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.

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.

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. 

In 2013 Angry Robot books will be publishing three Split Worlds novels, the first is out in March and called Between Two Thorns. I’ve been releasing a new story every week for a year and a day, hosted on a different site every time, all set in the Split Worlds. I wanted to give readers a taste of my kind of urban fantasy and have the opportunity to build in secrets and extra bits for those people who, like me, love the tiny details. It’s also been a major part of my world-building work alongside writing the novels.

This is the fiftieth tale in the year and a day of weekly short stories set in the Split Worlds.  If you would like me to read it to you instead, you can listen here. You can find links to all the other stories, and the new ones as they are released, here. You can also sign up to get the stories delivered to your inbox, one per week for a year and a day.

This story revisits characters in “The Price of Art” a year after that story takes place. (In case you want to check that one out first!)

The Business of Art

Clive held the hammer in the air, poised to strike as he listened. There was another knock at the door. He swore under his breath and laid the hammer down as quietly as he could.

“Mr Pascoe?” A male voice called. “I know you’re in there, I could hear you down the street.”

“Who is it?”

“Mr Neugent.”

Clive recognised the voice now; he was the one who’d tried to buy his work. But he’d torn up the cheque and contract and ignored his calls. Why was he there, that day of all days?

He unlocked the door after covering the piece he was working on with a dust sheet. Neugent’s hair was greyer than he remembered but his eyes were the same copper sulphate blue. He smiled and extended a hand which Clive shook.

“It’s the opening day of the exhibition,” Neugent said. “I thought you’d be checking your installations.”

The gnawing anxiety made Clive’s stomach cramp again. “It’s all ready. I know it is.”

Neugent looked at the draped sheet. “Come to work off some nerves?”

“Something like that. Look, it was nothing personal. Before, I mean. I just… it didn’t…”

“Amelia Rose convinced you to sculpt wood,” Neugent said, walking towards the hidden piece. “How has that worked out for you?”

Clive sat on an upturned bucket, tired of pretending. “It’s shit. The whole exhibition, all of it. It’s derivative GCSE art student crap with no convincing narrative between the pieces. But Amelia seemed happy enough.”

“She knows nothing about art,” Neugent said.

“That’s what she says about you,” Clive replied.

“She’s happy with the exhibition, but it’s not because of your work.” Neugent’s hand reached towards the sheet. “She doesn’t care about your career, your development or how you feel.”

“But she’s been funding me for a year!”

“It’s a small price to pay to prevent me offering patronage.” Neugent grasped the cloth and looked at Clive who just shrugged. He pulled it off the unfinished sculpture and let the sheet fall to the floor.

Clive watched the way Neugent touched the metal and the direction his hands moved in. He was following the flow of the piece. He understood what he was trying to capture.

“This is good,” Neugent whispered. “Very good. Steel perfectly balanced between strength and beauty.” His blue eyes were brilliant against the grey metal. “You can’t deny this is your calling. You come here and make this when you should be preparing for your opening night – that says everything.”

“I know,” Clive let his head rest on his hands. “I’m screwed. She’ll go mental if she–”

“Have you eaten?”

“What?”

“Let’s go and eat.” Neugent headed for the door. “Talk things over. No pressure, no obligations, just lunch. I’ll buy.”

There was a limousine outside. Clive climbed inside wearing his overalls, worrying he would mark the cream leather seats. He only had boxer shorts on underneath and no other clothes at the workshop. The walnut veneer reminded him of the dreaded exhibition.

Neugent offered him a drink and he declined. The limousine moved off and Clive stared out at the grimy streets. This was where he belonged, not the sunny studio in Richmond that Amelia had given him. He needed to be in east London, somewhere that still remembered industry and hard work and didn’t mind the hammering.

“She said you’d burn me out,” he told Neugent as they left the streets he knew. “That you valued money more than art. I suppose I thought I’d be selling out if I went with your offer.”

“Rose is very persuasive,” Neugent replied. “Do you regret it?”

