The Realm of Reagul

A Season of Kings, Self-Publishing, Tales of Reagul, The Emperor of Reagul, The War of the Wizards, Writing, , , , , , , , ,
Reagul2
The original concept map for Reagul

The Realm of Reagul

 One of the longest projects I’ve ever worked on has been a world-building one called Reagul. I originally conceived of the land of Reagul in a computer game I designed back in the early days of computer games. It was called Prisoner of Z’anth, which involved an American soldier during the Vietnam War who comes across a mysterious artifact in the jungle that points to a sinister organization working behind the scenes of the war. As he battles his way through enemies, he comes to a portal they are protecting that takes him to the land of Z’anth, a realm completely in Earth’s middle ages but filled with dragons and strange creatures, as well as humans who know nothing of Earth. The story in Z’anth opens up to a revelation that this land was once linked with Earth many years ago, and that an alien race may have been responsible for why all of these people are on this planet. The game itself concludes with a final battle against an evil sorcerer who wishes to control everything around him and is now intrigued to discover there’s a world (Earth) he has yet to conquer.

 A few years later, I created another game called Lessons in Death, which took place in the year 3000, when Earth has been taken over by an emperor who seeks to subjugate the known universe. The peace-loving Eden System comes under attack, and a young female ensign from Eden named Laura begins a quest to destroy the emperor and the empire. It starts out as a space battle and then becomes a medieval sword and sorcery tale on a planet that comes to be known as Reagul. As you might suspect, Reagul is none other than the original Z’anth.

 This game eventually became my novel Destiny, which is basically the introduction to the Tales of Reagul, whish strangely begins 3000 years after the saga actually begins in the first series of the Tales of Reagul. Let me explain.

 During the early days of the Roman Empire, an alien race of beings called the Minions takes a large group of Roman citizens from different locations across the empire and moves them to the planet Reagul. As you start to discover, this is not the first time they have done this to human civilizations, having done this with the Egyptians before and the Greeks soon after. They have also transplanted creatures from other planets, running experiments to see how different species interact with each other.

 At some point, the Minions are called home to fight a war that has been taking place in their home solar system. Realizing they must leave soon, they train a young man in their ways, basically giving him the knowledge of a civilization that is thousands of years ahead of anything ever seen before. His new knowledge makes him so powerful, he becomes the first wizard/sorcerer of Reagul, and his name is Sarbonn.  After the Minions leave, Sarbonn attempts to continue their work of protecting the planet, but he also starts to discover that he’s not the first one they’ve trained, as he begins to discover hints of something referred to as the Dark One, a former trainee who has become so powerful that he has gone insane and seeks to destroy all life through a process of chaos and destruction.

 But Sarbonn, oblivious to this future danger, trains two young sorcerers who become his “children”. Over the years, all is fine, and the kingdoms of Reagul begin to grow with the usual sorts of skirmishes that happen when humans try to create civilizations in different places but are close enough to influence one another. Then the process begins to fall apart.

 One of Sarbonn’s “children” decides that because he is so powerful he should be ruling mankind instead of serving it, so he begins a war of aggression that eventually leads to him becoming the emperor of Reagul. Finally, Sarbonn and his other son must confront this upstart, which leads to a cataclysm like none ever seen before.

 Meanwhile, the shadow of the Dark One continues to spread its tentacles, planning and waiting for the right moment to strike.

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The first novel will be released later next month, and it’s called A Season of Kings. Later this month, the first teaser will be published, which is called The Beast of Begmire, which tells the story of a mysterious sorceress who comes in battle with the Dark One some time after the events of the first three books.

 

 

 

 

Beast of Begmire - High Resolution

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Still no such thing as a free lunch

Economics, News, Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

Some moron running for senate in Georgia thinks he has a great idea to, well, I don’t really know what it would solve, but like usual, a House Representative in Georgia, who wants to rise in power, thinks it’s a really good idea to put school children to work to earn their “free lunches.” Basically, U.S.Representative Jack Kingston thinks it would be really nifty for the poor to put them to work sweeping up cafeterias for their lunch money, because somehow this would instill in them the idea that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you think about it, he’s advocating a legal fix to an old adage that doesn’t actually have a lot of connection to anyone’s reality.

