Author Archives: Michael R. Underwood

Labor in the Publishing Industry

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Things like close-open shifts at bookstores, where booksellers got less than 10 hours off the clock between closing one night and opening the next day. Co-workers at the B&N I worked at faced it more than once or twice.

It’s commonly known in the industry that most editors have to do most of their reading and/or editing at home, *after* putting in full-time hours in the office doing project management/meetings/etc. On salary, so no OT. That’s a culture of habitual crunch.

Publicists given 12 or more titles per month to cover, requiring either shoddy support for some titles and/or substantial, *habitual* overtime. Again, likely uncompensated.

Sales reps asked to read up on the titles they’re selling, which almost always happens outside of office hours. Again, uncompensated. I’m told this happens with some indie booksellers, too.

Unpaid overtime is, from what I can see and what I’ve heard, the *norm*, not the exception. Especially in the entertainment industry, where “passion” is supposed to sustain you. Where there are a hundred people eager to replace you if you leave your under-paying position.

New York State has done a version of this just on the NY level, which is a step in the right direction. Assuming it is enforced and workers aren’t intimidated into working unpaid overtime and not reporting it. I don’t know how it’s working in practice.

Also, let’s talk about how many agents are paid *only* on a commission basis – where it frequently takes several years to build up a client base with sales at a level necessary to make up a living wage.

Oh, yeah, what about the people that write the dang books?

So that’s a lot. And that’s not even including authors. If there’s one type of actor in the publishing industry without whom it could not even begin to function, it’s authors.

How many hundreds of hours of labor goes into each book? What % of book deals actually cover that spread at a level that comes out to even minimum wage? The fastest I ever wrote a novel was 31 days. 71k words for the first draft. About 3 hours a day.

I took Sundays off. So that’s 26 days times three hours a day. I put in *at least* 50 hours of editing & extra writing, and that’s lowballing. But we also have to count outlining, brainstorming, copy editing, page proofs, and promotion. Say another 100 hours for all of that.

(26 x 3) + 50 + 100 = 228 hours. I’d wager that is far onto the low end for a full-length adult novel. Even written very quickly, my $4k advance divides to become $17.5 an hour. Also, it’s not W2 money, that’s 1099 money, so I paid more taxes on it. Plus 15% of the gross went to my agent (which I do not begrudge at all). So I maybe, maybe, hit $15 an hour on that one, pre-tax. So $10 an hour post-taxes.

And that was the *only* novel I’ve been able to write anywhere near that fast. Most I’d say took twice to three times as long. The fast novel was the fourth in a series, so I really knew the characters and had a big arc ending to push for. I was also in good health at the time.

If it takes 500-1000 hours to write a novel and you’re getting $5k to $10 in advances, many of which don’t earn out, you’re looking at maybe $10 an hour, minus agent commission and taxes. For the person *who wrote the damn book everyone else gets paid to help publish*.

Staff and booksellers and other publishing professionals work on a lot of books at once, so the jobs are not a direct comparison. And they for sure add value and deserve to be compensated. Ultimately, my point is that just about everyone is getting screwed until you get into (probably) upper management or the C-suite.

Authors, editors, publicists, sales staff, booksellers, all grist for the mill. And who profits? Who is doing *really well* in this equation? Executives, stockholders, and a *very* tiny percentage of authors. Most of the costs and risks are born by the folks at the bottom. The authors that get dropped when a series doesn’t take off. The publicist let go because they struck out despite working their ass off. The booksellers let go when a chain liquidates to pay out stockholders.

As I think about this, I try to remember that I’m not the only person in the hot seat. I’m in the grind with my agent and (probably) my editors, publicists, sales team, etc. But Passion. But Love of Books. But Literature.

The people at the top are counting on passion. They’re counting on the fact that there is no end to the # of people that want your job or your spot on the list. But we have to do better. We have to demand better.

We can create a world where work is fairly compensated. Where people aren’t pushed to their breaking points to stay on top of the schedule. Where the expectation of unpaid internships doesn’t keep excluding marginalized writers & staffers.

So, what’s the takeaway?

What can I do? What can any of us do?

1) If you’re in a position to set work culture in your office, be a leader in taking care of your staff. In pushing upper management for overtime pay and/or more sensible hours.

2) Remember that you are not alone, not if you’re an author, agent, junior publicist or bookseller. That passion that gets used against us also links us with other people in the field. We can fight for one another.

