Star Wars vs. Star Trek Quiz and Twitter Contest

Over at the Adams Media humor blog, I wrote up a 12-question quiz to help you figure out if you’re a bigger supporter of Team Star Wars or Team Star Trek. It’s called “12 Ways to Tell if You’re a Star Wars or Star Trek Fan.” For example:

2. You regularly tell your kids, “Don’t make me destroy you.”

To celebrate this silly event, the Adams Media folks are giving away six copies of Star Wars vs. Star Trek. To enter, all you have to do is follow @adamsmedia on Twitter, then tweet your team + WHY with either #teamstarwars OR #teamstartrek. On June 23, they’ll pick 6 random Tweeters, 3 from each team, to receive a free copy of the book.

Doomtown Prints on eBay

My son Marty’s putting up more of my old stuff on eBay now that school’s out. He just stumbled across a pair of art prints I’d forgotten I had. Paul (Prof) Herbert created this artwork for the Doomtown CCG back when I was still the president of Pinnacle. The first one features Eureka the dog holding a zombie arm with a pistol still in it. The second shows a zombie Eureka.

Much as I love the artwork, I never hung these in my house, as they’re a bit too dark for my younger kids. They’re part of a limited run of 500 prints, signed and numbered by Prof himself, and they each come with a certificate of authenticity. Marty thought these pieces were something special, so he asked me to post about them. Go ahead and make his day: bid.

New Reviews

A pair of great reviews showed up recently. The first is for Star Wars vs. Star Trek, and Earl Davis wrote it for the Empyrean. He gives the book 4 out of 5 stars and writes:

It took one of our own, Matt Forbeck to shine an honest light on the subject and force us to laugh at ourselves… Forbeck pulls no punches, laying out lightsaber swipes and Vulcan Nerve Pinches with equal aplomb.

Over at Amazon.com, Darrin Drader tackles Amortals. He awards it a perfect 5 out of 5 stars. Among other kind things, he writes:

The story has the kind of action that you would expect from a Hollywood movie, but there’s a very touching human element to the book that you simply don’t find in a lot of action movies.

Thanks, guys!

Bid and Vote on ENnies Dream Dates

Once again, the ENnies (the biggest tabletop RPG awards around) will have a cocktail hour and award ceremony at Gen Con this August. As part of that, they’ve asked a number of industry folks to help raise money by auctioning off an arrangement to hang out with them during the big ballyhoo. The list this year includes Paizo, White Wolf, the 2011 ENnies Judges, Ed Healy/Rone Barton (Atomic Array), Erik Bauer (Gaming Paper), Evil Hat Productions, Hero Games, Monte Cook, Owen K.C. Stephens, Sean Fannon (DTRPG), Stan!, and me–even though I’m only able to commit to the cocktail hour due to conflicting plans later in the evening.

The auctions for Paizo and White Wolf are already up on eBay. For the rest of us, the ENnies are running a poll to see whose time should be put up for bid next. Go check it out and vote for me or whoever else you’d like to see on the block next. We’ll all get there sooner or later, have some fun, and raise some money to help keep the ENnies running.

[Edited to add:] I don’t recall if I ever publicly thanked Ben McFarland for his winning bid last year. We had a great chat at the ENnies about his burgeoning work as an RPG writer (check out Streets of Zobeck, for instance), but that was just part of a series of talks throughout the weekend, starting at the Diana Jones Award ceremony. Thanks, Ben!

eBay Burst

With school out, my son Marty is listed a bunch more things from the games collection in my attic on eBay. We also have a few things left from the collection of Liz Danforth up there now. If you’re looking for old, good games cheap, be sure to check out our listings. He’ll be adding to them regularly over the next few weeks.

You’ll also help keep Marty too busy to play ding-dong-ditch on me while I’m trying to write, so that’s a double bonus.

Hot & Steamy Review and Interview

Over at Steamed, Suzanne Lazear asked me to write a quick post about my story for Hot & Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance. In the post, I explain how the invitation to write such a story surprised me, but that turned out to be a good thing. Anything that forces you to stretch your creative muscles outside of your standard strolls seems wise to me.

Also, at the Main Edge, Allen Adams gives Hot & Steamy a solid review. This includes a shout-out to my story, “In the Belly of the Behemoth,” which he describes as “a Civil War-era tale about a crazed Confederate inventor and the slaves he may push too far.”

Hot & Steamy Out Today

Hot & Steamy: Tales of Steampunk Romance, the new anthology from Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg, hits digital and analog bookshelves today. It features stories from Donald J. Bingle, Maurice Broaddus, Tobias S. Buckell, Mary Louise Eklund, C.J. Henderson, Vicki Johnson-Steger, Dean Leggett, Jody Lynn Nye, Mickey Zucker Reichert, Michael A. Stackpole, Stephen D. Sullivan, Marc Tassin, Robert E. Vardeman, Elizabeth A. Vaughan, and C.A. Verstraete, plus one from me.

Despite the basic theme running through the anthology, the tales vary in particulars as much as their authors. My tale “In the Belly of the Behemoth,” pits the slaves on a Georgia plantation in the midst of the American Civil War against their mad-scientist master and his steampunk battle machine. Here’s a short sample:

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Happy Birthday, Quads!

I had a wonderful, jam-packed weekend, most of which was spent celebrating the ninth birthday of my quadruplet kids: Pat, Nick, Ken, and Helen. It started off Friday right after school with a sleepover party with four of their friends and their big brother Marty, who was nursing a side pain that landed us in the ER on Thursday. (He’s fine now, thanks.) This involved pizza, playing outside in the record-breaking heat (94F), making s’mores over an open fire, and camping out in the backyard.

The kids and their guests had a wonderful, wild time, staying up past midnight and then getting up at the crack of dawn. We dined on donuts and started playing again until the guests’ parents came to collect them, except for one boy who plays on the quads’ soccer team. I coached the quads’ last soccer game at 11:30 AM, and we all came home to collapse for a couple hours before heading out to a friend’s pool party, at which there was another cake with the quads’ names on it too.

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