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.
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: 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:
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.
You can tell when I’m busy because I don’t post around here nearly as often as I’d like. Things like Twitter and Facebook make it easy for me to toss out quick updates or observations with far less effort, so I tend to rely on those rather than writing bits for here–or for GeekDad or Tor.com, both of which are kind enough to publish my posts too.
In the meantime, though, I took part in a couple interviews that were released over the past week. First, I joined the crew at the RedPhoneZone for a discussion of one of my favorite movie series, the James Bond films. We had a great time, ranging over the entire gamut.
Today, Sue London posted an interview with me over at Writing Insight. In it, I talk about the ups and downs of being a freelance writer, plus a description of me as a superhero action figure.
At the moment, I’m gearing up for a quick trip to Seattle later this week for a still secret-project, so expect a bit more silence here as I keep my nose to the virtual grindstone, even as I wander about.
Earlier this year, John Anealio asked me to help him out with some verses for the “Angry Robot” song he’d written as a theme song for the Angry Robot podcasts that Mur Lafferty hosts for Angry Robot, the publisher of my original novels. He posted it on his website for free downloads, and people seemed to like it.
That included the folks at Angry Robot, who suggested we run a remixing contest for the song, with the prize being a death scene for a character named after the winner in my next original novel, Carpathia. We had a lot of great entries, and we recently announced the winners. John then assembled the best of the remixes and has made them available as a free, downloadable album. Be sure to check it out, and enjoy!
I’m heading up to WisCon in Madison this weekend to take part in, as they bill it, the world’s leading feminist science-fiction convention, which has expanded over the years to include discussions on gender, race, and class. I’m scheduled for one panel at 1 PM on Saturday: “Shakespeare Got to Get Paid, Son.” My fellow panelists (Shannon Prickett, Shana Cohen, Alexandra Erin, and Kathryn Sullivan) and I will talk about the changing landscape of professional writing and how to make a living while weathering it.
Other than that, I plan to wander around, meet people, catch up with old friends, and have a great time. I’ll definitely check into the Tor party on Saturday night, to do many of those exact same things, but in a single suite. If you’re in the area, I hope to see you there!
Rob Weiland interviewed me and a few other writers for an article on Wisconsin tie-in novelists recently, and today it appears in The Onion‘s A.V. Club. As a huge fan of The Onion and the A.V. Club for many years, it’s a real thrill to see my name up there with my friends Rob King, Steve Sullivan, Margaret Weis, and John Jackson Miller.
Yesterday, Ghost Recon Online was officially announced to the world. That means I can now reveal that this is the game I helped out with when I was in Singapore for a couple weeks back in March. It’s a free-to-play MMO for the PC set in the world of the Tom Clancy games, including Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, and Rainbow Six. The beta starts this summer, so if you’d like to get in on the fun, stop by the site and sign up.
Earlier today, Angry Robot announced the winners of the contest we ran to remix the “Angry Robot” song I co-wrote with John Anealio. John, Marc Gascoigne, and I listened to and ranked the songs and picked three winners.
David De La Hoya took third place with his mix, Denis Cherryman took second, and Dale Chase – who blew us away with his overlaid rap – took first. As their prize, I’ll include fictional versions of each of them in Carpathia, the next novel I’m writing for Angry Robot to publish – and then I’ll kill them. (The fictional versions, of course.) To thank all the talented people who took the time to submit a mix, I’m going to include everyone of their names in the book too.
John’s busy putting together an album collecting the various remixes, but in the meantime, you can listen to the winners on the Angry Robot site. They’re fantastic.