Over at Booklife, Jeremy Jones interviews Ken Hite about two of his favorite topics: Cthulhu and creativity. The article includes kind quotes about Ken from Will Hindmarch and me. (Since Ken let me crash in his guest room last weekend during C2E2, it was the least I could do.) It’s a fun article that captures those specific aspects of Ken’s …
Music from College: Steven Mark and Ronan Lynch
The music of a couple college pals turned musicians cropped up this week. Back in 2006, I revealed that I’d borrowed the name Ronan Lynch – the main hero of Deadlands – from an Irish exchange student I’d met at the University of Michigan. Ronan had worked as a journalist for a while but had moved to Germany to take …
New Makeshift Prodigy Album Out
Makeshift Prodigy – the band that played a fantastic set at the Brave New World: Revolution teaser trailer debut at last year’s Gen Con – released its second album today: Mathematica. You can listen to the whole album for free online, or you can buy a CD for $5. If you’d rather download it, it’s available in a stunning variety …
The 100 Best Games Breakdowns
Family Games: The 100 Best should be on shelves Real Soon Now, I’m told. To hold you over for this smorgasbord of essays, check out Alan De Smet’s stunning and thorough breakdowns of both this book and its predecessor, Hobby Games: The 100 Best. Alan goes over the books in terms of writers, designers, and publishers to see who’s inspired …
Thriller Awards Nominees Announced
Because Amortals is a sci-fi thriller, I recently joined the International Thriller Writers. (Best benefit? Membership is free to qualified writers.) Yesterday, they announced the nominees for their Thriller Awards. I don’t know any of the nominees personally, but I’ve read some of their excellent work. Congratulations to them all! The awards will be given out this July at Thrillerfest.
Blurbs: Dan Abnett
To help kick off my hunt for kind words in advance of the publication of Amortals, the publishing director at Angry Robot – Marc Gascoigne – sent me a starter blurb from Dan Abnett. It reads: “Matt Forbeck does near-future so well, I think he’s been there. Actually, I think he designed it. Then he kicked its ass.” – Dan …
The Future of Publishing
Here’s a brilliant little presentation that DK (publishers of The Marvel Encyclopedia I revised last year) put together for an internal sales conference in February, as Penguin’s blog tells it. It’s a clever piece about the end of publishing as we know it and the hope that gleams straight through that. Be sure to watch it all the way through. …
Tools I Use: Scrivener
One of my favorite programs over the past few years is the Mac-only writing program Scrivener. If you’re doing any kind of creative writing, give it a try. I raved about it on my Twitter feed a couple weeks back, and David Johnson – the sales and marketing man and chief tea-maker for the program’s publisher, Literature & Latte – …
How We Learn
Lincoln Stollard, who I met at the GAMA Trade Show a few years back, just told me that he’s completed work on a book called The Learning Project. In it, Lincoln interviews dozens of people in different fields to discover different ways in which people learn. It’s aimed at teenagers, to show them that there are all sorts of different …
Good-Bye, Tomorrow Is Yesterday
Tomorrow Is Yesterday, the first game and comic-book shop I regularly shopped at as a kid, went under late last year. I had heard that they and Black Hawk Hobby Distributors, which were both owned by the same people, were having troubles last year, but it had been a while since I’d been able to get down to Rockford, Illinois, …