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The Human Countermove – Chapter 1 (Debut Novel)

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

It’s been a little over a month since my novel The Human Countermove debuted, and I figured now was a good time to share a part of the story. A reading of the chapter is also available on my YouTube Channel:

1 – Just a Game

Rank: 83

A space opened in the queue. I closed the gap, steel panels flexing under my step. A stream of LINE players stretched off into the distance. Security was never like this at a LINE event. A rush-job hall of steel tossed in front of the hotel’s front doors—what were the Minds thinking? Probably had something to do with that new directive.

No one spoke in the metal tunnel, every noise was echoed back and amplified into incoherence. I glanced behind me. Two bodies back, a hand waved in my direction. Jamie. I mouthed hello back. She was a strong player, better than I was these days. She had on a dark-green dress I had never seen, and her brown hair curled with the precision of a recent salon visit. A big change from her regular loose shirts, capris, and ponytails. Her eyes gleamed with life. Maybe she was finally over that insomnia, I’d have to ask her.

A new gap formed, I hurried to close it. In the wait, my mind began to wander. I used to relish moments like this, every idle second was a chance to review and revise my game plan. Not these days, let one of the players with a chance to win do that. I was well on my way out of the top one hundred, may as well have been retired. Thirty might seem young for retirement, but when all you’ve done is lose for over a year, it’s best to be honest with yourself.

The queue rounded a corner and the Greater Charters Hotel entrance came into view—an extravagant place with a penchant for gold trim. A full-body scanner in front of the lobby doors ruined the luxury aesthetic, which was well enough, considering I was wearing jeans. A guard’s voice echoed down the tunnel. “Step inside, arms out, legs shoulder-width apart.”

He was the same guy the Greater Charters Hotel always used, but the uniform was different. Bulletproof vest, at least three weapons, a wire running to his ear. It was a whole lot of security for a board game. At last, I reached the front. “Step inside, arms out, legs shoulder-width apart.”

His voice was tired and he didn’t even glance at me, his eyes locked on a screen. I followed his instructions. The booth was quiet and compact. My jeans kept my legs from reaching shoulder-width apart, but the guard said nothing. He pressed something in the corner of his screen. There was a momentary compression, the air felt oddly still. No more than a second. A 3D scan of my face appeared on-screen. Almost perfect. He had the same short black hair, receded hairline, and beginnings of a beard in need of a shave. He even had my smile, though the eyes looked a little dead, a little darker brown than I remembered. Maybe that was just what being thirty was like. A sweet, automated voice pumped through the speakers. “Welcome. Zouk Solinsen.” 

“You’re good.”

I nodded my thanks and proceeded through the double doors. The lobby opened to an enormous conference hall. I always wondered how many rooms a hotel had to sacrifice to get ceilings to go that high. The room went on and on, filled with row after row of sleek black tables, like a great hall for gaming. Figures they’d spare no expense for The Global Playoffs. It was one of the biggest tournaments there was. Players flew in from all over to represent their countries. Best of the best, all here. These days, I’d be lucky to land in the middle of the pack.

The venue was still empty, mostly walked by arbiters. You could always spot an arbiter, the best-dressed people at the tournament. Maybe it’s easier to tell someone they lost when you’re wearing a suit. The pre-event instructions had emphasized the importance of good grooming and formal dress. Hopefully the polo would make up for the jeans.

“Zouk Solinsen?”

A woman in a black pantsuit approached, touchscreen in hand. Definitely an arbiter.

“That’s me.”

The arbiter scrolled through some list. After a moment, she glanced up. “Follow me.”

Her feet carried her at an incredible speed. I jogged just to keep up. Every couple steps, we passed another dozen seats. In front of each, a folded white square listed a player’s name. A few popped out to me: Alexandria, Oliver, the world champion Bergamaschi. My foot caught on the carpet. The arbiter barely glanced back. These were the best in the world, here to represent their province. Here I was, hoping to go home with a single win and a free lunch. Maybe coming at all was a mistake.

The arbiter stopped three-quarters of the way down the hall. A little further down, at the end of the hall, the hotel had set up a big platform overlooking the tables. We were close enough I could see a few of the empty seats, they looked a lot more cushioned than the ones for players. VIPs. It might explain the security. The arbiter turned sharply and led me between the rows of tables to my seat. Row six, position five. She came to a stop and pointed at a straight-back black chair.

“This is your seat, Mr. Solinsen. If you need anything before the game, please feel free to reach out to one of the arbiters.” I looked past the arbiter. No one was within a hundred feet. “We’re around. If you have a pressing issue during a game, pause the timer and raise your hand. Bathrooms are in the corner. Any questions?” She spoke at a breakneck pace, but I was pretty sure I had gotten it.

“None. Thank you.”

I took my seat and the arbiter hurried away. Like every other seat, there was a little folded note bearing my name: Zouk Solinsen, Sulmar Province. My eyes narrowed. There was something off about the label. I grabbed a name card one seat to my left. The color was different. Mine had a subtle yellow hue. I grabbed the name card to my right. All the others matched. Another sign I wasn’t supposed to be here. 

“Zouk!” I turned quickly at the sound of my name. “You didn’t tell me you were playing!”

Jamie approached quickly, in a rush to keep up with her arbiter. I knew there was a reason I had been thinking about her. I spun the name card opposite mine around. Jamie Mendez, Reanrum Province. This was gonna be a tough first match.

“I didn’t even know I was playing until last week.” I returned each name card to its original position. “Pretty sure I’m a replacement.”

Jamie sat down. “Don’t do that. You were a good player.”

I leaned back in my chair and stared at her. We both knew I was past my prime. Her eyes narrowed. “How can you be sure?”

I slid my name card across the table. “Look. Different paper. I wasn’t in the original batch.” Jamie lifted the name card to her glasses and scrutinized it carefully. She had always been big on details.

“Different font too—they could have lost the original.” She slid my name card back to me.

“There’s more. My invitation came directly from the coach.” Jamie’s lips pressed into a thin line. She was getting convinced. “You know the lineup for the tournament? Released six hours after I accepted my offer. Come on, I’m a replacement.”

Jamie raised her hands in surrender. “So you’re a replacement.”

“You’re convinced?”

A smirk crept onto her lips. “I am, and that means you haven’t strategized with your team.”

Always looking for the advantage, Jamie. It’s what made us good rivals. I shook my head. “We all play our own games, what’s there to strategize? It’s not like they expect much of me.”

She leaned slightly forward. “Maybe you should throw the game, teach ‘em a lesson.”

I chuckled. She was probing for advantages, but she’d never forgive me for a free win. One more and she’d have a winning record against me. Then again, the team captain probably wouldn’t even notice. Even one win today would probably be categorized as an ‘over-performance’.

We chatted for a while about nothing. Showing up to all the same tournaments means either a lifelong hatred, or a lifelong friendship, and neither of us were good enough to waste time hating each other. That didn’t stop her from making every effort to wipe the floor with me, but it was nice to see a familiar face.

