Toronto Celebrates The Lion and the Aardvark

Last night’s Toronto launch of our modern fables anthology The Lion and the Aardvark exceeded expectations, thanks to a packed house of fable enthusiasts. Our supply of the book sold out at half-time. Writers Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Ann Ewan, Heather J. Wood, Daniel Perry, Jim Zub, Richard Scarsbrook, and Laura Lush hit the stage to read from their work. Special thanks to Kathryn for bravely persevering through a scratchy throat. Also, if you haven’t heard Rich Scarsbrook impersonate a trout, you have not yet really attended a literary event.

Jim received double accolades, as he is also our cover artist. Interior illustrator Rachel Kahn was on hand to take a bow, as was author Julie McArthur. Toronto-area authors who were unable to make it were toasted in spirit.

After the reading we gathered onstage for an impromptu mass signing. Collectors showed gratifying appreciation for the book, and for the beautiful work of our production team.

From left: Rachel Kahn, Laura Lush, Jim Zub, Heather J. Wood, Daniel Perry, Ann Ewan, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Julie McArthur, Richard Scarsbrook. Together they comprise 12% of the Lion and Aardvark creative team.

Thanks to the Rowers Reading Series and its artistic director Heather J. Wood (see above)  for their event organizing prowess, and to our venue hosts, the Victory Café.

The Lion and the Aardvark Toronto Launch Event

With offices in London, a Creative Director in Toronto, and writers from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland and arguably France, Stone Skin Press is a decidedly post-national operation. Yet since I’m in Hogtown, a nice swath of The Lion and the Aardvark’s 70 contributors happen to reside in the GTA. Thanks to the good offices of the Rowers Pub Reading Series, we’ll be celebrating that fact on Tuesday May 14th at 8pm, in the cozy, craft beer loving confines of the Victory Café in Mirvish Village (Bloor / Bathurst.)

Scheduled to read are Ann Ewan, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Laura Lush, Julie McArthur, Daniel Perry, Richard Scarsbrook, Heather Wood, Halli Villegas, and Jim Zub. Buy a copy and get it signed by the aforementioned, plus interior illustrator Rachel Kahn and your humble editor.

In The Lion and the Aardvark, 70 writers from across the creative spectrum bring their modern sensibilities to the classic fable format. Zombies, dog-men and robot wasps mingle with cats, coyotes and cockroaches. Parables ranging from the punchy to the evocative, the wry to the disturbing, explore eternal human foibles, as displaced onto lemmings, trout, and racing cars. But beware— in these terse explorations of desire, envy, and power, certitude isn’t always as clear as it looks.

Update: Ed Greenwood has had to drop out to attend to a family medical matter. He'll be there in spirit.

Fast Times at the Pelgrane Booth

Thursday is always my favorite day to man a booth at Gen Con. That’s when your most devoted readers and gamers show up to say hi and grab the new stuff. Pelgrane had a record Thursday this year, with an early rush followed by a slow and steady diminishment of its stacks of books. Thanks to all the Pelgraniacs who reported for duty.

The star item this time is unquestionably Kenneth Hite’s Night’s Black Agents. Its “Bourne if Treadstone were vampires” elevator pitch makes for an easy sell. So much so that the booth may well run out of them before show’s end. If you’re planning to grab one, don’t put that off for the last minute.

I was unsure how the Stone Skin Press books would do at a gaming convention—our adventure into fiction is not directly related to the main Pelgrane mission after all. Once more the taste and sagacity of Gen Con attendees dispels my reflexive Canadian pessimism. We will probably run out of these as well. (That’s The New Hero 1 and 2, and especially Shotguns v. Cthulhu, for those joining us already in progress.) There will be a signing with many of the Stone Skin authors here at the show on Sunday at 11am, for which we’ll be holding a quantity of the books back.

Also garnering a gratifying response is the Tartarus/Terra Nova adventure double-header for Ashen Stars, combined in the Ace Double style of old. I didn’t even know this would be here, but that’s Simon and Beth for you. Turn your back on them for a minute, and they’ll print up your new product and have it out for Gen Con.