3) Vote for candidates that support living wages and stronger protections for workers.

4) Investigate unionization and labor advocacy in your workplace.

5) Take care of yourself. Especially if no one else is. And then, if you can, try to help someone else.

Speculate Reborn

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For a couple of years now, I’ve been a co-host on the podcast Speculate! Speculate started as a science fiction/fantasy analysis and interview show, “The Podcast for REaders, Writers, and Fans.” We’d talk about books in-depth as well as interviewing authors and hosting discussions on various topics like games writing, health and self-care for writers, and more.

Earlier this year, co-founder Gregory A. Wilson and I decided to reboot the show with a different focus. We did this for a lot of different reasons, which we talked about in a special episode of the show.

The new Speculate is an Actual Play RPG show starring a rotating cast of SFF professionals, including Maurice Broaddus, Jaym Gates, Valerie Valdes, Brandon O’Brien, and more. If you know me, you probably know how important RPGs have been in my academic career and in my life as a storyteller. It’s been a great experience so far, and we’re just getting started.

Our first session was a D&D 5th edition game set in the world of Eberron, and all three episodes are now live. At the end of each session, we also have an out-of-game discussion about the game, a little bit like Talks Machina meets Inside the Actor’s Studio.

If this sounds interesting, you can listen to the first Actual Play episode here.

Story World Dossier #2 – Space Opera

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When I set out to write a science fiction episode of Genrenauts for the first season, I couldn’t just use ‘Science Fiction’ as the genre for this second episode. Science Fiction is too broad a category to have the specificity of expectations and tropes, so I had to drill down. I could have done it by sub-genre (diplomatic/political space opera), by tone (heroic but nuanced), or by character (a story about a kidnapped ambassador).

I picked Space Opera as the genre category, but that is still too wide. Space Opera has been used to describe works from Star Wars to The Expanse, Guardians of the Galaxy to Dune and beyond.

I’ve written extensively about the influence and inspiration I’ve taken from Babylon 5 in my writing, and Genrenauts is one of the many places in my writing where that influence manifests. Once I had the idea to use Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine as the setting touchstones, I had to dig deeper into what I thought about that mode of science fiction, what was important, what would be fun to poke at.

The entire concept of Genrenauts is science fiction, so in that way, every Genrenauts episode is a science fiction episode, even when it’s also investigating other genres. The series plays with the conventions of science fiction more broadly, as well as some of the more specific tropes and structures of time travel stories (despite the Genrenauts’ travel being interdimensional rather than time-travel). There’s still the “end up in a place very different from your home, where there are different social mores and you have to tread carefully” element that is so common in time-travel stories, as well as the “blend in with the locals” and others.

But back to the Babylon 5/Deep Space 9 portion of Space Opera. A lot of the diplomatic stories seen in that mode of storytelling come down to individuals and their connections with people, the authority and trust they’ve accrued through their action, the reputation they’ve built. Groups will trust a meeting held by this individual because they did X, Y, and Z in the past. They’ve proven their integrity, and so on.

Which then provides an instant opportunity as to a place to find a narrative break, the breach – if a key figure in diplomacy disappears, then not only are they not around to see things through, that trust is no longer there to bridge the gaps between the factions, *and* there’s the suspicion of who kidnapped the key figure and why. That gave me the main thrust of the narrative, which then could be split into two threads – keeping things together diplomatically and finding the ambassador. I got to cast Shrin and Leah into the roles of “senior diplomat” and “junior diplomat”, having Leah’s unfamiliarity with the setting to allow Shirin to unpack and explain things to her and therefore the audience. This was another move to suggest that the setting had a history and a life of its own that would make the individual story breach feel like it had impact and that the world itself was lived in and that its happenings had real weight and importance.

So I had my setting, I had my story breach, and I had one major thread of the plot. In building out the rest of the episode, I decided on some other narrative tropes to showcase. I wanted to play with the fun of distinct and cool-looking alien species, as well as some of their cultural mores, showing humanity to be one among many, to give contrast without too much flattening any species to a single set of traits.

I also wanted to put some spotlight on Roman, the action-adventure hero type of the group. That meant that I could bring in and comment on the ways that the expectations and tropes of action stories manifest in this type of SF stories – diplomacy and politics is balanced with and/or challenged by action and violence, which requires characters like the security chief, the traveling adventurer, etc. And since it’s space opera, that meant I could have dogfights in starships and gunfights in cool locales.

