Help Our Fiction Writing Visualization Tool By Taking This Survey

Gameplaywright is developing a writing visualization tool that might seem familiar to those of you who know my book Hamlet’s Hit Points. It might even have something to do with the HHP follow-up project I’m working on, which uses its beat system, plus spiffy new insights, to address fiction writing in general. If this intrigues you, please help us out by taking a brief survey.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Freemium Democratic Regime

In the latest episode of our ENnie-winning podcast, Ken and I talk School of Night, whiskey war, scene transitions, and the Illuminati hotel room.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: And the Heads of a Whole Bunch of People

In the latest episode of our ENnie-winning podcast, Ken and I talk gaming homework, Bram Stoker, recommendations and Marie Antoinette.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The Simpering Bridegroom

In the latest episode of our windswept podcast, Ken and I talk St. John's, spotty attendance, The Castle of Otranto and Ed & Lorraine Warren.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Chekov’s Squid Throwing

In the latest episode of our entangling podcast, Ken and I talk monster ability awareness, stolen passports, William S. Burroughs and the Mary Celeste.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The Random Piggly-Wiggly Table -

In the latest episode of our sage (not to mention cranberry) podcast, Ken and I talk luck as branch point, wonder and horror, PVP RPG and moving Thanksgiving.

World War Cthulhu

The title says it all: Cubicle 7’s newly released fiction anthology World War Cthulhu combines tentacled cosmic horror with the 20th century’s darkest era. Edited by Jonathan Oliver, it includes such darkling luminaries as Greg Stolze, Sarah Newton, and World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar.

My story, “The Egyptian”, reveals the wartime career of infantry sergeant Tyler Freeborn, formerly of Miskatonic University, and his uneasy bond with the title character, an on-again, off-again soldier who fights with terrible ferocity. If  your only concern is to get your unit through the war, and Nyarlathotep reports for duty, do you turn him down?

Grab it as an ebook download from the Cubicle 7 web store.

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The Marshy Aunt

In the latest episode of our exquisitely marinated podcast, Ken and I talk backstories, August Derleth, chef cheats and the roots of Nazi Occultism.

Toronto Celebrates The Lion and the Aardvark

Last night’s Toronto launch of our modern fables anthology The Lion and the Aardvark exceeded expectations, thanks to a packed house of fable enthusiasts. Our supply of the book sold out at half-time. Writers Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Ann Ewan, Heather J. Wood, Daniel Perry, Jim Zub, Richard Scarsbrook, and Laura Lush hit the stage to read from their work. Special thanks to Kathryn for bravely persevering through a scratchy throat. Also, if you haven’t heard Rich Scarsbrook impersonate a trout, you have not yet really attended a literary event.

Jim received double accolades, as he is also our cover artist. Interior illustrator Rachel Kahn was on hand to take a bow, as was author Julie McArthur. Toronto-area authors who were unable to make it were toasted in spirit.

After the reading we gathered onstage for an impromptu mass signing. Collectors showed gratifying appreciation for the book, and for the beautiful work of our production team.

From left: Rachel Kahn, Laura Lush, Jim Zub, Heather J. Wood, Daniel Perry, Ann Ewan, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Julie McArthur, Richard Scarsbrook. Together they comprise 12% of the Lion and Aardvark creative team.

Thanks to the Rowers Reading Series and its artistic director Heather J. Wood (see above)  for their event organizing prowess, and to our venue hosts, the Victory Café.

The Lion and the Aardvark Toronto Launch Event

With offices in London, a Creative Director in Toronto, and writers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and arguably France, Stone Skin Press is a decidedly post-national operation. Yet since I’m in Hogtown, a nice swath of The Lion and the Aardvark’s 70 contributors happen to reside in the GTA. Thanks to the good offices of the Rowers Pub Reading Series, we’ll be celebrating that fact on Tuesday May 14th at 8pm, in the cozy, craft beer loving confines of the Victory Café in Mirvish Village (Bloor / Bathurst.)

Scheduled to read are Ann Ewan, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Laura Lush, Julie McArthur, Daniel Perry, Richard Scarsbrook, Heather Wood, Halli Villegas, and Jim Zub. Buy a copy and get it signed by the aforementioned, plus interior illustrator Rachel Kahn and your humble editor.