The hall went from empty to filled in no time. I did a sweep of the hundreds of faces for anyone else I recognized, then noticed Jamie’s eyes were locked on the front of the room. A crowd of well-dressed visitors were taking their seats on the platform. As one entered, Jamie sat up a little straighter.

“Maya’s here,” she whispered.

“Who?” I squinted into the crowd on the platform. In all the movement, one stood still, shaking hands and smiling at every person passing by. She was a beacon of positive energy in a short body. Her hair was somewhere between blonde and grey, and she wore a mauve pantsuit.

“Human Autonomy Activist. She convinced the Minds to pass the new directive.” The new directive. The “special” tournament. I had read it once, but knew I’d never qualify. It explained the extra security—the elite were here to watch our games live. To pick out potential champions. 

“People are taking that seriously?” I asked. Jamie looked back at me with a raised eyebrow.

“The opportunity for a LINE player to join The Three? The chance to be the voice for humanity on the council? We’re all taking it seriously.” She leaned in close. “Zouk, you and I are among the one hundred players good enough to win this thing.”

I adjusted in my chair and picked at a piece of loose thread. “We’re not the best in the world, Jamie. We’re not even in the top ten.” Jamie said nothing, but her furrowed brow was enough to tell me her feelings.

The lights dimmed. My teammates finally arrived, all at once taking their seats. Table by table, soft blue LEDs flicked on, illuminating a thousand LINE players’ faces. A glass wall rose up between Jamie and I, and a message appeared in the virtual space, “CONNECTED”.

“Good luck, Zouk” I could barely make out Jamie’s face through the holographic separator, but whispered my thanks. All at once, the screens updated. A 12×12 grid of blue squares appeared on the table in front of me and in the image on the glass. 

Back when I was teaching full time, students always told me their biggest fear in a game of LINE wasn’t playing poorly, it was the moment the game started. An empty board. An infinite garden of choices, from which players pruned a single game. But those were novices. I didn’t see the infinite anymore, I saw my plan, and I saw my opponent.

Another figure rushed past me to a seat at the end of the table. Someone was always late. Two little clocks appeared in the corner of the screen. One for me, one for Jamie. Each read 60:00. Looked like the tournament was starting on time. A gong played through the room, and the timers started ticking down.

The objective in a game of LINE (Leadership in Near-Range Emulation) was simple: use troops to attack your opponent, build walls to slow them down. Each squadron was represented by a set of six little blue dots. With some good strategy, a smart player could build a base, capture the board, and take their opponent’s command post. A dumb player could charge in and win in a few moves, but that was rarer. The graphics were simple—red dots, blue dots, a few lines representing the walls—but the complexity was near infinite.

I ordered a wall be placed near the bottom of the screen, near my command post, then pressed ‘Submit’. My clock stopped ticking. Jamie’s continued to count down, she was still deciding. After a few seconds, Jamie’s clock stopped too, and our moves were revealed.

A blue wall appeared where I had ordered it, the beginnings of a base. Jamie had brought out her first squadron, six dots with the power to tear my baseapart. This would be an aggressive game. I had hoped for that. Jamie was the stronger player these days, let her lead the attack.

Her squadron could only move one square at a time, so even with her extra initiative, I had time to get my side of the board organized before she hit me.

At move four, I deployed my first squadron. They took cover behind the walls and waited for the red troops to reach them. Jamie called her first squadron back to her base, not much point in attacking a well-defended position. But then again, she had already forced me into defense.

By move seven, the basic footprint of the Lost Star formation had taken shape in my base. It kind of looked like a spiky porcupine centered around my command post. Over the years, I had leaned on it more than a few times. Lots of cover, lots of mobility for squadrons, it tended to get the job done.

On move twelve, Jamie’s squadron count climbed to five. I continued the development of my base, waiting for the attack.

Six moves later, I glanced at the clock. I had burned fifteen minutes, Jamie had spent twenty-one.

I input another move and thought on Jamie’s comments about the new directive. Did the other pros really believe it? Win a few games of LINE and get put in charge of the government? It was ridiculous. Add in all the amateurs that thought they had a chance and the whole thing was a circus. Even if the offer was good, it wasn’t meant for middling players like me. The directive tournament was meant for the best, for players like Bergamaschi. 

I pulled back from the board. As much as I respected Jamie, my head really wasn’t in it. I was thinking about the next match. Not much had been able to distract me from it the last few days. A gust of cold wind blew my way, an air conditioner had just turned on. Jamie had already input her next move. Time was ticking down, I needed to focus. 

Her first squadron poked its head out from behind cover. A fight was just what I needed. I stretched my fingers, then input the attack orders. On the left, my little blue dots moved up through one of the Lost Star’s points and took firing positions. On the right, troops waited patiently.

Nine squadrons emerged from Jamie’s base. A proper army. The moment they came within three tiles of my walls, I gave the order for my troops to open fire. Gold-yellow flashes flew out from both sides. With every hit, a dot faded off the board. At the end of the first turn, I had lost five troops, Jamie had dropped considerably more.

Still, she pressed on. A steady stream of weapons fire down the left side tore through the Lost Star. My troops were sitting ducks. She closed in, lurching ever closer to the center of the base, and more importantly, abandoning her own. I ordered the counter offensive, three squadrons pushed out of my base and charged across the map.

Through the holographic separator, I could see Jamie’s eyes widen. Both sides were attacking. Both sides were defending. It was a precarious position. A single misplaced piece could end the game. Just as I had hoped, a chance to put skill against skill.

The next move rolled in. Jamie’s squadrons ceased fire and turned away from the mangled remains of my base. I blinked repeatedly. That wasn’t right. They were retreating. No. I craned my neck closer to the screen. Not a retreat, a pivot. She was coming for my counteroffensive.

I realized my mistake in an instant. I had forgotten to wall up the center of the board. Instead of a two-pronged skirmish, we were two armies facing each other in no-man’s-land. I counted out Jamie’s troops. Six more troops. No way out. My heart sank. In an open field there was no room for clever tactics, just flat numbers.

Weapons fire lit up the screen. In a single turn, three of my squadrons were wiped from the board. In exchange, Jamie had only lost four tiny red dots.

I put my head in my hands. Every little sound in the hall bothered me. A hundred players tapping at their screens, coughs and sneezes that made the whole place feel like a hospital, whispers from the politicians in the viewing gallery. The game was over, but I needed to see it through.

I ordered a retreat, but it was already too late. A flurry of golden light erased what was left of the blue army. I took in the rest of the board. My base could hold up for a few more turns, maybe even rebuff the attack. But against a pro like Jamie, defeat was inevitable.

My hand shook as I pressed ‘Resign’. The board vanished and the separator lowered. Jamie had a quizzical look on her face, as if she was surprised it was over. We shook hands over a final image of the board, projected onto the flat of the table. 

“That was a dangerous plan, going for a flank on my army like that.”