The obvious counter to this whole situation is this belief that somehow this is going to make poor kids feel like they’ve “earned” their lunch. No kid pays for his or her own lunch at that age, or at least very few do, because no kids have their own money at that age. Their parents give them money, so they aren’t learning money management skills. They’re learning that their parents have money, or they’re learning that their parents have no money. That’s really the lesson that gets taught here no matter how some Republican Neanderthal wants to spin it.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Well, it’s not really a secret, but I grew up dirt poor. My mom was uneducated and my dad split when I was too young to ever know him. So my mom worked crap jobs and was basically too uneducated (and proud) to take government handouts. She probably should have. It didn’t help that she was sick and then went blind in one eye. She tried and that’s really all that’s important.

So, at one point I was put on discount lunches. Somehow, even though our apartment was overrun with cockroaches on a daily basis and our neighbors were crack addicts and prostitutes, we were too well off to get full free lunches. So, my mom had to pay a certain amount of money and then got discounted lunches for me when I went to school.

Let me tell you about those discounts. They gave you a special paper card that you had to present each and every time you presented for lunch, and the system was so obviously designed to point out that you were using this card, which meant that every other kid looked at you when you were presenting it, and I can’t tell you how bad kids are at making someone feel like shit in some weird process of making themselves feel better about themselves. It was humiliating every time I had to present that card and then pay my token of the discount I was allowed to pay. There were many times when I skipped lunch because it was easier to not eat than to have to go through that process each and every time at lunch.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Representative Kingston never had to go through that experience when he was growing up. And I’ll bet that not once has one of his children ever had to go through such a thing just to get a stupid lunch meal. That sort of thing scars you for a long time, and even in my middle age these days, I have never forgot how it felt to have to present that stupid card when I was at that age.

And that’s the problem with a lot of our representatives who think they actually represent people they serve. Edmund Burke argued a long time ago that he could “represent” miners in his district even though he’s never been a miner because he knows what’s best for them. He was wrong then, and Kingston is wrong today. I’m sure there’s a special place in Goddess Hell where Kingston has to ask for a school lunch each and every day and is told that no, he must starve because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

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It’s not really charity if you want credit for your giving

Business, Economics, Healthcare, Memoirs, , , , , , , , ,

Years ago, I used to work for a hotel that loved good publicity. It would volunteer for neighborhood “giving” things, and then recruits its employees to provide the ground work for what needed to happen. And then it would release a big press release about how much that hotel was doing for the community.

One of the employee “perks” of working for that large hotel chain was that on every Thanksgiving the hotel would give a turkey to each employee before that holiday. It was a nice thing, and if you had a family, or could cook a turkey, it was probably a great benefit. I worked for that company for seven years, and five years in I realized that each year they gave away a turkey, I never took one because I basically had no family and no way to actually cook it. So, it would have been a waste of food. But on that fifth year, I had a new idea. I was going to give my turkey to a food shelter so other people could benefit from the free item I was given.

As I told other people about this, I started to discover how many people didn’t have families of their own, and how many of them turned down the turkey each year on Thanksgiving because they had nothing to do with it. So, they started asking me if they could give their turkeys to me and then have me donate them to the food shelter I was going to give mine to. In a few short days, I had the promise of 25 turkeys from random people at work who told other people who then contacted me. When the givaway occurred, I realized I had a bit of a problem because I really had no ability to carry 25 turkeys home with me, or any place to store them for several days before I would be able to deliver them. So, I contacted one of the main kitchen executives, and he gave me access to a freezer for the time being so I could store this bounty.

Then I got onto the phone and started calling food banks, before realizing that unless you’re a “donor” they know, they’re sometimes not all that interested in someone giving them free food. Finally, I found a San Francisco food kitchen that was in desperate need of this sort of thing, and I arranged to deliver it to them.