Clive looked down at the black under his fingernails. Nothing felt so good as when he was working the metal. “Yeah. The splinters suck.”

Neugent reflected his smirk but said nothing. Was he going to make the offer again? If he did, what would Amelia say? She could destroy his artistic reputation. But then his own exhibition was about to do that anyway.

He looked back out of the window and waited for Neugent to say something but the minutes passed in silence. What was he doing getting into some bloke’s limo? How had he got so–

They were driving down a familiar street and the car was slowing down. They passed the gallery and parked only metres away, making his stomach churn. The gallery’s owner was outside with a woman in a suit holding a clipboard. The owner was pale and clearly distressed.

“Who’s that woman?” he asked Neugent as they watched through the rear window.

“Health and Safety,” he replied. “What a day to have a surprise inspection.” Neugent pointed at the alleyway running down the side of the gallery. The securing bolts at the top of the metal fire escape had failed and it was leaning away from the building.

A piece of paper was pulled from the clipboard and handed to the owner who scrunched it up and shouted something at the inspector as she left. Clive looked away, not sure whether to feel relieved or not. The exhibition would have to be cancelled, but did he want to be in a car with someone prepared to sabotage another person’s livelihood?

“It looks like you’ll have some time to reflect upon your career,” Neugent said. “If you want to pull out all together I can help with the legal side of things. The gallery hasn’t provided a space so they’re in breach of contract.”

“But what about Amelia?”

“I’m sure a solution can be found.”

Clive sighed. “This isn’t the first time this has happened, is it?”

Neugent smiled. “No. And it won’t be the last. She’ll know it’s nothing personal. You have to consider what’s best for you and your career now. We can talk about it over lunch.”

Clive nodded. He wasn’t going to disagree whilst sitting in his car.

The gallery owner walked to the alley, his back to the limo as he looked up at the fire escape. “What about him though?” Clive asked. “He’s a nice guy. It doesn’t seem fair.”

Neugent pressed the button to open the window an inch and then got out of the car. “Is this the right place for the Pascoe exhibition opening tonight?”

“It would be,” the owner pointed at the fire escape. “It’s going to be delayed.”

Neugent reached into his pocket. “If you need any help, I run a company that can manage communications in difficult circumstances.” He handed the owner a business card. “PinPR.com. We can help.”

“Smooth,” Clive said when Neugent got back in. “You may get a client out of today as well as a pet artist.”

“Art is art, Mr Pascoe,” Neugent said as he closed the window. “And business is business.”

Thanks for hosting, Matt! By the way, there’s a prize draw for those who pre-order Between Two Thorns and information on launch events here. 

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+.

Alas Vegas is, as James describes it, “an RPG miniseries about amnesia, sin, horror and gambling… The player characters begin the game by digging themselves out of a shallow grave in the desert, at midnight. They are naked, and they have no memory of who they are or how they got where they are. On the horizon is a scar of neon. There will be answers there. And trouble.”

I don’t know about you, but that hooked me good.

James’s backers smashed through the funding goal in under eight hours, and he’s lined up a number of excellent stretch goals. These include new campaigns by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and Allen Varney, cocktail recipes by John Tynes, a guide for using Tarot cards in other games by Robin Laws, and even an Alas Vegas novel by James himself.

I’m also chipping in a chapter on how to handle Vegas-style gambling in games that are already card and dice driven. As a game designer, that’s a fun challenge, and as you might imagine, I studied a lot about Vegas gambling to prepare for writing Vegas Knights. That kicks in if/when Alas Vegas reaches £13k. Since the drive’s already up past £8k and has 18 days left, I’m betting it can make that.

Go check it out. If you like it, deal yourself in.

Tales of the Far West – a short story anthology from Adamant Entertainment, based on their Kickstarted RPG Far West – grabbed a nomination for Best RPG Related Product. That’s about as un-fun a category title as you can find, sure, but it’s a catch-all for anything cool that’s related to RPGs. That puts the book up against a fun and eclectic array of  competitors, including a soundtrack, a book on game design, a board game, and wrapping paper with pictures of Cthulhu on it.