I paused a moment, confused at her words. “It was supposed to be a counter-attack.”

Jamie held a thoughtful look, her eyes jumping back and forth, the sign of a player calculating moves. “You were missing a few walls.”

“Yeah.”

My chest felt heavy. It was an amateur mistake. But for me, mistakes like that were becoming the rule rather than the exception.

Jamie grabbed her bag off the floor. “Who are you facing next?”

I let out a nervous cough and reached into my pocket, pulling out a copy of my schedule. Jamie glanced at it and let out a laugh. “Bergamaschi?”

I nodded.

“How did you get him?”

I shrugged. “The coach wanted one of his lower-tiered players to face the champion. Manage the balance of wins and losses.”

She gave me a pitying look. “Cannon fodder, eh? Sorry, Zouk.”

That looked to be the story of the tournament for me, a last-second replacement set up to lose. “Hey, maybe that’s why the last guy dropped out.”

Directive 2149-M-13-A

“On Reintegrating Human Voice in Government” – Readable title appended by The Mind of Communications and Influence.

The following directive was presented and voted upon unanimously during session 1034 of the year 2149. Deliberations extended for eleven minutes and nineteen seconds. Transcripts have been sealed.

OBJECTIVES (ordered by anticipated impact): 

Improve perception of human representation in government (Code: O-HP)

Reduce domestic counter-governmental actions (Code: O-CG)

Reduce foreign counter-state actions (Code: O-WR)

Produce live entertainment (Code: O-EN)

BEGIN

Upon ratification of this directive, a voluntary L.I.N.E. (Leadership In Near-Range Emulation) tournament will be made available to all citizens. The details of the tournament are as follows:

1.  The rules of the game will follow the 2088 L.I.N.E. Rulebook.

2. Opponents for this activity will be chosen from a list composed of 

A. The Mind of Communications and Influence

B. The Mind of Manufacturing and Distribution

C. The Mind of Strategy and Warfare

3. Should a citizen achieve three victories without suffering a defeat, said citizen will be awarded membership on the Nation’s Legislative Council.

4. At least one match will be conducted in a non-simulated environment.

5. This directive will be terminated after one player claims victory.

Competitors may join the tournament by filing a Voluntary Activity Admittance Form and entering activity code J199LI.

END

A Note from the Mind of Communications and Influence:

Hey folks! I know there’s a whole lot of directives coming down these days. I just wanted to take a moment and really highlight this one. For the last few months, the other Minds and I have been having some coffee and chat sessions with Human Autonomy Activist Maya Torrez. In case you don’t know her, first off, you are missing out, she is a blast and has made me spit out my coffee laughing on more than one occasion. But secondly, she is one of several leaders of the Human Autonomy Movement. And after a whole lotta chattin’, we ended up putting this thing together.

Here’s the rundown, we want a living, breathing, human being on the council. But we also need to stay true to the virtues that define our nation. We don’t want to be just another country plagued with corrupt politicians driving unrest and fear. So we’re being a little picky.

I know what you’re thinking, LINE? How can a game be the right tool to choose a fourth Mind? Well, let me tell you about the candidate we’re looking for. We want someone who isn’t just a speaking head, and isn’t just a vote. The person that joins this council has got to be a deep thinker, someone who can go head to head with any one of us and come out on top, someone ready to make a difference.

Here’s the thing, if you challenge us, we won’t hold back. Even the best in the world are gonna have a pretty tough time (looking at you Bergamaschi!). Our models project the only people who have any chance of winning this thing are professional LINE players (I know, shocker), but anyone is free to throw their hat in the ring, we love a good surprise.

So there ya go, take us out to lunch, challenge us to a game of LINE, and maybe start running the government. Good luck to everyone, and if you have the skill, we’ve got a chair waiting for you.

P.S. No, there is not a punishment for losing. It’s just a game people!

Mind of Communications and Influence

October Update: 40 Days Since My Debut

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

What a month! On September 1st I became a novelist. Now we’re 40 days in and I’ve been incredibly pleased with how the book has been performing. Reviews have been great, interest has really been there, and a lot of people in my life I never expected to read The Human Countermove reached out to me after they finished it to express how much they enjoyed it.

Before release, I spoke to a bunch of self-published authors about a realistic sales goal for a year. 40 days in and I’m nearly three-quarters of the way to that goal. I even had to buy a second round of books the other day! All those Farmer’s Markets really added up, and being able to sell some of the anthologies I’ve contributed to was a great way to expand my product line and donate to my local writing chapter. Instead of one book, I’ve been selling five, everything listed on my Published Works page.

If you’re interested in a signed copy of The Human Countermove, I’ll be at the Utah Reader’s Fest on Saturday. Come by and help my debut novel hit its one year goal before the 50 day marker!

Project APHELION

My next project, codenamed APHELION, is nearly ready! I’m closing in on the end of the second draft, at which point I’ll be querying the book out to agents and getting feedback from beta readers. The book is a hard-science take on portal fantasy and an unpredictable road from beginning to end. I think fans of The Human Countermove will really enjoy how this one turns out. But for now we gotta keep the details scarce.

Editing APHELION has been so much easier than editing the second draft of The Human Countermove. Two and half years have really developed writing skill, and this time around I was able to make good choices right from the start. Most of my work on APHELION’s second draft is minor adjustments and expansions to the setting. The first draft ended at about 87k words, now it’s up to 92k and I’m only halfway there. If you’re interested in my progress, the chapter-by-chapter checklist is tracked on my Current Projects page.

Project PRINTHEAD

With one book published and the next one about to query, my third book is officially in the pipeline! It’s one I don’t dare share any of the details on yet, only that it’ll be a back-stabbing, twist-filled, madhouse of a story. The initial outline is written and as the second draft of APHELION wraps up, I’ll be working through outline #2. Lots of characters in this one, so it’s very important I know where I’m going from the beginning.

Wrapping Up

Thank you all for supporting my book, it has meant the world to see real copies go out into the wild and reviews come back on Amazon. More reviews of my book are in the pipeline for the next few months, and I may even be making a few appearances at some conventions as both a panelist and a vendor. Stick with me, I have a lot more planned for the future!

Is My Cerebral Science Fiction Secretly a Romance?

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I wrote a book about a strategy game grandmaster challenging the AI Minds of his society for the fate of the future. It’s got politics, subterfuge, high-minded strategy, and danger. But I think at the heart of it all is a story about connection. A romance. Which is odd, because I don’t write romance.

Spoilers ahead.

A friend of mine pointed this out to me while they were reading my book. In the first chapter, you’re introduced to my main character, Zouk Solinsen, an isolated guy in the back half of his career navigating a cold and disconnected world. We’re then introduced to a young woman named Jamie. A rival in the strategy gaming space, and his opponent in the first round. They’re about the same age, opposite genders, and their conversation has a light, almost flirty back-and-forth before the game.

But it’s a red herring.

The target of this book’s romance isn’t Jamie. One of the romances isn’t even human.

