagged as neutral?” or “What if a janitor trips over the power cord to the server?” And also, what if the main character does defeat the horde of demi-liches? Do they just respawn the moment he turns his back so other players can take them on, thereby lowering the stakes even further? It’s a bad set up for a book. If an author wants to put game like stats in his novel, then just have the character wear some sort of contact lense that scans everyone’s strength levels, or make it a spell, or have aliens rip out everyone’s eyeballs and replace them with cyber eyes that give them special skills and make them duke it out on a planet full of dinosaurs. It’s just lazy writing IMO to make it a video game.

I’ll probably try again to read further into Alpha World, and maybe I’ll get to a point where I can ignore all the game stuff, because I really liked the two series I recommended above, but man, it’s tough. “Oh, he finally met a girl that’s probably going to be a love interest… but has he? Or has he met a lookup table with some clever dialog trees?”

Anyway. I liked his other books and maybe you will too.

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Obligatory Covid-19 Post

by on March 26, 2020 at 12:02 am
Posted In: Blog

Stay safe guys. I feel a little detached from all the disruption since I work from home, but I know this is a super weird time, and a lot of places have moved to quarantine in place protocols because humans are a bunch of dipshits that can’t figure out what 6′ of personal space means. A week ago I went to Chili’s to pick up a take out order, and there were 10 people milling around outside, and another 10 all bunched together in the little To Go closet they have. It took 90 minutes to get my food because apparently the management figured that since the city had told all restaurants in the city that dining in was not allowed for the foreseeable future, Chili’s management figured “Well I guess the amount of to go traffic won’t change and we shouldn’t staff up for some unpredictable rush.”

Ug. Hopefully everyone will start figuring it out soon, but you know what Einstein said; “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

My point is, be safe, and don’t contribute to the general level of dipshittery by being a dipshit. And don’t hoard toilet paper. I just can’t figure that one out. I mean, hand sanitizer, I kind of get, even though regular soap is perfectly fine, but the people hoarding TP are a bunch of assholes. There’s already reports of sewage systems getting fucked up because people have had to resort to using paper towels and those wet wipes for your butt that famously fuck up sewage systems. We’ve got a few rolls left in the house, but a month from now, I really don’t want to have to take a shower every time I pinch one off.

78 Comments

Tamer: Enhancer

by on January 23, 2020 at 9:05 am
Posted In: Blog

I wrote a book!

It has nothing whatsoever to do with Grrl Power. It’s actually Tamer fanfic. Hopefully that’s obvious from the cover there.

I’ve never written a book before, so I decided to see if I could. I’ve dabbled in prose before, like a lot of you, I’m sure, but never actually finished anything. I figured that using an established universe would make the process a bit easier. Actually I found writing quite enjoyable, editing is the hard part.

Please let me know what you think! Pacing, wordsmithing, characters, all that good stuff. I’m amenable to all constructive feedback. Feel free to leave comments here, but please be mindful of spoilers if you do. You can also email me at grrlpowercomic@gmail.

FYI – There are sex scenes in the book (spoilers, I guess.) Not a lot, but they don’t fade to black. Well, some are more terse than others. I would describe them as explicit, but not gratuitous, but those are obviously relative terms. If you’ve survived MSE sex scenes you’ll be fine.

Tamer: King of Dinosaurs is by Michael-Scott Earle. I’ve linked it several times in the past. The first book is free if you’ve never checked it out, but you don’t need to be familiar with Tamer to read my story.

Obviously, “Tamer: King of Dinosaurs” is Michael-Scott Earle’s IP and my fan work is by a fan for fans, and certainly not intended to infringe in any way.

Here’s a .mobi file for kindles, and an .epub for everything else. And here’s a .PDF if you like.
02/03/2020 – The book’s been updated with a ton of edits and fixes.
02/16/2020 – Even more fixes.

For those of you unsure of how to get a .mobi file onto your Kindle or Kindle app on your phone/ipad, the easiest way is to download it, then email it to your kindle email. You can find this on Amazon, under “Your Contents and Devices” you’ll see a list of books you’ve bought through Amazon. Click on “Devices” up at the top and you’ll see a list of kindles and phones etc that have the kindle app installed. Click on the box with the “…” next to each device and you’ll see an email address for it. Just email that address with the .mobi attachment.

Alternatively, I’m sure you could transfer it with dropbox or google drive or whatever poison you use.

269 Comments

Avengers: Endgame Talk

by on May 9, 2019 at 9:42 am
Posted In: Blog

Well, I finally got around to seeing Avengers: Endgame, and I figured everyone could use a place to talk about it without worrying about spoiling the movie for other people. So be aware, anything in the comments of this post is probably a spoiler of some kind.

Seriously, don’t click into the comments if you haven’t seen it yet.

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267 Comments

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