Well. This is a new one for me. And not something strictly related to hobby gaming, but certainly exists because of it…
Over the years I’ve scrawled out card games, skirmish rules, half-finished RPGs, a glut of 3d models, some finished, most not, and more abandoned project notes than I care to admit to. But I’ve never had a book. A real, properly bound, FSC-accredited, sat-on-a-shelf-in-Waterstones book. Until now.
My debut novel, The Binary Butterfly, is out — published through Enigma Press (an imprint of Partnership Publishing) and available right now from actual, genuine retailers that aren’t just me flogging a £3 PDF off my own lacklustre shop page.
For those that have followed my ramblings, this one grew out of a Cyberpunk RPG campaign I ran — I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time hacking GURPS not just for this but Fallout was int he mix too. What started as a game at a table somehow mutated into 332 pages of prose. I’m still slightly baffled by that.
It’s set in Akureyri City, a sort of concrete monument to misplaced hope, where the people that build the place are the ones it grinds down hardest. It’s a story about existence, money and power not always being the same thing, and people muddling through the toil of it all. I’m very proud of it.
Here’s where you can grab a copy:
It’s a high-quality paperback, 332 pages, £12.99, printed in the UK on ethically sourced paper — so you can feel smug about the trees while you read about a dying city.
I won’t pretend the journey here was quick. Anyone who’s read this blog knows my natural state is “floundering between four hobbies and finishing none of them”, so getting an actual finished, professionally published novel into the world feels faintly miraculous. We all have to put the brush down and look at the picture eventually — and this time the picture has an ISBN.
If you buy a copy, thank you, sincerely. If you read it and enjoy it, even better — and a review somewhere would help an unknown first-time author more than you’d think. And if you’d rather just keep the lights on around here, the donation jar remains as ever-hopeful as I am:
Right. Back to the other ten unfinished things. Watch this space as I’ve been cooking up yet ANOTHER single-page Micro-RPG that will hit the itch page soon! Peace out until next time. – RP