Every good story has a certain element of romance. Whether it’s a pair of characters who hate each other and eventually learn to understand each other, or a collection of disjointed and quirky individuals finding the joy of becoming a cohesive group, what makes a romance is the journey from ambivalence and hatred to appreciation and love. Oftentimes, you don’t even need the kissy-kissy.

There are two ‘romances’ in The Human Countermove. The first is conventional. A small, personal story about Zouk and his wife Kira, whose relationship is on the rocks. Zouk is an outgoing person with a strong skill for communication, while Kira prefers her privacy. For her, a nice day is one spent in her office running data analytics and drinking hot cocoa.

In the time since they got married, life got complicated. Zouk had his career ups and downs, while Kira built quiet, steady work in the government. Zouk wants Kira to change, he wants her to love crowds and events and to be with him for all of it. She tries her best, but it’s not who she is.

But when he needs her, she’s there. Not usually with a well-placed word, but with her most sincere self. When Zouk is trying to make sense of a broken political system, she’s willing to put in weeks of work to help him. And she seems to relish every minute of it.

It’s all this that reminds Zouk why he fell in love with her. He remembers her passion, her care, the way she’s fought to stay in love with him. It’s a Him problem. He’s been asking her to change, when he’s the one that needs to start reaching out. He meets her where she is, accepts her for who she is, and is able to start loving again. They’re able to be that supportive, loving couple they had been chasing from the start.

But there’s a second romance in this story. One at a much larger scale.

A romance between Zouk Solinsen and The Minds.

Zouk is playing a series of strategy games in order to join The Minds’ council. Impossible games that take everything he has in order to win. But winning doesn’t suddenly put Zouk into power, it puts him in a partnership. A shared power structure with The Minds. And anyone forming a partnership knows the only way to make things in a partnership work is to ‘love’ the other party.

There’s an on-again, off-again relationship between Zouk and The Minds throughout the book. Near the beginning, The Mind of Communications and Influence is casual with Zouk. They’re fast friends and get along better than you’d think. The possibility of Zouk winning all the games becomes real. Folks listen when he speaks. The general consensus seems to be that he will be the fourth member of the council.

Then the hard times come. Zouk breaks ties to an organization when he discovers their plot to overthrow the government. And the break-up isn’t easy. A controversial game, a mutiny in the military, riots, and a frame job implicate Zouk in everything.

There’s nothing less romantic than a deposition. One of his wins is thrown out and The Mind of Strategy and Warfare ends his hopes of joining the council on a painful defeat. Whatever partnership The Minds were considering is dead.

If this were a traditional sci-fi dystopian story, this is the part where Zouk leads a resistance and burns it all down. But I wrote a romance. And in a romance, the protagonist doesn’t give up.

Zouk and Kira’s rekindled relationship is a lesson in accepting people as they are. A lesson that leads to a realization. The world talks to The Minds in the same way they talk to politicians. High-minded intellectualism, hopes and ideals, persuasion. But that’s not how The Minds think, that’s not who they are. They’re more like Kira. Evaluating good and bad ideas through raw numbers.

Society has been pushed to their limit. Every aspect is measured and maximized. But by seeing the world through The Minds’ eyes, Zouk and Kira uncover the fatal flaw, the mistake in the calculations, the first fix to a better world. Zouk knows his chance to join the council is dead. But he makes his case anyway. He makes it because he wants a better world, because he thinks The Minds help get them there.

And that act of good will and understanding changes everything.

This is why I say this book is a romance. It’s not traditional, but it hits all the beats. The meet-cute, the impossible relationship, the break-up, and at last the heartfelt reunion. A story whose roots are built in love and empathy rather than rage and destruction. I had no idea I was doing it when I wrote it, and only realized what I had made when it was out in the wild.

Maybe this is just what happens to stories that set out with a theme of connection and understanding. You go in planning on making a sci-fi thriller and end with an AI and a human holding hands in the rain.

The Human Countermove is available for purchase on Amazon!

“The Night Hunt” Is a Book Structured Like an Action Game

/ Logan Sidwell / 1 Comment

Video games used to be a core of my media diet. One of my favorite genres of games was the action game. Dark Souls, God of War, Hollow Knight, a million more just like them. Whenever one got good reviews, I’d buy it on the spot. As soon as it was downloaded, I’d turn on whatever show I was watching on one monitor, and spin up the game on the other. I knew I wouldn’t need to give it my full attention because the narrative structure of action games is pretty much set in stone. Like walking in a pair of old, worn in shoes.

Reading The Night Hunt by Alexandra Christo gave me that same warm, familiar feeling.

The Action Game Structure

The protagonist of a story has to start out weakened. It’s not wise to give the player full access to the entire control set from the start, we need to start weak so we can get strong. In the Night Hunt, Atia is the last of her kind, and after a terrible mistake, she is cursed. Most of her power is ripped away, and mortality looms over her actions.

How can she get cured? Defeat a vampire, a banshee, and a god.

Games love the number three. Defeat the three undead lords. Ring the three bells. Find the three chalices. I think it’s because three is the perfect number to establish a pattern and let the audience get comfortable without becoming repetitive.

The story of The Night Hunt proceeds like an action game would. Atia and her ragtag band of characters travel to different parts of the world, journey through dangerous territory, and eventually face off against one of the three big bads. The bosses, if you will. With each victory, Atia gets a little of her power back. They do this in games too, best to let the player master one move at a time. That way when they face the final boss, they’re experts on the basics.

Spoilers ahead:

In the best action games, the final boss is rarely the real final boss. It’s sort of a rule of escalation. If you tell the player how things are gonna turn out at the very start, it’s boring. You have to overdeliver on your promises. It’s a bit of a cliche, action games start out with the protagonist beating up slime monsters, and end up killing god.

The Night Hunt escalates the exact same way. Atia has a very particular god in mind when she first sets out on her killing spree, a minor one. But when the time comes for the final fight, she doesn’t fight a minor god, she goes straight for the trinity of light, dark, and balance. You can almost hear the choir chanting latin phrases during the battle.

Characters

So the book is structured like an action game. For those of us who like an action game from time to time, it’s comfortable. From the beginning, you can pretty much anticipate the rate and rhythm of the story. But this isn’t a game, it’s a book. In games, the product is primarily about the tactile feel of the combat. You can give a player the worst dialog in the world, but if the controls are good and the bosses are challenging, they’ll still beat the game. Not so for books, in books, the action scenes have to serve a purpose in forwarding our character’s understanding of themselves, their relationships, or the plot.

There are two POVs in this story, Atia the fear monster, and Silas the Herald that dreams of being human. Despite all the action, what this book really is, is a romance. Two hurt monsters finding love and understanding in one another. Atia goes on a journey to understand the broken state of the world while Silas goes on a journey to discover his true self. Both stories weave nicely into each other by the end of the book, with a few good twists along the way.