In a more traditional vein, the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game racked up three nominations: Best Game, Best Rules, and Best Product of the Year. That’s a hell of a trifecta, and all credit for it goes to line developer Cam Banks, who did most of the heavy lifting for the game.

As the ENnies site states: “Voting begins on Friday, July 20 and runs to Sunday, July 29. The ceremony itself will be on Friday, August 17, in the Union Station Grand Hall at 8pm with the cocktail reception beginning at 6:30pm.” Depending on my schedule, I may once again serve as a dream date for that cocktail reception, although I may not be able to make the ceremony itself.

Congrats to all the nominees. It’s a fine list of games and “related products,” and I’m looking forward to seeing the final results at Gen Con!

My fellow Alliterate Steve Sullivan just launched a drive for his Tournament of Death 1 & 2 writing stunt. He’s setting up a live-writing event that pits fantasy characters against each other to coincide with the Olympics. He pulled it off in 2008, and he’s reprising it this summer too. He wants to start at the same time as the big games, so this is a short one, only 14 days in the whole drive.

My pal Greg Stolze is running Transmit and Other Stories, the latest in his Kickstarters that combine it with his ransom model. (Once he gets the money, he releases the story to everyone for free.) He’s already cracked open “Transmit,” and now he’s pushing for the other stories. Read some of his other work, and if you like it, give him a boost.

First off, my pals Robin Laws and Simon Rogers over at Stone Skin Press have launched a drive for a set of four fiction anthologies. I have a story in The New Hero 2 anthology, which was the first Shotguns & Sorcery tale I wrote, and I came up with a short fable in The Lion and the Aardvark too. The books are crammed with all sorts of other great tales, and I’m looking forward to reading them all.

My friend Steve Savile is one of the writers behind the drive for the adaptation of the O3 trilogy of progressive metal albums by former Dream Theater lead singer Charlie Dominici. If you’re into high-concept SF with a cracking soundtrack, be sure to check it out.

My fellow Alliterate Wolfgang Baur is running a drive for the Midgard Bestiary, a monsters book for Dungeons & Dragons. All stretch goals have been unlocked, making this a great value.

Lillian Cohen-Moore has a wild project for an RPG sourcebook/fiction book called The Guide to the Village by the Sea. It incorporates a condition she has called synesthesia, which causes her to taste colors and mix her other senses in unusual ways. It’s edited by my pal Rich Dansky, and his seal of approval is more than enough for me.

Fred Hicks and the rest of my pals at Evil Hat have a drive for their first board game, Race to Adventure. I’ve known one of the designers, Eric Lytle, for years, and he knows great games. If this is even half as good as their RPGs and fiction, it’ll rock.

My pals at Zombie Orpheus Entertainment – the folks behind The Gamers films and Journey Quest – have a drive for The Mask of Death, the Pathfinder version of the adventure the heroes played through in The Gamers: Dorkness Rising. Too much fun.

Jennifer Steen of Jennisodes has a drive going for her first game: Project Ninja Panda Taco. If that name alone doesn’t sell it to you, I don’t know what will, but she also has a crack production team, including John Adamus, Brian Patterson, and Daniel Solis.

On top of all that, my friend Ryan Macklin has a drive for his excellent Master Plan podcast about game design. He smashed through his first goal and is heading for stretch goals now. Only 30-some hours left here, so don’t delay.

Other drives that caught my eye:

• Mage Knight returns as a video game.
• Hieroglyph of the Human Soul, a film featuring Dean Haglund (had dinner with him once, such an enthusiastic guy).
• B. J. Keeton’s drive for his science-fantasy novel Birthright. Only 40-some hours left.
• My friend Jeff Siadek (designer of Battlestations!) has a drive for his debut SF novel Deep Black.
• Rockford native Travis Legge’s romantic comedy film Dry Spell.
• My friend Lee Garvin (of Tales from the Floating Vagabond RPG fame) has a drive for his game Badass Zombie Killers.
• Gryphon and Eagle Games are bringing back some classic Sid Sackson games, including Sleuth.
• Marc Zicree (with whom I enjoyed a dinner at a World Fantasy con years back) has a drive for a new SF film series called Space Command.

