Grab the First Shotguns & Sorcery Story Now

Friends-Like-These-Cover-1Shotguns & Sorcery started out as an idea I had for a new setting for a fantasy roleplaying game. Back in 2001, I licensed the concept to Mongoose Publishing in a sweet deal that would have seen me writing an entire line of d20 (Dungeons & Dragons-compatible) books.

And then my wife became pregnant with quadruplets. (Yeah, I know. Writers. We always have one excuse or another.)

I shelved the project at that point, and I didn’t come back to it for an entire decade. That’s when Robin Laws asked me for a story for his new set of anthologies exploring his theory about the iconic hero: The New Hero 1 & 2. Having had Shotguns & Sorcery knocking around in the back of my head for too long, it finally burst out onto the page, and “Friends Like These” is what I scraped together from the spatter it left behind. It first appeared in The New Hero 2 back in 2012.

I had such a good time with this story that I returned to the setting for “Goblintown Justice,” which appeared in Marc Tassin’s Carnage & Consequences anthology. That story actually came out before “Friends Like These,” so for most people “Goblintown Justice” introduced them to the world of Dragon City.

While I was still waiting for the story to come out, I had this insane idea that I wanted to write a dozen short novels, one for each month. I called the project 12 for ’12, and I broke the books up into four trilogies and ran a Kickstarter drive for each. The second of those trilogies became the novels Hard Times in Dragon City, Bad Times in Dragon City, and End Times in Dragon City, each of which tell the continuing stories of ex-adventurer Max Gibson and the dragon-run city he calls home. 

If you wanted to see how the adventures of Max Gibson and his friends started out, though, you had to track down a copy of The New Hero 2. Now, for the first time, you can buy it all on its own, for the low price of just 99¢.

[I’m trying an experiment with this story by making it available exclusively for the Kindle for now. Amazon gives all sorts of perks to stories that set up camp solely under their tent. While I’m a big believer in the long-term health of a diverse marketplace for my work, which is why I sell all the rest of my stories through a number of different shops, I still want to play around with those tools a bit, and this gives me the chance to do that on a small basis. I’ll try to let you know what I figure out.]

So, tell your friends and neighbors! Come on in and get the sharp little story that started it all!

The Marvel Encyclopedia 2014 Is Here!

Marvel 2014 CoverBack in 2008, I revised the Marvel Encyclopedia for DK Publishing. That meant taking the original version of a book written by Tom DeFalco, Peter Sanderson, Tom Brevoort, Michael Teitelbaum, Daniel Wallace, and Andrew Darling–and revamping and updating most of the entries. I also wrote a slew of new material for the book and nearly melted a keyboard trying to get it all ready to help celebrate Marvel’s 70th anniversary in 2009. We just made it.

Fast forward five years, and it’s the same thing all over again, only this time we’re pushing to have it ready in time for Marvel’s 75th anniversary instead. It sounds like a simple enough assignment: read five years of Marvel comics and update each entry that needs it once again. Add more pages for the most popular characters on top of that, and throw in a bit of perspective while you’re at it.

Sure, there are worse assignments than having to read five years worth of comics in a few months, but wow, Marvel puts dozens of comics every month. That quickly adds up to stacks of reading you wouldn’t want collapsing on you for fear of having the life crushed out of you. Still, it’s a fantastic and fun universe, and I’m always grateful to be able to spend some time in it, especially when it has a purpose like this.

One of the great delights of going to visit Disney Studios last month was seeing the last edition of the book in a couple different spots. For one, it was on sale in the Disney gift shop right there on the premises, and I even signed a copy for one of my fellow bloggers.

Better yet, my friend Dave Wallach spotted a copy on the shelves of the Disney Archives. When I was in there later, listening to recordings of P. L. Travers discussing Mary Poppins with the Sherman brothers, I looked over and spotted the book sitting right behind the main desk in the room, right at eye level for the woman sitting there. I mentioned it to the man giving the presentation, and he was pleased to tell me they’d gotten a lot of great use out of the book over the years.

The brand-new 2014 edition of the Marvel Encyclopedia isn’t supposed to be out until St. Patrick’s Day, but it looks like most retailers already jumped the gun. There’s no reason to wait politely yourself, so get yourself down to your local bookstore, and grab yourself a copy. If you love Marvel Comics, you’ll love this book too–maybe as much as I loved working on it.

My Disney Trip

IMG_4565Last month, Corrina Lawson of Geek Dad/Geek Mom had to drop out of a planned junket to Disney Studios. I wound up going in her place and had a wonderful time. Not only did I get a guided tour of the inside of both the Disney Animation Studios and Disney Toon Studios–both of which are normally closed to the public–I also managed to find some time to see some old friends and to make a bunch of new ones.