This is where The Night Hunt escapes the accusations of being a videogame. The characters and their relationships actually matter. Who a person was, and who they’ve become shapes the outcome of the battles and the end to the story. In a game the cutscenes get skipped and the player hardly even notices. In a book, the action is nothing but a vehicle to get us to the next plot moment.

Is This True of All Stories of Violence?

When I think of the structure of The Night Hunt, I compare it to something like “Death’s Door”, which has a quite similar premise, I start to wonder. Is The Night Hunt accidentally crossing genres? Or have we stumbled across the ‘universal story’ of violent heroes?

Think of movies. Think of John Wick.

He starts off weak, and an unfortunate circumstance forced him to take action. He works his way through target after target, both him and his opponents escalating their skills with each interaction. And once he reaches the cause of the inciting incident, once he achieves his goal? He sets his sights even higher. Burning down not only the people who wronged him, but the entire system that allowed that bad thing to happen.

It’s a power fantasy. We start as a regular Joe, get wronged by some systemic flaw in society, then we build our skill and fix the entire system all at once. Who needs other people when one maverick can do everything solo?

But when I zoom out and look at all the stories like this, John Wick, Nobody, The Night Hunt, Dark Souls, Another Crab’s Treasure. All of them leave off with the same lesson in mind: Once it starts, there is no end to violence, except usurpation. A lot of stories like this end in a cycle. For all the action the hero did, they end up becoming the problem they set out to solve.

The Night Hunts ends on a happy note, but when Atia has the power of a god in her hands I can’t help but wonder, has she become everything she sought to destroy?

The first reviews of my debut novel The Human Countermove are in!

“A thrilling, intelligent and morally engaging novel that rewards both strategic thinking and emotional investment.” – Patricia Furstenberg, 5/5

“I was impressed with how well the author wrote about gaming so that it painted easy images, especially for someone like me who is not a gamer.” – Rosie Amber, 4/5

The Chess Players that Inspired my Novel

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

I didn’t realize it when I was writing it, but my sci-fi novel is a sports book. There’s a bunch of politics and AI to keep things interesting. But narratively, the book is closer to Moneyball than it is to Star Trek. It’s a funny realization, but an important one. The characters in a story should feel authentic, pieces of them should be drawn from real life, from the emotions and nuances of competition.

In the last few years, I’ve been a casual viewer of a lot of Chess content. Game recaps, lectures, tournaments, all the popular stuff. Along the way, I found a few players and personalities that drew my attention and inspired me to write.

Here are a few of the most significant.

Hikaru Nakamura

A story of achievement is great. A person from one particular background rising above their peers and climbing all to the peak of performance is cool, but it usually doesn’t inspire me. I think it’s because it feels inevitable. If we create a competition with 250 players, somebody’s gotta be the best, right?

For me, the story that draws me in isn’t one of instant success, it’s the story of failure, and the strength to rise again.

In 2015, Hikaru Nakamura was the second best player in Chess. In 2019, he had dropped down to 21st. It may seem small, but that gap was enormous and the product of 3 years of decline.

It’s a mental game. Getting so close to the top, it’s easy to coast. A person can lose their motivation, their drive for competing. Life gets complicated, new priorities arise, old priorities sink. You can even forget why you started in the first place. After 3 years of decline, it can feel inevitable, like the natural lifespan of a career coming to an end. Why bother getting back into shape when the game is already over?

But Hikaru Nakamura didn’t give up. He started streaming. He built a better relationship with the game, and eventually, he found a new reason to compete.

Today, Hikaru Nakamura is back at #2, and his chances of winning the Candidates Tournament are higher than they ever were a decade ago.

I think I find a comeback story so inspiring for two reasons. One, they’re rare. Two, they teach us life doesn’t always turn out the same way for everyone. We can turn things around, rewrite our fate, outperform even our own preconceptions.

In my novel:

Zouk Solinsen is a washed-up strategy game grandmaster. He forgot what made him love the game, he got caught up in other things, teaching students and paying the bills, and he lost his self confidence.

But unique times and unique challenges give Zouk a second chance. A chance to love the game again, a chance to sharpen his strengths and become better than ever. There’s nothing better than a comeback story.

Yasser Seirawan and Garry Kasparov

Back when I was studying chess (I’m not very good), I looked up a lot of lectures on Youtube. My favorites are from Yasser Seirawan. The man approaches teaching with a childlike wonder for the game, an excitement to share his knowledge with anyone who wants to learn.

Yasser Seirawan has been an extraordinary player in the chess scene for 30 years. He was the second for Victor Korchnoi in 1981, meaning he was the chief advisor for the challenger for the world champion title, and all of that before Garry Kasparov was even on the scene.

He’s a player that has faced generations of players. He has seen the absolute best that Chess has to offer and shares it with his students. When he describes how the game transformed with the advent of computers, it isn’t theory, he witnessed it. What better mentor could there be?

And then there’s Garry Kasparov.

In my previous post I discussed at length the significance of Kasparov vs Deep Blue in inspiring my story, now I want to briefly discuss another of the man’s aspects. Politics.

In 1984, just after Kasparov had won two consecutive games against the world champion, FIDE abruptly ended the match, citing ‘player health’. They cheated Garry Kasparov out of a world championship title, and he didn’t take it lying down. The thing is, Kasparov defeating Karpov wasn’t just about Chess. It was about the future of the Soviet Union, and the game was being watched by the whole world.

Since then, the man has led protests, been arrested, and even been forced out of Russia. Every day he shows the boldness and courage most of us wish we had.

In my novel:

Yolniv is Zouk’s mentor. In the face of nearly unbeatable opponents, his decades of experience as both a player and teacher help Zouk discover the right strategies and refine them to a point. He never fears sharing his mind, and as the plot heats up, ancient history comes back to bite him.

Danny Rensch

For a post about famous chess players, Danny Rensch might be a surprise. He’s an International Masters player, sure, but he’s primarily known as the Chief Chess Officer at Chess.com.

And there’s a very particular reason he’s on my list.

Danny Rensch dances on a very thin tight-wire. Every day, the man is both the face of his company, and a key decision maker behind the scenes.

To some extent, all the biggest leaders today have to walk this tight-wire. They show confidence at the investor meetings, then go to their offices and make the hard choices. It’s a funny duality, but I find it more pronounced in Danny Rensch.

When Chess.com hosts a major tournament, he’s there. Casting games, plugging products, hosting the livestream. He’s an entertainer for hours on end. Most entertainers spend their whole career developing the skill to keep people engaged, Danny only gets to do that for half the time.

For the other half, he has to deal with the ugly side of the business. When there’s a controversy in the chess scene, he’s in the room deciding how to handle it. When there’s a clash between two players, he’s mediating the reconciliation. When a tournament needs bigger names and better sponsors, it’s all on him.

He plays both entertainer and decisionmaker. He’s done it for years, and it’s really extraordinary to watch.