Whew. Now I need to get back to work so I can afford all this cool stuff.

Much like myself, Chuck started out working in the tabletop gaming industry – he was a developer for White Wolf, among other things – but he’s since become one hell of a fiction writer too. He may be best known these days for his blog, on which he dispenses inspiring writing advice shot through with creative profanity, but his novels prove that he knows a lot more about writing fiction than just how to talk about it. I had the chance to read his upcoming Blackbirds, which is being published by Angry Robot in April, and it’s fantastic. 

Your blog is named Terribleminds. What’s that about?

The name, or the blog?

Doesn’t matter; I can answer both in a single answer. Like Superman.

I procured the URL over a decade ago and my initial thought was to do this online zine bullshit writer’s community hoo-hah, but somewhere along the way I decided, “That’s going to be a lot of work.” Then I took a nap. When I awoke I decided it would be better instead to just keep the site as my own personal babble-space.

So, the name terribleminds comes out of that notion where the site would allow an unholy host of terrible-minded writer-types to gather. Which, in a sense, it has become over these many glacial epochs. Prophecy, fulfilled!

How many years did it take for you to become the overnight success you are today?

Let’s see. I’m just about to turn 36. And I had my first short story published when I was 18 (a story called “Bourbon Street Lullaby” in a magazine called Not One of Us). So, it took me eighteen years. Provided my meager math skills are functioning correctly.

In other news: hey, holy crap, I’m getting older. Whee!

You publish your own stuff, write original books, and write tie-ins too, as well as write for games and film. How do all these fit into your genius plans to dominate the storytelling world?

Thing is, I have no genius plan. I mostly just rove drunkenly between whatever opportunity I can conjure up — it goes well with a phrase I use semi-often: “Painting with shotguns.” That’s basically what I’m doing. The key is — as you well know, as a many-headed penmonkey yourself — diversity of work. Tell as many stories across as many platforms as possible. Try not to fall down and die in the process.

As a sidenote, I just read a study that said most writers earn an average of $9000 a year. Which is, to me, insane. I can’t even imagine living on that. I hope some data is missing, there. [My suspicion is that counts part-timers, which spikes the average down.]

You recently launched a Kickstarter drive for your readers to encourage you to write a number of novels based on your Atlanta Burns character from your Shotgun Gravy novella. Tell us about Atlanta and why you chose her for this.

Both the names “Atlanta Burns” and “Shotgun Gravy” were kicking around my head for a couple of years. I had no idea what to do with them and, for some reason, refused to think that somehow they went together.

Then came a time when my head started orbiting the sadly real-life problem of bullies and gay suicide and the “It Gets Better” online phenomenon and a story started bubbling to the surface. I started to think: “Well, sure, those videos are great, but teens have a hard time seeing past the day in which they’re living. That’s why they drive fast and act stupid, because they don’t see the potential in the future. So, telling them it gets better is only so useful — you have to imagine that at some point a teenager is going to decide to try to make it better now.

But, of course, my brain is twisted, so “making it better now” suddenly became this story of a teen going up against bullies with a shotgun and making a right mess of things.

Somehow, the names “Atlanta Burns” and “Shotgun Gravy” just clicked with that concept, and here we are.

The original plan was admittedly to do a series of novellas, but the story for the next in the series, Bait Dog, got bigger and bigger in my head to the point where it seemed to deserve more room on the page. So now it’s novel-shaped, instead!

How do you like Kickstarter? Do you see yourself doing more projects using it?

Man, I love Kickstarter. It energizes your fans, it bolsters your work, it allows for a system that is equal parts “pre-order” and “artist patronage.” I totally intend to use it again.

You became a new father last year. How’s that affected your writing?

Ha ha ha ha! Hah! Hee. Hah. Haw.