In The Lion and the Aardvark, 70 writers from across the creative spectrum bring their modern sensibilities to the classic fable format. Zombies, dog-men and robot wasps mingle with cats, coyotes and cockroaches. Parables ranging from the punchy to the evocative, the wry to the disturbing, explore eternal human foibles, as displaced onto lemmings, trout, and racing cars. But beware— in these terse explorations of desire, envy, and power, certitude isn’t always as clear as it looks.

Update: Ed Greenwood has had to drop out to attend to a family medical matter. He'll be there in spirit.

The Blood on the Wall in the Fortress

New Tales of the Yellow Sign, my anthology of weird tales conjuring Robert W. Chambers’ classic King in Yellow mythos, is in print as of September from Atomic Overmind Press, and in ebook form from vendors including Amazon/Kindle, DriveThru, Nook, Smashwords, Apple iTunes, and Paizo.

This post is third in a series looking at the individual stories.

In true weird-tale tradition, the germinative image of “The Blood in the Wall in the Fortress” pressed itself on me in a dream, where I was a member of an artillery unit shelling a tower across a river, knowing there were innocent people inside. The story, of a soldier’s guilt and the madness of self-justifying war, sets itself in 1947. But it’s not our 1947, as Loyalists battle Alsatians, to the incessant clattering of a black box issuing incomprehensible orders. This is a world made, or unmade, by the destabilizing influence of the Yellow Sign.

From Kenneth Hite’s introduction: Although the war in “The Blood on the Wall in the Fortress” begins in 1947 in another history, the fortress sits in Alsace, target and symbol of the Franco-Prussian War that Chambers used in a more personal catastrophe in “The Street of the First Shell.” The plot echoes “The Yellow Sign” in its portents, its artistic protagonist, and its inevitable approach of death; the tone is post-Remarque, post-trenches, almost documentary realism approaching the unreal.

With New Opportunities Comes New Etiquette

A powerful quality of social media is its ability to break down barriers between creators and audience, and indeed between colleagues working in the same field. With that, however, come new interactional pitfalls. Here are some tips to keep in mind if you’re contacting a creator you admire—for the sake of example, let’s call him Robin Laws—to ask for help on your cool new project.

The creator you admire gets lots of requests for help. With the sudden uptake of Kickstarter, they’ve multiplied by what feels like tenfold.

When you ask creators for input on your project, and you’re not clearly offering to pay their consulting rates to do so, you’re asking them to work for free. Chances are that they will be unable to do so, even if they want to. Which they don’t, because you’re popping up out of the blue to ask them to do something for free. Any freelancer has to maximize the creative time spend doing work that will help pay that pesky rent. This is as true for fiction projects as game designs. Looking at both of these things is, to be blunt, a task I perform in exchange for money.

When you ask creators to look at your project and promote it, you are asking them to expend a limited resource, the attention of their social media audiences. Is your thing so awesome and different that the creator is doing himself a favor by pointing to it, enhancing his stature as a linker to awesomeness? Unless what you’re doing is genuinely category-busting, well, probably not. If what you’re doing is just the regular cool labor of love, you’re simply asking a favor. And in a favor economy, you’ve got to give in order to receive.

I have so many great folks in my immediate circle of collaborators that pointing to their work, which I’m already to some degree aware of and can confidently tout, already uses up my finite pool of promotional mojo. If we have no prior relationship and I don’t feel that tug of mutual loyalty, I’m going to beg off.

To that end, you will likely get my new boilerplate reply, which goes like this:

Thanks for letting me know about your Kickstarter project. As crowdfunding has taken off, I’ve been getting an increasing number of requests for help in promoting various projects and have been struggling with the best way to handle this.

If I choose to promote a large number of projects, the value of that promotion dilutes. Also, I’m crazy-busy these days and can’t always spare the time to check out every project I’m asked to post about. For these reasons, the approach that feels right to me is to confine my plugs to projects within my immediate circle of colleagues and collaborators. With the ubiquity of crowdfunding at the moment, and the size of that circle, that’s already a lot of plugging.

