Romance Novels

Why Romance Writers Shouldn’t Play Fire Emblem

September 19, 2019 by Elizabeth Drake 1 Comment

I mentioned here that romance writers shouldn’t be gamers.

That wasn’t correct.

Really, what I should have said, was romance writers shouldn’t play Fire Emblem games.

I try to mitigate any spoilers ahead, but fair warning, I do talk about some later game stuff.

I struggled with my playthrough of Fire Emblem Fates Birthright when the game killed two of the main characters and I could do nothing to save them. In the Fire Emblem franchise, characters can die. Permanently. However, you can usually avoid this by having an appropriate “rank” with them. Or not getting them killed in battle. This was different.

Then Fire Emblem Fates Conquest killed a different two characters. Both games sit unfinished because I just can’t…I have Revelation, which my husband says I should just play as it’s the “canon” version and no one has to die, but I haven’t yet.

Then I bought Fire Emblem Three Houses that just came out.

A strategy game with a complicated admin system, more lovable crazy characters, and a female House lead?!? YES, please!

As I played through the intro, I discovered you must pick one path, and one of the three paths you can pick is leading knights.

You wanna talk about my catnip!

Sorry Edelgard, there are knights over here.

Except, I should have known better. Remember the other games? Remember the issue with basic writing even in a sandbox world?

I am over half-way through the playthrough, even with all of the min-maxing I have been doing. Why do so many games have a fishing component?!?

But I digress.

At this point, I want to slap the main character I am supposed to be helping.

Dracor help me, but if he doesn’t stop whining, pick himself up, and be the savior king so many people have sacrificed so much for, be the king his people desperately need, the king he promised he’d be…

If I were allowed to go off the gaming rails, my character would first try to help him. I know, novel thought, right? Why isn’t that an option?!? Her charisma is through the roof.

Anyway, if kindness didn’t work, she would slap him. Hard. Her strength is through the roof, too. And she’d make him get a haircut. At least look like a king. Seriously. My character would be kind enough to have a super mutant follower, but she is not going to tolerate abusive and self-harming ways. Kingdom harming ways.

sword-2140940_640 — Suck it up and be a knight.

I am not certain the writers can save the knight who is supposed to become king in my eyes. I guess we’ll see, but given previous game writing, I am skeptical. When you have made a character fall so far, become so unlikable, the plot crucible it takes to bring them back is that much greater.

I understand that he is probably suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and crushing depression. I get it. But I still need him to be redeemable instead of a homicidal maniac I wouldn’t put in charge of a boy scout troop much less an entire kingdom.

This game has become a family affair as I have been playing it on the big screen in the living room, and my family will not let me put it down half way.

But I want my happy ending. I want my happily ever after. I want the characters to have earned it.

Yes, I already know this series isn’t known for that. And I figured out character recruiting late…

I want the same cathartic release I get when I finish a book, but on a grander scale as I have put so many more hours into this game.

I should have picked Edelgard.

Serial Micro Fiction: The Cycle

September 17, 2019 by Elizabeth Drake Leave a Comment

“Absolutely not!” Alaric roared. “You are my sister. I will protect you.”

Claudia folded her arms over her chest. “I am a mage purple class.”

“All the more reason for you to stay here where its safe. Do you know what Ilyiosians do to mages?”

“I don’t care. I won’t lose you to them, too.”

Why Romance Writers Shouldn’t Be Gamers

September 12, 2019 by Elizabeth Drake 1 Comment

As you may or may not know, in addition to writing, I enjoy playing video games.

We played World of Warcraft back when it was vanilla. I remember when Burning Crusades was released…yeah, I just aged myself. We decided online games were not for us. We explored other games, and fell in love with many fan favorites: Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Mass Effect, Assassin’s Creed etc.

**Not even going to confess how many hours we spent on this game.**

My disappointment that many of these games abandoned decent writing in a desperate attempt to create a MMO (looking at you Mass Effect) aside, you will note that many of these are open worlds. Giant sandboxes to play in with little or no plot. Why? Because as Assassin’s Creed taught me when they killed the main protagonist (Desmond Miles, not Ezio or the various other past lives you jump into), the concept of story is not something most gaming companies do well.

So give me Fallout where I roam the wastes to find my father and basically get to explore, find cool stuff, and the like. Which, incidentally, is another game where their story-telling was SO bad they had to patch the ending. The game is so old I won’t consider this a spoiler, but literally most of your companions could complete the ending quest of walking into the radioactive room without being harmed (robots) or actually being healed (super mutant – which yes, I was such a goody-two-shoes I had one as my companion), but nope, you had to do it and die…for reasons… Yeah, they had to patch that. Not even their core gamer population was swallowing that.