*slams another glass of Basil Hayden’s*

It has been wondrous and maddening all in the same space. On the one hand, it gives me further impetus to do what I do. Now I’ve a kid with a mouth to feed and a head to cram full of crazy stories. On the other hand, as it turns out, you can’t just put a baby in a terrarium.

I mean, you can, but you probably shouldn’t.

They require attention! And writing requires concentration. Babies, I’ve posited, are the opposite of writers: chaos to the writer’s need for order.

So, it’s awesome in the truest sense of that word.

We both write novels for Angry Robot, and your first – Blackbirds – comes out this spring. It’s the first in a series of stories about Miriam Black. Tell us what’s special about her and why that speaks to you so much you decided to devote so many excellent words to tell her story.

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die. She touches you and that’s it. She sees your death play out in her mind like a little mini-movie. Miriam’s story speaks to a very old theme of fate versus free will, but in an… erm, classically Wendigo-style. (Violence and profanity with a core of sweetness and sadness buried within.)

Her story comes out of my own life, in dealing with the deaths of many family members – and, further, suddenly realizing that uh-oh, I’m also going to die someday.

How did your work as a game developer train you to become the writer you are today?

I learned a lot about writing from doing game design, RPG scenarios, game-related fiction. I had some great developers in the game world. And some pretty shitty ones. Both taught me a lot about writing in terms of positive and negative lessons to takeaway.

With games, I mostly learned how important it is to appease an audience and to give them something they don’t expect. A lot of fiction is rote. I don’t want to write rote fiction.

You’re editing an anthology based on the Don’t Rest Your Head RPG? How does that editor’s cap fit you?

I’ve done development before (I developed the entire Hunter: The Vigil gameline, for instance). I love to do it. Love to foster writers. Love to teach inside the fabric of a draft.

But it’s tricky because editing and development time takes away from writing time, and more and more that’s becoming a no-no. I’ve devoted 2012 to being more generative as a writer, and so that means in the future I’m unlikely to take editorial work unless it’s something really special.

Now, that being said, the DRYH anthology is something special, and has some stories that made my jaw drop. (Including yours, if I may say.) We’ve got great writers on-board. LA Gilman, Harry Connolly, Stephen Blackmoore, Rich Dansky. And some unexpected stuff, too. Both Will Hindmarch and Josh Roby turned in stories that sucker-punched me outta nowhere.

You hand out a lot of writing advice on your blog, and you’ve collected much of that into three ebooks with 1,250 tips in total. Which are your three favorite bits?

It’s like asking me to choose my favorite children. Out of 1,250 children.

Which is how many children you have, I’ve heard!

Anyway.

If anything, three lessons pop up again and again:

First, finish your shit. Completo el poopo.

Second, we do not “have” time, but rather, we make it.

Third, read your work aloud.

If anybody takes anything away from the constant barrage of nonsense I barf up at terribleminds, those three are probably good ones.

To help raise awareness about this problem, filmmaker Rubin Burgos created a documentary about three local homeless teens. He called it Sixteen Forty-Nine after the numbers of hours and minutes a child has to wait between leaving the safe haven of a school in the afternoon and returning the next morning. Ann and Robin took up that banner, naming their effort Project 16:49, and they’ve been showing this moving film all around the area to help drum up support ever since.

This pays off in all sorts of ways, not just raising funds for the shelter itself but also motivating people to chip in as best they can. Earlier this month, for instance, the staff of the Mercy Health Mall teamed up to donate backpacks full of school and personal supplies for Janesville’s homeless teens. (That’s them in the photo. Ann’s the one in the blue dress in the middle.)

Today, State Superintendent Tony Evers is recognizing Project 16:49’s efforts (along with eight others) in a ceremony at the state capitol, and Ann and Robin are there to accept the award. Read the official press release, and if you can manage it, visit the Project 16:49 website to see if there’s something you can do to help.

I spend my days entertaining people, which I love, but my wife and her friends are out there on the front lines every day, working hard to help people in the worst need. I’m glad the state superintendent stood up to recognize and endorse all their hard work.