Disney brought me and a couple dozen other mom and dad bloggers out to show us around so we’d write about some of their creations. This includes Frozen, Saving Mr. Banks, and Pirate Fairy (an upcoming Tinkerbell direct-to-video movie), among other things. My first post about the trip went up over at GeekDad.com today, and it covers the roundtable interview I did with the directors, writer, and producer of the Oscar-winning Frozen. 

My first day there, I managed to grab lunch with John Rogers (of Leverage fame). I hadn’t seen him in person for a few years, and it was great to catch up with a Hollywood-style lunch. That night, I had dinner with all the other bloggers, and we all hit it off famously. Later, I joined Dave Wallach (of DadAllDay.com) for a drink, along with Mark Staufer and Bryan Erwin of the excellent podcast Dadsaster.

Dave wrote a way-too-kind post about me when he got back home, and I’d like to return the favor. I know a lot of great, funny guys, and Dave’s at the top of the list. He’s as generous with his time and his wisdom as he is with his humor, and he lights up like the dawn over Lakeshore Drive when he talks about his wife and kids.

Despite all that he’s humble and personable as can be. It wasn’t until a couple days into the trip that he let drop the fact that he’d played football for the University of Wisconsin his freshman year in college, before a knee injury sidelined him. He’s produced more reality TV shows than I’ve had the chance to watch. And on top of all that, he’s a damn fine writer too.

Inspired by the trip and the bloggers we met, Dave set up a new Facebook group called DAM (Dads and Moms) Bloggers. If you’re one of those sorts yourself, be sure to jump on over and join us.

I’ll have a number of posts to follow this up and show you inside the studios and the trip. Join me for the first installment today, and I’ll let you know when the other bits arrive too.

The Crossing the Streams Reddit AMA

reddit-alienAs you might recall, I’m running a month-long contest here as part of the multi-author Crossing the Streams mega-contest of DOOOOOM! (In which said doom involves the ability to win dozens of autographed books from some of the best genre writers around.)

As part of that, a bunch of us Crossing the Streams authors are taking part in an AMA at Reddit. That’s an “Ask Me Anything” forum at Reddit.com. Stop on by and ask me anything you’d like, and you can also drill the rest of the crew with the same questions. The answerers include Paul S. Kemp, Richard Lee Byers, Joshua Palmatier, Marsheila Rockwell, Jeffrey J. Mariotte, Betsy Dornbusch, Dave Gross, Wendy N. Wagner, James L. Sutter, Erik Scott de Bie, Erin M. Evans, Howard Andrew Jones, Jeff Salyards, Erin Hoffman, and our ringmaster Ari Marmell.

The AMA lasts for roughly a day, so get those questions in fast. The answers will be preserved forever. (In which case, forever equals the age of the internet, which is all of 8,247 days as I write this.

 

 

The First Shotguns & Sorcery Story

Friends-Like-These-Cover-1There’s a long history behind the Shotguns & Sorcery setting. It started out as a setting for a tabletop roleplaying game that I never got around to writing (because quadruplets), and it eventually became the world I used for the second of my 12 for ’12 Kickstarters. Those stories filled a doorstop of an omnibus, and I’ve been giving away the story “Goblintown Justice” for free to go along with them ever since I launched that Kickstarter. (You can still grab it here.)

I originally resurrected the world, though, for Robin Laws’s The New Hero 2 anthology, and because of that Stone Skin Press had the exclusive rights to the story for a while. Despite that, with Robin’s permission, I included the story in the omnibus my Kickstarter backers received. To get your hands on it, though, you had to either grab The New Hero 2–which I recommend, as it’s full of great stories–or travel back in time to back the Shotguns & Sorcery Kickstarter.

Until now.

I’m going to release that first story–called “Friends Like These”–as an ebook next week. It’ll set you back all of 99¢. Until then, take a gander at the cover I whipped up for it, which features the dragonfire drinks that our hero Max Gibson likes tossing back so well.

If you enjoyed Hard Times in Dragon City, Bad Times in Dragon City, or End Times in Dragon City, this is your chance to finally see where it all began. 

Get My Eberron Audiobooks and Ebooks

51RcgPtO1XL._SL300_Over the past several months, Audible has not only been releasing books from Angry Robot–including my Amortals, which I wrote about yesterday–but also several novels from Wizards of the Coast. In that number, we can now count all three of the novels I wrote in the Lost Mark Trilogy. These were some of the first novels written for Eberron, the Dungeons & Dragons world designed by my pal Keith Baker, and they were also the first big, thick fantasy novels I ever had published. 

The three books, in order:

  1. Marked for Death
  2. The Road to Death
  3. The Queen of Death

You can also get Marked for Death, The Road to Death, and The Queen of Death on Amazon. The first two have been released as ebooks there too, and I suspect the third should be along in good time.

