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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Insightful Interview and Bond Podcast

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.

 

Free Angry Robot Song Remix Album

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!

Heading for WisCon

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!

Ghost Recon Online Announced

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.

Angry Robot Remix Winners Announced

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.

A Spanish Interview and Vegas Knights Giveaway

Over at the Itzel Library – a Mexican book review site – Yel interviewed me about Vegas Knights. While all our interactions were in English, she translated the entire interview into Spanish as well and posted a braided version of the interview in both languages.

Back when I graduated college, I could speak Spanish fluently. As part of my degree through the Residential College at the University of Michigan, I took two terms of intensive Spanish, plus a term of conversational Spanish. Each of the intensive courses was worth eight credits, and we met for two hours four days a week, plus had 15 minutes of lab work each day. On top of that, we had a Spanish-only lunch table in the cafeteria and met for a Spanish-only coffee hour once per week.

At the end of those two terms, I had to pass a United Nations level 3 fluency exam, which was a three-hour exam topped by a fifteen-minute interview with two native speakers of the language. If I failed it, I risked losing out on all eight credits for that term. I studied so hard, I actually wound up dreaming in Spanish for the week before the exam.

Of course, now I’ve lost most of it. I can puzzle out some of what Yel wrote, but mostly because there’s a reliable translation right next to it. Someday I’ll get back into it. Someday. Or maybe I’ll just come to rely on Google Translate even more.

Meanwhile, Yel’s giving away an autographed copy of Vegas Knights to one of her followers. Win it, and I’ll dedicate it to you and ship it on out. Good luck!

Pornokitsch on Vegas Knights

Over at Pornokitsch, Jared read Vegas Knights and mostly enjoyed it. Unlike other reviewers, he didn’t care much for the chase scenes, but he really dug the mix of magic and gambling, especially the game Mojo Poker, which plays a huge role in the book:

Mr. Forbeck’s invention of “Mojo Poker” may be the best magical contest since Assumption. Above and beyond the pure fun of wizards duelling over the card table, Mr. Forbeck also uses the card game as a vehicle to demonstrate both cunning and sorcery.

He then sums up:

Vegas Knights has a core handful of intriguing scenes surrounded by a lot of self-consciously blockbuster icing. The latter, as crowd-pleasing as it is, is a shame. The book has the potential to be tense, low-key and subtle, but instead opts for brash flamboyance. Not unlike the city itself (which seems to be doing pretty well out of it).

Some of the other reviews have said the exact opposite of this. Those readers loved the chase scenes and the splashy stuff, but they found the card games tedious. To me, this means two things.

First, you can’t please everyone. Second, Vegas Knights is a book with a mix of sharp flavors in it, and not everyone is going to love them all. Hopefully, though, they’ll find enough to their liking that they enjoy the book as a whole.