For which, see also the appearance of the Dying Earth Revivification Folio, which I also didn’t expect to see here in its tastefully arcane finished state. Since the Dying Earth RPG started it all for Pelgrane, it tugs at the heartstrings a little to see this refurbished, streamlined version to the game being exchanged for the richly-deserved terces of a discriminating clientele.

I tend to forget last year’s big thing, but Ashen Stars itself continues to sell well at the stand as well. If you’ve been thinking of picking it up, now’s the time, as the first print run dwindles as we speak. The tricky economics of reprints may force Simon to go turn the glorious color of the current run into black and white, so get it while you can.

In other news, my first but hopefully not last Writer’s Symposium event, the advanced plotting workshop, gave John Helfers, Matt Forbeck and I much to talk about. We represented a continuum of authorial pre-planning, with Matt on the mellow end and me as the obsessive who diagrams every major beat using Campaign Cartographer and the Hamlet’s Hit Points system before going to written outline. We managed to stop talking soon enough to give specific notes to writers currently grappling with their own works in progress.

Today (Friday) I will don my Pathfinder Tales author’s hat (disclaimer: not actually a hat) for a panel at noon and a signing at 1:30, where I will gladly deface copies of my new release, Blood of the City, and last year’s controversial demonic heist novel, The Worldwound Gambit.

I’m also the interviewee at a live recording of the Tome Show podcast, at 6pm, right before the ENnies.

With all these festivities planned, this had to be the day for the wonder of the Utamaro shirt. Prepare to be awed.

Nords Triumph at Diana Jones Awards

Defying the Vegas oddsmakers, who had crowdfunding as a heavy favorite, authors Jaakko Stenros and Markus Montola last night earned the 2012 Diana Jones Award for their book Nordic LARP. As a document of an inherently ephemeral movement in narrative art, the book is an achievement in itself, while also allowing the DJA committee to recognize the importance of that movement as a whole.  (Were one to foolishly attempt to divine their motives of this mysterious collective entity, which is, of course, the sheerest folly.) Though the authors were still ensconced in deepest Scandinavia, Emily Care Boss was on hand to read their heartfelt and inspiring acceptance statement. Apparently she’s even hand-delivering the award to its year-long stay in the high latitudes. Congratulations again, Jaakko and Markus.

At the Diana Jones party, where the cream of the industry gathers to get their schmoozing heads back on, Atomic Overmind honcho Hal Mangold had in his capacious pocket copy zero of New Tales of the Yellow Sign, which has safely arrived at the show in all its horrible splendor. After posting this I’ll be off to the hall for some signing and numbering. It will be at the Green Ronin booth; we’ll also work out a complex Traveller-style triangular trade agreement to get copies in place at the Pelgrane stand.

Prior to the DJA party, I took the chance to network with colleagues in the fiction world, at a meet-up for participants in the Writers’ Symposium. This series of events offers a full track of seminars and workshops to aspiring fiction writers. People can, and do, come to Gen Con strictly for that. I’m dipping my toe into this pool to as one of the gurus at a sold-out workshop on advanced plotting. Although I’ve written a great deal of fiction over the years my networking circle has always been on the gaming side, so it was great to indulge in a related but different line of shop talk. Maurice Broaddus and Dave Gross were on hand to assist with introductions, and I made sure to talk up their contributions to the Stone Skin Press line. (Maurice is in The New Hero; Dave’s stories appear in Shotguns v. Cthulhu and The Lion and the Aardvark.)

Likewise gratifying is the chance to hear positive feedback on the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast, which, if you hadn’t heard, is now available through iTunes.