The day I pulled up my station wagon to the loading dock to load all of these turkeys, I was met in the loading dock by a minion from the human resources department., She wanted to know what I was doing with all of these turkeys. After I explained it to her, she indicated that these turkeys were for employees, and that I had no permission from the hotel to be doing what I was doing. I explained that these turkeys were given to me by employees who wanted them to go to some place where they would be of use. She was adamant that this had to be approved by higher ups. The guys in the loading dock ignored her and loaded up my car with the turkeys and then allowed me to leave. When I returned to work on Monday morning, I was subsequently written up by someone in human resources for subordination, which ended up being dissolved after a union rep was brought in to dispute the charge.

The next year, no less than 40 people approached me about donating turkeys, even though I didn’t even say I was going to do it that year. As I started coordinating the activity, another person from human resources had me called into her office where she explained to me that if it wasn’t a hotel function, designed by hotel HR, then it was not my option to do. I explained that these turkeys were given to employees, which meant they could do anything they waned with them. She explained that if the hotel wasn’t getting credit for its charity, then I was to cease this activity immediately. I said no, as this wasn’t really her choice to make. We never came to an agreement.

I stopped working there the next year and went back to school, but let’s just say that it taught me an important lesson when it comes to HR and corporations. I’ll let you figure out what that lesson was.

Fast forward to now, and I now work for a hospital system that loves its publicity (sound familiar). It constantly reveals how loved it is in the community to which it serves, and it often calls on its employees to make it appear even better. An example I find eye-opening is its yearly United Way campaign. Every year, expensively produced materials are given to every employee to assist them in making the maximum contribution they can. What I find interesting is that one of the very attractive women I work with who NEVER speaks to me on a daily basis, actually starts speaking to me right before she approaches me to “give” to the United Way campaign because she is the department’s spokesperson and her success in getting signatures is part of how she is perceived to management.

Now, I have personal problems with the United Way that are irrelevant to the discussion, but let’s just say that due to my experiences with them, I do not contribute to them. I do contribute to other places. Just not them. But the place where I work feels it is important for maximum contributions and consistently overplays how important it is that each employee contribute. One such appeal came the other day from a corporate VP who felt that employees weren’t giving enough, so he was opening up the time to give for longer than originally planned. All I kept thinking was “you know, this guy makes so much money that he could probably make up the need that he wants all by himself, but I bet he’s not interested because he’s only giving a certain amount that will be represented by a certain percentage of what he can claim on his taxes this year.” Or something like that.

When this whole campaign is over, the place where I work will claim victory and won’t actually say “Our employees were so great because they gave this much money to the United Way.” Instead, the expensively printed materials will indicate that the place where I work reached its goals and provided a certain amount of money to the United Way. Again, it may just be semantics, but those semantics are why I tend to avoid corporate giving in most instances. It’s almost always about the corporation, not about the people who work for that organization. Sure, they’ll have a nice little memo that goes out to the employees, but when it comes to the real recognition, they’ll take full credit and bask in the glory.

That’s why I say it’s not really charity if you want credit for your giving. When I gave away those turkeys, the recipient who off loaded them wanted to know who she should give credit, even trying to figure out who to make out  receipt, and I just stared at her dumbfounded, revealing that I did it because people were hungry and I had extra food. What more needed to be said than that?

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Sometimes, it seems like the whole world just wants to fight with itself

Memoirs, News, Politics, , , , , , ,

star-wars-darth-vader-sense

I found out today that Michigan decided to tell women to go screw themselves when it comes to rape. Basically, women used to be able to get abortions if they were raped. Now, they can’t, unless they thought ahead and bought rape insurance. Yep, I said that correctly. They have to buy rape insurance. I have all sorts of snide comments to make on that, but I’m just going to leave that one for you to digest. Rape insurance. Okay, moving on.

Meanwhile, there was another shooting in Colorado, which has verified to me that if you want to die, and happen to be young enough to still be in school, go to Colorado. Come to think of it. Go anywhere in America, and you’re probably going to find somebody willing to kill you. We’re just that helpful.

