DJ Bodden

DJ Bodden

Melissa: [00:00:00] This is by our country. And I’m Melissa searcher today on the show, I get to talk with a creator about his new Kickstarter campaign for gentleman’s war, DJ Bodden. Welcome to the.

DJ Bodden: Thanks so much. Thanks for

Melissa: having me. Yeah, absolutely. As we were, we were just discussing you’re in Switzerland and I’m just curious, like what, what brings you there?

Are you, were you born there? Is that we have family.

DJ Bodden: So I I was born in the Cayman islands just about a, an hours flight south of Miami and the Sydney D of Jamaica, but much smaller. And when I was about three years old my father had an accident and he drowned and my mom wanted to start over And so it was she was a Delaware born, Georgia raised a girl and she could have gone home to her family and instead she decided to go in the exact opposite direction and traveled to the Southern coast of France.

And that’s where I grew up. Wow.

Melissa: That’s awesome. Very exciting. [00:01:00] So did you, you grew up mostly there. Did you come back to the U S at all from time to time?

DJ Bodden: I used to come back. So, so my mom was a widow at this point, so she’s a single mom. She, she didn’t want me hanging around the house during the summers.

So usually I’d go out to camps and, and, and, and kind of school trips. But I also spent a lot of time with my family and my mom’s family was kind of spread between Georgia. And the, the kind of Bellevue area of, of Washington Seattle I had an aunt who worked for Microsoft and another two uncles who worked for Boeing.

So, between that in, in Atlanta, I spent a lot of my summers in the.

Melissa: Wow. Okay. Very cool. That’s a cool upbringing as well. You know, it probably helps you a lot as the creator you know, finding inspiration you know, overseas and you know, probably a lot of cool little places that you’ve discovered over there.

So tell me about, so you have gentleman’s war, which is a, a tabletop card game. Correct. Awesome. Now, Tom, tell us about that. Is [00:02:00] this, so this is a Kickstarter. That’s going till November 5th and yeah. Tell us about the game.

DJ Bodden: So the game was something first of all, th the Kickstarter, you can, you can find it at gentleman’s war.com.

So that’s G N T L E M a N S w a r.com. And that will redirect you to the Kickstarter page. You can also search for that same term on kickstarter.com. And gentleman’s war is actually two things. One it’s a 52 card and two joker cardiac. That you can use for any card game you want, whether it’s a, you know, they’re standard sized poker cards.

And each individual card is, is just gorgeously illustrated by a, an artist that we work with. And so they go through four suits and each of the suit is a different kind of fantasy faction. If you will. So we have thieves, we have inquisitors, we have monsters and we have dark elves. And so each card is a, you know, your standard two through eight of, [00:03:00] of that suit heart spades clubs and diamonds.

And then they also have a little flavor text under them and really neat picture. And it all ties together. In terms of the game itself gentleman’s war is, is also kind of an amped up version of the game of war. So in war, the basic rule is high card wins and equal cards battle. Right. And so what we did is we said, okay, Okay, that that’s a classic it’s, it’s basic, it’s fast.

You know, kids can play this. How do we amp this up a notch? And then the way we came up with it was I, I was a Marine and I was in Afghanistan in 2011 on my second tour. And we were sitting around waiting for a plane out of there. And we had a deck of cards and that’s where gentleman’s war, which at the time we call it, city of knives was, was kind of born.

And, and we started playing war and we started throwing new rules in as we went along. And the first one was if HyperCard has won that around and you have a card to con her cards under, after the round is played, you can actually assassinate the high card. [00:04:00] So high card doesn’t always win. And that was the first rule we came up with.

Melissa: Very interesting. Now, why did you decide to. Incorporate the regular playing card style as well.

DJ Bodden: Well, and, and, you know, honestly, maybe that’s a mistake because I, I think sometimes when you, you pack too much into a product, it makes it harder to grasp. But what, what we wanted to do is we, we had written this game.

