Write-a-Thon Check-in

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Almost halfway through Week One of the Clarion West Write-a-Thon, I have gotten off to a great start with 3893 words, mostly from a great session of writing on Saturday (technically before the Write-a-Thon, but I’m counting it since I wrote on Saturday that weekend and not Sunday.

 

Here’s my participant page (where you can sponsor me — hint, hint) http://www.clarionwest.org/writeathon/michaelrunderwood

 

The Write-a-Thon is taking sponsorships/donations through the end of the workshop, so you have a bit over five weeks to sponsor me. I initially pledged 10,000 words in these six weeks, but I hope that my strong performance so far will let me annihilate that goal and keep going. Word count will likely slow down when travel gets more intense for my day job and when Geekomancy comes out, but I need to keep making words so that there can be another geek-tastic adventure with Ree next year.

 

Check in soon for a big announcement about Geekomancy‘s release! Excitement! Adventure!

Clarion West Write-a-Thon 2012

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For those of you who don’t know, I attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2007, and it was a huge boost to my writing career. Clarion West allows writers to focus on craft and critiquing for six weeks. Most writers are urged to write a story each of the six weeks as well as critiquing 3-5 short stories by their classmates each day during the week. It’s often described as Boot Camp for writers, and while I haven’t done a military boot camp, my Clarion West experience was certainly a crucible. I’m still applying and re-interpreting lessons learned at the workshop, and Clarion West also gave me a community of peers, most of whom I’m still in touch with and some of whom I see once or twice a year at conventions, keeping up and basking in one another’s successes.

Digression for plugs — Success like Cassie Alexander’s NIGHTSHIFTED, first a three book (and counting!) series about a nurse that works in the paranormal ward of her local hospital; David Constantine’s PILLARS OF HERCULES, a Roman Steampunk action-adventure novel that includes Steam Engines, a Possibly-Divine Alexander, and the secrets of Atlantis; Melinda Thielbar’s MANGA MATH series of manga  about kids in a dojo that have to use math and martial arts to solve mysteries; and others!

I wrote my first salable novel after Clarion West (though it hasn’t sold yet), and I’ve tried to keep some connection to the workshop by participating in the Write-a-Thon most of the summers since.

For more info about the Clarion West Write-a-Thon, head here: http://www.clarionwest.org/writeathon

I’ve pledged to write 10,000 words and am hoping to raise $150 this year. My participant page is here, in case you feel like sponsoring me. 🙂

http://www.clarionwest.org/writeathon/michaelrunderwood

In Praise of Tabletop

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I’ve been enjoying the Geek & Sundry YouTube channel, especially the Sword & Laser video show, but today, I want to talk about the awesome that is Tabletop.

I’ve been a gamer nearly all of my life, but I became a Gamer at the tender age of nine, when classmates at school invited me to play D&D with them. My first character was a Barbarian with a Dune Buggy, and it was all downhill from there.

Like many geeks of my generation, large portions of my teen years were spent in front of dining room tables, consoles, and PCs, playing games of all types: video, board, collectible card, strategy, miniatures, and so on.

Wil Wheaton had a distinctively different upbringing than I did, having been a child star and all, but this thing we have in common: a great love for tabletop games. Wheaton brings this love to Tabletop, a web series where he invites friends and colleagues to hang out and play board games, card games, and strategy games. Wheaton has taken up a role of advocacy for these games, touting their ability to train critical thinking, strategy, teamwork, and to strengthen social connections. But rather than doing it in a Suzanne Somers “Please adopt this hungry d12. Just a quarter a day can help it get the crayons it needs to have clearly defined numbers…” kind of way, more a “this is really fun, let me give you the jist and then we will show you!”

The gameplay shown in Tabletop is intentionally heightened, as the players are clearly ‘ON’ in terms of giving a performance to maximize watchability, but it is usually not a huge stretch from an animated game between good friends.

One of the benefits of the show for me (and I hope many others) is the chance to introduce loved ones to the joy of tabletop games. I’ve bought several of the games featured (at my friendly local game store, of course), and shared them with my girlfriend, who is very gracious about sharing my passions, and whom I hope to turn to the Dork side of the Force (at least a little, if she wants).

I’ve embedded the first episode here to give a sense of the show.

What are some of your favorite tabletop games? Anything you think would be especially good for the show?

Blurb 2: The Geekening

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I’m honored to have three blurbs from fellow authors and advance readers of GEEKOMANCY , which we’ll get to use for the initial release of the book (including one on the book’s cover, perchance).

Underwood’s Geek Fu is strong–and he’s not afraid to use it. GEEKOMANCY is fun, fresh and full of geek culture references that will have you LOLing to the very last page. This book is one hundred percent pure awesomesauce and totally FTW.

— Mari Mancusi, award winning author of The Blood Coven Vampire series

Modern, sleek, and whip-smart, GEEKOMANCY is a wonderful blend of geek and pop culture — you’ll find yourself grinning knowingly at least every other page. And Ree is the perfect protagonist to navigate Geekomancy’s world — geek enough to hold her own, yet human enough for me to be deeply invested in her struggles. I can’t wait to read the next one!”

— Cassie Alexander, author of NIGHTSHIFTED

If Buffy hooked up with Doctor Who while on board the Serenity, this book would be their lovechild. In other words, GEEKOMANCY is full of epic win.