I was happy to see that our Congress was able to come together long enough to decide on a budget, which will pay for military projects and anything needed by very wealthy people who already have enough money that they couldn’t possibly think of anything else to spend it on. Those on unemployment, well, go screw yourself because this country just thinks you’re some lazy ass who is sitting at home trying to get free bon bons while the rest of us work hard at…um, well, not sure what we’re working hard on, as I don’t think too many people in this country actually have really difficult jobs these days, although they like to think they do. But I’m sure they’re all upset at the freeloading people who are starving to death in the snow, while trying to push their broken shopping carts that some legislator seems to think needs to be smashed with a sledgehammer (guess that somehow gets those freeloaders back to work?). Anyway, basically our country works well if you’re already filthy rich. If you’re not, you’re just lazy and should go out and get a job, even if you have three of them that don’t pay enough combined to get you off of food stamps (which, by the way, we need to cut because government decided that money needed to go to rich billionaire oil barons).

And we just bombed a bunch of strangers in Syria with drones that we stated we wouldn’t use just to bomb anyone, although we may have just accidentally taken out an entourage of people returning from a wedding, which someone in our government than had the audacity to state: “They were all enemies of state”, which I’m sure includes the toddlers and the bride. But what do I know?

And China decided to play top gun with its ships by basically threatening to ram a US missile cruiser in international waters. And what did we do? We stepped aside and let them pass. In other words, the most powerful Navy in the freaking world just backed down to yet another tin hat power broker.

Oh well, I guess I’m just bitter because my stuffed animals have more of a social life than I do.

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I can’t thank readers enough

Books, Self-Publishing, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, , , ,

I don’t mean for buying my books, while I’m very thankful for that. But a reader of my latest book noticed a discrepancy that I missed during the rewrite (where I kept one location that had been changed unchanged in another spot in the book). So, I was able to fix that and feel much better about the new novel.

Hopefully, this time the book is exactly what it was meant to be.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 648

On to new projects

A Season of Kings, Books, Memoirs, Self-Publishing, Tales of Reagul, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, , , , , , ,

Last night, I finished the last touches of The Teddy Bear Conspiracy, and it’s now on sale on Kindle and will be on sale in paperback in the next few days (had one more run through the edit check and had to fix a couple of things before I could let it go one more time). Either way, the book is done, and it is now available for the masses to read, so hopefully you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Which brings me to my next projects. Over the next few days, I have some outlining to do for my Haven project, and then I’ll be working on The Tales of Reagul, specifically book one, A Season of Kings.  With an aggressive schedule, I’m hoping to have these books released within the next month.

I’m starting to explore new ways of generating reviews, and Library Thing has become my new plaything. I put up ten digital copies of The Ameriad there last week, and then a few days ago, I put 100 copies of Leader of the Losers. Part of what drives a writer’s career these days is reviews, and I can’t even begin to explain how difficult those have been to come by. Which is shocking  because the books themselves have sold enough copies that you’d think they’d have lots of positive reviews, but they don’t. It’s like they’re completely overlooked by everyone, mainly because those who write me and say they loved the book never bother to leave a review on Amazon, which would make things so much more beneficial for someone like me. You know, someone who is still trying to get ANYONE to realize he’s actually publishing books.

Well, only two weeks (and one day) of work left in this job before I’m a full-time writer, and I’m really hoping this works out for the best. Right now, I’m not feeling so great about this decision, but it had to be done, which means it was meant to be, whatever that might actually mean in the greater scheme of things.

Let’s hope for the best.

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Final day for giveaway for The Teddy Bear Conspiracy–goes on sale tomorrow

Books, Business, Self-Publishing, Writing, , , , , , , ,

My book The Teddy Bear Conspiracy is in its final day of its giveaway contest on Goodreads.

 

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Teddy Bear Conspiracy by Duane Gundrum

The Teddy Bear Conspiracy

by Duane Gundrum

Giveaway ends December 09, 2013.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

The book goes on sale everywhere starting tomorrow.

