Join Me as a Guest of Honor at Gen Con

GenConLOGOLast year, Gen Con (the largest tabletop gaming convention in America) decided to form a panel of experts to help them select people to join them as part of their slate of Industry Insider Guests of Honor. These are creators who work in the tabletop gaming industry and have something to share as panelists at the show. Ken Hite, Stan!, and I formed that original panel, and this year Nicole Lindroos and Eric Lang have joined us.

To be considered to become a Guest of Honor, you have to apply with Gen Con. This is the best way for us to collate the bits of information we need and to reach out beyond our network of friends in the industry and find fresh new voices as well. To do this, you first have to register an account with Gen Con (which costs nothing) and then go fill out the online form.

Apply is easy and shouldn’t take much time. The questions are all about you, so you should already know most of the answers.

The deadline for this year’s applications is April 8, 2013.

So what’s involved? Here’s what Gen Con has to say:

What is Required of an Industry Insider Guest and What do I Get In Return?

Gen Con Industry Insider Guests of Honor are required to attend Gen Con Indy and are asked to participate in 3-6 seminars/panels over the course of the four days. We encourage you to host interactive events such as workshops and ask that you provide us with information about what you would like to host at the show. The events you submit should take into consideration topics that are broad enough for other Industry Guests to be a part of. Only fellow Industry Guests are permitted to participate in panels as part of the Industry Insider events/programming. You can submit individual events separately outside of the Industry Insider program.

At the end of the submission process, you will be required to agree to Terms & Conditions which outlines your involvement, this will serve as a contract moving forward.

In return, Industry Insider Guests receive the following:

  • A “Guest of Honor” badge (good for all fours days of the show)
  • Picture and Bio featured on our website and in a dedicated section of the program book
  • A hotel code that allows access to an exclusive block of “self-pay” rooms just for Industry Insider Guests. (You are responsible for acquiring your room and covering the costs)

After the deadline, the panel will gather the applications, review them, and come up with a list of guests. The results will be announced in late April/early May.

This will be my 12th year running as a guest of honor at the show, and it’s a fantastic time. It’s my favorite event of the year, topping both my Christmas and my birthday (which sometimes falls during the show, so bonus!).

So, if you qualify and would like to join us at Gen Con, please apply. And if you know someone else who fits the bill, pass the information along. I’d love to see a fantastic and robust group of guests.

Either way, if you enjoy games at all, come on out and join the rest of us at the show. Gen Con had something like 45,000 gamers show up in Indianapolis last August, and if you like this kind of event, you’re not going to find a better time.

 

All Sorts of Shorts: The New Hero 2

new_hero_2_cover_thumbTwo fresh anthologies and a revamped one either hit shelves in the recent past or are just about to appear, and I have a story in each of them. First up, we have two books from the all-new Stone Skin Press, which is run by my pal Robin Laws. Robin’s a fantastic game designer, but it turns out he has a sharp eye as a fiction editor as well. He assembled fantastic slates of writers for both books.

The first one is The New Hero: Volume 2. The New Hero series is based on the idea that not all heroes change, as you’re often told they must in your literature classes. Instead, some are iconic, the kinds of heroes that force the world to change around them by being true to themselves. This includes most heroes in serial fiction, from Spider-Man to Sherlock Holmes.

The story I wrote for this was the first-ever Shotguns & Sorcery yarn, “Friends Like These.” I liked it so much I followed it up with another short called “Goblintown Justice” – which you can grab here for free – and a trilogy of novels, starting with Hard Times in Dragon City.

The book features a fantastic cover in the ancient Japanese style, created by incredible comic-book artist Gene Ha. If you look closely, you can see Max Gibson and Moira slipping out of the front door of the building there.

A stack of great writers joins me in this book, including Alex Bledsoe, Emily Care Boss, Jennifer Brozek, Tobias Buckell, Jesse Bullington, Robin D. Laws (himself), Will Hindmarch, Jean Rabe, Christina Stiles, Greg Stolze, James L. Sutter, John Scott Tynes, and James Wallis.

Next comes The Lion and the Aardvark, but I’ll tell you about that one Monday.

 

Bad Times in Dragon City on Sale Now

Bad-Times-Cover-Standard-600Bad Times in Dragon City, the sequel to my fantasy noir novel Hard Times in Dragon City, is on sale now. This is the second in the Shotguns & Sorcery series, and the fifth of the books I wrote during my 12 for ’12 challenge. My backers received their copies a few weeks back, and I’m now releasing the book to the public.

