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I was introduced to the world of Fallout with Fallout 3. A guy I worked with suggested both it and Fallout New Vegas to me. We were working together that day, and he expounded on all the crazy things you could do in the games for well over an hour.

I started off by getting Fallout 3. I was immediately impressed by the immersive quality of the game. You were given a main storyline to follow, but were given full license to wander across the burnt earth and twisted steel of the Capital Wasteland.

This spoke to me immensely. I was coming off of the whimsical world of the Nintendo 64. My favorite games were Super Mario 64, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, and the Banjo Kazooie games.

What endeared them to me the most, as a casual gamer, was the wide-open feel they had. A straightforward path to follow? Nah. You have this much time to complete it? Nope! In fact, some of the most rewarding experiences in the games were had by purposefully wandering off the beaten path.

Fallout 3 was like Banjo Kazooie all grown up… and irradiated, I guess. Instead of learning new moves, you leveled up your character. Instead of finding a secret path to a hidden jiggy, you found an abandoned vault full of old-world goodies.

Another mechanic that endeared me to the series was the ability to mold the story as it progressed. I was also a fan of Final Fantasy VII and VIII. These are the only two Final Fantasy games that exist, as far as I’m concerned, by the way. Part of the fun was being able to influence events in the game with dialogue choices.

Fallout 3 took that shit and ran with it. Just like with the Force, you could follow the light or turn to the dark side. Certain possible companions could only be hired if you were an asshole. How you handled Megaton at the beginning of the game would determine if you were pursued by an elite gang of thugs or a posse of wasteland cowboy justice bringers throughout the rest of the story.

I absolutely loved these elements, but there was a definite lean towards gunfights and sneaking… and subways. There were lots and lots of subways. Like, SO MUCH SUBWAYS, you guys.

While I was playing though, I was checking out details on Fallout New Vegas. The more I read, the more I liked. Here was Fallout 3, but somehow bigger and better. I abandoned the Lone Wanderer for the time-being and got acquainted with the Courier.

It was the best damn decision I ever made in my life.

People say they play video games as a hobby, I play Fallout New Vegas as a hobby. I have nearly 130 hours logged on it as of this writing, and I only get like an hour or two to play it in a week. What I’m saying is, I kind of like this game.

It took everything I liked about Fallout 3 and turned the knob to the right. It literally drops you into a small town in the middle of the desert and says go anywhere. Well, just not straight to New Vegas(hello, blind deathclaw!)

From the very beginning, you start molding your own character. He or she can be made to look like you, or any which way you want. You take various “tests” to determine your base stats and demeanor. This all happens before you leave the home of the doctor that saved your life.

Once out in the world, you’re encouraged to follow the tutorial-like first quests to learn the basics, but after that the world is your oyster. It’s like Banjo Kazooie on Forced Evolutionary Virus. Go anywhere you want in this big old map, full of things to discover only tangentially related to the main storyline.

Some people complain about the vast tracts of nothing between locations in the Mojave, but I think it adds to the realness of the world. The layout of locations also does a good job of guiding the player along the main quest line while gently nudging them off the trail to explore.

Another considerable improvement was in the ways you can influence the story and the outcome of not only the main quests, but several smaller quests as well. Black and white decisions have been replaced with ones tinged in shades of gray. Sometimes there simply isn’t a “best” option, and this is a beautiful thing, to me.

All of your choices culminate in an epic slide show at the end of the game. The fates of all the places and people you’ve touched throughout the game are revealed for better or worse. My desire to give them better fates has pushed me to play through more than once.

Fallout New Vegas also, hands down, has the best DLC content I’ve ever seen. You have four new story lines that feed directly off the main game, but stand alone as their own tales. Just like the main game, your decisions greatly influence your outcome as well as the outcome for characters and places in the DLC.

Chief among these four is Old World Blues, which gives a fascinating window into the links between the past and the future. A close second is Lonesome Road, which serves to tie together the three previous DLCs. This story shows the connection between the hubris that brought human civilization to its knees, and how those same machinations may see it brought to the grave.

So it was with much excitement and impatience that I looked forward to the release of Fallout 4. I paid extra to get the premium Pip-Boy-including edition. I didn’t even have an Xbox One yet, and wouldn’t for months afterward.