I’m a, I’m a writer also. I write in lit RPG. I write Fantasy and a video game type books, and we’d written the game into the game world. So we had several elements that we could bring together. One was this kind of crazy game of war with assassinations and bodyguards and escalating battles where you could.

Literally, it has a whole deck of cards on the table at once win or lose on one, one draw. And then, and also a game in which she was encouraged. So, you know, again, we were bored and, and, you know, just a bunch of guys sitting around and trying to [00:05:00] come up with something ridiculous to do, to pass the time.

And we said, you know, The funnest part of poker sometimes. And the funnest part of playing cards is not necessarily playing by the rules, but it’s finding ways to cheat. And thinking back at all the movies where, you know, someone pulls an ACE out of their sleeve and the other guy, you know, points to them and says cheater.

And then, you know, it’s pistols and the main street we bought, that’s fun. We should be able to do that. And we want to let the player do the fun thing. So, so that was one thing. And then the second thing was. Well, if we’re going to give people these cards and you know, like us, they might be somewhere, they might be bored.

They might be playing with someone who doesn’t know the rules of gentleman’s war, or they, they have, you know, they traditionally play poker with their friends or, or what have you. And, and we thought, well, why don’t we make it so that they can also play other games with this and still have these kinds of really cool looking cards that, you know, some of them are just cool looking.

Some of them are funny. Like the twos of each suit are, are generally. Pretty hilarious. The two of [00:06:00] inquisitor of inquisitors is a, is a a snitch. He’s an informant. So it’s what appears to be a blind old man, but he’s lifting up his eyepatch and under his eyepatch his eyes virtually fine. And then you know, we, we have a Patsy in the, the thieves union who is basically the fall guy.

Who’s going to take the blame for whatever the other thieves have done. So, we, we tried to put a lot of humor into this. Hey, we can make something kind of really neat. We can create a bunch of art for our universe, which is always nice. That’s we usable and we’ll make something really cool that people who just want to play cards can use.

And then the other thing was, you know, building something into the universe where, when we think of things like the Witcher and having lint and world of Warcraft and having hearth world and, and, you know, being able to loop that idea of a game within a game, let’s just kind of.

Melissa: Yeah, very meta that’s very cool.

And so would you consider yourself, like, have you always been a lover of, of gaming and in that whole genre?

DJ Bodden: Oh, yeah. I mean, I remember when my mom got remarried to this like [00:07:00] big Australian rugby rugby player who probably should have turned me into a jock. And instead I used to steal his old Tandy laptop computer that he brought in from work and I play Frogger on it.

So, you know, it’s the, the thing with kids, they, they learn from you, but never the things that you want them to and then, you know, kind of growing up, I always had a computer. I played a lot of games and then you know, even when I graduated to kind of being able to do the adventure stuff in the, in the real world, in the Marine Corps, you know, I was jumping out of helicopters and flying around.

Doing all that kind of crazy, crazy stuff. I still enjoyed gaming. And it’s also kind of something that really connects me to my high school friends between board games and video games. You know, we used to have Mario cart weekends, and it became such a social aspect for me growing up that I think it’s really important.

To connect with people over conflict. That’s not conflict, you know?

Melissa: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great way to pass the time too. I mean, especially as a kid, you know, I know they always say like, oh, you know, TV was like the [00:08:00] big thing, right. Where if we watch TV too much, you know, our parents for like the whole, it rods, your brains thing.

And then when gaming came out, you know, be like in every household, you know, with the Nintendo and everything Parents were probably like wishing we had just stuck to TV. And at that point it was gaming. It was like a lot more of an expensive habit. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, definitely. So when you were, you know, plotting this game out and I mean, you know, seriously not when you were just like messing around, but when you decided you’re going to make this product, did you play any other games to kind of like get a feel for how different games are structured?

DJ Bodden: Well, you know, I, I read a couple of games on game design and, and that wasn’t just like, it was set around board games of kind of the European style. But, but it was really kind of, the, the core concept that I drew away from that is again, Let the player do the fun thing. And, and how can we do that with just a deck of cards?