You can read a free sample and purchase Bad Times here on my site or through Smashwords or DriveThruFiction.com. It should also be up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble shortly. You can also grab print copies through DriveThruFiction.com, in both paperback and hardcover.

The book already has a couple of glowing reviews up on GoodReads.com, both for five stars. If and when you read the book, go ahead and share your own review either there, at Amazon, or wherever else you might have purchased it.

I’d be out there pushing the book hard, but I’m in Shanghai this week and the next, working on a new video game for Ubisoft. I’m having a fantastic time so far, even though I don’t speak a lick of Chinese. As a writer, it’s always a wild experience to be in a part of the world in which you’re a functional illiterate.

However, China also clamps down hard on all the social media I like to use, which makes it hard for me to tell people more about the book. So, spread the word far and wide. Tell your friends and neighbors. And most of all, enjoy the read. I had a ball with this book, and it has a doozy of an ending.

More Bundle of Holding to Love

bundleofholdingWith just nine days left to grab the Bundle of Holding, another bonus book has been added to the package. Bundle founder Allen Varney steps up with Stay Alert, the first of his novels based upon the classic RPG Paranoia, the hilarious roleplaying game of dystopian treachery. This brings the grand total of the number of books in the full bundle to a nice, round 10, featuring books from Chuck Wendig, Jenna Moran, Stephen D. Sullivan, Rafael Chandler, Derek Pearcy, Aaron Rosenberg, Sarah Newton, Mur Lafferty, Allen, and me.

You can pay what you want for the bundle, down to as low as $1, and split the money between the writers, the website, and our two chosen charities: Child’s Play and Reading Is Fundamental. For that, you get the first six books. If you pay more than the current average donation, you get four bonus books as well, including both Stay Alert and my own Hard Times in Dragon City. It’s a great deal and it goes to worthy causes – oh, and to those two charities too!

The clock’s ticking on the deal, so don’t wait to long. Go grab it while the grabbing’s good.

Bundle of Holding Got Bigger

500x500_2736861_fileThe Bundle of Holding is only a few days old, but it’s already doing pretty well. Despite a few Day-One glitches, it brought in a lot of buyers and made a good chunk of change for both Child’s Play and Reading Is Fundamental so far.

One of the biggest surprises is how generous the donors have been. We started out with an average of $8, but that quickly ran to over $16. Since then it’s tapered off a bit and is now back down closer to $15, but that’s still amazing.

Tonight, we added another bonus book to the lot. This one’s from the amazing and multi-talented Mur Lafferty. Besides being a great novelist and an RPG writer, Mur hosts the long-running podcasts I Should Be Writing and Escape Pod, as well as the podcast from Angry Robot Books, which publishes my own Amortals, Vegas Knights, and Carpathia.

Mur’s contribution to the bundle is a superheroes novel called Playing for Keeps. It’s a fun and funny book about a bar owner in a world filled with charming villains and superheroic jerks. Be sure to check it out and grab it – and the rest of the bundle – while you still can.

Hard Times Hardcopies on Sale Now

With the help of my friends at DriveThruFiction.com, I just flipped the switch, and you print junkies out there can now order print-on-demand hardcopies of Hard Times in Dragon City from them. Hardcovers are $15, and softcovers are $10 each. They come complete with a free copy of the ebook editions in DRM-free ePub, Kindle, and PDF formats.

Of course, if you just want the ebook edition, you can grab that through the Bundle of Holding, which is still going for the next 17 days. Alternatively, you can snag right here on this site or through Amazon, BN.com, etc.

Book 2 in the series – Bad Times in Dragon City – went out to my Kickstarter backers last week, and we’re looking at a March 5 release for the rest of you fine readers out there. I’m editing Book 3 – End Times in Dragon City – this week and hope to have that out to my backers soon too, with the public release a couple weeks past that.

Meanwhile, you can check out a couple recent interviews with me. Monday night, I chatted with Christopher Helton of Dorkland about all fiction, games, and all things in between. We had a fun, relaxed time.

 

Last night, the fine guys behind the Speculate podcast – Brad Beaulieu and Gregory A. Wilson, both excellent writers – released Episode 68, in which they chatted with extraordinary artist Lee Moyer and me. Since Brad, Lee, and I have all run successful Kickstarters, the conversation revolved around that. We had a rollicking good talk.

A Split Worlds Story from Emma Newman

BetweenTwoThorns-144dpiToday, in a very special blog post… I’m going to do something I’ve never done on this blog before: post someone else’s fiction. Hell, I don’t even post my own fiction up here that much. I usually wrap it up in an ebook and either sell it or give it away in that format instead.