For the dogfights, I wanted interesting terrain that could provide the ability to maneuver. Asteroid fields are the easy answer, so I wanted to also have another option – hence the spaceship graveyard. That graveyard also helped convey a sense of history for the setting, since I was trying to make the world feel real and lived in with 30,000 words or less, which is not a lot. (For context, most novels are 80,000 words or more, often around 100,000 words).

And for the climax of the adventure plotline, I got to show Roman’s push-pull relationship with recklessness. Action heroes take big, needless risks, always pushing the envelope and usually getting away with it because the storytellers want them to. Roman and King’s argument over method and risk puts that part of how action storytelling manifests in other genres into focus and plays with it while also delivering a set-piece action sequence in the kidnapper’s base. It’s the “parody and critique the thing while you show it” approach as seen in works like Galaxy Quest, Blazing Saddles, etc.

Earning readers’ trust in this episode was just as important as in the pilot, again *because* Genrenauts is science fiction all the way through. If I couldn’t show that I had interesting things to do with the premise of story worlds and broken narratives in science fiction, it’d be harder to get them to stick with me through the other episodes and to see what I was going to do once the formula had been established (it’s hard to break a formula before you establish it. You set a rhythm and then break it, etc.). I also wanted to leave this universe in a place where readers could expect that the individual problem had been fixed but that new problems would emerge in the future, since it is a world where stories are constantly playing out. The episode was done, but there was far more in store for Ahura-3 and for our Genrenauts.

Get the entire first season of the Stabby-award finalist Genrenauts series for one low price with the Season One Omnibus.

Genrenauts Season One cover - art by Thomas WalkerDirect from the Author
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Story World Dossier #1 – Western

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This is the first in a series of essays prompted as stretch goals for the Genrenauts Season One Kickstarter, re-published here so non-backers can read them.

The Shootout Solution – Western

My first memories are of living in Texas. As most Americans know, Texas isn’t the South, it’s Texas. Texas’ regional identity is closely tied to the American narrative of the Western and the Cowboy. It’s the state of the Alamo and the Ranger, of wide open spaces. It’s a state defined by an assertion of singular independence. Living in Texas as a very young child, there’s little wonder that Westerns would stick with me, even though I’ve lived most of my life in cities and suburbs, seldom out in the country.

The first inklings of a fascination with Westerns, the ones that framed my expectations as a child came from the works of legendary author Louis L’Amour. For what felt like two years, L’Amour’s books on tape (aka old-school audiobooks) were my bedtime tales. I didn’t retain the details of the individual plots very well, nodding off before the sixty minute side of the tape was complete, but what I did absorb was the aesthetic and the feel of the genre—the archetypes, the common stories: the lawman vs. the bandits, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the reluctant killer who has to take up the gun again to protect the town/their lover/etc., the lone hero struggling through the desert, the loyal deputy, the schoolmarm, and so on.

These days, Westerns mostly show up in hybrid form, combined with other genres—weird Western, Western SF, Western romance, etc. The familiarity of that genre brings recognizable but interesting contrasts with other genres, or uses other genres to invigorate the tale types and archetypes of the Western.

Which is exactly what I set out to do. By starting the series with Westerns — a genre with what I see as very stable genre expectations — I could use that baseline to give me room for complexity in other aspects, like characterization and the overall setup of the series.

But while tropes and structures of Westerns are pretty familiar, especially to an American audience, I had to figure out the practicalities of telling a post-modern Western without continuing the genre’s history of sexism and racism (not that I wanted to write that kind of story to begin with).

For inspiration, I turned to my favorite, loving parody of the Western genre—Blazing Saddles. The film tackles the racism of the period/genre, challenging expectations of what a Western hero acts like as well as what they look like with Cleavon Little as Sheriff Bart. The film shows the emotional consequences of being a gunfighter with Gene Wilder’s character Jim, but doesn’t then delve into the darkness, it brings the character back into the light. Madeline Kahn’s Lili Von Schtupp is a brilliant, self-motivated send-up/remix of dance hall Marlene Dietrich, and in the finale, the film’s zaniness rises to such a level that it doesn’t just break through the fourth wall, it knocks the whole thing down, the fight spilling out into the world around the production of the film. Blazing Saddles isn’t perfect, especially in terms of its homophobic punchlines and Native nations representation, but I could learn from its lessons and build on them.