This is in no way a judgment on the promise of your project, and I wish you every success with it.

Just another nugget of new etiquette for the disintermediation age.

Gaps

New Tales of the Yellow Sign, my anthology of weird tales conjuring Robert W. Chambers’ classic King in Yellow mythos, is in print as of September from Atomic Overmind Press, and in ebook form from vendors including Amazon/Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, Apple iTunes, and Paizo.

This post is second in a series looking at the individual stories.

When trauma compromises your memory, spaces in time become abysses of horror. Experience this through the second-person point of view of “Gaps”’ unnamed narrator, for whom a kidnapping scheme leads to strange vengeance and an even stranger affection. What complicity do you bear if you jump into an awful crime in mid-act, with no memory of the decision that led to it?

Kenneth Hite, in his introduction finds parallels to multiple Chambers tales:

...a long-form, secular variation on the theme Chambers sets down in “In the Court of the Dragon,” invoking in negative space the games of memory in “Repairer of Reputations,” the loss and wonder of “The Demoiselle D’Ys,” and in muted tones the shifts in “The Prophets’ Paradise.”

Full Bleed

New Tales of the Yellow Sign, my anthology of weird tales conjuring Robert W. Chambers’ classic King in Yellow mythos, is in print as of September from Atomic Overmind Press, and in ebook form from vendors including Amazon/Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, Apple iTunes, and Paizo.

This post is first in a series looking at the individual stories.

In “Repairer of Reputations”, Robert Chambers writes one of the canon’s earliest tales from the point of view of an unreliable narrator. The reading experience trains us to accept the words presented to us by the author—without that trust, we are unmoored, disoriented. What device could be more appropriate to a cycle of stories about a book—a collection of untrustworthy words—that spreads madness and perhaps even reshapes reality itself?

“Full Bleed” plays with both ideas by siting them in the present day, through the action report of an agent determined to stamp out new eruptions of the Yellow Sign in print—in this case, by tracking the activities of an indie comics artist.

In his introduction to New Tales of the Yellow Sign, Kenneth Hite says of “Full Bleed”:

“Full Bleed” riffs off “The Repairer of Reputations,” through a procedural tenor recalling both Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled fictions and the first-person “fantasy of competence” that fearful 21^st-century readers crave from their security romances.

Secret hint: downloading the free sample on the Kindle page and elsewhere gets you all of “Full Bleed,” and Ken’s intro in its entirety.

Treasure of Far Thallai Concludes

Because August has turned into the Robin D. Laws Fiction Explosion (RDLFE for short) I have failed to point out that with the sixth and final installment in Paizo’s Skull and Shackles Adventure Path comes the swashbuckling conclusion to “The Treasure of Far Thallai.” In “Claw Cove”, a classic ship-to-ship showdown unfolds as Challys Argent sends her ship, the Aspidochelone to intercept the Slicer, captained by the insane Kered Firsk. With final battle comes a strange decision for one of Challys’ reluctant sidekicks. Sail your galleon to the Paizo store, or to your discerning local purveyor of fine gaming products. And while you’re there, keep the plundering to a minimum, willya?

Part Two of “In the Event of My Untimely Demise”

When in doubt, have a dwarf come through the door carrying a grudge. Part Two of “In the Event of My Untimely Demise” is now up at the Paizo blog.

Prequeling a Dramatic Hero

The first installment of my web fiction serial “In the Event of My Untimely Demise” is now up at Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales blog. It features Luma, hero of my new Pathfinder novel, Blood of the City. A cobblestone druid attuned to the magic of the marble metropolis of Magnimar, she’s the odd sibling out in a team of urban adventurers for hire. In part one, “The Dead Client”, Luma, having been barred from a prestigious assignment, receives an unusual commission—to perform an investigation purchased in advance by a now-deceased customer.

Writing this serial posed a challenge I didn’t have to deal with when coming up with its equivalent for The Worldwound Gambit. Unlike Gad, the heisting hero of that novel, Luma is not presented as an iconic hero, who does not change in the course of the story but instead changes the world around her by remaining true to her essential problem-solving ethos. Instead she’s a dramatic hero, who undergoes a personal journey that profoundly alters her sense of self and relationship to the world.