— Marie Lu, author of the Legend trilogy

 

Now back to doing my authorial happy dance. We’re less than one month out from GEEKOMANCY’s release, and I am reaching the stage of excited where it requires deliberate effort to calm down at times. I’m also hard at work on the sequel, so that there can be another adventure with Ree Reyes to share with readers next year.

Gamer Girl/Country Boy — Geek and Sundry music video

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One of this week’s offerings from the Geek and Sundry YouTube channel is a music video for a song called “Gamer Girl, Country Boy” by Felicia Day and Jason Charles Miller.

Watching the video, in addition to being amused, I found myself thinking that this would probably become a theme for the GEEKOMANCY readers who ship Ree and Eastwood (of which I know there are more than one).

First Blurb for Geekomancy

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Today, I got the first blurb for Geekomancy! And it’s a doozy, if I do say so myself.

“If Buffy hooked up with Doctor Who while on board the Serenity, this book would be their lovechild. In other words, GEEKOMANCY is full of epic win.”
– Marie Lu, author of the Legend trilogy
This is me doing my happy author dance. Those who have seen the ‘There Will Be Flail’ video will have a good idea of what said dance looks like.
We’ll be able to use this quote on the cover, at the various websites, etc. Cover blurbs are a great way to give a snapshot of what is worth getting excited about in a novel, and they help draw in the audiences for established/popular authors to build buzz. We’ve got a few other leads out for blurbs, and I hope the novel connects with some of the other folks reading as well.

The Joy of WisCon

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This weekend I had the absolute pleasure of attending WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention in Madison, WI. Last year was my first WisCon, and I knew very early into the con that I’d be coming back. WisCon has a strong academic thread as well as a clear social justice orientation, in addition to being a SF/F writing convention. Plus, Madison is a great city, the hotel is in the middle of a great cluster of restaurants downtown, and I have local friends to visit.

This year I had even more fun than the first time. I’ve been to a number of conventions over the years, and it always takes me a few hours to rev up, but once I get going, I’m in full extrovert geek mode, happy to meet new people and wax geeky.

I had the chance to participate in programming this year, thanks to the quick work of the convention committee and the generosity of the Exotic Worlds group: Bradley P. Beaulieu, Holly McDowell, Derek Silver, and LaShawn M. Wanak. I read from chapter two of Geekomancy, and was very happy that the time I spent on preparation paid off.

Since I’ve been performing nearly my whole life, between choir, dance, and various RPGs (tabletop and LARP), I do my best to make sure that my public readings are performances, with notable value added. If I just read what is written, I wouldn’t be adding anything new. But since I have that experience, and love a crowd, I try to use those skills and inclinations as a benefit. Word on the street is that there are far fewer book tours these days in U.S. publishing, where only a small handful of authors for each publisher are supported with funds for in-person tours across the country. By developing my reading performance skills now, I can try to make a reputation as an entertaining reader…and if that leads to

The reading went very well, I think, since I was happy with it and I got good feedback over the weekend from folks that were there.

This was also my first convention after selling Geekomancy and sequel, so it was all fresh and new to be a bona fide author, with a novel coming very very soon. I had a great time talking about Geekomancy but tried not to toot my horn too often or too loudly. No one wants to listen to the writer that turns every conversation into an extended commercial for their books. I love the conversations that pipe up at conventions, from craft to life, tips to tales of publishing mishaps small and large. Conventions are where I go to bask in the awesome of the SF/F community, who are some of my favorite people in the world.

Even as I was leaving, I started yearning for the next WisCon. Each convention has its own flavor, its own feel, and it can change from year to year (especially conventions that change locations each year, like the World Fantasy Convention). But WisCon was and will likely remain one of my absolute favorites.

Nightshifted — Cassie Alexander

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My friend Cassie Alexander’s debut novel, a kick-ass urban fantasy titled Nightshifted, is out in stores now!

 

The awesome cover:

Nightshifted Cover

And the scoop on the novel:

 

Welcome to the secret wing of County Hospital—where vampires get transfusions, werewolves have silver allergies, and one nurse is in way over her head…

Nursing school prepared Edie Spence for a lot of things. Burn victims? No problem. Severed limbs? Piece of cake. Vampires? No way in hell. But as the newest nurse on Y4, the secret ward hidden in the bowels of County Hospital, Edie has her hands full with every paranormal patient you can imagine—from vamps and were-things to zombies and beyond…

 

 

NIGHTSHIFTED

 

 

Edie’s just trying to learn the ropes so she can get through her latest shift unscathed.  But when a vampire servant turns to dust under her watch, all hell breaks loose. Now she’s haunted by the man’s dying words—Save Anna—and before she knows it, she’s on a mission to rescue some poor girl from the undead. Which involves crashing a vampire den, falling for a zombie, and fighting for her soul.

 

 

Grey’s Anatomy was never like this…

Cassie’s website is here:

http://cassiealexander.com/books/nightshifted/

I cannot express how happy I am for Cassie, and how impressed I was when I started reading Nightshifted. Cassie is also a RN in California, so all of the medical talk comes from expertise…except the stuff about treating dragons. It is fiction, after all.