While I was waiting to play I heard some… things. The Sole Survivor had his own voice. The marketing really pushed his specific appearance as well. He also did the “War never changes” speech(BLASPHEMY!) These things really make it hard to make that character yours. They also made John Cleese record like, five thousand names so Cogsworth could say your name, so there was that.

Alas, it was much worse than I had imagined. Even painting my face over that of the Sole Survivor did not make the character my own. It was me with some dude’s voice talking to other characters.

Then you had the dialogue options. While you could still make decisions that influenced the path of the game, you could be a saint or… sarcastic? One of the funnest things about New Vegas was being able to be a psychotic asshole if you wanted, and the game would tailor itself to your whims.

The only way to be evil in Fallout 4 is to kill people. No epic dialogue demeaning them beforehand, just kill them. And the game acts to discourage this behavior.

Also discouraged is playing the field, actions-wise. In New Vegas, you can move through most of each faction’s quests without being vilified by the other factions. Doing the same in Fallout 4 would require multiple play-throughs.

This game also goes back to Fallout 3‘s habit of heavy gun play. Diplomacy and skill are largely ignored in favor of weapon mods and constant battle. That’s great if you love Call of Duty, but… I don’t love most FPS in general.

The one saving grace are the graphics. The world in this game is GORGEOUS. There are still numerous places to explore, and they do reveal some world-building and player-growing tidbits. But the fact that this has been the most enjoyable part of the game for me so far should be a big red flag.

In fact, after starting the game twice, I’ve gone back to do one more extra-thorough play through of New Vegas. After that? I actually might go back and finally play through all of Fallout 3. I just can’t face Fallout 4 quite yet.

Like Obi Wan to Anakin, I say to Fallout 4, “You were the chosen one!” After learning the lessons from the previous two titles, this game should have been absolutely amazing. To an extent it is, but for a Fallout fanatic like me, it’s a dull whisper of what it should have been.

I’ll still hope for the future, but for now, you can find me in the Mojave.

The past fifteen months have been interesting for me.

I’ve undergone a bit of a transformation, though beautiful butterfly I am not. I have become more aware of who I am. Perhaps I’m a little more assertive than I once was. I’ve certainly become more prone to reminiscing about my younger years, though I’ve weathered a number of repressed memories as well.

Amongst all this, something curious began to happen.

A constant throughout my life has been daydreaming. It’s partly how I dealt with upsetting situations. I’ve suffered from social anxiety (never officially diagnosed) ever since I was a child.

For whatever reason, the way schools dealt with this issue was to, well, ignore it, really. With nobody listening to my concerns and no help given in regards to how to cope, I was prone to acting out. I have precious few happy moments from my childhood. Unsurprisingly, I am alone in those few happy memories.

The one coping mechanism I came upon by myself was daydreaming. Ahead of any social interactions, I would try to imagine every possible scenario I’d be faced with, and how best to handle it. Sometimes it backfired, but more often than not I found it beneficial.

A natural offshoot of this behavior was a healthy imagination. I soon grew fond of dreaming up random characters and the adventures they would go on. I’d occasionally try to put these imaginings to paper, but finding nobody to read them, typically relegated them to the big garbage dump in the sky.

I never left behind my precious coping mechanism. I still use it to this day, though I’ve made some progress combating my social anxiety. As a result of flexing that muscle for so many years, I’ve also become really good at daydreaming.

Jump back to fifteen months ago. I was going through one of the darkest periods in my life. I was facing the real possibility of having to start my life over once again, both financially and emotionally.

Needless to say, I was doing some seriously deep thinking during this time. I frequently daydreamed not just to make it through the day, but to distract myself from my misery. It was in this daydreaming that I had a thought.

That thought was of an encounter between a young man and an old man, who was sitting on a porch. One had a plasma pistol, and the other didn’t seem to care that it was being pointed at him. That thought grew into a great story idea.

That story idea grew into After, my first novel.

Working on After became another form of therapy, a way to escape. I worked on it late into the night after everyone had gone to bed for the night. For an hour or two, everything went away and there was just Alex, me, and a journey.

It would turn out Alex and I both were on a journey of self-discovery. I found my way to, if not the light, a brighter place in my own life. Meanwhile, I continued to forge a meaningful life for Alex.

I released After at the end of March 2017 through self-publication. I had no great hopes for it. The novel was my first published work and I had zero social media presence.