Iconic heroes, like Batman, Sherlock Holmes or James T. Kirk, are built for recurring appearances. Dramatic heroes are tougher. I can see Luma becoming an iconic hero, maybe, after the events portrayed in Blood of the City. But going back in time, to a moment prior to the opening scenes introducing her dramatic dilemma, required some head-scratching.

Without giving too much away, the story prefigures her arc and echoes a key theme of the novel, without putting her on the path toward her transformation. It’s both free-standing story and prelude.

Head on over and check it out.

In Which My Humility is Variously Assaulted

Anglo/Canadian diffidence took a thundering body blow last night as Pelgrane saw four of its eleven ENnie nominations turn into silver and gold. I’d like to again thank ENnie judges and voters for their silver nods to Lorefinder for best rules and Ashen Stars for best setting. The first constitutes greatly satisfying recognition to a book that seemed to fly under the radar when first released. In raiding GUMSHOE’s stuff and turning it into Pathfinder treasure, Gareth Hanrahan performed feats of mighty battle, and it was lovely to see him hit the awards podium at his first Gen Con in years. The setting nod for Ashen Stars was an unexpected jolt of approbation and gave me the chance to thank the art team (Jerome Huguenin and Chris Huth) as well as cupcake magnate Beth Lewis and gentleman adventurer Simon Rogers for their indispensable contributions.

For pure delight it was impossible to beat Paula Dempsey’s reaction to her gold award for Best Writing the Occult Investigator’s Guide to London, which is her first book. Contributor Steve Dempsey once again uncorked his freestyle chops to deliver his portion of the acceptance speech in rap form. I was proud to be namechecked in this profound expression of the hip-hop arts. In accepting the gold award for best electronic product for Cthulhu Apocalypse, Simon praised the fecund womb of author Graham Walmsley, veering towards and then away from an invocation of the dread buzzword.

Earlier in the day I was happy to appear alongside Paizo fiction majordomo James Sutter and fellow scribes Richard Lee Byers and Dave Gross for a panel on the Pathfinder Tales novels. Ed Greenwood popped in for a cameo appearance to announce his upcoming book for the line. To what must surely be his eternal chagrin, he missed the later discussion of the supposed chasteness of the series, which turned into a list of all the naughty passages in past or forthcoming books. I think James might have been blushing. Along the way we mulled the inextricable relationship between plot and character and maybe even found a few fresh ways to talk about the balance between respecting and obscuring game rules when writing RPG-inspired fiction.

I also had a fine time doing the guest thing on the Tome Show podcast. You can listen to it when it drops, so I needn’t recap. The D&D focus of the ‘cast provided me with a welcome topic shift. Thanks to Tracy and Jeff for inviting me and for their incisive questions and smooth direction of the Q&A segment.

Today I’m at the IPR booth at noon for a Don’t Read This Book group signing, and doing a GUMSHOE seminar with Ken and Simon at 3. Other than that I’ll be chatting and signing at Pelgrane temporary global HQ, booth 1427.

Fast Times at the Pelgrane Booth

Thursday is always my favorite day to man a booth at Gen Con. That’s when your most devoted readers and gamers show up to say hi and grab the new stuff. Pelgrane had a record Thursday this year, with an early rush followed by a slow and steady diminishment of its stacks of books. Thanks to all the Pelgraniacs who reported for duty.

The star item this time is unquestionably Kenneth Hite’s Night’s Black Agents. Its “Bourne if Treadstone were vampires” elevator pitch makes for an easy sell. So much so that the booth may well run out of them before show’s end. If you’re planning to grab one, don’t put that off for the last minute.

I was unsure how the Stone Skin Press books would do at a gaming convention—our adventure into fiction is not directly related to the main Pelgrane mission after all. Once more the taste and sagacity of Gen Con attendees dispels my reflexive Canadian pessimism. We will probably run out of these as well. (That’s The New Hero 1 and 2, and especially Shotguns v. Cthulhu, for those joining us already in progress.) There will be a signing with many of the Stone Skin authors here at the show on Sunday at 11am, for which we’ll be holding a quantity of the books back.