First off, I wanted to make sure that women and people of color played important roles in the story. I had a leg up there with my main cast, but I wanted the Western characters to show the diversity of the period of history that inspired the genre. And I also wanted to play with the tale types themselves, since Genrenauts is all about finding broken stories and getting them back on track. I decided to focus on the “who gets to be a hero” aspect of Westerns, providing some alternatives and exploring heroic motivation with different leading characters. The series required a balance between historically-accurate representation (most cowboys were Latinx and/or black, not white) and what is accurate to the genre – where cowboys of color are largely erased, instead spotlighting white heroes.

So much of genre is how each one comes with expectations—the common stories, the expected plot twists, the aesthetic checkboxes many readers bring to a story, looking for a fresh take on familiar stories. In Westerns, I knew readers would be looking for gunfights, shady saloons, working girls, dastardly black hats, rugged white hats, and sullied but strong anti-heroes caught in the middle.

There’s great comfort in the familiar, in being just one step ahead or behind your heroes, seeing the twist coming or being caught unawares. I wanted to play with expectations in The Shootout Solution, giving readers the familiar with one hand and throwing curveballs with the other. Since my Western town was intentionally generic, I turned that aesthetic checklist into a feature wherever possible, using my POV lead to talk about all the places where this Western was like any other Western. And perhaps even more importantly, I gave her an attitude toward it—she relished the back-lot sound-studio feeling of the town.

One lesson I learned writing the Ree Reyes series was that pop culture references are more resonant when they matter to the character—the POV character’s passion or snark provides an emotional access point for the reader. Therefore, Leah Tang, my lead, needed to have a perspective on the bizarrely familiar world of Western World. On top of caring about the story she and the team were trying to put back on course.

And then, against that backdrop of generic tropes and Leah’s responses, I designed the episodes guest stars to stand out—a sensitive aspirant chef who is truly a reluctant hero, and his highly capable sister, with secrets of her own. These characters let me make my points about the genre’s failings, its lies by omission, and more.

Something I’m not satisfied with from the first episode is the inclusion of native nations characters. Westerns usually demonize and stereotype native peoples, so I wanted to make sure to avoid that bad impulse but to also show some native peoples, to not erase them. I don’t think I did the best job of balancing that. While I did have central Mexicanx characters, there are very few native characters in the story, just in the crowd scenes. The story in The Shootout Solution is very tightly focused, but that’s not an excuse. It’s something I’d need myself to push and do better with if/when I return to the Western World in Genrenauts.

The Shootout Solution was just my first foray into genre exploration via storytelling in the Genrenauts series, but looking back on my youth, on decades of Westerns, remixed, deconstructed, or played straight, it’s not surprising that it’s where I’d want to turn to launch the series. There’s plenty left to say about the Western and what its endurance as a narrative tradition says about American conceptions of our own past, about America’s horrendous treatment of native nations peoples (among others), the use of violence, and our self-defining narrative of how the country was born. The Shootout Solution’s heroes rode off into the sunset, but there will always be another town, another crisis, another time when people wield power and spill blood in dusty streets or wide-angle shots of the dusty countryside.

And I’m not alone in playing with the genre. Logan drew upon the tradition with an explicit shout-out to Shane and Westworld tackling the tropes and archetypes of Westerns in a different kind of science fiction setting. This old genre can learn some new tricks as new creators bring their perspectives to the contested Old West.

The New Landscape, Part Three – Bifurcation, Specialization, and Hybridization

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Today I started a twitter thread inspired by Chuck Wendig’s post about writing series. I’m re-posting it here because it’s really a continuation of my The New Landscape series that has been fallow for a while because my life 2016-2018 has been pretty overwhelming, even post-Angry Robot.

If you missed Part One and Part Two, here they are. This post re-treads some of this ground, but it might be handy to have read the previous bits if you don’t mind me repeating myself a bit here.

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It’s pretty remarkable to me that trad and indie SFF are diverging so sharply on series. Trad moving away from longer series for new writer/work because of retail death spiral while indie SFF writers are finding the best success with series where they can create a product funnel.

I understand the reasons – shrinking shelf space in the retail marketplace, difficulty in breaking out new authors, etc. vs. a MOAR CONTENT! high rate of consumption, KU-dominated indie model where rapid publication is logistically easier and maximizes reader retention.