And now it’s time to head down to the exhibit hall, attempt to plot the shortest route between decent coffee and the exhibit hall, and hope that a certain distinguished publisher remembers to text me his prepaid cell number so I can claim my badge…

Factors in Arranging The Lion and the Aardvark

Ordering the stories in a fiction anthology is always an exercise in multi-level thinking. The Lion and the Aardvark, the upcoming book of modern fables I am editing for Stone Skin Press, adds some new wrinkles to the task. In addition to the usual matters of mixing tones and voices, I have to equally space the stories we’ve chosen to have illustrated (by the perfectly cast Rachel Kahn.) Ideally I’ll find the right rhythm of the personal political, the funny and poignant, the affirming and the disturbing. That’s all par for the course, too. But for the first time I also have to avoid clusters of:

• cats
• dogs, wolves, coyotes & foxes
• birds
• fish
• bugs
• dragons
• scientists
• zombies

Finding Me at Gen Con

Is it just me, or does it feels like Gen Con ‘11 happened only a few months ago? Nonetheless, my calendar reliably tells me that the great tribal gathering happens next week.

My new releases for the show take on a distinctly fictional cast this year. Print gods willing, you’ll be able to grab:

Blood of the City, my Pathfinder Tales novel of urban mystery, political machination, and family intrigue. At the Paizo booth.

The limited edition hardcover of my short fiction collection New Tales of the Yellow Sign, serving up weird new takes on the weird mythos of Robert W. Chambers. Seek it in the Atomic Overmind section of the Green Ronin booth.

Advance print copies of The New Hero, The New Hero Volume 2, and Shotguns v. Cthulhu, the first three Stone Skin Press anthologies, which I edited, will be at the Pelgrane Press both. If you missed the Kickstarter campaign, allow them to entice you into the notoriously seductive Pelgrane 4 for 3 deal. There you may also avail yourself of the chance to pick up The Birds: There Goes My Day Job, which came out earlier this year but makes a perfect convention impulse buy.

Even more important than the consumer frenzy I hope to whip you into is the chance to say hi, whether to catch up or meet up for the first time. Catch me at any of the following scheduled events:

Thurs	3-4 pm	Writer’s Symposium Advanced Plotting Seminar	ICC-245
Fri	Noon – 1 pm	Pathfinder Tales Fiction Panel	Crowne Victoria C/D
Fri	1:30 – 2:30 pm	Pathfinder Tales signing	Paizo booth
Fri	6 – 7 pm	Tome Show Podcast	Crowne Victoria C/D
Sat	Noon – 1 pm	Don’t Read This Book signing	IPR booth
Sat	3 – 4 pm	GUMSHOE / Investigative Roleplaying panel	Crowne Pennyslvania Stn

During exhibit hall hours, when I’m not off in a meeting or desperately scarfing down a slice of convention center pizza, I’ll be manning my post at the Pelgrane Press booth. Please don’t be shy about coming up to chat. It’s what I’m there for!

Big Thanks to Stone Skin Backers

Yesterday morning the Kickstarter clock ticked its final tick, leaving the Stone Skin Press fiction launch funded at 250% of its goal. Thanks to all of you who pledged. I’m very proud of the fiction anthologies we’ve assembled and look forward to seeing them reach this all-important first wave of readers. And I can stop compulsively refreshing the Kickstarter page to see if the total has ticked up.

Congratulations to Managing Director Simon Rogers and Managing Editor Beth K. Lewis for managing a fun campaign, full of personality and blatant cupcake solicitation. Now it’s time for us to buckle down to work on those stretch goals, from audio performances to the limited edition chapbook.

We’ve learned lessons along the way, which we’ll be applying to Pelgrane’s next crowdfunding campaign, for Hillfolk. That will kick off in late September, just as I’m recovering from my annual jaunt to the Toronto Film Festival. The hiatus also gives us the chance to gather more art to feature in the campaign. Visuals are now appearing in my inbox and I’m confident you’ll be as knocked out by them as I am.

While I have my thanking hat on, I’m also grateful for the immediate enthusiasm expressed for the inaugural edition of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast. Many of you have asked if there will be an RSS feed and/or iTunes availability, and the answer is yes to both. Setting up the RSS feed so that it talks nicely to iTunes takes a bit of messing about, which is now underway.