Also garnering a gratifying response is the Tartarus/Terra Nova adventure double-header for Ashen Stars, combined in the Ace Double style of old. I didn’t even know this would be here, but that’s Simon and Beth for you. Turn your back on them for a minute, and they’ll print up your new product and have it out for Gen Con.

For which, see also the appearance of the Dying Earth Revivification Folio, which I also didn’t expect to see here in its tastefully arcane finished state. Since the Dying Earth RPG started it all for Pelgrane, it tugs at the heartstrings a little to see this refurbished, streamlined version to the game being exchanged for the richly-deserved terces of a discriminating clientele.

I tend to forget last year’s big thing, but Ashen Stars itself continues to sell well at the stand as well. If you’ve been thinking of picking it up, now’s the time, as the first print run dwindles as we speak. The tricky economics of reprints may force Simon to go turn the glorious color of the current run into black and white, so get it while you can.

In other news, my first but hopefully not last Writer’s Symposium event, the advanced plotting workshop, gave John Helfers, Matt Forbeck and I much to talk about. We represented a continuum of authorial pre-planning, with Matt on the mellow end and me as the obsessive who diagrams every major beat using Campaign Cartographer and the Hamlet’s Hit Points system before going to written outline. We managed to stop talking soon enough to give specific notes to writers currently grappling with their own works in progress.

Today (Friday) I will don my Pathfinder Tales author’s hat (disclaimer: not actually a hat) for a panel at noon and a signing at 1:30, where I will gladly deface copies of my new release, Blood of the City, and last year’s controversial demonic heist novel, The Worldwound Gambit.

I’m also the interviewee at a live recording of the Tome Show podcast, at 6pm, right before the ENnies.

With all these festivities planned, this had to be the day for the wonder of the Utamaro shirt. Prepare to be awed.

Nords Triumph at Diana Jones Awards

Defying the Vegas oddsmakers, who had crowdfunding as a heavy favorite, authors Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola last night earned the 2012 Diana Jones Award for their book Nordic LARP. As a document of an inherently ephemeral movement in narrative art, the book is an achievement in itself, while also allowing the DJA committee to recognize the importance of that movement as a whole.  (Were one to foolishly attempt to divine their motives of this mysterious collective entity, which is, of course, the sheerest folly.) Though the authors were still ensconced in deepest Scandinavia, Emily Care Boss was on hand to read their heartfelt and inspiring acceptance statement. Apparently she’s even hand-delivering the award to its year-long stay in the high latitudes. Congratulations again, Jaakko and Markus.

At the Diana Jones party, where the cream of the industry gathers to get their schmoozing heads back on, Atomic Overmind honcho Hal Mangold had in his capacious pocket copy zero of New Tales of the Yellow Sign, which has safely arrived at the show in all its horrible splendor. After posting this I’ll be off to the hall for some signing and numbering. It will be at the Green Ronin booth; we’ll also work out a complex Traveller-style triangular trade agreement to get copies in place at the Pelgrane stand.

Prior to the DJA party, I took the chance to network with colleagues in the fiction world, at a meet-up for participants in the Writers’ Symposium. This series of events offers a full track of seminars and workshops to aspiring fiction writers. People can, and do, come to Gen Con strictly for that. I’m dipping my toe into this pool to as one of the gurus at a sold-out workshop on advanced plotting. Although I’ve written a great deal of fiction over the years my networking circle has always been on the gaming side, so it was great to indulge in a related but different line of shop talk. Maurice Broaddus and Dave Gross were on hand to assist with introductions, and I made sure to talk up their contributions to the Stone Skin Press line. (Maurice is in The New Hero; Dave’s stories appear in Shotguns v. Cthulhu and The Lion and the Aardvark.)

Likewise gratifying is the chance to hear positive feedback on the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast, which, if you hadn’t heard, is now available through iTunes.

And now it’s time to head down to the exhibit hall, attempt to plot the shortest route between decent coffee and the exhibit hall, and hope that a certain distinguished publisher remembers to text me his prepaid cell number so I can claim my badge…