All posts by Jeremy Varner

Coven of Dolls

When they revealed themselves to the world, they changed everything. Creatures of legend that were thought to be little more than myth and superstition came out of hiding to found a new nation for their kind and those who would be willing to live with them. The Republic of Argyre, founded on an artificial island they built in secret over half a century, would act as a safe harbor for the creatures now calling themselves “Alters”. But it wasn’t enough to just construct this haven, they needed to ensure the rest of the world would accept their kind as well. Realizing that not every Alter could reach their island, Argyre established the Alter Control Task Force – an international organization meant to act as police in Alter situations. These stories follow the ACTF and the Agents of Argyre.

Following the events of Shards of Glass and A Patchwork Soul, the Agent of Argyre series now continues in Coven of Dolls – a tale of murder, mystery, and harmful secrets.

Coven of Dolls finds Agent Nathaniel Leone more seasoned and a bit tenderized. He’s dealt with unusual events and more unusual people. But, despite this experience, he’s not quite prepared for what’s coming when a string of murders is carried out by people who have no memories of the crimes they committed.

Breaking the peace and quiet of a lazy summer day, Nate finds one of these murders on his very doorstep in this excerpt from…

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Inertia and Potential

Everywhere you look, people like to talk about the power of motivation. We all think about it at some point or another, we’ve seen plenty of self-help books try to sell us the secrets to it, and we’ve all collected our personal tricks to reignite it in ourselves. Why wouldn’t we? There’s a school of thought that proper motivation and the power of positive thinking are enough to achieve anything. And it’s true, you do need to be moving to be able to make things happen. But something I’ve come to recognize is that we don’t just have to understand the value of motivation but also the nature of something else often at play: inertia.

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My Resolution

It’s 2020: a new year, a new decade, and for many people a new opportunity to measure their expectations. It’s a time of reflection and a time of trying to come up with goals that you hope to obtain in a year’s time, even if resolutions don’t always work out for the best. But still, we keep trying, because for this one window of time we feel like there’s hope that things will be better the next time that ball drops. Maybe we aren’t coming out of one of our “worst” years, maybe we’re even coming out of one of our best – but even then we still want to try to make sure this next one’s better. And, for at least the first couple of months, most of us think we can.

Resolutions are a bit of a funny thing. We always want to make big, sweeping changes in our lives, but study after study shows we’re less likely to make those changes than we are to make smaller, more reasonable changes over time. We make general, feel good declarations, yet those same studies say that specifics are more likely to succeed. So, ideally, we want to make specific goals with defined milestones that can be achieved in steps.

Of course this means that my resolution for the year is to make sure every day counts and that I take advantage of more opportunities – because I’m terrible at taking advice.

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Identifiable Names

Though I’ve spent a few years writing my blog on this particular page and in this particular format, it’s likely no surprise to anyone that it wasn’t always this way. I’ve been writing nonsense on the internet for two decades in one form or another. For some that might date them, as no one wants to admit they’ve been writing articles for longer than some of their readers have been alive, but I’ve actually been doing it since I got access to my first computer. I got my start writing lengthy forum posts arguing with other teenagers about trivial things, but eventually moved on to writing in places where that was expected and no one had the ability to ban me for being a nuisance. Ever since then I’ve bounced from website to website and various pen names before eventually deciding to pull the trigger, reveal my real name, and come home.

Am I writing Catcher In The Rye now? Oooh boy…

But even this blog wasn’t originally posted to my personal website. Though I had the website at the time, I kept them separate for a while for reasons I cannot for the life of me remember anymore. And when I first started this blog, since it wasn’t actually hosted directly on my website, I needed to give it a title for people to see. In fact, that title is still there if you look at the top of one of the navigation bars. It was a little joke that I made long ago that some friends thought was amusing as I decided to call it “Dreams from Walnut Dust”.

