Gen Con Wrap

As usual the day after Gen Con, my brain is mushy and my creative spirits lifted. Thanks to everyone who attended a seminar, asked for a signature, posed questions, or shared responses to my many and various projects. Without an audience this work would not exist. This show serves as a joyous and emotionally overwhelming confrontation with that fact.

Or to put it another way, my current ear worm is the chorus to "Dream Weaver." And I think I like it.

On Sunday, the Pelgrane booth sold out of its pre-release copies of The New Hero and Shotguns v. Cthulhu.

The New Tales of the Yellow Sign sold most of its limited hardcover print run. Remaining copies will go to DragonCon courtesy of Adventure Retail, or to Atomic Overmind world headquarters, where they may be made available via mail order. The main softcover run releases next month.

Now I get to go home and decompress. Oh wait, no, tomorrow's TIFF program book day and the weekend's FanExpo. Belay that. Pass the espresso drum, nurse!

Telegraphic Snippets of a Whirlwind Gen Con Saturday

[Image is accurate rendition of author's breakfast-deprived state.]

The Pelgrane booth sold out of Ashen Stars late in the afternoon. To bask in its silver-ENnie winning setting you will now have to head to your discerning game retailer or the Pelgrane web store. Or to your bookshelf, for those of you with the taste and forethought to have acquired it already.

Supplies of New Tales of the Yellow Sign ought to hold for the last day. Find it either in its native environment in the Atomic Overmind section of the Green Ronin booth, or at the Pelgrane booth or Adventure Retail’s Cthulhuiana Corner.

The investigative roleplaying seminar went well, with lots of great questions. This year most attendees new GUMSHOE already, with a more advanced discussion resulting. It turned into a bit of a Night’s Black Agents master class, though we also covered the game’s genesis and the various future projects we’re mulling—and what to do when you have two forensic scientists in your group and they don’t agree on what tests their characters might be performing in the 1930s. I may or may not have captured usable audio of the talk on my magic phone; if so, we’ll slip some highlights into future Ken and Robin podcasts.

Today at 11am Stone Skin authors present at the show gather at the Pelgrane booth to celebrate the success of the prelaunch, and to personalize your copies of The New Hero 1 and 2 and Shotguns v. Cthulhu. Swing on by.

But now I must deal with an immediate crisis, the absence of any discernable protein at the hotel’s breakfast buffet. A desperate Plan B must now be activated. Pray for me, Gen Con. Pray for me.

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…

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!

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

New Hero Cover Revealed

Here’s a peek at the cover for The New Hero. As you’ll recall, this is the first of the fiction anthologies I’m shepherding for Stone Skin Press, Pelgrane’s new fiction line. We were lucky enough to snag the services of comics artist and illustrator extraordinaire Gene Ha, who more than met our expectations with the fabulous image you see below.

Gene went above and beyond the call of duty by closely reading each and every one of the fourteen great stories in the collection, placing each protagonist in his composition. He pitched us the idea of a Greek vase as emblematic of the book’s theme, which combines the time-honored structure of the iconic hero tale with fresh new characters, settings, and voices. The individual elements will also appear in the interior, as part of the title treatment for each story.

The first volume of a new line carries a lot of freight. We couldn’t be more thrilled.