I have, for a while, talked about a bifurcating market, where indie and trad are two models uneasily sharing an industry, each in the shadow of and reacting to the other. Trad-focused sites and figures talk about print resurgent and ebook fading while indie-focused reporting talks about a massive increase in the readership of SFF. It’s a heightened version of positionality and confirmation bias mixed in with results extrapolated from poor data.

It’s hard for trad publishers to do well with digital-only books (I know from experience) because they’re not as comfortable in the digital space and don’t work on indie timetables. They also don’t want to undermine print, where they have a massive structural advantage.

Indie authors are increasingly beholden to AMZ as KU and Audible continue to dominate the ebook and audio marketplaces. Print distribution, meanwhile, remains largely inaccessible.

Trad can put a huge amount of push behind individual releases, but can’t magically make more shelf space for sequels, watches Mass Market die a slow and struggles to adjust b/c they’ve largely sacrificed digital to protect print.

Indie authors have developed tons of tools to drive discovery and to keep readers coming back for more in a series, but they’re caught in an ever-faster loop of rapid publication, a flooded market of competition, scammers, stuffers, and hustling constantly to stay afloat in the insatiable seas of the algorithm until they hit their 1k+ true fans, etc.

Many writers have already unpacked and explained the utility of a hybrid career, but as the two models diverge, each demanding more and more of writers, it gets exhausting even when you’ve got the energy and time to do both. And all the while, the writer always gets paid last.

I don’t have any easy answers. The answers I do have for writers involve lots of hard work and effort put into being an entrepreneur. And for publishers, they involve drastically re-working how to approach print/ebook/audio as well as thinking about who their customer is.

This is the part where I remind readers that they can hire me to help them with sales & marketing strategy. 😉

Floating islands against a blue sky. Text reads 'Strategic Vision'

D&D – Wayfinders, Drama Systems, and Me

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I’ve been thinking a lot about D&D and tabletop RPGs, not just in general, but for some specific reasons that will become clear pretty soon (/tease). Here are some of these thoughts, prompted by a new release from Wizards of the Coast re: D&D.

This week, the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron arrived on the PDF storefronts. The guide is a living document-slash-Early Access-type-dealie unofficial supplement for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (5e), bringing the world of Eberron back to the game. Eberron was created by Keith Baker (who you might also know as the creator of Gloom) for the D&D 3rd edition setting contest. I remember entering the contest with negligible hopes, and I was exactly right – didn’t make it past the first round. Alas, the email address I used is long gone so I don’t have a record of it, and only remember the vague details (it was vaguely Deadlands-inspired and was focused on like the power of the land and artifacts, I think?). I’ve gotten better at keeping track of my ideas, thankfully.

Drama Systems

When Eberron came out, it was remarkable (to me) for applying a Drama Die-style mechanic to D&D – Action Points. Action Points could be used to make a roll more likely to succeed or to activate class abilities, etc. This was meant to represent the pulp adventure tone of Eberron, which was more cinematic than the default 3e D&D tone.

Around fifteen years later, this re-introduction of Eberron comes with a new mechanic, again cribbed from and/or reminiscent of something happening elsewhere in the RPG design world – Environmental Elements.

This mechanic is, IMO, straight-up a D&D version of Situation Aspects from FATE Core.

This type of mechanic, where drawing upon the established details of a scene in your action (We said there’s a chandelier, so I’m going to jump up and swing on it to get over the guards so we can flank them) grants a mechanical bonus, is a fabulous tool. In the Wayfinder’s Guide, it grants advantage. The version from FATE allows for an extra aspect bonus (the game is built on creating and using aspects for bonuses).

Newer story/indie games talk about ‘Fictional Positioning’ and ‘Fiction-First Play’, which are both ways of focusing the play and judgment of mechanical advantages on the specifics of the scene in a way that enhances visually evocative play. Rather than thinking about what you want the rules to do for you, this style says “what does the fiction say right now, and what do you want to happen in the story?” and then asks “how can the rules help you make that come alive or resolve a dangerous or contested situation?”

As in, very much a way of playing RPGs that I like. I like cool rules, I like utility powers and mechanics that express theme and let players show mastery and achieve extraordinary results. But a lot of why I like those things because they let me drive the story forward in interesting ways.

When I cracked open the Wayfinder’s Guide, one of the questions I had was “how will this version of Eberron convey the pulp adventure tone the world is known for?” In 3e, it was action points. Here, Environmental Elements — and maybe more! I’ve just started reading. Action Dice do not make a return, though as this is a work-in-progress, who knows what will come down the road. And really, I don’t think it’d be too hard to just port Action Dice over to your D&D 5e game. Especially if you want to focus on the high-adventure/pulp heroics tone.