You know, to a certain extent, I, I played a little magic, the gathering when I was a kid I collected [00:09:00] some more Hemmer, 40 K collectibles and each time for me, it was just kinda like, I started seeing how much this was costing and I just backed away from it. And so part of the reason we built it around.

You know, a standard deck of cards both when we were making our deck. And when you were making the game is this idea that, you know, some people can’t afford to just drop 20, 30 bucks on a deck of cards, so let’s make it so they can play the game anyway. And so part of the Kickstarter is actually.

Sign up for the lowest tier. And we’ll give you a 40 page manual that tells you all about the history behind the game in, in the fictional world you know, it tells you about the different cards, tells you about how to play, how to cheat, how to, you know, yell at your friends and have a good time. Because we thought it was important that, you know, ultimately me and kind of, the, the creator of the fictional universe James Hunter, what we wanted to do was.

Help people have a good time, you know, and I think that’s come out as we play tested this, you know, I, I think he the first time I explained the rules to him and we did like a little simulated game on tabletop simulator [00:10:00] online. Cause he was, he was in Kentucky. I was in. And Switzerland. And my other friend was in Portugal and we were all playing together in the middle of COVID.

And so, he, he took that and we, we, you know, it’s pretty easy to pick up, obviously, you know, you basic rules of war and then just a little bit more ridiculousness piled on top. But he took that and he then took it the next time he had to get together with his parents. And one of his nieces, who’s like five years old.

The older parents and the niece to play. And I want to say that within like 15 minutes, she threw her cards down called them all cheaters and liars and stomped away from the table. And that’s exactly what we want to inspire in these games.

Melissa: Oh, it’s hilarious. She’s like, I know that this is wrong. Like leave it to a child to call you out.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. That’s so funny. Well that’s cool because I think are you familiar? There’s a, there’s a card game. It’s like a drinking game called asshole. Have you ever played.

DJ Bodden: I have heard of [00:11:00] that. I’ve never played it. I don’t think. Or maybe I have, and I just don’t remember, which is probably even more worrying.

Melissa: We’re a good thing. Yeah. If you don’t remember, it’s one of those games where, you know, it, we always say at the end of it, like we’re never playing the same again because everyone’s fighting. By the end of it. But yeah, it’s like this, if I remember correctly, it’s not a long time, but I’m like, somebody is like the president and they get to kind of like make rules and break them.

And then everyone else has to kind of do their bidding and you’re trying to like become the asshole essentially, or the, or the president, but it’s, you have to drink at certain times too. And so just get ridiculous. I start fighting and arguing and like not talking to each other afterwards for hours. And it’s just one of those games that it’s addicting because then as soon as like, time has passed, you’re like, oh, we should, we should play as well.

I think we had fun last time.

DJ Bodden: Like, we, we, we were doing another play test this time. It was in dragon con, which which actually went this year in Atlanta and about [00:12:00] 40,000 people there. So we, we decided to break out the cards and we had some good reactions from it, but we had you know, a couple other veterans sitting around one guy called Joe Dan, one guy called Zach who’s like this massive 240 pound just.

Brick wall of a man and I’m sitting there and watching him and James play. And every time James discards a card into his discard pile, Zack is reaching under his AOL elbow and stealing the discard pile and folding it into his own. And it just like this goes on for a couple of hands. And then James finally.

You know, realizes it and he walks away from the table because he’s lost half his cards, you know? So, yeah, I mean that, that, that’s ultimately like the kind of memories we want to create with us. And I think it’s, it’s, it’s exactly that, you know, it’s maybe not what you’re going to sit down and play every time.

But it’s so easy to learn and it’s. You know, it, it’s so funny in terms of the reactions, the interrelations that you get between people that it’s just a really great way to break the ice. And it’s a great way to, to have fun with, with [00:13:00] friends that you’ve been, you’ve known for a long time and and don’t mind getting hit by.

Right.

