Stardew Valley & a new book from me!

Preorders and the review team for the Potion Dealers is open!

Hello all!

I hope you are all well! At least here, spring weather has arrived and I know that while I do hate summer, those early days of spring are delicious enough to remind me of all the beauties of the world. It’s hard to be entirely unhappy when it’s cool yet sunny, breezy, and smells of everything waking up.

I’ve still been struggling with my health, and particularly, I’ve been feeling like Jekyll and Hyde. If you are a woman sensitive to your menstrual cycle you will already know there is a rhythm to the moods of it. And I’ve always been quite sensitive to it. Lately it’s just gotten SO. EXTREME. There are two different spots in the cycle that tend to feel the most emotionally and physically bad…and lately they’ve been just so, so horrible and debilitating with a wild list of symptoms. But when I hit the highs, I am SO high. Nothing bothers me or worries me. I’m in a creative euphoria ALL day, putting on records and dancing myself to a joyful sweat at midnight, barely even wanting to sleep.

When I feel bad, I don’t believe I ever felt so good and am deeply convinced I must be dying, and when I feel good, I don’t believe I ever felt so bad, and I start planning way too much, feeling entirely confident that I’ll be able to do All The Things, forgetting that sometimes I am losing an entire week every month to the bad times.

Welcome to 43, I guess. Perimenopause is wild and really destabilizing. I keep talking about it just to…well, to keep warning others I guess.

The past few days were very bad so I just let myself take a break and finally tried out Stardew Valley! I’ve been wanting to play it for YEARS, and I would always talk myself out of it because I knew it would be a time suck. But the other day we popped into GameStop, mainly for Dade to grab a game, and they had a used copy with the case and booklet, and it just seemed like a sign. It was time. I’m now 26 hours into it and not even done with the first year, so it is a time suck indeed, but it’s also relatively guilt-free dopamine. When Dade and I were playing Minecraft together many years ago, I had this theoretical perfect game envisioned that combined elements of Minecraft, Animal Crossing, and Harvest Moon, but with more treasure and surprise, and Stardew Valley is about as close as I imagine. I knew nothing about the background of the game. I didn’t even know what country it was developed in. So I was pleasantly surprised to see it was created by one single American, and I identified with this development story considerably.

Eric was a team of one. It took him four and a half years to design, program, animate, draw, compose, record, and write everything in the game, working 12-hour days, seven days a week. His budget was the part-time wage he made as an evening usher at the local stage theater.

Eric needed hundreds of lines of dialogue for the three dozen or so townsfolk you can interact with. (…) He never considered easier alternatives, even if sticking to his vision meant months of painstakingly boring and sometimes infuriating work. “Ultimately, I wanted the game world to feel like a living place. I wanted you to forget that it was a video game and to feel like these people had a life of their own.”

He knows Stardew Valley’s success was, in part, due to a lack of “PR bullshit.” With game number two, it’s no different. “I’m just making the game I want to make, in the style that I want, without worrying whether it’s going to be successful or not.”

—From Valley Forged: How One Man Made the Indie Video Game Sensation Stardew Valley, GQ

It was a good reminder for me, as I am still early in the journey of writing my Hidden Lands novels, that if you have that burning drive to create something personal and special and deep, and you are fortunate enough to have time and space to devote to it, it’s worth doing even if you never know if or when it will succeed. Because if no one ever participated in that sort of madness, we wouldn’t have Stardew Valley.

On that note, I have a new Hidden Lands novel on preorder!

https://books2read.com/u/3GgWEQ

Alfred Bravider is the heir to a powerful family of potion dealers. His passion for magical history has helped him talk his way into the cottages, lairs, and penthouse apartments of sorcerers who usually shun visitors—only to lose clients because they don’t want to work for his greedy, bureaucratic father.

But Alfred’s position has always been in doubt since he was bllnded as an infant by an unfortunate curse. No matter—Alfred’s father has finally the cure: the daughter of the sorceress who cast the curse (specifically, a few drops of her blood).

Livonya Orlestin has never left her tiny village to the far north—never seen a city—never had an adventure. Her uncle always warned her to stay put. After all, her parents had adventures and got themselves killed. But now adventure has appeared at her door. Compared to the local farm boys, Alfred has tales of travel and treasure hunting. Turns out nothing gets Livonya’s heart fluttering like a man with his own magical archive.

She also wonders why he wants the curse lifted when he’s been blind all his life and seems so confident. He’s insulted that his parents are so fixated on curing him. He knows what they really care about—preserving their image. Livonya wonders…does he need to work for his father at all? Alfred has never met anyone who barely knows what the rules should be and questions them so freely, but with a woman like this at his side, he might be willing to break them—and deal with the misfits, outsiders, and eccentrics of the magical world to build his own potion-dealing empire.

This story was originally published as a young adult novel called the Vengeful Half, but it was never meant to be a young adult, and it’s felt amazing to rewrite it without thinking “how must I change this to sell it?”

These characters are probably the nearest to my heart of ALL my characters, which is already a tall order, considering how much I love everyone else. And as usual, if you are following the Hidden Lands books, each series stands alone, but everything ties in to everything else. This book has a cameo appearance of Grau and Velsa and this series will also eventually answer the question of what happened with Grau’s sister.

If you would like to join the review team for it, please let me know!

Now that it’s done, however, once I’ve edited it, I swear I am going to try and focus my attention on the Broken Queen sequel, The Shattered King. I will feel much much better once I have three complete binge-able series that will also give a better sense of what this world is and where it’s going. You can be assured that this is my Stardew Valley and I will do everything possible to complete this entire saga!

xo,

Lidiya

P. S. If you played Stardew Valley, who did YOU marry??