The Lineage of Chainmail

5e is (IMO) the most playable, most accessible edition of D&D yet, even though it is still very firmly tied to its lineage as a spin-off from a miniatures war game (Chainmail). I like some crunch (by crunch I mean more detailed and interconnected mechanical systems) – in 3.X and 5e D&D I like classes like Rogue, Bard, and Inquisitor that have some interesting inter-connected systems and utility powers, especially when it expresses an interesting character theme. But even though it’s more accessible, 5e D&D still has big spell lists, massive numbers of systemic interactions that need to be considered at every step of the way in a big, dramatic fight. And for me, it still has the Superhero Crossover problem of “Did you have the right plan for this?” where in order to keep combat moving, you have to reach such a high level of internalization of tons of different spells and effects and interactions and countermeasures so that you can declare your action and resolve it very quickly.

But then I see another problem on top of that. To keep tactical combat moving, you have to be concise and optimized. In my experience, it’s common for big combats to last 90 minutes or longer, and that’s with players and the GM keeping things moving. But what *I* want most from a fight is emotional stakes and cool description – the baseline mechanics of D&D don’t help me with that – unless the DM decides my description is cool enough to earn Advantage (more on that later)

Slowing a fight down to convey how your character feels or to do a flashback or to give a cool description of your action, even a 15-30 second description…it still slows the fight down. And the system is already set up for combat to be a slog. So as a player I end up getting self-conscious about balancing optimized, efficient play with my own play agenda of expressing my character’s emotional landscape and/or being a co-cinematographer and describing a cool action.

The Advantages/Disadvantages of Advantage/Disadvantage

D&D 5e has Advantage/Disadvantage, which is an *excellent* system. (In brief – normally in D&D you roll one 20-sided die and add a number to see if you rolled high enough to do the Thing. With Advantage, you roll 2 dice and take the better result. With Disadvantage, you roll 2 dice and take the lower result) But in my own games and the games I hear people talk about, Advantage and Disadvantage are criminally under-used. My friend Andy Romine said this about Advantage/Disadvantage:

I love the idea of Advantage/Disadvantage, but my experience has been just that — the DM “grants it.” Kind of a one-way street…Nothing stopping PCs from asking for Advantage (“Hey, I see that chandelier…”) but the game’s action economy doesn’t seem organically set up for this.

That’s the thing – Advantage/Disadvantage feels more like it rests on top of the core system instead of being as fully integrated into the system – mostly because the major way that you get either is a Guess Culture thing. You can describe an action hoping for advantage, you can ask for it, but it’s still all by fiat. The Inspiration system isn’t enough, IMO.

And beyond that, I’m not sure the D&D materials do a good enough job of communicating to the DM how powerful a tool Advantage/Disadvantage is. Even though other parts of D&D talk about Advantage/Disadvantage, it still mostly comes from DM fiat. If more things in D&D just straight-up gave you Advantage/Disadvantage, from class abilities to spells, etc. it would feel more like a critical part of the game, and I think it’d do a better job of helping the player avoid the famous whiffs where the d20 conspires against an awesome idea/action/etc. and then it just…fizzles.

But now, Environmental Elements takes a *huge* step toward making Advantage feel like a central part of the D&D system.

New Moves, New Opportunities

And here’s another thing I’ve been thinking about for D&D. One of the things that I love about the Powered by the Apocalypse lineage of games (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World) is the way they approach information-gathering. In those games, when you want to investigate a scene or get information from someone, it falls under one of several ‘Moves’ (attacking is a move. Trying to intimidate someone falls into another move. It’s a cool approach. Go read Apocalypse World). With these moves, you roll and then get to pick from a list of questions. If you roll poorly, you get fewer questions, and maybe you take a consequence but still get some information.

I’ve been thinking about running a game that I’d call D&D but would really be drawing heavily on the systems of games like Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, and FATE Core. I’d use the faction rules and downtime rules and progress clocks from Blades in the Dark, and I’d adapt the information-gathering moves from Apocalypse World/Dungeon World

It’d got a little something like this.

“When you analyze a situation, Roll Perception. For every 5 points of your result, you get to ask one question:

What is the biggest threat?
What is my way in/out?
What happened here?
Are there hidden threats I should know about?”

And then like maybe you get an extra question if you also accept a consequence/suffer a cost/etc.

