My friend Jack Norris is running a Kickstarter for a wuxia RPG called Tianxia: Blood, Silk, and Jade. Jack and I go way back in gaming, and I had the fortune of testing an early early version of what would become Tianxia, and even then it was awesome. The game is 99% done and printer-ready, and the Kickstarter has hit its initial goal and several stretch goals.

But there’s one more stretch goal, and this one is particularly important to me: If we get a total of 1000 backers (48 more at the time of this writing) or hit $35,000 ($2,692 more at this time), then Vigilance Press will produce a fiction anthology called Tianxia: Year of the Snake. I’ve committed to writing for the anthology if it happens, and I’d be in the company of gaming luminaries such as Robin D. Laws, Gareth Skarka, Allen Turner,  T.S. Luikar, and John “Leverage” Rogers, a personal writing idol of mine.

So if you’re a gamer or you like wuxia stories, kung fu action, or cool fiction anthologies, please go take a look at the Kickstarter page and consider pledging to help us reach this last goal.

Tianxia: Blood, Silk, and Jade

This exciting news hit my Twitter feed today, courtesy of Publishers’ Weekly.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/59674-simon-schuster-to-launch-science-fiction-fantasy-imprint.html

I’d been wondering why S&S didn’t have a dedicated SF&F imprint, since it’s a genre that’s adapted well to digital distribution, and is continuing to garner a ton of buzz and an avid fanbase in the reading world.

Congrats and good luck to all involved. I’ll be watching this news with great interest.

Today I have a special bit of funny for you all. Mary Robinette Kowal, who narrated CELEBROMANCY, snuck out of the recording studio with a blooper reel from the sessions, and has provided that reel for me to share with you all.

Ze Bloopers!

My favorite bit? “Patently paternal…that’s just mean.” And it was. Not intentionally mean, but funny nonetheless. Despite my failings in producing (just a few) audio clunkers like that line, Mary did a fantastic job on the audiobook, and I recommend it as a great way of engaging with the story.

What these bloopers remind me of is how important it is to bring in your ear when doing revisions. Since I can now ambitiously assume that I’ll either sell audio rights or want to exploit them myself on all of my major works, I think it’s especially important to consider the aurality when doing revision. Sometimes, I don’t do enough, as we can hear from the bloopers, but I’ve tried to incorporate a read-aloud stage to my revisions whenever possible.

On the one hand, having bloopers is funny, but on the other hand, I’d rather have narrators who love performing my work extra because I manage to avoid such aurally preposterous phrases.

Sometimes, a line that plays really well in text will cause a headache for an audio narrator, and you have to choose which audience you’re primarily serving, or figure out if there’s a way to re-phrase or re-approach that works both ways. It’s a balance I’m still working on, and will beg forgiveness from my audio narrators in the meantime while I try to figure things out.

#SFWApro

I’m leaving now for New York Comic-Con, and I’ll be there all weekend, discovering new comics creators, findingout about everything new and awesome in geekdom, chatting with my amazing publishing teams at Simon & Schuster and 47North, as well as catching up with writer-friends who have come in from all across the country for a weekend of awesomeness.

As a reminder, you can find me at the “Ode to Nerds” panel on Saturday at 1:30 PM, where I and other fabulous nerdy authors will be talking with one another in what I imagine will be an all-out geekfest. Bring your questions for us and/or your books to be signed, since we’ll proceed from the panel to the signing area.

Info about the panel: http://nycc13.mapyourshow.com/5_0/sessions/sessiondetails.cfm?ScheduledSessionID=10ADCC.

See you there!

One of my absolute favorite memories of WorldCon 2013 is that during the convention, I joined the Skiffy & Fanty team to record a very special Torture Cinema podcast episode about SHARKNADO.

This is the episode in which I declared SHARKNADO to be “the apotheosis of the bad SyFy channel Sci-Fi movie.”

Notice: the recording is filled with total ridiculousness, profanity, and a drunkenly-acted skit.

Listen, if you dare…

A while back, I made some noise about a new 3-book deal with Pocket Star – 2 of the books being in a new series titled YOUNGER GODS, and the other being a novella in the Ree Reyes universe, set after CELEBROMANCY.

Now that I have edits back on the novella, we’ve settled on a title for the novella: ATTACK THE GEEK. This book will be about half the size of a Ree Reyes novel, and focuses on one Incredibly Bad Night (TM) at Grognard’s, featuring Geekomancers new and old, magic curses, whacky monsters, more romantic tension between Ree and Drake, and the on-screen return of everyone’s favorite Grizzled Geekomantic Mentor, Eastwood!

ATTACK THE GEEK will be available on April 7th, 2014. Set your calendars now!

You can see it even now on Goodreads, and pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes. Other links to come. (N.B. the final price will be lower than $5.99, since it’s a shorter work).

w00t!

On 9/11, I was a brand-new Freshman in college. My adulthood has been formed in a number of ways by that day.

I remember waking up and checking news on a Legend of the Five rings blog site and thinking it was a hoax at first. Then spending hours going down internet rabbit holes, needing to know more.

My one class that day spent the first 60 minutes just trying to process what had happened, and our teacher, excellent as she was, wove it back into the subject of the class, on international relations (The West and China, in the class’ case, but it worked).

That night, the dorms at Indiana University had impromptu group grief counseling sessions. Walking back to our dorm, I remember talking with a group about how if we don’t want this to lead to a war, we should contact our representatives, tell them to find a peaceful solution. That didn’t exactly pan out.

Not long after that, I borrowed The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Power of Myth from the library, which set me on the path of designing my own major (Creative Mythology) out of a need to tell stories, perhaps derived from a desire for some kind of control, to be able to make sense of the world. That major then put me on the path towards becoming a novelist, of going from ‘I want to write fiction some day’ to ‘I am going to start doing this thing, now.’

Would I have still become a writer without 9/11? Probably. But that day, the effects it had on the USA as a country, psychologically, socially, politically, economically, have created the world that I live in.

“Never Forget.” I’m part of the 9/11 generation. How could I ever forget? All I can do is try to move on.