Melissa: That sounds really cool, actually. So I’m looking at like your tears on the Kickstarter and it’s pretty like, there’s an option for anyone really at any like level, because you know, to start. Basically 25, if you want that, the deck which is a great price for the manual, you know, and the doc together.

And then, you know, you go all the way up just, and you keep adding really cool stuff to each tier, which is awesome. And you have like a pretty big one at the end there. The last one. The $9,000 pledge. That’s what, what does that all entail? Like what do they get with that?

DJ Bodden: So we have no idea. We, we don’t actually, I mean, it’s almost a dare to see if anyone would actually pick this one up.

You know, a little bit of this is the joke you know, that, that someone would be overpowered level 9,000. But you know, what we, what we said basically is if someone buys that tier we’ll, we’ll spend the money back on them and you know, we’ll fly them out. We’ll take them to dinner. We’ll play some games.

Gentleman’s war. We’ll talk about stories. You know, I, I think we’re pretty [00:14:00] flexible in terms of making sure that the person feels like they got their money’s worth, but also they’d help you know, kind of, our project, which we think is a great project, come to fruition and. You know, if someone wants to drop that on the table, we will, we will try to make sure that it’s worth their while and they get some good memories from it.

But, but really, you know, we, again, we, we tried to make it so that everyone could participate. You know, there’s that tier below the 25. You know, you, you don’t have 25 to spare right now. That’s fine. You can get the manual for 10 bucks. You can go out and play. And you can use, you know, kind of regular playing cards.

You can also get the, you know, there there’s tiers that are a little bit higher, but the individual cost of the card decks is lower. So if you have a couple of friends and you want to pitch in together you know, you can get four card decks, I think for 19 bucks is what it comes down to. 19 bucks a piece.

So, yeah, we, we, we tried to make it accessible.

Melissa: That’s great. And then have you, is this the first card game you’ve created? I know you said you were an author as well, but is this like the first, your first card

DJ Bodden: back? Absolutely. It is the first card deck. And it’s [00:15:00] the first one that we kind of put together.

We we’ve been thinking of other suits. You know, there’s one of the upper tiers as well that lets you get drawn by our artists. So we’ll, we’ll go as authors we’ll come in, we’ll help you design your character. Within this fictional world and, and we’re, we’re happy to have our artists work through and do your portrait as part of the cards.

And then what we were thinking is, you know, this is, this is a video game world, a little bit like Skyrim or Baldur’s gate or the Warcraft. So what we were thinking is that players, human players, who joined the game are called travelers in this universe. And we were thinking of making a suit called the travelers, which would be.

Real people and various things, and, and that would be an additional suit. And then we have two other suits that are kind of in the story that we could bring in which, which include the Roman Legion, which is kind of, well, a Roman themed. Even though they have, you know, sourcers and mages and. And CJ engineers.

And then also we, we could bring in any number of other factions that are mentioned in the story. I mean, the, the fictional universe is 21 books today about to go to 23 by [00:16:00] the end of the year. And it just keeps growing. So there’s, there’s a lot of material to draw. Wow. That’s

Melissa: amazing. How long does it take for you to, to make, you know, to develop and like literally from the start to the final product?

Like how long does that

DJ Bodden: take? Well, it it’s, it’s you talking about the books? Are you talking about the game,

Melissa: the game itself? Making the cards, you know, with the art and doing the manual and everything, and literally getting them printed and packaged, like what is, how long has that

DJ Bodden: process? So from the day that the project gets funded to the day that we actually send all this up out, it’s probably going to be a you know, four months to be conservative and at least two months, because that’s just how long the printing company takes.

To produce a card run once they’ve accepted the files and everything’s in you know, in terms of making the art itself. I want to say we worked on it for the better part of a year. You know, where each week we do between one and three cards So, you know, you figure, and sometimes, you know, [00:17:00] the artists had to take a vacation too, so yeah, he need a little life.