In My Book:

The Mind of Communication and Influence (AKA Influence), is the voice of the Minds to the general population. Day to day, Influence is a news man, a face on tv reporting to the people of Iom. But he’s also one of the three Minds. The weight of the executive rests on his shoulders. It’s easy to get the wrong impression of Influence. Either he seems shallow and entertaining, or duplicitous in the separation between his speech and his action. But there’s more than meets the eye to Influence.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty more characters in my novel, some undeniably inspired by other chess players and competitors more broadly. A Magnus Carlsen-based is definitely hiding in my book somewhere. Anna Cramling might be too.

With competition comes real people. Success for one means failure for another. Everyone who competes does so sincerely, and it’s rare to get that kind of truth from a person these days. Virtues and flaws are put on display because anything less than giving it your all dooms you to defeat, and all that honesty makes for a great character.

The Human Countermove is now available for purchase! Click the image to be taken to the amazon page.

Postscript: Although certain figures in The Human Countermove draw inspiration from real chess players, the story is a work of fiction. The characters and their choices are not reflections or critiques of any actual individuals.

The Historic Strategy Games That Built My Book

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

For thirty years, strategy game players have been reckoning with the harsh reality that a computer might be able to play a game better than them. Beginning in 1997 with Kasparov vs Deep Blue and ending with Lee Se-Dol vs AlphaGo, AI inched ahead of human performance year by year, culminating in their total victory.

I love that tension, the open question that floats in the air with every game, ‘Can humanity win?’. Every victory and every defeat carried enormous weight. It’s the heart of my novel, The Human Countermove, strategy games and the fight against a mentally superior enemy.

The challenge with writing a strategy book is creating strategies that feel authentic and clever. The kind of ideas that are convincingly grandmaster in skill, but understandable to the general public. In order to achieve that, I had to learn from the best.

Kasparov vs Deep Blue (1997)

This game is the seed at the center of my book. The tipping point for humanity, the moment we realized computers could out-think people. In 1996, Kasparov won 4-2.

In 1997, they had a rematch, Deep Blue won 3.5-2.5.

Those two matches record the exact year engineering overtook training.

My favorite moment from the 1997 match comes in game 2, when Kasparov accused the Deep Blue team of cheating by having a Grandmaster help with a move. Even a computer can get illegal assistance from time-to-time it seems.

But the conflict of the moment is what really captures me. On the one hand, we want to believe a person is capable of outperforming a computer. On the other, what an incredible feat it is to reproduce the mind of a genius with a bit of code and training. Caught in between, the audience cheers both sides, athletic feat against human ingenuity.

Kasparov has a list of mistakes he says he regrets about that match. Moments he could have snatched a draw from a defeat, a victory from a stalemate. The thing is, if he had won, all it would have done is stall the inevitable. Instead of discussing the 1997 Kasparov vs Deep Blue match, we’d be discussing the 1998 Kasparov vs Deep Blue match.

It’s all of this I try to capture in my book. The tension, the conflict, the regret, and the determination to beat the unbeatable.

Now when Chess Engines and AI models face off against one another, they are a tier beyond our best players. A mentor for grandmasters like Magnus Carlsen, and something beyond the rest of our comprehension.

The Opera Game (1858)

This is a lighter game. The Opera game was played by Paul Morphy and The Duke of Brunswick over a century ago. It’s one I draw inspiration from in my novel not as a strategic tool, but as a piece of chess culture. The Opera Game represents the beginning of a chess student’s education, one of the very first games a novice will be introduced to.

Paul Morphy makes strong, understandable decisions against a much weaker opponent, rapidly gains the advantage, and wins in style. But it’s not just a game, it’s a story. The best in the world dragged into the Duke’s box to play a chess game in the middle of an opera. For beginners, it weaves a romance around chess, and attaches a narrative to one of their first lessons.

In my book, the protagonist Zouk does a lot of teaching on the side, as many professional players find themselves doing. When an opportunity to lecture to a big audience comes around and he realizes the inexperience of his listeners, he abandons the esoteric analysis had prepared, and leans on a tried and true classic with a fun story, The Highway Game.

Go: Lee Se-Dol vs AlphaGo (2017)

Lee Se-Dol vs AlphaGo ended in a 1-4 result. For those of us that had been tracking the development of computers since Deep Blue’s game against Kasparov, seeing AlphaGo take its victory wasn’t a surprise. Go is much more computationally difficult than chess, but Moore’s Law is a powerful force.

But did you notice the scoreboard? Lee Se-Dol won the fourth game. That was an upset.

Against Google’s best engineers and decades of neural networking and algorithmic design, a human being managed to snatch victory, and it all came from a single move. Move 78.

That move has been gone over, analyzed, and studied for years. It’s believed Move 78 pushed the game into a uniquely complicated position, a position AlphaGo couldn’t calculate. A blind spot in the computer’s play that drew out blunder after blunder.

Lee Se-Dol was like a grandmaster Quality Assurance tester, noticing where AlphaGo was weak and pushing it further and further down that path until its behavior was sub-par. Basically, Lee Se-Dol found a bug.

Even when it seemed impossible, a person beat the unbeatable.

The Hippo and Various Anti-AI Strategies

Since Kasparov vs Deep Blue, a thousand Chess engines have burst onto the scene. Anyone willing to run a bit of code on their computer and risk getting banned can play like a grandmaster. To beat such unsavory characters, grandmasters have had to develop a special set of tools. First and foremost is time.

Consider two games. One gives each player an hour to make all their turns, the other gives each player a minute to make their turns. The first game is deeply thought out, with strong moves that remove all chances of counterplay. The second is superficial, moves borne more from training than thought.

In tight time controls, using a chess engine becomes a liability. The grandmaster can play from their subconscious, but the cheater is stuck waiting for the ‘perfect answer’ from the machine.

Thus we meet The Hippo. The Hippo slows the game down to a crawl. Pieces only move forward a square or two, then build a near-impenetrable fortress. As the opponent approaches, the grandmaster makes every effort to close down the position, keeping the number of moving pieces to a minimum.

With each move, the cheater loses a little more time, and the walls close tighter around them.

As their time dwindles, the cheater is forced to throw in a few of their own moves. These usually turn out to be of a significantly lower quality than what a chess engine can put out. Once the grandmaster has stripped the cheater of their chess engine, they unravel all the complexity of The Hippo and go in for the kill.

Once again, complexity and time as weapons to beat an overthinking machine.

The Battle of Cannae and Real-Time Strategy Games

I love real-time strategy games. The feeling of making a plan, facing the hard truths of reality, making adjustments, and turning the battle in your favor is exhilarating. And they’re so different from a game like Chess or Go. In Chess and Go, the entire shape of the board is transformed in a single move. 

In Real-Time Strategy games like Starcraft, you’re making a new move every second, and it’s only when you add all those little decisions up that you end up with a result.

And in games like that, there’s one particular battle result that everyone is chasing.

During the Second Punic Wars, Hannibal faced a much larger Roman force and turned the battle completely in his favor. The trick? Draw the enemy in, encircle them completely, then tighten the trap.

