Author Diary: Novelist, Thanks to BoardGameGeek

While I was a writer well before BoardGameGeek, it really is this very site that launched me on the path to traditional novelist. We'll skip the part of the story where I majored in writing, always wanted to be a writer, and had completed a novel-length work in high school because you hear that kind of thing all the time.

Let's start where you, the BGG user, come in. I registered way back. That's right: The Dirk Ages. (Some of you think that's a typo.) Being a writer, I wrote a ton of content. I had a hundred reviews up fairly quickly, which put me in the top 10 most prolific reviewers at the time. Lots of thumbs up, lots of notice.

Being "one of the top reviewers", at least by volume, meant companies sent me games to review. That became playtesting for a bunch of titles, like a few waves of some little game called Heroscape, which happened to be my first (and 100th) review. I was found by the designers because of my write-ups. This kind of thing spread. I think Star Trek: Fleet Captains expansions came next. Oh, and I'm the guy who figured out what flavor text goes on each card in The Lord of the Rings Dice Building Game. (I watched all of the Extended Editions over two days to do that — it nearly killed me.) This turned into game development, where people trusted me enough to tell them how to tweak their designs.

Somewhere among all these gigs writing flavor text and rulebooks, I did a session report of boutique fantasy miniatures game Nin-Gonost. I wrote it as if it were a scene in a fantasy novel.

Alain Henner, president of Adiken and producer of Nin-Gonost, read that piece. That was the catalyst. He hired me to write fiction for every character in the game, new rules, scenarios, everything — for actual decent money.

I've done flavor text, fiction, and scenario design for dozens of games since then. The most recent "big fish" is Oathsworn: Into The Deepwood that hit for $1.9 million on Kickstarter. Tens of thousands of words of that game came from me, along with work from NYT bestseller Aaron Dembski-Bowden of the Games Workshop Black Library. James Cosmo, who played Jeor Mormont in Game of Thrones, narrated my words. I was touring internationally, giving seminars on gaming, writing, world-building, and all sorts of fun things. I posted articles on Medium.com, earning money and the Top Humor Writer Badge for a few months. It's possible you've read a few as they're often about gaming.

Please note that you are reading this journey in a few paragraphs. This was nearly twenty years of building a writing résumé on BGG.

Fast forward to Pandemic 2020: I got COVID real bad in April, first wave. Spoiler: I survived — but with bad aftereffects. I was struck with a terrible fear of crowds and human contact. My wife asked me the important question: What do you want to do next?

The answer was easy: Become a full-time writer.

She said, "Okay."

I got some jobs writing articles remotely and ghostwriting science fiction for publishers that release tons of novels under assumed names. This gave me excellent experience with editors and the process and machinery of the publishing world at large. Time to strike out on my own. No game. No IP. No assumed name.

Of course, everyone out there jumped in to say that it's impossible to get an agent for traditional publication and that I would end up self-publishing, lost in the sea of books on Amazon where a new book is published every TWELVE FREAKING SECONDS.

First, I had to write a book that would snag an agent.

I had done my ghostwriting, which is very much writing to what you know the audience wants to read. I was used to writing for games, where a huge fantasy history has to grab your attention in the single paragraph at the front of the rule book. I had written flavor text in which you had less space than in a single tweet. All this boardgaming background was serving me. My roots were firmly in sci-fi and fantasy. I just needed a hook...

The lead couple meets at a support group for the possessed.

Boom. Hook.

That line immediately tags the work in the reader’s mind as a quirky romance, urban fantasy, horror story. The title: Unlawful Possession. See, I told you I was a humor writer. I knew it needed certain elements: Monsters. Mystery. Humor. Sex. Violence. All the good stuff you see warnings for at the start of a Netflix show. I went and wrote that book.

Yes, it really is that easy. Here's the steps to write a novel: Write a word. Repeat 75,000 times.

I had gotten enough experience with game background fictions and ghostwriting that the novel was nice and easy. It took two months. I then needed an agent. Research, research, research. I sent a few messages out with that hook. I got positive responses. I sent some chapters to a handful of agencies. By the end of 2020, a hop, jump and referral later, I was signed. My agent shopped around to a few publishers and found me a traditional deal at a small press. "Traditional deal", for those not in the industry, means I pay for nothing. I get assigned editors, readers, and artists, all at the expense of someone else. This is opposed to hybrid- or self-publishing where you have to pay for your own team. I'm a new writer, so I figured that small press deal was spot on. Signed.

The publisher called me on the phone. They said the piece was kind of literary and deeply thematic — their editor wanted more. They wanted the book to be the lead-in to a series. Oh. Um. Okay? Right there, on the phone, we came up with my new series name: Riftsiders. I had to edit the book to change it a bit to be this new open-ended starter sequence. Book two was submitted to the publisher for review before book one was for sale.

That's how it all built up to Riftsiders: Unlawful Possession, with a release date of April 18, 2022.

And I need to thank everyone who ever read a bit of my nonsense here on BGG, gave me a thumbs up, or said, "You write good". BGG even gets a bit of a cameo on the book as a "geeky boardgame website" that one of the characters visits. So — thank you. All of you. It's been a wild ride, and I hope to take you further along with me. Your support is deeply appreciated, whether or not you go ahead and spend your hard-earned bucks on my book rather than a game.

Paul DeStefano
Riftsiders