I swallowed (some of) my social anxiety and forged a Twitter account to go along with my new website(another love of mine.) I did my best to start garnering interest for both the website and my new novel. I also paid for some pell-mell advertising and crossed my fingers.

Imagine my surprise when I almost immediately had people reading my book on Kindle Unlimited, and even buying copies of the eBook edition. I even had some sales of the physical edition. Could I be on to something?

Spurred on by my accidental success, I worked up another idea I had about a detective murder mystery set in the future. Spurred on by the (relatively) astounding success I had with my first novel, I began my work by mid April of 2017. That idea would of course grow into my second novel, Preservation Protocol.

Skip to November. This was a big deal for me. Here I was, a brand-new author, poised to release my second novel in less than a year. Preservation Protocol was longer, more detailed, and showed real growth for me as an author(at least to me.) I even had a pre-order on it for the eBook edition a few weeks ahead of its official release.

Then something curious happened. I only had two pre-orders, and I was one of them. The day of release, I sold three copies. Fast-forward to the present: January 2018.

I haven’t sold any more copies.

I’ve thrown far more money at advertising the book than is reasonable. I’ve moaned and groaned about it on Twitter to the point of annoyance, I’m sure. Still, no takers.

It’s as if Preservation Protocol is in some weird black spot in everyone’s consciousness. I’ve actually seen a recent surge in interest for After again, but no follow-up purchases of my latest novel. Anyone who has said anything about After has been largely positive.

What people have said about Preservation Protocol has also been positive, for that matter.

Needless to say, I’ve not taken the wholesale rejection of my latest offering very well. I started writing my third novel, Something Deeper, shortly after releasing Preservation Protocol. I’ve struggled to find the same fire I had in my soul for the first two novels.

I’ve fought to convince myself that I’m a good writer, or even a passable writer. I’ve walked down the dark road all writers follow at least once in their lives. Maybe I should just put down my pen, maybe for good.

Maybe I should stop working on this new book. Maybe I should delete this new book. Will anyone even ever read this new book? Is it even worth punishing myself late at night by continuing to work on it?

Yes. It is.

I’m not sure what changed between my first release and my second, but what I know hasn’t changed is my passion for writing. Despite all the negative thoughts I’ve had, I’ve never stopped enjoying the process of creating and exploring new worlds. I’ve struggled, but I still want… need… to see what happens to Simon Travers in Something Deeper.

So I will continue to write. I will continue to release novels, even if only a handful of people ever enjoy reading them. I’ve decided it doesn’t matter, because I enjoy writing them.

Just over six hundred people read After last year. That’s nothing over a nine-month period, but it’s everything to me. I will hold that in my heart going forward.

I may never grow rich or have thousands of fans, but I will have fun. I’ve discovered a trick so few manage to pull off in this world. I can create whole worlds.

I can see untold tales from lands far away and people long gone. I feel the emotions of people not yet born, in realms yet to be discovered. I hold the darkest secrets of the most holy.

I am their seer, their scribe, their friend. I accept my duty to commit to paper their stories. I will sing their songs and preserve their names.

And I will always find joy in it all.

Yeah, I’m going there.

I will start off by saying that I enjoy the Star Wars movies. I was introduced to them as far back as three years old. My earliest memory involves me picking out a Darth Vader light saber and insisting that the red one was the good guy’s sword.

That said, the Star Wars saga is a twisted, convoluted mess of a series. There was no clear plan for the very first movie, let alone for a nine-movie-long saga. Quite frankly, George Lucas didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

Lest anyone forget, Lucas’ first movie, THX 1138 was not a success by any measure.  It could be argued that the only reason American Graffiti turned out as well as it did was due to it largely being based on Lucas’ own life. Star Wars was similarly based on a love of Lucas’.

No, I’m not saying that George Lucas is an alien. Everyone knows that, anyway. As many people know now, Star Wars was a love letter to the old Flash Gordon serials of Lucas’ youth. When he couldn’t obtain the rights to Flash Gordon, he basically set out to make a rip-off of it.

Writing the original Star Wars was a giant mess in and of itself. Looking back over the Wikipedia article about the writing process, Lucas didn’t seem to know what to do beyond write something science-fictiony. Looking over it as a whole, Lucas was relatively clueless as to what he was doing.