To be honest, it never occurred to me to do something like this, but then Emma Newman came along. I had the pleasure of meeting Emma – one of my fellow Angry Robot writers – at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago last Labor Day Weekend. In a lot of ways, the AR crew is like an extended family, and the group of us spent large chunks of the weekend hanging out together swapping publishing war stories and having a fantastic time. So when Emma asked if I’d be willing to put one of her Split Worlds stories up here – set in the same universe as her upcoming urban fantasy trilogy, which launches next month with Between Two Thorns – I only wondered why she hadn’t asked earlier and why I hadn’t thought to offer.

I tried to write a dozen novels last year. Just as ambitious, Emma tackled fifty short stories instead, and she’s still going! Here’s her latest, the fiftieth of the lot.

I’ll let Emma set it up for you. Read More

Grab the Bundle of Holding Now

bundle-books-launchThe Bundle of Holding went live this morning. As I mentioned earlier this week, this is a bundle of fiction ebooks written by games writers, for which you can pay what you like. You get the books in all three major formats (ePub, Kindle, and PDF), and they’re all DRM-free (no built-in copy restrictions).

There are eight books in the bundle in all, including stories from:

If you pay less than the average – down to a minimum of $1, which is there to cover processing fees – you get six of the books. That includes:

  • Irregular Creatures by Chuck Wendig
  • The Birth of the Dread Remorra by Aaron Rosenberg
  • Hero Worship by Derek Pearcy
  • Tournament of Death by Stephen D. Sullivan
  • The Fable of the Swan by Jenna Moran
  • Hexcommunicated by Rafael Chandler

If you pay more than the average, you also get Sarah Newton’s Mindjammer and my Hard Times in Dragon City tossed into your bundle as well. Another neat thing is that when you buy the bundle, you get to choose where the money goes, splitting it among the writers, our chosen charities, and the upkeep of the site.

The average started at $8 this morning, but people have been so generous that it keeps going up. Since our chosen charities go to Child’s Play and Reading Is Fundamental, that’s a good thing.

Now, you might remember that I released Hard Times in Dragon City last week with a note telling you to hold off buying it. That’s because I didn’t want anyone to regret picking it up and missing out on the bundle just over the horizon. Now, though, GO AHEAD AND GRAB IT! PLEASE!

If you like the idea of the bundle, go ahead and pay above the average for that, and get Hard Times in Dragon City with it.

If you don’t want the rest of the bundle, just grab the book by itself.

If you’d rather have a printed version of the book, I should have that available soon too. Meanwhile, be sure to check out the Bundle of Holding and chip in if you can. Thanks!

Magic: The Gathering: Paths of Vengeance #3 Out Tomorrow

MagictheGathering_PathofVengeance_03Tomorrow, IDW releases Magic: The Gathering: Paths of Vengeance #3. This is the 11th comic I’ve written featuring Dack Fayden, the planeswalking spell thief, and it’s roller coaster ride that leads up to the climax in the next and final issue in the series. You can check out a free preview of it over at Comicosity.

Dack’s story – or at least my part in it – comes to an end with the next issue. I’d always plotted the story to fit a dozen issues, and I’m thrilled that Martin Cóccolo, J. Edwin Stevens, and I got to tell the whole thing. Be sure to grab that final issue too, as we send Dack off with a bang.

There’s a Bundle on the Horizon

bundlestarfield-764This Wednesday, keep your eyes peeled for the Bundle of Holding, a bundle of fiction ebooks written by tabletop game designers (like me). It’s going to make for a fantastic deal, and it’ll include one of my novels in the pack.

Tabletop game designers spend their days building worlds and adventures for other people to play in. They come up with characters, locations, situations, and all the others bits that make fictional universes seem the kind of thrilling places you’d like to spend some time in – at least at the arm’s length that playing a game or reading a book affords.

That’s just one chunk of making a great speculative fiction book, of course, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any group better at it. With the Bundle of Holding, you can read what happens when those same people with their rare skill sets place characters of their own into worlds they’ve created and let them loose.

This Bundle of Holding is modeled on other successful bundles like the Humble Bundle and Story Bundle. You can pay whatever you like for the bundle, down to $1, and you can split the proceeds among the writers, the website itself, and charity. All we ask then is that you enjoy the books and help spread the fun.

The Bundle of Holding site should launch on Wednesday, so look for it then. Meanwhile, you can follow the Bundle of Holding on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.