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.

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…

Factors in Arranging The Lion and the Aardvark

Ordering the stories in a fiction anthology is always an exercise in multi-level thinking. The Lion and the Aardvark, the upcoming book of modern fables I am editing for Stone Skin Press, adds some new wrinkles to the task. In addition to the usual matters of mixing tones and voices, I have to equally space the stories we’ve chosen to have illustrated (by the perfectly cast Rachel Kahn.) Ideally I’ll find the right rhythm of the personal political, the funny and poignant, the affirming and the disturbing. That’s all par for the course, too. But for the first time I also have to avoid clusters of:

• cats
• dogs, wolves, coyotes & foxes
• birds
• fish
• bugs
• dragons
• scientists
• zombies

Shub-Niggurath Syndrome

When I agreed to serve as creative director for Stone Skin Press, one of my challenges to myself was to always treat writers as I would want to be treated. This is simpler to say than to live up to.

For example, I don’t want people having to write on spec for us, especially since our anthology themes can be quite specific. Sure, if I made an open call for action-oriented Cthulhu mythos stories, the writers of good pieces that didn’t make the cut could eventually place them elsewhere. But it might not be so easy to place an iconic hero tale or a modern fable.

For this reason, I set up the process to invite people I knew I wanted in the books, if they were available and willing. Part of the Stone Skin mandate is to cross the streams of various creative scenes, bringing together talents you wouldn’t normally see on the same table of contents. As we go along, we’ve been able to expand our range quite a bit. By the fourth book, The Lion and the Aardvark, you'll be seeing not only names from our gaming home team and its adjacent S/SF world, but also contributors from comics, YA, journalism, film and literary fiction. The invitation process becomes akin to casting a play, where the objective is to look not only at the individual contributions but the overall mixture of tones and traditions.

For this to work, I did need an advance indication of what each writer planned to submit, to avoid overlap. Some Lion and the Aardvark stories concern the Internet, as you might expect from the modern fable concept—or from looking at the titular animals on the cover and notice what they’re tapping away on. Two different writers toyed with the idea of a story featuring the legendary white squirrel of Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods park. (Alas for fans of Whitey McRedeyes, he made himself elusive and will not be making an appearance in the final book.)

Even with me keeping an eye on story ideas this, it turns out that an anthology has a life of its own, and that certain themes and motifs were determined to worm their way in. When writers diverged from their pitches, they often moved in the same direction. I’ve come to think of this as Shub-Niggurath syndrome: for Shotguns v. Cthulhu, it seemed like every second story wanted to be about that particular Lovecraftian anti-deity. For the fables book, I had to steer contributors away from meta-pieces about the writing life, a subject John Kovalic already has hilarious dibs on.

A recurring motif made its way into the two New Hero books, too. That one’s a little spoilery, so that's all I’ll say for now. I’m wondering if it will be as apparent to readers as it became to me.

I’m sure a Shub-Niggurath Syndrome will manifest in the next book we commission, and am just as positive that its exact nature will come as an odd surprise.

Pre-order some or all of the first four Stone Skin Press books, in various permutations, with or without cupcakes for the London office, by taking part in the Kickstarter for our launch.

Stone Skin Press Crowdfunding Round-Up

As is his wily, silver-coiffed wont, Simon Rogers has introduced considerable distraction to the final days of my vacation by launching the Kickstarter campaign for Stone Skin Press. Avenge me by heading over and making a pledge. The four ebook deal in particular is a steal. Bibliomanes among you may wish to snap up the various limited edition options.

As of this writing, we’re at the 57% mark after three days. But as the snake said of the scorpion, it’s the back half that’s the tricky part. Please join us in making this ambitious exercise in fictional boundary-hopping a reality.

When I return to work tomorrow I’ll have more to reveal about the Stone Skin line and the process that led us to it.

In the meantime, we’re highlighting the stories and iconic protagonists of The New Hero anthology. If you haven’t been glued to the Stone Skin site, here’s what you’ve missed so far:

Jonny Nexus’ character Pete Stone conjoins two streams of British heroism, nodding with equal affection toward both Dan Dare and James Bond.

Ed Greenwood’s Midnight Knight, a contemporary adventuress attended by an able crew of Ren-faire sidekicks, is a departure for Ed, yet also quintessentially Greenwoodian.

Kenneth Hite makes his fiction debut as you figure he might, with Ray Cazador, a hero who prowls the mean streets between historical probabilities. Ken seizes the joy of the alternate history genre with a conceit allowing him to elegantly set aside its overused devices.

The Lion and the Aardvark cover reveal

As previously touted hereabouts, Pelgrane Press is launching a fiction imprint, Stone Skin Press, with yours truly serving as Creative Director.  The fourth book in our series of genre-busting anthologies will be The Lion and the Aardvark, a collection of modern fables from an impressive talent roster from writing scenes near and far.

Today we unveiled a cover mock-up to highlight the splendid illustration by Jim Zub, of Skullkickers and Udon fame. It brings a 1900s editorial cartoon style to the dueling laptops wielded by the opposed protagonists of Ekaterina Sedia’s title story.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Jim’s work more than meets the gold standard already set by Stone Skin cover artists, Gene Ha and Jason Morningstar.

We’re slating this for a Christmas release, so save space in your stockings.

Style Notes for Anthropomorphic Prose

[Posted without context, but also, by popular request.]

Fable convention has it that we meet one member of each animal type, and his species name is treated as his given name:

Frog and Badger went down to the lake where they saw that Duck had polluted it with his motorboat.

Treat the species names of such characters as proper names, capitalized accordingly, without the indefinite article. References to groups of creatures would not be capitalized, and would use the definite article:

“I am happy to be a bald eagle,” Bald Eagle said.

That is all.