Has Been Viewed (since August 20, 2021): 440

The Countdown to Being Solo Is Around the Corner

A Season of Kings, Self-Publishing, Tales of Reagul, The Deck Const, The Emperor of Reagul, The War of the Wizards, Writing, , , , , , , , ,

I think I mentioned that I decided to quit my job a few weeks ago. I put in my notice, and I have a little over two weeks left. A couple of days, I almost quit on the same day I was working, but I’ve perservered, and my last date of work will be December 24th, Christmas Eve. There’s no significance to that day, but that will be my last day of work.

So far, no other jobs have lined themselves up for me. And I’m anticipating that it’s probably not going to happen either. This means I really need to make it as a writer, or I’m going to starve to death. Simple as that. I won’t even get unemployment benefits. I kind of screwed myself on this one, but I’m trying to move forward with a positive disposition, no matter how many dark thoughts keep overwhelming me about this decision and its process as its being carried out.

Monday, I have a release for one of my new novels, The Teddy Bear Conspiracy.

theteddybearconspiracy2a

I ran a 2 month contest on Goodreads for this book, and nearly 600 requested a copy of it. I am giving away 10 copies. There’s still a few more days left in the contest, but I’ve given up hyping the contest. Check one of the older posts, or just go to Goodreads if you’re interested in that. I also listed a giveaway of The Ameriad through Library Thing, which I did this morning, and it has about a month before it will complete its giveaway process. I don’t have an immediate link to that one, but you can definitely find it if you just go to Library Thing’s site and search for it under giveaways.

But anxiety is definitely beginning to emerge for me because so far this month, I haven’t sold a single book on Amazon. I’ve sold a few through Barnes & Noble and Kobo, but Amazon, which is usually the one that does the bulk of the selling, has been dead cold for me this month so far. That is not a comforting feeling. Remember what I was saying about starving? Hunger pains are already starting to emerge, and I’m not even at the no food stage yet.

After the Teddy Bear Conspiracy goes live, my next project involves a romance series I’m writing with a female writing friend of mine, and then I’ll be heading for a “sometime in January” release of the first book of the Tales of Reagul series, A Season of Kings. Actually, it’s not really the first book, as Destiny was the first book, but I did something a little strange with this series that not too many other writers do with a series. The first book, Destiny, starts 3000 years after the Tales of Reagul series begins, which kind of makes it an interesting universe for someone following the saga. To explain:

During the period of the Roman Empire, a small group of villages were snatched up by an alien civilization and placed onto a planet called Reagul, where an experiment was being conducted to see how civilizations handle in different environments (the original Rome being the control group, and Reagul being the experiment group). One of the citizens of the new Reagul is a young man who eventually learns all of the alien technology (to be the shepherd of this planet) and immediately after he learns everything, the aliens are called back to their home system to fight a war that is obliterating their people. The young man becomes the prominent wizard of Reagul, as everyone sees his technology as magic, and with such knowledge, it practically is. This begins the Tales of Reagul. 3000 years later, which is about 1000 years in our future, the human empire has spread across the stars, and a coloony comes under attack from the empire. A survivor of the assault leads a mission to destroy the empire by killing the emperor, which brings her to the planet Reagul, where it is discovered that her abilities (the reason she was chosen for the mission) rival those of the wizards of Reagul, indicating a tie between her planet and the strange alien race that contacted them years before (obviously being the same aliens who started the experiment with Reagul in the first place). That loater story is Destiny.

As you can see, it’s kind of complicated, but it’s a great, fun story. The first of that story (aside from Destiny) is slated for release in January.

The next project is a sequel to Thompson’s Bounty: A Ship Out of Time, my time travel adventure involving pirates and the Coast Guard. The new adventure will take Thompson and his crew into the Greek and Roman eras. That should be a lot of fun to write (and hopefully, read). People have been asking for a sequel to this novel for years now, so I finally started plotting it out.

