My Gen Con Schedule

Gen Con just posted the schedule for the Industry Insider Guests of Honor. Once again, I’m honored to be such a guest, and a number of fantastic game designers are joining me, namely Steven Charbonneau, Michael Elliott, Steven Ellis, Mike Gray, David Hill, Eric Lang, Brian Lewis, Stan!, Owen K.C. Stephens, Jeff Tidball, and Bryan Tillman.

Combine this with the stuff I already have set up, and I have ten events scheduled at the show. I’ll be all over the place, so be sure to hunt me down and say hi!

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Gibson on Futures and Writing

William Gibson (author of Neuromancer among many other fantastic books) spoke at this year’s BEA about how how the Future as we once knew it is over. We caught up with it and live in an eternal and evolving now.

In science-fiction – the great harbinger of the Future – stories about the Future rarely have really been. As he notes, “[I]maginary futures are always, regardless of what the authors might think, about the day in which they’re written.” You can’t comment on things that are in the distant days to come, and who would really care if you did? It’s far more interesting to discuss what’s happening now, and even if that inevitably leads to thinking about where it all might lead, that’s a warped reflection of where we are at the moment and the vectors upon which we believe we’re traveling.

The best part of his talk, though, comes in his closing paragraphs:

A book exists at the intersection of the author’s subconscious and the reader’s response. An author’s career exists in the same way. A writer worries away at a jumble of thoughts, building them into a device that communicates, but the writer doesn’t know what’s been communicated until it’s possible to see it communicated.

Novelists should carve the last clause on the wall above their desks. You don’t know what your book is about until its done. You may have ideas about it, and you may railroad your text down a rigid set of rails in that direction, but until you finish the book, you can’t really see it. That’s why you write the book in the first place.

Writing is an act of exploration and discovery, for the writer as much as for the reader. That’s where the magic is. You sit down to express an opinion or to tell a story, and when you’re done, you – and hopefully your readers – can figure out what you really meant.

Them Bones

My friends over at Gameplaywright.net have just opened up pre-orders for the special edition of The Bones, a book of essays about everyone’s favorite random number generators: dice. It features pieces by some of the brightest lights in the gaming industry, including Keith Baker, Jason L Blair, Greg Costikyan, Ray Fawkes, Pat Harrigan, Jess Hartley, Fred Hicks, Will Hindmarch, Kenneth Hite, John Kovalic, James Lowder, Russ Pitts, Jesse Scoble, Mike Selinker, Jared Sorensen, Paul Tevis, Jeff Tidball, Monica Valentinelli, Chuck Wendig, and Wil Wheaton. Plus a little bit by me titled “Daryl Hannah’s Dice Saved My Marriage.”

The special version is a hardcover edition limited to just 100 copies, each of which comes with the PDF of the book as well. Will Hindmarch, who put the whole book together, will sign and number each of these personally.

I already have my PDF of the book, and it’s fantastic. If you’ve ever owned a dice bag, if you’ve ever spun a d6 on its point, if you’ve ever wondered about the most basic tools we use to determine our fate, this book is for you.

Amortals and Vegas Knights Dates

The downside of Angry Robot moving from HarperCollins to Osprey is that they won’t be releasing any books for a few months during the transition. This includes both Amortals and Vegas Knights, which were slated for shelves in the UK this spring and the US this summer. The new schedule for the UK looks like this:

Amortals: November 2010

Vegas Knights: March 2011

The US schedule isn’t as firm quite yet, but the books should be out shortly after their respective debuts in the UK. The books will be distributed in the US through Random House, so they should be available just about everywhere.

The upside is that this gives me a bit more time to polish the books so they’ll be bright and shiny for your reading pleasure. As Troy Denning has often told me, an editor’s scorn for a late book lasts only a little bit, while a bad book sits on the shelf with your name on it forever, so I’m going to make the most of that.

Angry Robot Finds New Home

While I was out last week, my pals at Angry Robot announced that they’d left the HarperCollins family and joined the growing Osprey flock instead. While this has caused some understandable turbulence in their release schedule, I think this is a fine thing. I was happy to be a HarperCollins author, but with the troubles wracking the publishing industry on a weekly basis HC has been trimming a lot of things, like the experimental and innovative HarperStudio.

A novel (in all senses of the word) imprint like Angry Robot, designed to work like an indie publisher within a massive conglomerate, had to look like easy pickings for any bean counter. It was always going to be a challenge to make it fit, and when you’re looking for things to trim the square pegs go first. Fortunately, Osprey had the perfect square hole ready and waiting to slot Angry Robot in.

I’ve been a fan of Osprey’s books ever since I discovered them in college. They do the best illustrated military history books in the world, bar none. I first spotted them by way of Angus McBride, the legendary artist. Angus had been creating covers for Iron Crown Enterprises‘s Middle-earth Role Playing books for years, including some books I’d worked on. When I spotted his gorgeous artwork on Osprey’s books too, I couldn’t help but be drawn in.

Angry Robot may seem like a strange fit for Osprey, but gamers know that the line between military history and genre fiction is thinner than many would like to admit. Dungeons & Dragons – the original fantasy roleplaying game – grew out of Chainmail, a set of historical miniatures rules. Modern games started with and owe a huge debt to war games, going all the way back to H. G. Wells‘s Little Wars.

To top that off, the fact that Osprey is already a long-established indie publisher means that the Angry Robot sensibilities fit better with it than they ever could have with a giant like HarperCollins. This seems like a great match, and I’m thrilled for Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris, the soul of Angry Robot, as they join up with their new partners in publishing.