If you missed the grand unveiling on Friday afternoon, you can in the meantime head over to the episode page to listen through your browser or download for manual transfer to your listening device of choice.

Catch Me on the G*M*S Podcast

Color me honored to appear as a guest on the landmark 50th episode of the G*M*S Podcast. Join ace interviewer Paco Jaen as he grills me on Stone Skin Press, Hillfolk, and how we coerced Simon Rogers into greenlighting Dreamhounds of Paris.

Regarding the post-interview discussion, I hate to ruin a thrilling mental picture but have to say that working with Chuck Wendig in no way resembled a clash of the titans. When you commission a piece from Chuck, it’s not his delightfully gonzo online persona that shows up to play, but a skilled and thoroughly professional talent. He delivers great work and, when asked for adjustments, responds to them in a way that further plumbs the emotional depth of his story.

In the same discussion, Paco wonders, re: Hillfolk, how much politics and drama can arise from a tribal raiding culture. Clearly Paco has never been an iron age raider. From deposing the chieftain to making alliances and feuds, grist for intrigue always abounds in a Hillfolk game. The relative isolation of the tribal setting provides the emotional hothouse that requires the main characters to continue to deal with one another. Most compelling dramas confine their main casts in some way, within a family, sub-culture, or power structure. The raider band conceit does that in a very clear and simple way, helping players to quickly find and remain in the game’s essential rhythm.

Shub-Niggurath Syndrome

When I agreed to serve as creative director for Stone Skin Press, one of my challenges to myself was to always treat writers as I would want to be treated. This is simpler to say than to live up to.

For example, I don’t want people having to write on spec for us, especially since our anthology themes can be quite specific. Sure, if I made an open call for action-oriented Cthulhu mythos stories, the writers of good pieces that didn’t make the cut could eventually place them elsewhere. But it might not be so easy to place an iconic hero tale or a modern fable.

For this reason, I set up the process to invite people I knew I wanted in the books, if they were available and willing. Part of the Stone Skin mandate is to cross the streams of various creative scenes, bringing together talents you wouldn’t normally see on the same table of contents. As we go along, we’ve been able to expand our range quite a bit. By the fourth book, The Lion and the Aardvark, you'll be seeing not only names from our gaming home team and its adjacent S/SF world, but also contributors from comics, YA, journalism, film and literary fiction. The invitation process becomes akin to casting a play, where the objective is to look not only at the individual contributions but the overall mixture of tones and traditions.

For this to work, I did need an advance indication of what each writer planned to submit, to avoid overlap. Some Lion and the Aardvark stories concern the Internet, as you might expect from the modern fable concept—or from looking at the titular animals on the cover and notice what they’re tapping away on. Two different writers toyed with the idea of a story featuring the legendary white squirrel of Toronto’s Trinity-Bellwoods park. (Alas for fans of Whitey McRedeyes, he made himself elusive and will not be making an appearance in the final book.)

Even with me keeping an eye on story ideas this, it turns out that an anthology has a life of its own, and that certain themes and motifs were determined to worm their way in. When writers diverged from their pitches, they often moved in the same direction. I’ve come to think of this as Shub-Niggurath syndrome: for Shotguns v. Cthulhu, it seemed like every second story wanted to be about that particular Lovecraftian anti-deity. For the fables book, I had to steer contributors away from meta-pieces about the writing life, a subject John Kovalic already has hilarious dibs on.

A recurring motif made its way into the two New Hero books, too. That one’s a little spoilery, so that's all I’ll say for now. I’m wondering if it will be as apparent to readers as it became to me.

I’m sure a Shub-Niggurath Syndrome will manifest in the next book we commission, and am just as positive that its exact nature will come as an odd surprise.

Pre-order some or all of the first four Stone Skin Press books, in various permutations, with or without cupcakes for the London office, by taking part in the Kickstarter for our launch.