Example – “You can get a better look and one more question if you scramble to the top of the tree and expose your position to the giant crows.”

None of this is new in the Powered by the Apocalypse lineage. But it’s a huge departure for the ‘make the DC or fail’ setup of D&D, even in 5e. But even that small change is liberating for me as a player and as a DM because it is less of a binary state. It’s more tangible, more focused. If I only get one question, I can prioritize. And if I want to push for more information, I have the permission to push and the cost/benefit is spelled out and systematized.

And what I think I can do here is to hybridize D&D. I can start players with the familiar trappings or the familiar shell of the D&D-style adventure fantasy, but hack the game by changing come of the cogs and gears in the system with others that I like better, and to add some after-market attachments (faction rep, downtime action, clocks) to provide more tools to make D&D into the kind of game I want to be playing. I could also just run something like Dungeon World, and I think I will, but the idea of trying to make D&D into the version of the game that I want is very appealing.

A while back, I applied to a D&D designer position – and one of the things I pitched in that application was the idea of a D&D Accelerated (inspired by FATE Accelerated, a version of FATE Core). This hacking of D&D process would basically be me designing D&D Accelerated through exploratory play, which is not a bad approach, IMO.

But mostly, I am excited to be playing more tabletop games and to draw joy and inspiration from the game texts, sourcebooks, and more. Look for more gaming news from me soon. 🙂

Throwing My Hat in the Ring

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Today I’m officially launching my consulting business! I’m offering career coaching, instruction about how publishing works, marketing assistance, convention sales services, and more.

I’ve learned a lot about the publishing industry in the 10 or so years I’ve been involved (as a writer and bookseller/sales rep/sales manager, etc.), and I want to keep sharing and applying that knowledge like I’ve been able to in my various day jobs, but as a supplement to my writing rather than as the Day Job (TM).

Head on over to the page detailing the services offered for more info, including how to get in touch and hire me to help you in your publishing journey! And if you have a friend looking for publishing help, please feel free to send them my way.

“All The Nations of the Sky”

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Born to the Blade S1 cover art - by Will Staehle
The flames of war burn bright, and options are growing thin.

The only way out for the Warders of the Circle is forward.

Today’s release “All the Nations of the Sky” by yours truly completes Born to the Blade season one!

I’ve learned SO MUCH about writing, storytelling, and business from this series, and am so grateful to my co-writers Cassandra Khaw, Malka Older, and Marie Brennan. They brought so much to the series and I have learned a lot about storytelling from each of them. I’m grateful to @serialboxpub for taking a chance on this series, for bringing the team on-board to help make new moves in storytelling, to meet readers where they are in their busy lives, commuting, sneaking in bits of reading time here and there, and so on.

I’m so honored that the series has connected with readers and that I’ve had the chance to push myself as a storyteller. Having reviewers covering the series week after week has been an utter delight.

In working on projects since BORN TO THE BLADE, I can already see the improvements to my craft – in characterization, worldbuilding, action scenes, and sentence-level craft. It’s been a lot of hard work and even more excitement, wonder, and joy.

So thank you to everyone who has been reading the series, to everyone that reviewed an episode or the season or talked about it with friends. The future of Born to the Blade now comes down to word of mouth and continuing to spread and earn new readers.

If you want to see what happens next for Kris, Michiko, Ojo, and everyone else, keep talking about the series with your friends!

BONUS: new readers can get the entire first season for just $1.99 at serialbox.com/redeem with the code SUMMER18

Summer of the Blade

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I knew Summer would come along, but it didn’t have to be a jerk about it. I went on a walk with Oreo the Dog last week and we had to take a break in the shade before coming home. That evening, the only thing that made sense was to curl up with a good book with a fan running.

If your weather situation is anything like mine, that means it’s time to find some new reading material and hide from the weather. Some of you may be in the southern hemisphere, and in that case, books are also great to curl up with under the covers. So it’s a win-win. And if you’re somewhere where the weather is beautiful all the time, then you have my envy. 😉

The constant for me this spring into summer has been Born to the Blade.

The series is seven weeks into an eleven-episode first season. The response so far has been incredible and it’s so cool for the characters and world that have been kicking around in my head for most of a decade are finally out there making an impression on readers around the world. I poured a lot of heart and soul into this world, along with my co-writers Malka Older, Cassandra Khaw, and Marie Brennan. We’re very proud of what we’ve done and are hoping that enough readers fall in love with the world for the series to get renewed for a second season.