The other distant project is my Deck Const series, which received a bit of fame from a series of short stories that I published back in the 1990s in some of the pulp magazines of that time. They were often referred to as The Soldier stories, and there was always a hint of something called The Deck Const in every one of them. I’ve finally finished the first draft of three novels that I’m reworkiing for publication. It’s a dystopian suspense series of the last soldier who is trying to rebuild civilization while on the quest to find a mysterious talisman only known as The Deck Const.

That’s kind of an update for now. Not sure if anyone even reads these updates any more, but just in case this is being read by soldiers from the future who are in search of the elusive Deck Const, let this be your clue that it exists and perhaps you are one step closer to finding it and rebuilding civilization again. Until then, sorry life kind of sucks for you right now, but dystopian societies can be that way.

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The problem of being asked questions that no one wants an answer to

Business, Education, , ,

Last week, I received an email from two separate sources at the school where I teach. The first one was informing me that I would be charged for parking, and it would be coming out of my bi-weekly pay. It also stated to inform them if I was no longer working on campus, as that didn’t require a charge for parking. The same day, I received an email from another entity asking me pretty much the same thing.

So, I responded to both of them at separate times, indicating that I was teaching ON campus, BUT I didn’t utilize their parking because I worked down the street from school, which meant that I was walking there every day and haven’t used parking since I started working there years ago. In other words, each year they’ve been charging me for parking that I don’t actually use. And never will.

Their response: None. Last week, I was charged for parking.

Does anyone else find this a little annoying?

This falls into what I like to call false communication, meaning that someone addresses you with a conversation but isn’t really interested in the response. What was really going on here was that the administrators of my school were informing me that they were going to be charging me for parking, and it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that they were going to do it regardless of what I said or did.

This is one of the problems a lot of businesses have. A great example of this was the debacle that Netflix went through a few years ago when they tried to raise their prices but did it as if they were offering a “service”. The service they were offering was one that no one wanted, so when people responded that this was a bad idea, they went ahead and did it any way. So, the result was that a lot of people left Netflix and never came back. No amount of cajoling or explaining “this is what we meant to say or do” made a difference. Because they lost their customers by basically telling them one thing, being adamant about it, and then going ahead and doing regardless of the feedback from customers.

And that’s the problem right there. When you ask for feedback from customers, you acctually need to do something about responding to it. If you say, I want to hear from people about our services, don’t be surprised when they respond with negative information. If your goal is to get only good responses, you’re basically wasting the opportunity of asking for information in the first place.

I’ve worked at a few places that have this faulty philosophy where they basically only want to put forth a positive image, so they suppress anything that sounds negative. An example is a human resources department I worked for that used to constantly say “Our company is the number one company in our area and people want to work here.” They say this even though their turn-over is massive, and they basically can’t hire people to remain even in the industry in which they are a pominent player. What has happened is that they kept telling this lie to themselves to the point of where actual employees used to joke with each other by insulting the company and stating “Yeah, this is the place where employees really want to work.” When your boast becomes a sarcastic retort, you’re obviously doing something wrong.

I once worked for a company that kept being hit by national scores on bad customer service. Therefore, management decided that it would educate staff on customer service so they could raise these scores. As I listened to executives explain how they would begin training the staff in customer service, the one thought going through my mind was “you know, if the customer service of the staff teaching customer service is atrocious, how do you expect to raise those scores?” And that was a huge concern. I’d listen to one supervisor talk about how staff was going to work hard to increase those customer service scores, and I’d look around the room at people who weren’t happy to be there in the meeting in the first place. And you’d wonder, do they even realize there’s a problem much bigger than customer service ratings on forms from people outside the organization?

And that’s the other problem. As long as people are short sighted enough to not realize the problems are inherent within the system itself, they’re never going to solve the problem.

I go back to my school and think, if they only knew that their lack of communication is hurting them, they might actually do something about improving it. But even if I said something, they’d most likely see me as an outlier and continue doing what they do, because up until now, nothing has caused them to think they’re doing anything wrong. Until people are affected and their illusions of security are threatened, they have no reason to make changes.

And thus, we get charged for parking even when we don’t need…or want…it.

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