Behind the Scenes on Shotguns v. Cthulhu

Yesterday I revealed the Shotguns v. Cthulhu Table of Contents. Today I thought I’d draw back the squamous curtain and share project brief I sent to our impressive roster of New Cthulhuvians. Here’s the meat of it, shorn of the boring business stuff.

The premise: a story of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos which includes at least one action sequence.

“Action sequence” could, among other things, evoke the spirit of:

• Robert E. Howard’s two-fisted mythos tales

• the rooftop chase from Shadow Over Innsmouth

• Ludlumesque technothriller meets cosmic horror

• that loopy, tommy-gun heavy Call of Cthulhu game you ran when you were thirteen

To fulfill the promise of the title, I need at least some adventure romps in which sinewy muscle and/or high-powered weaponry prevail against the minions of the Great Old Ones. That said, I’d also like to see stories combining movement and violence with the existential despair at the heart of Lovecraft’s work. There might be some room for the oddball or deconstructive takes on HPL; I’m not looking for outright spoof or parody.

Stories can be set in any period. If anything, I’m resistant to pieces that revel in the 1920s and 1930s as a wellspring of the quaint and old-timey. Prehistorical, historical, contemporary, futuristic are all possibilities.

I’ll also be skeptical of stories that include Lovecraft himself or his works as part of the fictional reality. Unless you have some stunning new take on it, the idea that HPL’s work masked an awareness of actual occult forces that more or less resemble the mythos has already been thoroughly explored.

I am in no way, shape or form looking for pastiches of Lovecraft’s style. We all know how painful that can be. Write the story in a voice of your own that’s appropriate to the piece.

---

You will note that this is a simpler concept than The New Hero, and thus, a much briefer brief. As you'll see when you pick up the book (which at present you can do through the Kickstarter for the Stone Skin Press launch), the writers came through with guns blazing, with exercises in clammy unease easily outnumbering the romps.

Shotguns v. Cthulhu Table of Contents Revealed

Stone Skin Press has already revealed the author roster for its upcoming second short fiction anthology, Shotguns v. Cthulhu. We haven’t yet tantalized you with the titles of its fourteen tales of action-packed cosmic horror...until now:

Kyla Ward, Who Looks Back?

Rob Heinsoo, Old Wave

Dennis Detwiller, Lithic

Chris Lackey, Snack Time

Dan Harms, The Host from the Hill

Steve Dempsey, Breaking Through

A. Scott Glancy, Last Things Last

Chad Fifer, One Small, Valuable Thing

Nick Mamatas, Wuji

Natania Barron, The One in the Swamp

Kenneth Hite, Infernal Devices

Dave Gross, Walker

Robin D. Laws, And I Feel Fine

Larry DiTillio, Welcome to Cthulhuville

Ekaterina Sedia, End of White

And yes, I included a story of my own in there. Simon made me do it.

As of this writing, the Kickstarter for the Stone Skin Press launch has just nudged past 80%. Go top it up, and watch Simon scramble for stretch goals.

Stone Skin Press Crowdfunding Round-Up

As is his wily, silver-coiffed wont, Simon Rogers has introduced considerable distraction to the final days of my vacation by launching the Kickstarter campaign for Stone Skin Press. Avenge me by heading over and making a pledge. The four ebook deal in particular is a steal. Bibliomanes among you may wish to snap up the various limited edition options.

As of this writing, we’re at the 57% mark after three days. But as the snake said of the scorpion, it’s the back half that’s the tricky part. Please join us in making this ambitious exercise in fictional boundary-hopping a reality.

When I return to work tomorrow I’ll have more to reveal about the Stone Skin line and the process that led us to it.

In the meantime, we’re highlighting the stories and iconic protagonists of The New Hero anthology. If you haven’t been glued to the Stone Skin site, here’s what you’ve missed so far:

Jonny Nexus’ character Pete Stone conjoins two streams of British heroism, nodding with equal affection toward both Dan Dare and James Bond.

Ed Greenwood’s Midnight Knight, a contemporary adventuress attended by an able crew of Ren-faire sidekicks, is a departure for Ed, yet also quintessentially Greenwoodian.