HobbiesBobbleHeadsFallout — **And you know I have every one of these.**

Fallout is not kid friendly. Especially not the way we play with the one shot, one kill mentality. Yes, we like to play snipers in our house. As we play through Skyrim and find ourselves already able to sneak without penalty in our full daedric armor before ever find the Nightingale quest line…

But we have not yet figured out a way to turn off the graphic violence of a head shot in these games, and the heads on pikes in Fallout are not for children. So kids has meant we turned to many old favorites that are family friendly, like the Legend of Zelda and Mario Kart.

As part of this, we bought Super Smash Brothers mostly to get a chance to play the characters from a whole slew of different games.

Because my daughter desperately wanted to play Zelda.

Sad that Zelda was not even a favorite in the game…But there was this whole slew of characters I had never seen before that intrigued me. So, I started checking into their games, figuring they would be more games I could share with my kids as they were all Nintendo…

Ummm, yeah. I got sucked into the Fire Emblem series in 2019 through Super Smash Brothers as so many got sucked into it over two decades ago when Smash Brother came out on the Nintendo 64. The only reason Nintendo even brought Fire Emblem to the US was how many people wanted it after playing Smash Brothers back then.

Fire Emblem. A strategy game, with crazy characters that I build relationships with so I can marry them off then recruit their kids to my team?!? This exists? And no one told me?

I discovered my ultimate gamer catnip.

Or so I thought.

Then I learned the hard way. The Fire Emblem series doesn’t believe in happily ever after.

Research: Five Things You Thought You Knew About Avalanches But Were Wrong

September 5, 2019 by Elizabeth Drake Leave a Comment

I have been doing a bit of research for another story.

Along the way, I started researching avalanches. For no reason. No reason at all…

Anyway, I thought I would share the results of some of that.

Five Things You Thought You Knew About Avalanches But Were Wrong

1. Avalanches are not triggered by sound.

That is correct. It’s a plot point in many movies, but noise simply does not have enough force to trigger an avalanche. I was more than a little surprised by this, though I should know by now Hollywood spins a good story, not necessary an accurate one.

2. Avalanches are seldom random.

Those sudden and inexplicable snow slides you see in the movies? Very unlikely. In 92% of all avalanche accidents, either the victim or someone in the victim’s party triggered the avalanche. So while a tree falling in the woods is enough to displace the snow pack, it is usually the force of skiers over the snow that causes the snow to break free and start falling down the mountain.

3. Avalanches are not fluffy

You’ve seen the images. The brilliant puff of white snow that hail the impending avalanche. Except in most cases, that isn’t what an avalanche looks like at all. They usually travel at approximately 80mph in one dense slab. They are powerful forces of nature that take down trees, boulders, and other debris with them.

4. Avalanches Don’t Start with a Bang but a “Whumph”

Avalanches tend to happen when there is more than one kind of snow on the ground. For example, an original layer of snow that is then covered by fresh snow. The fragile needle-like crystals connecting the new snow to the older snow can be easily broken. Even by the weight of a skier. The weight of the skier can have a ripple effect through the snow, and this can cause the upper layer of snow to collapse by as little as a millimeter. This collapse is often accompanied by an audible “whumph” of settling snow. This settling produces enough energy to shatter the fragile crystals and tends to propagate uphill, leading to a major release of the upper layer. The rest is up to gravity, friction, and the steepness of the mountain.

5. Avalanches Don’t Freeze You To Death

While cold is certainly a factor, most deaths from avalanches are caused by trauma and asphyxiation. Approximately 30% of people caught in an avalanche die from trauma. While you can sometimes swim through snow, once it comes to rest, it will be packed around the victim as hard as rock, squeezing the air out of their lungs. Victims of an avalanche who survive the trauma have a 90% chance of survival if they are rescued in 15 minutes. If they are freed in 30 minutes, the odds are down to 50%. In the event of a significant avalanche dropping more than 6 feet of snow, the odds of the victim surviving are almost zero.

I am not a skier, and I am definitely not a back country skier. After reading a lot of this research, I understand why it considered such a dangerous sport. Still, it does present some interesting “opportunities” for characters.

*evil author laugh*

Serial Micro Fiction: News

September 3, 2019 by Elizabeth Drake Leave a Comment

Claudia paced as she thought through her prayer and found her brother alone in the great hall with an untouched glass of wine beside him.

“What’s wrong?”

He shook his head.

“Tell me.” Claudia crouched beside him. While he was almost ten summers her senior, she had been his confidant and voice of reason since Anton’s death.

“King Garon wants war.”

Serial Micro Fiction: The Prayer

August 27, 2019 by Elizabeth Drake Leave a Comment

There were no spells in any of Claudia’s books large enough, powerful enough, to destroy all of Ilyious.

No matter how much she studied, how much she was willing to give up, there was no way to end the wars once and for all.

But she would not give up.

She closed her eyes and prayed to the Moon Dragon.