If you’re curious about the series, here’s a short review round-up to give you a taste of what to expect:

“Born to the Blade is the best Fantasy Epic NOT on TV” – Inverse

“a complex and fascinating world that is filled with cool shit.” – Liz Bourke for Tor.com

“Above and beyond the rich world and worldbuilding, Underwood and his team bring together an intriguing set of point of view characters and secondary characters to populate that rich world.” – Paul Weimer for Skiffy and Fanty

“Born to the Blade is a fast-paced fantasy story that features strong worldbuilding, exciting action sequences, and great characters.” – Speculative Chic

” ‘Arrivals’ starts off the Born to the Blade series in a fun, magic-packed story. This opening teases at a larger, complex world where politics involves duels and airborne islands. Recommended.” – Primmlife

“It’s a heck of an achievement for a single episode, because I am definitely left gasping for next week to see how this all develops.” Imyril, Onemore.org
Read more about the series and subscribe to get the whole season at Serial Box.

Born to the Blade S1 cover art - by Will Staehle
If you’re already reading Born to the Blade, I’d love for you to consider writing a short, honest review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, or wherever you talk about books with friends. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool for books, and it’s always more fun to read with friends.

 

Here’s some other cool stuff I’ve been enjoying:

The summer movies are coming fast and furious now, from Avengers Infinity War to Solo to Deadpool 2. Most people probably already know about those, so I’m going to talk about some other cool things in my life.

Moonlighter – So you’ve got dungeon crawl video games and you’ve got merchant simulator and shopkeeper games, but Moonlighter is cool in that it is both (not the first game to combine them, but a cool version of it). Moonlighter has an excellent art style and an irresistible play loop, as you delve into dungeons to kill monsters and collect treasure and monster parts, then you sell that loot to upgrade your gear, renovate your shop, and to rebuild the town around you to build your community. It’s just $20 on most platforms, and while I maybe should have waited for it to come to Switch, I’m already having a blast.

Dirty Computer – I’ve been a fan of Janelle Monáe’s music since the ArchAndroid days, so I was eagerly anticipating this new album. And wow, it delivers more than expected. From the incredibly sexy Prince-esque “Make You Feel” to the defiance of “American” and the playful hedonism of “Screwed,” this album has helped me cheer up on hard days, provided an energetic soundtrack as I play games or enjoy poking around the internet.

Wanted & Wired – This is the novel I curled up with yesterday when it was just too hot out. Written by Vivien Jackson, this is a futuristic cyberpunk romance. But it’s not the glitzy chrome cyberpunk, it’s gritty, dirty, mercs living on the margins cyberpunk, with solid action and lots of emotionally-potent discussions of post-humanity (the male lead is *heavily* augmented and has lots of feelings about it). It’s got some of the best worldbuilding I’ve seen in a SF Romance (noting that I’ve only read a few, nowhere near as many as I’ve read non-Romance SF).

Battletech (by Harebrained Studios) – I have a variety of memories from across the years playing in this universe, from Mechwarrior 2 to the original Battletech board game and the MechWarrior RPG, the Battletech Card Game, and the CG-tastic cartoon. I haven’t played this new game yet, but I’ve been watching Waypoint’s streams of the game and having a lot of fun, both because of the game and because of Austin and Rob’s banter and geeking out about the universe.

Balticon 2018

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Continuing my fortnight of events, from my sister’s graduation to the Nebulas and beyond, Balticon 52 is this weekend. Here’s my programming schedule for the weekend.
Friday, May 25
5pm – How to be a Good Moderator
Room 8029, 5pm – 5:55pm
Saturday, May 26
10am – Readings: Jared Axelrod, Val Griswold-Ford, Michael R. Underwood
St. George, 10am – 10:55am
12pm – Dangerous Voices Variety Hour
Kent, 12pm – 12:55pm
5pm – Serialized Fiction – Is it Viable Today?
Room 7029, 5pm – 5:55pm
Spoiler: The answer is yes
6pm – Comics Without Superheroes
Room 9029, 6pm – 6:55pm
Sunday, May 27
4pm – Kickstarter, Patreon, and Crowdfunding Your Novel
Guilford, 4pm – 4:55pm
And outside of these events, you can find me kicking around here and there. I will have cool postcards for Born to the Blade and am just about always game to talk shop about writing and publishing. See you there!