Kenneth Hite makes his fiction debut as you figure he might, with Ray Cazador, a hero who prowls the mean streets between historical probabilities. Ken seizes the joy of the alternate history genre with a conceit allowing him to elegantly set aside its overused devices.

Video Interview with the Secret DM

In this Gamerati interview, I talk Hillfolk, Stone Skin Press, Dreamhounds of Paris, Hamlet’s Hit Points, and our plan to apprehend Flattop, with David Melmo, the Secret DM.  Check out his lovely intro, subscribe to Ed Healy’s Gamerati YouTube channel, or dive in directly below.

New Hero Brief: Story Requirements

With Stone Skin Press’ first books headed for pre-release roll-out, I thought you might enjoy a look inside the process, at the brief I sent out when inviting contributors to take part in The New Hero (and its later follow-up, The New Hero Volume 2). I’ll be breaking these up into blog-sized bites over the next few days. Please note that this is not a call for contributions; the books are finished and ready for the printer, the invited authors having delivered some exciting work featuring their new and newish iconic characters.

The previous installment defined the unifying structure the books revolve around. Here’s what I asked contributors to do with the theme when writing their stories.

---

Your story must show us everything about the hero and his environment that we need to know to understand the action. If you can imply that we’re following one of the hero’s many similar adventures, so much the better. Check out a Sherlock Holmes or Conan story to see how the classic authors of iconic serial fiction efficiently introduced their heroes and then got on with the story at hand.

Possible genres include: epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, urban fantasy, space opera, mystery, occult investigation, hard-boiled action, super heroes, pulp, special forces, espionage, gothic intrigue, steampunk, cyberpunk, and historical derring-do. This is not an exhaustive list. Surprise me. Not fitting an immediately identifiable genre is cool, too.

Likewise, feel free to set your story in the past, present or future, in this world or on an imaginary one.

We’re looking for a mix of genres so the more distinctive your choice of genre, the easier time I’ll have deciding which of the two volumes it fits in. Pick the genre you most feel at home in or that best inspire you to create a new iconic hero.

We need female as well as male heroes.

Solo protagonists are easiest to introduce and follow, but other configurations are acceptable, so long as one of them is an iconic hero. You might have your iconic hero/sidekick combo, as per Holmes and Watson, or a duality of iconic heroes, like Mulder and Scully. A team of equally iconic heroes would be hard to pull off, given space constraints, but could work.

We seek self-contained adventures featuring already iconic heroes, not origin stories in which a character undergoes a dramatic arc to become an iconic hero at the end.

We’d be happy to see further adventures of heroes you’ve featured in previous published stories. provided that they meet the iconic criteria, or can be presented as iconic heroes for the length of your story. (You might for example write a standalone adventure of a character who remains unchanged throughout but undergoes a dramatic arc elsewhere in your work.) It goes without saying that you must own the underlying rights for any existing characters (or settings) you wish to feature.

 

What We’re Not Looking For

As noted above, ixnay on the origin stories.

Engage the premise head-on. We’re not looking for stories that subvert, invert, deconstruct, parody, ironically riff on, or otherwise take the mickey out of the concept of the iconic hero.

Humor is okay within the context of a heroic story but we’re not looking for pieces that are predominantly spoofy.

Please don’t propose new adventures of preexisting heroes created by other authors, even if you have secured the rights to them. We are likewise not looking for new adventures of public domain heroes. Nor are we seeking Solar Pons-styles pastiches in which the names and serial numbers have been filed off of classic iconic heroes.

We’re not looking to reprint previously published stories.

New Hero Brief: What Makes an Iconic Hero?

With Stone Skin Press’ first books headed for pre-release roll-out, I thought you might enjoy a look inside the process, at the brief I sent out when inviting contributors to take part in The New Hero (and its later follow-up, The New Hero Volume 2). I’ll be breaking these up into blog-sized bites over the next few days. Please note that this is not a call for contributions; the books are finished and ready for the printer, the invited authors having delivered some exciting work featuring their new and newish iconic characters.