Claire Christie narrated each of the books. She’s done great work for other writers too, including Heather Graham and David Brin. Go listen in.

Grab the Amortals Audiobook

51mN70j3LCL._SL300_Last week, I stumbled over the fact that Amortals has been released as an audiobook. This is part of the deal that Audible has with Angry Robot to turn their novels into books people can hear being read by professionals. Carpathia was one of the first novels to be released under this deal, and the idea was that once Audible was able to catch up with Angry Robot’s current releases, they’d go back and start working on the older books too.

Amortals’ turn finally came up. You can now purchase it at the following places, for your listening pleasure.

Tony Award-winning actor Hayward Morse read the book aloud for us. He doesn’t have the voice I heard in my head as I wrote it, but that’s probably a relief for everyone. He’s narrated lots of other books for authors including Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph Conrad, Ed McBain, Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, Arthur C. Clarke, and Mickey Spillane. He also appeared in Death Wish 3. 

Give it a listen.

Goodbye, Aaron Allston

Aaron_allston_2005I got the terrible news last night that Aaron Allston died earlier in the day. From what I can piece together, he’d arrived in Branson, Missouri, to be a guest of honor at VisionCon this weekend, where he collapsed and was taken to the hospital but did not recover.

Our mutual friend Allen Varney posted an excellent obituary for Aaron last night. Go give it a read.

Aaron was most famous these days for his many excellent Star Wars novels, but he started out in tabletop games. When I first met him at an Origins Game Fair some twenty plus years back, he was a compatriot, a fellow freelancer writing for Hero Games, working on books for Champions and Justice Inc. about the same time I was writing Western Hero. He was hellaciously talented, always ready with a wry joke or a bit of well-considered advice.

I watched Aaron move from games into novels, blazing a trail before me, much in the way of Mike Stackpole and Troy Denning, two mutual pals who mentored me along the same path. I cheered on every one of his successes. There’s something heartening about seeing good people achieve the kinds of goals you’ve set for yourself.

I’d seen him many times over the years, most recently at a Gen Con, I believe. The last time I spent any real time with him was at Comic-Con a few years back. He was recovering from heart problems, and like many freelancers didn’t have much in the way of health insurance to pay for something as costly as emergency bypass surgery. The SF and gaming communities had come together to help raise funds for him, though, and I know he appreciated that more than he could ever say.

Despite those troubles, he’d started taking better care of himself and had lost weight in an effort to improve his health. Even in the face of those challenges–both physical and financial–he put on a brave face and wore a ready smile. And he kept writing, telling fantastic stories to entertain hundreds of thousands of people for as long as he could.

He left us far too early. He was only 53.

I’ll miss him, and I know I’m not alone.

 

A Sojourn with Fear the Boot

126517Last week, the folks behind the Fear the Boot podcast–on which I’ve appeared a couple times–released their first ever anthology of fiction: Sojourn, edited by Laura K. Anderson and Ryan J. McDaniel, with a great deal of help from Fear the Boot’s Dan Repperger.

I’m proud to have a story in the book, along with

  • Laura K. Anderson
  • Thomas Childress
  • Wayne Cole
  • Hans Cummings
  • Shannon Dickson
  • Robert Freund
  • Chris Hussey
  • James Lowder
  • Johann Luebbering
  • Peter Martin
  • Ryan J. McDaniel
  • Tom McNeil
  • Dan Repperger
  • Elizabeth Roper

My story’s called “The Bookrunner.” It’s set in a dark, near future in which words have been weaponized and memes can kill.

From a writer’s point of view, creating this story makes for a great example of how fast publishing can move these days. Dan first contacted me about the book in the middle of November. I turned it over to Laura and Ryan on January 20, and the book was released on February 15. That’s three months from first contact to publication.

Of course, Dan, Laura, and Ryan had been working on the book for many months before that. I was a last-minute addition to fill in a hole that had appeared in the anthology. Even so, the experience on my end was lightning fast, and the entire team was a delight to work with.

I’m thrilled with how the story came out, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the tales too. If you’d like to join me, you can find the book on sale at:

Print copies should be available soon too. I’ve seen the proofs, and it looks fantastic.

Crossing the Streams, AGAIN!

Monster-Academy-3D-coverBack in 2012, Ari Marmell came up with this great idea for a bunch of authors to run simultaneous contests to help promote each other’s books. He called it Crossing the Streams, and it involved each author running their own contest, plus a united contest that gave a book from each writer to the grand-prize winner. It was both successful and fun.

Two years later, it’s time to do it again. For my part, I’m giving away three hardcover copies of Monster Academy: I Will Not Eat People. See my contest page for details on how you can join in the fun, both here and on the other authors’ pages. Folks like:

The best part about it? It doesn’t cost you a dime to enter. Just start clicking on those links, and have fun. Good luck!