And he didn’t just work on us, you know, he had, he’s a, he’s a pretty accomplished comic book designer So, he had other projects. So, you know, between that, you know, I think, you know, 40, 50 weeks is probably not that unheard of. And then the first time I actually, so we, we played the game for the first time with a bunch of Marines in 2011, I wrote it up.

As a, a game concept in 2013 I wrote it into a book in 2018 and then, you know, beginning of 2021, we started thinking, okay, let’s do this. Let’s let’s make it real.

Melissa: Now the, the book series you were talking about, that was a, who was that written?

DJ Bodden: So, it’s a multi-author universe a little bit like you know, world of Warcraft or forgotten realms or or the star wars novels where the, the first series that was written was written by an author called James A.

Hunter. And he’s a former [00:18:00] Marine machine gunner who, who kinda got out of the Marine Corps. He was doing mission work in Thailand living in a house with a dirt floor. And he just, you know, decided one day I’m going out of my mind. I need to do something. And then he started like with this old mechanical typewriter on the floor of this house living in, in, you know, a not very nice part of Thailand.

And, and, you know, he cranked out his first book and like all first time authors All the first time authors who put their first work out there. You know, I mean, I think some people needle, you know, needle away at it for 10 years and then they come out and boom, it’s, you know, the next best American novel James and I just put our stuff out there and bared our hearts and got nailed to trees for it.

But but I think you know, we got better and we kept at it and for the past, you know, six years we’ve been writing books he’s, he’s put out many more than me because he just went all in and did this full-time from the get-go. And I kept the day job and I think now I’m at let’s see, 4, 4, 4 I’m at about [00:19:00] 12 and to Anthem.

Books.

Melissa: Wow. Good for you. That’s awesome. Yeah, it is a hard business. I’ve I’ve written as well. I’m an author and I have nine books out and I know it’s really hard, especially when you release your first one, you know, because you grow so much as a writer throughout your career. And usually the first book is, can be cringe-worthy for a lot of people, you know?

And you’re just putting yourself out and being so vulnerable. It’s very very scary. So as you were saying about how you, you kind of like put it out and and then. Maybe get the response you wanted, but you know, how do you deal with that? How did you bounce back and just go, you know what I’m going to, I’m going to write another

DJ Bodden: one.

So, you know, the very first book that I wrote not the first book that I published, the very first book that I wrote. I was finishing up that same tour in Afghanistan. And we actually did a pretty good job of it. And by that, I mean that the area that we were in had gone. You know, there are no more firefights.

There are no new IETS. I mean, there were areas that you just didn’t go and both locals and the Marines knew not to go there, not to walk in those spots, but for the most [00:20:00] part, we, we handed over a pretty peaceful area to the next unit. And so normally, you know, the next unit will come. A week or two early, and then you’ll have one week to show them how to do the job.

One week of watching them, how to do the job, watching them do the job that you’ve been doing for seven months. And then you leave with, with a certain amount of transition time. And, you know, the guy who was replacing me, he came out with the early group. And by the time, you know, we could pass. He was like, listen, man, you’re crowding me, get out of here.

And so I went back to my. And I pulled out a computer and I wrote my first book in, in the space of two, three weeks. And it was just terrible. Like, I, I, I, you know, the, I didn’t have the concepts of plot. I didn’t have, you know, I, I grew up in Europe, so my, my understanding and writing of English.

Pretty decent, but a lot of it was just from books I’d read. So, you know, I had some gaps definitely on grammar, you know, I never formally learned English grammar. It was all, you know, hard knocks [00:21:00] and Strunk and white and trying to catch up. And, and I, I finished it and I was pretty, you know, proud of it and okay with it.

And so, I send it off to a real editor, like a real. Kind of semi-retired tread pub editor and I paid I want to say a thousand bucks for him to go through and it came back with more red on the page than black, at least in my perception, you know, he had a thick red pen too. And how did I bounce back from that?

