Robin D. Laws's Blog, page 73

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: The Audacity of Cupcakes

Yellow signs, Kickstarter, idea wrangling and mysticism take center stage in this week’s episode of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff podcast.

Prequeling a Dramatic Hero

The first installment of my web fiction serial “In the Event of My Untimely Demise” is now up at Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales blog. It features Luma, hero of my new Pathfinder novel, Blood of the City. A cobblestone druid attuned to the magic of the marble metropolis of Magnimar, she’s the odd sibling out in a team of urban adventurers for hire. In part one, “The Dead Client”, Luma, having been barred from a prestigious assignment, receives an unusual commission—to perform an investigation purchased in advance by a now-deceased customer.

Writing this serial posed a challenge I didn’t have to deal with when coming up with its equivalent for The Worldwound Gambit. Unlike Gad, the heisting hero of that novel, Luma is not presented as an iconic hero, who does not change in the course of the story but instead changes the world around her by remaining true to her essential problem-solving ethos. Instead she’s a dramatic hero, who undergoes a personal journey that profoundly alters her sense of self and relationship to the world.

Iconic heroes, like Batman, Sherlock Holmes or James T. Kirk, are built for recurring appearances. Dramatic heroes are tougher. I can see Luma becoming an iconic hero, maybe, after the events portrayed in Blood of the City. But going back in time, to a moment prior to the opening scenes introducing her dramatic dilemma, required some head-scratching.

Without giving too much away, the story prefigures her arc and echoes a key theme of the novel, without putting her on the path toward her transformation. It’s both free-standing story and prelude.

Head on over and check it out.

New Tales of the Yellow Sign Now Available For Kindle

New Tales of the Yellow Sign, my book of weird short fiction based on Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow Mythos, is now available from Amazon’s Kindle store.

You can also grab it from Smashwords, in the ebook format of your choice. Over the next weeks and days, it will propagate through them to other vendors including Apple, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble. As the book appears in these venues, I’ll announce them on my Twitter feed.

A last few copies of the limited hardcover run can be acquired at DragonCon from my eldritch pals at Adventure Retail. Atomic Overmind releases the softcover in September.

My FanExpo Panels

I’ll be doing the guest thing this weekend at Toronto’s FanExpo, appearing at two panels, both on Friday the 24th.

At 2pm I’ll be in room 707 for Robin’s Laws of Gaming, a solo version of the classic GM troubleshooting panel. If your questions wander off that topic, I won’t call security.

5pm will see me on the Crowdfunding panel, in room 717.

I’d hoped to participate in events on Saturday as well, but alas a scheduling conflict says otherwise.

Hope to see you there, GTA-area gamers!

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.

In Which My Humility is Variously Assaulted

Anglo/Canadian diffidence took a thundering body blow last night as Pelgrane saw four of its eleven ENnie nominations turn into silver and gold. I’d like to again thank ENnie judges and voters for their silver nods to Lorefinder for best rules and Ashen Stars for best setting. The first constitutes greatly satisfying recognition to a book that seemed to fly under the radar when first released. In raiding GUMSHOE’s stuff and turning it into Pathfinder treasure, Gareth Hanrahan performed feats of mighty battle, and it was lovely to see him hit the awards podium at his first Gen Con in years. The setting nod for Ashen Stars was an unexpected jolt of approbation and gave me the chance to thank the art team (Jerome Huguenin and Chris Huth) as well as cupcake magnate Beth Lewis and gentleman adventurer Simon Rogers for their indispensable contributions.

For pure delight it was impossible to beat Paula Dempsey’s reaction to her gold award for Best Writing the Occult Investigator’s Guide to London, which is her first book. Contributor Steve Dempsey once again uncorked his freestyle chops to deliver his portion of the acceptance speech in rap form. I was proud to be namechecked in this profound expression of the hip-hop arts. In accepting the gold award for best electronic product for Cthulhu Apocalypse, Simon praised the fecund womb of author Graham Walmsley, veering towards and then away from an invocation of the dread buzzword.

Earlier in the day I was happy to appear alongside Paizo fiction majordomo James Sutter and fellow scribes Richard Lee Byers and Dave Gross for a panel on the Pathfinder Tales novels. Ed Greenwood popped in for a cameo appearance to announce his upcoming book for the line. To what must surely be his eternal chagrin, he missed the later discussion of the supposed chasteness of the series, which turned into a list of all the naughty passages in past or forthcoming books. I think James might have been blushing. Along the way we mulled the inextricable relationship between plot and character and maybe even found a few fresh ways to talk about the balance between respecting and obscuring game rules when writing RPG-inspired fiction.

I also had a fine time doing the guest thing on the Tome Show podcast. You can listen to it when it drops, so I needn’t recap. The D&D focus of the ‘cast provided me with a welcome topic shift. Thanks to Tracy and Jeff for inviting me and for their incisive questions and smooth direction of the Q&A segment.

Today I’m at the IPR booth at noon for a Don’t Read This Book group signing, and doing a GUMSHOE seminar with Ken and Simon at 3. Other than that I’ll be chatting and signing at Pelgrane temporary global HQ, booth 1427.

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…

The Birds: Super Happy

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