A friend emailed me back in September and said, “Hey, you’ve been really quiet, are you okay?” I responded that I was spending too much time thinking about what it means to be an ordinary German in… I don’t know, 1937, maybe?… and that it was vastly impairing my ability to write blog posts. I don’t want to add negativity, pain, darkness to the world, but it’s pretty impossible to live in the world right now–especially Florida, of all places–and not feel like anything less would be disrespectful to the suffering people are going through.

People like my neighbors. Every time I walk by the house two doors up, I send them a little wish for safety. They used to have a thriving landscaping business, at least two or three trucks, and every morning when I was walking Sophie, I’d nod at all the guys getting ready to go to work. Now… the house isn’t boarded up, but there are no signs of life. I’d like to believe that they’ve taken all their hard-earned money and gone to some place sunny where they’re drinking tropical drinks on the beach, but… my imagination doesn’t stretch that far.

That said, my imagination did not stop. For the past eight months or so, I’ve been writing a story and posting chapters to Royal Road. Today I posted the ebook to my brand-new sparkly Patreon site.

The story’s not like anything I’ve written before. It’s in a genre called System Apocalypse LitRPG, which is… well, not a genre I expect you to be familiar with, to be honest. Wikipedia, much to my surprise, didn’t have an entry for it, but here’s what google had to say:

A System LitRPG is a subgenre of Literary Role-Playing Game (LitRPG) where a, often, magical or technological framework (the “System”) imposes explicit, quantifiable video-game mechanics—such as character stats, experience points (XP), levels, skills, and quests—onto the story’s world and characters. The System serves as a fundamental, rule-based structure driving character progression and world-building.

My specific story is called Challenge Scenario: Thorn’s Edge, Book One, and the description goes:

Olivia Thorne was declaring war on her bougainvilleas when the System arrived.

She missed the announcement. Her earbuds were in, her shovel was raised, and she was too busy trying to excavate a root the size of her arm to notice the multiverse welcoming humanity to its grand apocalyptic integration. By the time she looked up, a giant squirrel was attacking her dog.

So she attacked it. With the shovel.

Then a voice spoke in her head, a blue screen popped up in front of her face, and she was yanked into a 72-hour survival scenario in a monster-filled forest with 23 strangers and no way home.

In a world where mana is rewriting the rules of reality, the System wants her to fight, level up, pick a class, and earn abilities. Olivia just wants to keep herself and her dog alive long enough to get home.

A cozy apocalypse story about dogs, found family, and the radical act of caring about strangers when the System is keeping score.

System apocalypse litRPG books tend to be bleak and this is definitely not the lightest thing I’ve ever written. But my description for Royal Road includes the line, “A reluctant heroine who becomes extremely OP and remains faintly baffled about it”. OP, in gamer terms, means over-powered. This is a fantasy in which an ordinary woman who just wants to take care of her dogs, go camping once in a while, and live a pleasant life winds up kicking the bad guys around the block a few times instead. It is simultaneously pretty darn dark and also really fun.

It also has all of the elements of the genre, so levels, abilities, magic spells, battles with goblins, and if that’s not your speed, I totally get it. I myself only discovered the genre because of the hurricane back in October 2024, when I downloaded the entire free fantasy list of Amazon in preparation, said ‘what the heck is this?’ about the system lit books, and then became completely obsessed.

Anyway, it is only available on Patreon right now. You don’t have to become a member or subscriber — it’s just a straight purchase, $5, to download the ebook. The ebook should work on any ebook reader, but you need to use the Amazon Send to Kindle page to get it on your Kindle.

(But why are you not just posting it to Amazon? Because Amazon’s algorithms are now penalizing indie authors who are not exclusive to Amazon and I… have an issue with that. I probably will post it to Amazon eventually, but maybe not for a while. And if I can do well enough on Patreon–yes, yes, long shot, I know–I probably won’t.)

Anyway, I hope that you are doing well, managing to avoid doom-scrolling, and living a good life, despite the insanity raging all around us. And if you’d like to escape for a while, Challenge Scenario is a fun ride, and will be followed by The Rift in My Backyard within a month or so. Thanks for reading!