Unlike other anthologies united by theme or genre, The New Hero books ask writers to present material from any genre using a common structure. Here is how I presented that to the authors. Long-time readers of this blog may recognize the key concepts and examples.

---

The New Hero is an anthology of original fiction featuring new iconic heroes, edited by Robin D. Laws and published by Pelgrane Press.

It will consist of 14 stories, each 4500-7500 words long.

Each story features an iconic hero of the author’s creation, in any genre. The hero is presented with a problem, faces various entertaining complications as he or she engages with the problem, and solves the problem, bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion. The reader is thus left hungering for more stories starring your newly introduced iconic character.

What Makes a Hero Iconic

While a dramatic hero follows a character arc in which he is changed by his experience of the world (examples: Orpheus, King Lear, Ben Braddock), an iconic hero undertakes tasks (often serially) and changes the world, restoring order to it, by remaining true to his essential self.

Prevailing creative writing wisdom favors the changeable dramatic character over his serially unchanging iconic counterpart, but examples of the latter remain enduring tentpoles of popular culture. It’s the clear, simple, elemental iconic heroes who keep getting reinvented every generation. Each such classic character spoke to the era of its invention, while also evoking an eternal quality granting it a continuing resonance. We are going to create a new set of heroes who speak to the contemporary world while evoking the inescapable power of the iconic model.

An iconic hero re-imposes order on the world by reasserting his essential selfhood. The nature of his radical individuality can be summed up with a statement of his iconic ethos. It is the ethos that grants higher meaning to the hero’s actions, and a clue to his creator’s intentions. An iconic hero’s ethos motivates and empowers him.

• Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries using rigorous deductive logic.

• Miss Marple solves mysteries with a sharp mind, hidden behind a deceptively doddering demeanor.

• Conan uses his barbaric superiority to overturn the false order of corrupt civilization.

• Carnacki the Ghost Finder conquers fear with scientific methodology and technology.

• Dr. Gregory House caustically tramples social decencies to solve medical mysteries, temporarily assuaging his self-loathing.

• Batman brings justice to cowardly and superstitious wrongdoers, doing for others what he could not do for his murdered parents.

• Storm overcomes the enemies of human- and mutantkind by wielding nature’s untamed power.

• James Bond dispatches Britain's enemies with cold suavity and violence.

• Tarzan upholds the noble values of the jungle against the predatory outsiders who would despoil it.

• Philip Marlowe goes down mean streets, without himself becoming mean.

An iconic ethos implies both action and motivation. Each adventure featuring the hero is a satisfyingly ritualistic recapitulation of the character’s core action. By engaging in this recapitulation the hero restores the sense of order which was disrupted by the problem presented at the narrative’s outset.

This anthology provides your chance to create your Bond, your Batman, your Philip Marlowe.

Next: What we wanted to see in submitted stories—and what we didn’t.

With New Hero 2 Cover, Gene Ha Out-Awesomes Himself

For the fiction writer, the process of having one’s work illustrated serves up anxiety by the bucket load. You are not only at at a remove from the art direction process, but often out of the loop altogether. Instances of character images being shaped more by inattentive illustrators than the text abound in genre literature. And that’s for novels. The idea that you’d have significant input into a short story cover lies beyond the silver veil of authorial dreams.

That an artist would take it on himself to communicate with the writers of a short story collection, taking heed of their input and making adjustments accordingly—why, that’s got to be a crazy myth, on the order of the unicorn. That the artist would then labor to include every single lead character in a collection of fourteen—often with sidekick? Why, that’s a chocolate unicorn riding a platinum unicorn atop a prompt cable installer.

Unless we’re talking Gene Ha, in which case it is just Gene being Gene. Here’s his cover for Stone Skin Press’ The New Hero 2.