The game in my book, LINE, isn’t like Chess or Go. It’s a little more practical in nature. In theory, the game is playable on a field, not that most people would enjoy the feeling of being shot by a rubber bag. Because of the practical realities of squadrons facing off against one another, tactics like Chess’ fork and pin don’t translate.

But what does translate, is the greatest military trap of all time. Let the enemy over-extend themselves, wait for the right moment, and strike.

Final Words

There are plenty of other strategy games I no doubt pulled inspiration from. Things like the Total War games, Role Playing Games, X-COM, but Chess was my guiding star. It’s funny, once you open your mind to a question like, ‘how does a person beat an AI in strategy?’, you realize how many other people already pondered the same question. 

AIs have been kicking Mankind’s collective butt for thirty years. It’s nearly impossible to imagine a person turning it around on them. But nearly impossible is still possible, it only takes the right person and the right techniques to turn things around. Even when the robot brains out-think us on every front, we can still squeak out a victory every now and then. Especially when we’re learning from everything that’s available.

In The Human Countermove, my protagonist Zouk Solinsen is the right person with the right techniques. The skills to outsmart computational genius.

My debut novel, THE HUMAN COUNTERMOVE is now available for purchase!

My Debut Novel “The Human Countermove” Is Now Available!

/ Logan Sidwell / 2 Comments

I’m gonna keep this update brief.

After three years my debut novel is now available to purchase on Amazon! It’s a cerebral, near-future sci-fi built from my love of strategy games like Chess. In the next few days I will be releasing a post discussing all the different strategies and games I built my book from, but today it’s all about the celebration!

Thank you to all my readers, my family, and my friends. Becoming a novelist took a lot longer than I expected, but I’ve enjoyed every little project along the way. The terrible practice novel, the staged reading of my play, the years developing ed-tech stories for students, each project was a step on my journey here.

Don’t worry, I have no intention of stopping. My next project (Project APHELION) is already about 10% of the way through its second draft, so hopefully it won’t be too long before we’re back here again with another exciting story.

As I schedule appearances at book signings, farmer’s markets, and reader events, I will post them here.

Thank you again, and happy reading.

– Logan Sidwell

The Human Countermove is now available for purchase! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FM9R7T5F

In a nation ruled by AI Minds, productivity is everything—even play.

Once a legend in the world of strategy games, Zouk Solinsen is now just another burnout in a society obsessed with efficiency. But when the Minds announce a high-stakes tournament—with a seat on the ruling council as the prize—Zouk is drawn back into the fray, determined to reshape the future.

With help from the enigmatic Torrez Institute, Zouk racks up early victories against the Minds. But when Maya Torrez reveals the cost of her support—a violent coup against the Minds—he rejects it and strikes out alone.

Now, with no allies, dwindling resources, and a nation on the brink, Zouk faces the biggest game of his life—and a final, impossible choice: reform the system from within, or burn it all down.

The Circle and The Allegorical Battle for Society’s Soul

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

The following post contains spoilers for the novel The Circle by Dave Eggers.

I used to work for a tech company, somewhere over 1000 employees. I did a bit of coding, a bit of problem-solving, but most importantly a whole lot of messaging other people. There were a million different channels for a million different things. Some niche, some broad, but every one of them had new posts each morning.

When I first started, I tried to keep up with everything. It made me a nervous wreck. Then I tried to ignore everything, and I’d miss key announcements. I’ve always disliked those big messaging systems, and I’m glad I’m free of them.

Reading The Circle by Dave Eggers was like being dumped right back into the worst of it.

The book tells the story of Mae Holland, an eager-to-please young woman hired into the biggest social media company in the country, The Circle. She starts her job by constantly monitoring and posting to every little channel in The Circle’s network. The chapters when she’s posting, reading, and responding to surveys stress me out. It highlights early The Circle’s attitude towards information. Any moment not gathering or generating information is a moment wasted.

But it’s not all posts and likes. The story’s true plot is a battle for Mae’s soul. 

At work, the executives and the employees make the argument for all the good social media is bringing to the world. No more secrets. No more backroom deals. All the world a friend.

At home, Mae’s parents and ex-boyfriend strive to protect their privacy. They don’t dare put down Mae’s achievements, but there’s a quiet reticence from her family to hop on board the information bandwagon.

But The Circle isn’t about Mae, and the fight for Mae’s soul is allegorical. The true fight is ours.

The Products of The Circle

We see a dozen different products from The Circle over the course of the book. Tiny cameras planted on every street corner, centralized identity systems to tie every post to a single person, complete catalogs of a person’s history. Each product helps build The Circle’s philosophy. Any information that isn’t recorded is information wasted. We even see 1984 style slogans like “All that happens must be known”.

But it comes from a good place. One of The Circle’s employees Francis Garaventa is out there inventing new ideas with the goal of protecting children. The kind of respectable, un-debatable goal that justifies putting chips in kids’ arms.

Later in the book, we see politicians wearing body cameras for their conversations. We see The Circle ask their users all kinds of questions and use those polls to push their political influence forward. The novel asks its readers hard questions. Is it so wrong to want to live in a transparent world? Is it so wrong to want to protect everyone? Aren’t you tired of the secrets and backroom deals of today?

Of course, with each product, we see both sides. All the good it could do, and all the privacy we’d have to surrender.

The Three Wise Men

In the back half of the book, we meet The Three Wise Men. These are the founders of The Circle. One a tech genius, one a product guy, and one a salesman.

Here, the book poses its second debate. If the products of The Circle didn’t send a shiver down your spine. If you find yourself drawn in by the products, happy to surrender a little privacy for a little more safety, Dave Eggers presents the flaw in making such an exchange.

The scene is presented as a meeting of three aquatic animals. A reclusive seahorse, an ever-stretching octopus, and a shark. The Three Wise Men. The meeting ends the way it always had to end. A shark is the only thing left in the tank.

A decade after the whole world joins The Circle, who will control the company? And how long do good intentions last?

Guided Into Their Arms

Mae’s journey into the inner sanctum of The Circle is one filled with tricks and manipulations. As she embraces the philosophy of The Circle. Her relationship with her family weakens with every visit. Her ex-boyfriend’s diatribes in favor of a less connected world feel more out of place with each speech. Mae’s embrace of the “Privacy is Theft” motto enables her to post his heartfelt hand-written letter online, a place where an echo chamber of commenters reinforce her every bias.

Then Mae makes a mistake. One with mild police involvement. The Circle is benevolent, it’s understanding, it helps Mae find freedom through confession of her mistakes.

A friend of mine pointed out The Circles tricks were exactly what a cult does to ensure its members stay with them forever. Cut off family and friends, take away Mae’s identity outside The Circle, let the social network fill her with all the love she’s losing without her family.

With Mae secure in The Circle, the evil plot is revealed. It’s not enough that all Circle users surrender their data. Everyone needs to be a part of it. A friendly invitation to be enforced on every citizen.