So, of course, my very first entry had to explain what the hell that meant. (tl;dr – the only mind altering I get is from allergy medication)

Years down the line I’m a little bit better at naming things, I’ve written two novels, working on a third, and have written a lot more short stories and TTRPG campaigns than most people I know. Though a lot of my work toils in obscurity or was never released to the public, I have created dozens, if not hundreds of characters, alien races, countries, and whole worlds that require names. As they say, practice makes perfect. But that practice has taught me something that is difficult for a writer to accept.

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A Patchwork Soul Returns

When they revealed themselves to the world, they changed everything. Creatures of legend that were thought to be little more than myth and superstition came out of hiding to found a new nation for their kind and those who would be willing to live with them. The Republic of Argyre, founded on an artificial island they built in secret over half a century, would act as a safe harbor for the creatures now calling themselves “Alters”. But it wasn’t enough to just construct this haven, they needed to ensure the rest of the world would accept their kind as well. Realizing that not every Alter could reach their island, Argyre established the Alter Control Task Force – an international organization meant to act as police in Alter situations. These stories follow the ACTF and the Agents of Argyre.

Returning with new editions, a new format, and new covers, the Agent of Argyre series is back to tell the stories of the Seattle branch of the ACTF. And now, after the rerelease of Shards of Glass this July, we come to the return of the second book in the series: A Patchwork Soul.

Please follow me on Twitter for updates on where you can find it! In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt from the new edition:

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Shards of Glass Returns

When they revealed themselves to the world, they changed everything. Creatures of legend that were thought to be little more than myth and superstition came out of hiding to found a new nation for their kind and those who would be willing to live with them. The Republic of Argyre, founded on an artificial island they built in secret over half a century, would act as a safe harbor for the creatures now calling themselves “Alters”. But it wasn’t enough to just construct this haven, they needed to ensure the rest of the world would accept their kind as well. Realizing that not every Alter could reach their island, Argyre established the Alter Control Task Force – an international organization meant to act as police in Alter situations. These stories follow the ACTF and the Agents of Argyre.

Returning this summer with new editions, a new format, and new covers, the Agent of Argyre series is back to tell the stories of the Seattle branch of the ACTF – starting with the return of the first book in the series: Shards of Glass.

Please follow me on Twitter for updates on where you can find it! In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt from the new edition:

Continue reading Shards of Glass Returns

The Culture of Spoilers

One of the elements that separates humanity from the rest of the creatures on the Earth is our wonderful ability to use our language to craft works of fiction. From the legends of ancient mythology through to works of art found on the page and on the screen today, we’ve always had a talent at not only imagining other worlds for ourselves but making it possible to share those imagined worlds with each other. Gathered around a campfire, our most ancient of ancestors likely spent their evenings telling tall tales of the world around them either to entertain or explain the mysteries of nature. And, despite the power of that imagination, it’s nearly impossible to imagine there wasn’t someone around that campfire bitching about spoilers.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand. The relationship between the story teller and their audience is incredibly personal if done well. The story teller does everything they can to try to draw the audience in and the audience, if they’re invested, revels in being able to be pulled into that world. The idea that the experience could somehow be derailed by a third party is infuriating for some and that makes sense. But there’s a problem I’ve been noticing as of late:

We’re taking it all too far, and I’m not sure if we even have to…

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Language and Perception

Sometimes life throws events your way that defy not only your expectations but your understanding of reality. We never really expect accidents or sudden strokes of luck, but generally they fall within the domain of things your brain is capable of processing as “real”. However, there are some things that just sound so implausible that it requires reassessment of that reality. One of those happened recently when we found out that my extended family – an extended family consisting of truckers, housekeepers, and construction workers – might have been in the running for owning a substantial chunk of land in west Texas due to a distant relative that absolutely none of them had ever heard of. Effectively, a cliche came true: they had an uncle who died nearly 80 years ago and someone was looking for his living heirs.

