My friends over at Pelgrane Press—who are stalwart sponsors of the Diana Jones Award ceremony, among their many other good deeds—just announced that they’re launching a new fiction imprint called Stone Skin Press. Tabletop RPG legend Robin Laws heads up the new operation as its creative director, ensuring some high-quality tales.

Stone Skin also announced its first three titles: New Hero, Shotguns v. Cthulhu, and New Hero II. Robin explains the line and what the books are about, over on the Pelgrane blog. I don’t know the full list of contributors, but at the least it includes Ed Greenwood, Adam Marek, Alex Bledsoe, Jennifer Brozek, Jesse Bullington, Richard Dansky, Monte Cook, Julia Bond Ellingboe, Will Hindmarch, Jonny Nexus, Jeff Tidball, Kyla Ward, and Chuck Wendig, plus a number of other names yet to be revealed. Good money says that Robin will pitch in a story or three himself. Oh, and I have one in there too.

My story, “Friends Like These,” will appear in one of the New Hero books. It’s a shotguns & sorcery tale set in a world I had once planned to use as a d20 setting called Shadowknight. At one point, I’d signed contracts with Mongoose Publishing for that line, but when Ann became pregnant with the quads, I had to table the project for a, um, while. Now, eight or nine years later, I’m happy to be able to bring you a taste of it in 2011. And I can’t wait to read the rest of the stories too.