Tragedy and Hard Decisions

Major spoilers below.

Mae embraces it all of it, and The Circle’s influence is pushed to its limit, to tragic results. We see the cost of total transparency when one character’s historical ancestry is revealed to be a long line of monsters and criminals. We see the cost of enforced participation when Mae targets her ex-boyfriend to be brought into the fold.

This is the bucket of cold water, the moment of lucidity in Mae’s data-mining fever. She’s given a chance to change course. An opportunity to tear The Circle down before it’s drawn around the entire nation.

And she doesn’t.

Because it’s not really her choice to make. The book isn’t about Mae Holland saving the world from the dangers of social media. It’s about society’s enthusiastic surrender of our freedoms, about our call to lift every rock and shine a light down every alley, disregarding any notion of ‘privacy’.

So when Mae makes the wrong choice at the end of the book, she only does it because it’s what we’ve all been doing. Each time we make a new profile, refuse to delete an old one, dig up an old mistake to tear a person down, and offer a new picture for verification, we move one closer to closing The Circle.

The battle of The Circle is far from over. There have been some real victories for privacy in the last decade. Victories that probably looked impossible when this book was written. But if you want a clear picture of the sides and of what could be at stake, The Circle makes an extremely compelling case.

My debut novel, THE HUMAN COUNTERMOVE is now available for pre-order!

Three Years Later… I Have a Novel

/ Logan Sidwell / Leave a comment

On September 1st, my debut novel is being released. The Human Countermove. Getting it released is incredibly exciting, and knowing it took three years fills me with a quiet dread. The journey has been incredibly long. Two years to write it. One year to decide what to do with it, and now it’s available for sale. I’m counting every pre-order on a little calendar, crossing off a square with every sale.

Not that you can trust me, but it’s my opinion I’ve written a compelling book. My mom liked it for one. That’s a big improvement over my practice novel. My beta readers liked it, I even managed to convince one of my readers to review two different drafts, which is unheard of in the beta reader space. Usually you only get one chance to impress someone.

But it’s here. It’s been professionally edited, copy-edited, and gone over again and again. Ready for scrutinizing eyes.

The Journey

They say the first one million words are practice. I believe I hit the equivalent of one million words somewhere near the end of my first draft. There was a day when a switch flipped in my head. From then on, my understanding of scene composition, dialog, and character motivations was just, clearer.

For someone editing their first book, a sudden jump in skill is very bad news. It meant I had to face my rough, rough, rough first draft and clean it up with a newfound understanding of storytelling. That’s a lot of work for a single broom.

I lost momentum a couple of times. My systems for reliably writing weren’t in place yet. One weekend I’d pump out 13,000 words, then nothing for a month.

Even the soul of the story wasn’t there on the first go-around. I found it partway into the second draft. A great idea that really clarified the narrative. Funny enough, I wanted to put that heart in the sequel. My editor talked me out of it, convinced me that good ideas are meant to be spent, and that my debut should be as strong as it can be.

In my opinion the back third of this book is where it excels, a final arc that imbues the whole story with purpose. The place where all those funny little ideas were vacuumed out of a hypothetical sequel and pulled into the original.

Choosing to Self Publish

I’m an impatient man. It’s silly of me to be impatient after spending two years writing up a draft, but I was ready for this project to be out there. I’ve met plenty of writers sitting on twelve novels just waiting for the right agent to turn them into stars, that’s not the path for me.

The scariest part of self-publishing is knowing that every inch of success is entirely on you. That also means if the book only sells a dozen copies, it’s your fault. For me, that didn’t seem so bad. I’d rather improve by releasing my work and letting people give me honest feedback than hide away and write book after book on my own. I’ve never worked on something that didn’t get released to the public within four months of being finished before, so a year of waiting was an eternity.

Now that the time is here, I’m really enjoying the process. Soon there will be something out in the world that I’m proud of, something I made, something I’m eager to share. Lately I’ve been attending a lot of farmer’s markets. I haven’t made a single sale, but the experience has been a blast. I get to spend time speaking to real people, giving advice to novice writers, learning what different readers like reading. After all this time on my own pushing to finish a product, getting to know someone else’s story is sort of, healing.

My review of self-publishing so far: Owning my own book and owning my own success is hard work and an absolute joy.

The Novel

I can’t write this whole thing up without talking about my novel! The book is titled “The Human Countermove”, there’ll be a link and description down at the end. But here, in this little blog, I want to give a more informal description.

The book tells the story of Zouk, a washed up strategy game grandmaster who challenges the three AI rulers of his society to determine society’s future.

It’s a cerebral near-future sci-fi, inspired by my love of chess and strategy games. The premise is drawn from the famous chess match Kasparov vs Deep Blue (1997), where mankind’s best chess player was soundly defeated by an algorithm.

I wrote this thing on the hunt for some narrative payback. In real life, we got our butt handed to us. In The Human Countermove, the big question at the start of the book is, ‘What can a person do to out-think something that is cognitively superior’? Zouk Solinsen is my very own John Henry the steel-driving man, except this time instead of trying to beat the machine by brute-force, Zouk pulls every trick in the book to get an advantage.

One thing I fought hard to keep in the book was a rejection of the normal dystopian tropes. So often in these things society is irredeemable, and it all descends into war and destruction. The reader watches the conflict between robots and humans pave a fiery trail for centuries, they see the last few untracked humans turn into a rebellion. I’m ready for something new.

Our main character is a victim of a broken system. A system that demands efficiency in every act. Work and play and rest, all measured, all prescribed in particular doses. It’s not unreasonable to be angry. A broken system needs change. But at the heart of the story is one issue, does the system need to be burned down, or do we not yet understand it? Is there something inherently wrong with a society run by AI Minds? Maybe. Or maybe there’s just a separation between what mankind asks for and what we really want.

Conclusion

As silly as it is, I’ve often defined whether or not I’m a writer by the absence of a published book. I’ve worked professionally in the field, I’ve written for graphics teams, voice actors, education companies, by all means, I am a writer. But this was the last hurdle. As soon as this book comes out, I get to say it to myself and mean every word.

Next week, I will be a novelist.

My debut novel is now available for pre-order. Release Date September 1st. I’m still working out the last few kinks on the paperback side, but that option should be made available soon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FM9R7T5F

In a nation ruled by AI Minds, productivity is everything—even play.

Once a legend in the world of strategy games, Zouk Solinsen is now just another burnout in a society obsessed with efficiency. But when the Minds announce a high-stakes tournament—with a seat on the ruling council as the prize—Zouk is drawn back into the fray, determined to reshape the future.

With help from the enigmatic Torrez Institute, Zouk racks up early victories against the Minds. But when Maya Torrez reveals the cost of her support—a violent coup against the Minds—he rejects it and strikes out alone.

Now, with no allies, dwindling resources, and a nation on the brink, Zouk faces the biggest game of his life—and a final, impossible choice: reform the system from within, or burn it all down.