Suddenly, everyone in the family was scrambling to figure out just what the hell was going on. No one had ever heard of this man, let alone of the fact that he apparently bought a few hundred acres in Texas around a century ago. He had no children, he left no will, and it wasn’t immediately apparent just who owned the land after he died. Various companies, hoping to identify just who exactly owned this land, tracked down every surviving branch of his family tree and contacted them to try to make a deal. Blindly searching for heirs, they were hoping that someone in my extended family would know who owned it today. Unfortunately for everyone, that family tree was a bit gnarled and we didn’t even know some branches existed. Let’s just say it got a bit weird.

I wish I could say that we got that all sorted out. However, to the best of my knowledge, the only way to know for a fact just what happened anymore would require a Ouija board and a very well paid legal team. What I can say is that it means nothing for me personally at this point. I’m so far removed from the man that, even if any of it somehow ended up in my hands, I would probably have just enough land to erect a tool shed and an outhouse so that I would have exactly two places to keep my shit.

Still, I try to find a positive spin on things. Despite everything, I can say that I at least learned a couple things along the way. First, I have a lot of cousins I had no idea ever existed. Second, the definition of “cousin” is fairly pliable and means different things to different people. And finally, after reading quite a few legal documents over the last couple months, communicating with lawyers gives a pretty solid insight into what it must be like to make contact with aliens.

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First Contact Protocols

It is one of the oldest plots in speculative fiction: our protagonist, through some fantastic means, has come into contact with an alien race for the very first time and is faced with the knowledge that we are not alone in the universe. Either the aliens we meet are so far beyond us that we have a difficult time adapting to their very presence, we come to meet them as equals, or (more rarely) we’re the advanced species who’s happened upon more primitive life. And while the details within these three categories are usually pretty diverse, there’s usually a flow chart within each of them that will show the general direction our story is going in. After all, while the specifics will always be different, there’s only a handful of outcomes to really be had: we’ll be friends, indifferent to each other, or…

And one of the common elements within all of these possible stories is that, if we are aware that contacting aliens is a possibility, there will be some sort of “first contact protocol” or a general order about how we’re to treat other cultures. These orders are very rarely complicated and will usually be a simple set of rules that everyone’s to follow with little room for interpretation (though our protagonists will generally ignore that part).

One of the most well known and duplicated of these orders is Star Trek’s Prime Directive, General Order 1, or “non-interference directive”. The Prime Directive is simple: Star Fleet (or whatever organization exists in your universe) is not to interfere with the “natural development” of an alien civilization. This has a lot of far reaching ramifications and moral quandaries in it (all of which make for good stories), but one thing always bothered a little about it. There have always been debates on the morality of the Prime Directive, which was kind of the point of it from a writing standpoint, but usually those debates have to do with the morality of action vs inaction. But one of my problems, one that isn’t talked about quite as often, has always been about the general timing – and a TV show recently got me thinking about it again…

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A Zero Sum Culture

One of the benefits of maturity is growing to have a new perspective on things that I didn’t in the past. It’s not that I’ve become particularly mature – I chose a profession dedicated to manipulating really complicated imaginary friends – but life experience colors your perceptions of reality even if you do everything you can to stay detached from it. When you’re young you can have all the intelligence to understand complicated ideas but none of the time and experience necessary to see all the facets of a subject. But as you gain life experience and grow, your perspective on things grows with you and eventually you start to recognize just how big of an ass you were as a kid.

Hell, sometimes you recognize how big of a dick you were just last week.

Over the last couple of years, one of the things I’ve come to gain new perspective on is how often criticism can evolve into something different than it was originally intended. We’ve all been in that situation where we wonder if we might have been too harsh on something, but lately I’ve started to realize just how much it actually impacts us on both a personal and cultural level. In an age of social media, when it’s so easy to organize a group around any project, idea, or fandom, it’s even easier for the criticism evolve and harder for people to recognize when it has. Even if it were just between two people within the group, the act of being within the group can sometimes lead to the critic becoming emboldened by the association.

And, essentially, there’s a point where criticism starts to cross the line into… obstructionism.

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