Our Latest Additions and Plans for 2023

MK Eidson here, aka Mike, owner and operator of Eposic. Happy New Year, 2023! I’ve got big plans for Eposic for the new year, but first, how about a recap of last year?

In 2022, we released Illegal Avatars, book 3 of the Head Hoppers GameLit/LitRPG series by yours truly and Emila H Thicke. We also released Huntress of Avaleor, a science fiction novelette of low-tech wit vs. high-tech smarts by Dave Eidson and myself. As of December 28, 2022, Illegal Avatars is available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited and is available for pre-order on other sites, due out there on April 1, 2023.

I’d hoped for Eposic to release more books in 2022, but plans were delayed due to bouts of vertigo putting me out of commission for several months. I’m better now, but still feeling off balance at times. I’ll write more about my vertigo on my author site, mkeidson.com, and/or my personal site, trollmystic.com.

Since I’m faring better now, the last two volumes of Head Hoppers are on track for release in spring 2023. They’re up for pre-order on Amazon at this time, both due out April 1, 2023.

Another Number Search Maze puzzle book is planned for 2023. I’d produced one in 2021, but issues with Amazon prevented its publication. I never figured out what the issue was, so that particular book won’t be released on Amazon. I’ll release another book in its place, if possible. The one I had planned may move to DriveThruFiction instead, assuming they don’t have the same issues as Amazon, or that they can tell me what to fix with the book. Amazon simply said there were issues with the interior of the file, without saying what the real issues were. Funny thing is, I used the same process to create that book as I used to create the other three puzzle books I published on Amazon, the only difference being the font size used. Supposedly Amazon allows a 7-point font, and that’s what I used. But there’s nothing else I can think of that might be the issue. So I’ll use a 9-point font to create the next puzzle book for Amazon, and hope that fixes the problem. If everything works out with Eposic selling my puzzle books on DriveThruFiction, I’m thinking of releasing all future ones there in both PDF and print versions.

Coming also in 2023, possibly mid-year, is a speculative fiction work by myself about the end of the world, with the working title Just Another Day of the Apocalypse. It’s still in the planning stages, but it will be a standalone story, probably long enough to qualify as a novel, but still only a quarter to a half as long as the books in the Head Hoppers series, so somewhere around 40,000 to 60,000 words.

Music-wise, we have plans for another Max Gumdrop album in 2023, with music composed and lyrics written by Dave Eidson. The album will be a “digital country” album, so it will be exciting to see how that develops. There has also been work done on a Max Gumdrop electronica EP. Three of the tracks for the EP are finished, and a fourth is in progress, waiting for me to find the time to get back to it. It might be just those four tracks on the EP. Or we might come up with another one or two….

I’ve had ideas rolling around in my head for an interactive fiction product for some time now, likely to be written in Flutter and released on DriveThruRPG and maybe other places. Maybe the Microsoft app store? Maybe Google Play? That project might see the light of day in the latter half of 2023. I’d like to publish a total of six novels or novellas in 2023, at least, counting the interactive fiction app above as one. We’ll see what happens.

I also have this idea for an online game similar to Wordle. I won’t say how it works until it goes live, so someone else won’t steal the idea and implement it first. I’ve also got an idea of how I might make puzzle books that are basically the reverse of the online game. I have a working prototype of the online game in play-testing now, and I’m playing it every day, right after playing Wordle and Quordle for the day. It’s working fine, but just needs some extra features, like tracking longest streak and current streak, or making it easy to share how one did on social media without giving away the solution. I’ll need to carve out a day or two to finish it up sometime. It won’t be this week, since I have other things to wrap up. For one, Ken St. Andre’s monstersmonsters.org site is waiting on me to set it up correctly….

Emilah is available to edit for me and is entertaining the notion of writing a standalone speculative fiction novella on her own this year, but she has informed me she isn’t interested in working on further GameLit/LitRPG stories. I understand her reasons, and I share some her feelings. Our stories are good, but they aren’t what the established GameLit/LitRPG target audience is looking for, and yet they’re too GameLit for non-GameLit readers. Neither Emilah nor I would mind writing more stories in our particular brand of GameLit, but if they can’t find an audience, it doesn’t make sense to bother. I’ll be sticking to the non-GameLit side of speculative fiction for probably all of 2023, at least. After the full Head Hoppers series has been released, if it seems the GameLit/LitRPG target audience warms up to it, then we’ll think about authoring other GameLit/LitRPG stories, or at least I will. If they don’t warm up to it then, we’ll be hard pressed to find a reason to write in the genre any further.

Last thing I’ll mention here are the coloring books I’m producing, a couple of which are currently available on Amazon. Check out my Amazon Author page to see all my books on their site, including the coloring books. If everything goes as I hope on DriveThruFiction, my coloring books will be released there as well, including in PDF, so customers can print them out at home and color them in. I’d like to do one coloring book each month, and believe I have the wherewithal to do it. But I’ll be a busy boy, and the royalties are very low, especially as print books on Amazon. They might do better on DriveThruFiction, so we’ll see….

So then… what’s your 2023 looking like? Hit me up on Twitter or Facebook and let me know. I’m @eposic on both.