As part of our deal when I agreed to sign on as Stone Skin’s Creative Director, Simon Rogers required that I occasionally include my own stories in these anthologies, no matter how unCanadian that might make me feel. The yellow dude with the German shepherd is Longthought, my mutant hero of the semiotic apocalypse, from the story “Among the Montags.”

The Lion and the Aardvark cover reveal

As previously touted hereabouts, Pelgrane Press is launching a fiction imprint, Stone Skin Press, with yours truly serving as Creative Director.  The fourth book in our series of genre-busting anthologies will be The Lion and the Aardvark, a collection of modern fables from an impressive talent roster from writing scenes near and far.

Today we unveiled a cover mock-up to highlight the splendid illustration by Jim Zub, of Skullkickers and Udon fame. It brings a 1900s editorial cartoon style to the dueling laptops wielded by the opposed protagonists of Ekaterina Sedia’s title story.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Jim’s work more than meets the gold standard already set by Stone Skin cover artists, Gene Ha and Jason Morningstar.

We’re slating this for a Christmas release, so save space in your stockings.

Style Notes for Anthropomorphic Prose

[Posted without context, but also, by popular request.]

Fable convention has it that we meet one member of each animal type, and his species name is treated as his given name:

Frog and Badger went down to the lake where they saw that Duck had polluted it with his motorboat.

Treat the species names of such characters as proper names, capitalized accordingly, without the indefinite article. References to groups of creatures would not be capitalized, and would use the definite article:

“I am happy to be a bald eagle,” Bald Eagle said.

That is all.

Cthulhu and Me

Benjamin Hayward asks for my cthredentials:

You've been posting often about H. P. Lovecraft and Cthulhu on Twitter, Facebook, and here. Would you mind doing a blog entry talking about your first exposure to, favourite part of, interest in, and history with H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos?

I am among the first wave of readers who caught the Lovecraft bug from gaming. Call of Cthulhu came out when I was in high school; I bought it right away and was soon off to the Orillia public library to track down their copy of the Arkham House anthology The Dunwich Horror and Others, with its Lee Brown Coye cover. When Sandy Petersen’s game helped spur a resurgence of interest in Lovecraft, I grabbed the paperbacks as they showed up in the small Ontario city of my birth.

The story that I find most brilliant, innovative and influential as a piece of writing is “Call of Cthulhu”, with its documentary realism and disorienting, stories-within-stories structure.

The one that scared me the most was “Whisperer in Darkness”, perhaps because I mentally set it in an area I knew well from my childhood—not New England, but the stark landscape of Ontario’s Muskoka district. I also retain vivid sense memory of my first reading of the subtle and brilliant “The Color Out of Space.”

Lovecraft interests me on a couple of levels. The kid in me loves the outlandish details of its creatures. The geek responds to the quasi-continuity he builds as he adds to his corpus of stories, so that knowledge of one informs one’s responses to others. The group collaborative aspect with his peers is also appealing—and the reason the mythos sits in ambiguously in the public domain for anyone to play with. I appreciate him as an exponent of intellectual horror: it is as much about our fundamental aloneness as the fear of being torn apart by a star vampire or hound of Tindalos. In his mature work he is also a top-notch stylist, marrying prose to content in an uninhibited way we could use more of today.

For all of these reasons, I am glad to get to dip my toes in the icy Lovecraftian pool, both with works for Trail of Cthulhu, such as The Armitage Files, and as editor of the upcoming Shotguns v. Cthulhu fiction anthology for Stone Skin Press. There are also some other short fiction projects in the offing, which I’ll announce when the stars are right.

Shotguns v. Cthulhu Cover Preview

Here's a peek at the cover for Shotguns v. Cthulhu, the upcoming anthology of action-oriented Lovecraftian tales from Stone Skin Press. Jason Morningstar brilliantly captured the bold, graphic look we're pursuing for the line with his double-barreled, multi-tentacled retake of the skull and crossbones motif. Sans text, the design would look great on a T-shirt. Alas, that's a category of merchandise publishers have difficulty shifting, so you'll just have to keep an eye out for the book when it arrives later in 2012.