It would take him three years and uncountable rewrites and reimaginings before he finally put down the script… just as they started filming the movie. Lucas has admitted he was heavily influenced by numerous different sci-fi adventures he had seen and read. Star Wars was a lasagna whose different layers were built upon other writers’ works.

It kinda worked out okay though, in the end. Star Wars was a huge hit, and it is a good movie, but I think a large part of that is owed to luck. The movie is a veritable hodgepodge of other movies and books mixed together with a heaping helping of classical adventure archetypes added in for spice. That said, it would seem that Lucas had found his footing in Star Wars.

Except he had not. Lucas didn’t even write the base script for The Empire Strikes Back, though he would ultimately polish it into the story we saw on the big screen. It also wasn’t until this point that the trilogy… well… became a trilogy. It’s also the point that Darth Vader became Luke Skywalker’s daddy.

Darth Vader had not been destined to be Luke’s father when the first film was made. This introduced the first of many contradictions in the continuity of the series. It’s also the main crux of my argument, here.

From the beginning, Star Wars has always been a crapshoot. The first movie was supposed to be another movie entirely. The second movie morphed the series into a trilogy. The third movie, as far as I know, was supposed to end the trilogy.

Also, as far as I know, there was no grand plan of doing three prequels to the original trilogy. Insert your “Spaceballs: The Search for More Money” joke here. It should be said that Lucas claims he always wanted to do the prequel trilogy, however.

Whatever the truth is, the prequel movies were made, and the nerds rejoiced. Again, I enjoyed all three movies, though many swear they were terrible. Both sides are right.

The prequel trilogy showed a level of writing not seen in the first three movies. The plots and storylines were much more polished and coherent. It was evident that careful thought and planning had gone into the over-arching story that bound not only the three movies, but the prequel trilogy to the original triology.

My main beef with the prequels is twofold. Firstly, while the writing is cohesive, it is also emotionally flat. George Lucas has come a long way in his writing, but handles emotion with all the grace and nuance of a mentally deficient refrigerator.

The other major problem with the prequels was that the story they had to tell was set in stone, and had to be spread out across three movies. This problem can be seen the most in the first movie, which feels like it could be simplified to “pod racing and baffling good luck.” While The Phantom Menace does a good job of setting up the rest of the trilogy, it meanders relentlessly on its way there.

That brings us to the sequel trilogy. I can honestly understand at this point why George Lucas didn’t have much interest in doing the “final” trilogy. These movies, thus far, epitomize everything that’s wrong with Hollywood today.

There is no clear outline for this trilogy. It is literally being hammered out as they go along. The first movie was a total and complete send-up of the original Star Wars film. Kylo Ren is Darth Vader, rebels are trying to bring down the establishment, Starkiller Base is the Death Star, a lot of time is spent on a desert planet, etc.

The Last Jedi, if anything, seems to be an even more confused mess. It feels more like a generic sci-fi action/adventure movie than ever before. Without getting too deep into the plot of the film, it epitomizes the idea of delivering over-the-top moments versus building plot and character.

Speaking of character, Luke Skywalker comes off as more of a convenient plot device then the continuing arc of a beloved character. Leia Organa similarly seems to be there simply for the character recognition and as a place-holder. Her big “force” moment in the film feels like tacked-on lip service for the nerds in the audience.

At this point, I don’t know if there will be a truly satisfying end to this third trilogy. Disney seems more interested in delivering over-the-top cinematic moments than developing a mythos. Bottom line: Disney gonna Disney. And if their past is any indication, the third movie in the trilogy will not be the last.

Sure enough, there’s already been an indication that the original main movie line will continue, though not necessarily continuing with the Skywalker clan. These movies will undoubtedly continue to make way more money than they have any right to. These movies will continue to spawn more movies and spin-offs, and I’ll probably watch them all.

I truly am a fan of the Star Wars universe. I truly enjoy watching the movies. I’m simply disappointed that, after all these years and all these movies, the powers that be still can’t get their shit together and create a cohesive universe.  Flying by the seat of one’s pants might have worked out for Han Solo, but that doesn’t mean it will continue to work for Disney.

The Star Wars films are great popcorn movies, but they can be so. Much. MORE. Disney has the power and the talent to weave a storyline to rival that of the Marvel movies. The only real question now is, why aren’t they doing it?