I actually looked at that and I was like, this is awesome. Because there is so much for me to learn. And I, I never put that book out to, to be fair. I, I, I, I knew that it was too far broken to fix in terms of plot and structure and there was some stuff missing. So I actually spent the next. I want to say two years writing short stories, submitting them, getting rejected over and over again.

Reading them to friends, getting to the point where people cringed when I asked them to read something at one point my wife bless [00:22:00] her heart told me, you know, I just don’t give a crap about your characters. And I’m so grateful she did that actually. Because I was super stimulated by that. I was like, okay, it’s the characters, that’s the problem.

Right. You know, I went from my book is the problem too. I don’t care about your characters. That’s easy. I’m going to pick up five books on how to make more engaging characters. So, so nowadays I actually have readers comment pretty consistently in my reviews that my secondary characters feel so fleshed out.

They don’t necessarily know who to throw away and who to keep. And some of my readers, favorite characters are in fact secondary characters. So I took that lesson to heart and I think that that’s the beauty of like doing something that you’re passionate about. Right. It’s just, you just dig in and you get good and you keep shining it up and adding more detail.

And one day you look at it and you’re like, Wow. I’ve come a long way and that’s just [00:23:00] awesome.

Melissa: Yeah. That’s really a great feeling and yeah, I definitely agree with all of that and reading those path books really help. I mean, even nine novels in, I still, you know, I’m taking courses and we can always get better and develop our, our pros essentially.

Right. Yup. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, you have I’m looking at your Amazon page right now. It looks like you have the Zach Landstrom series is that. Yup. Yeah. The star born arrows spoken. Number one on Amazon while you have 118, pretty like four and five star reviews. That’s really cool. Thanks. That

DJ Bodden: was the book I wanted to write 10 years ago.

You know, that, that was the one I wanted to write a scifi, epic. You know, I, you know, people ask me what inspires me to write sometimes. And especially if I’m going through a dry spell, the, the same thing always drives me back. I read something. Or I, I watched something on the TV or as a movie and it’s just bad.

Like, man, I could write something better than this. And then I try to [00:24:00] and, and I think, you know, I’ve, I’ve gained a little bit more appreciation for, for good commercial fiction over the years. Like now I try to, instead of saying, something’s bad, I try to say, this is how they could have fixed that.

And then it’s been gratifying. Slowly slowly over time that nowadays when I say this is how they could have fixed that the people who hear it, whether the writers are not saying, oh, no, that would actually make that much better. So, so that, that, that again has been neat, but you know, I, I think I wrote Zach Landstrom.

You know, on the one hand I’d been reading, I read a lot of Warhammer, 40 K, which is super grim, dark, like in the, the cold dark of the future. There’s only war and it’s a little bit tongue in cheek about that, but it’s definitely a pessimistic universe and I didn’t want. Star Trek was too optimistic, right?

I mean, we have societies with no money and everything’s gonna be fine. And the good guys always gonna win in the end and someone’s going to die, but they’re going to be reborn and, and you know, that was too much. And then there was star wars [00:25:00] and I love star wars. I really like star wars, video games and books, but the movies just it’s just been like every time my heart gets.

All full of hope and brimming and joy. And then they, they just bring it out of me except for rogue one rogue one was a fantastic and so I watched rogue one and I watched the movies after it and I was like, you know what, now it’s time. It’s time. I want to write my own scifi story. And I didn’t do it right away.

I went to the small press publisher that I work with and I laid a 50 page PowerPoint on them saying, you know, this is my plan. And it, it, I wanted to do something that multiple authors could write in. I wanted to do something big. You know, I was, I was talking on a panel the other day. They were talking about, you know, how do you.

The rules of your universe. Cause especially in scifi and fantasy, you know, rules and systems are super important. And, and I said you know, the, the question was, how do you stop the rules of your universe from just growing into this like Akira size monster and [00:26:00] swallowing you hole? And the, the, the rule I always try to cry is big universe, small character, right?

So you can have super meaningful characters. They can change the worlds they live in. Two star systems over there needs to be like the ability for people to say, yeah, I never heard of you. And, and that lets you build something that really has scope. And so I did the PowerPoint and I read through David Weber’s honor verse because Again, I gained a respect for commercial fiction and people, you can just keep a series going for good Lord, 15 novels, 19 novels.

I think there there’s an art to that, that, that I haven’t quite mastered. But I think it’s just fantastic to be able to keep someone in that world. And and then I wrote the star born air and the star born air is basically your standard chosen one story flipped on its head. It’s you know, the, the story starts in this world called politics and in politics.

Based loosely on a futuristic version of Plato’s Plato’s Republic, where civil [00:27:00] servants are, are on the whole pretty honest, and they want to work for the common good and people have their kind of place in society. And there’s this kind of dynasty of reluctant tyrants. Governed the planet since the cologne, the day the colony was first founded to two present day, 3000 years later.

And the air to this planetary governorship who has been raised from childhood to be this perfect ruler, if you will basically finds out that his whole society is built on this. And the secret is without any spoilers. The key to a loss piece of technology, that’s been hidden somewhere in the star cluster.

And so instead of becoming the next governor and going to his nest next desk job as a you know, a mid-level official. Runs he ditches his father security detail. He borrows money from the mob. He has no intention to repay.[00:28:00] He learns to use a gun. He learns to fly a shuttle. He steals one and he books off planet with kind of a rag tag crew.

You know, there’s a, there’s a cybernetics doctor who lost her license because she cured one of her patients of their addiction and they didn’t want that. There’s a, there’s an old mercenary who he’s just really good at his job, but because of that, he takes the hardest missions and he tends to be the only survivor on either side.

So no one wants to work with him anymore. There’s a, there’s a kind of an under city savant who can build just about anything out of scrap. But he’s what they call a smoothie, which is he was essentially born on a factory floor. And he never got all the prenatal care that you would expect. In a future society.

So essentially everything that he would have needed to save his life, he got and that’s it. And they call that the smoothie, you know, he’s got a little bit of that that baby face, like you’re, you know, he’s not quite right. So he hides his face behind a hologram that’s. Various types of [00:29:00] smileys or frowny faces.

And you know, a couple of other characters like that, where you, you throw that together. And it it’s like a mix of like solo, the, the latest version of solo and and rogue one and kind of mashing those together. And that that’s the book I wanted.

Melissa: That’s awesome. I liked about those films actually about those two work, the best so far in the whole series, like the new ones they’ve been doing anyway.

No, that’s really cool. And it’s on your series is on a Kindle unlimited, which is great. So people can do that on there. And I’m definitely gonna check it out cause I’m on, I love Kindle unlimited. That’s a great way to like find new authors, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on today and you know, I’m excited to see.

The car deck when it, when it comes out and everything. As I was saying earlier, it’s the Kickstarter goes to November 5th and that’s gentleman’s war.com, which you can just click on it. It’ll take you right to the Kickstarter page. Or as you said, they can go on Kickstarter and just search gentleman’s war right in the search bar.[00:30:00]

Exactly. Awesome. And you can also follow a DJ at Bodon books on Twitter. Are you on Instagram and Facebook?

DJ Bodden: I am on Facebook. So you can find me by just searching for D period, J period Bodden B O D D E N. I have an Instagram account, but I honestly don’t use it. But you, you can also find me on there.

It’s the same handle as my Twitter account.

Melissa: Awesome. I will check that out as well. Thanks again for coming on. I’m excited to see the see the cards and and hopefully you reached your goal by the fifth.

DJ Bodden: Awesome. And thanks again for having me, Melissa. It was a pleasure. Thanks for the conversation and best of luck to you and your endeavors going forward.

And your listeners back the Kickstarter. We really appreciate it. And you know, we, we started this from, from scratch, you know, six to 10 years ago and we’re just trying to build cool stuff and we appreciate the support.

Melissa: Awesome. Of course then. Yeah. Hopefully we can get you some more backers from this episode.