Dan Wells's Blog, page 15

The PARTIALS book trailer is out!

Book trailers are becoming hot stuff these days, which is surprising to anyone who's ever seen one of the old ones: go back a couple of years and book trailer technology was basically "slow pans across still images while a breathless voice tries to make you think it's a movie trailer." They were goofy and weird and I've never met anyone who liked them, but the core concept behind them–a video promotion that can be shared on the Internet–was so strong that they kept doing it, and kept doing it, and now we're starting to see some pretty good book trailers. A lot of old school authors and readers still don't like them, but younger readers eat them up, which has helped (perhaps symbiotically) make them a staple of YA.

When the Balzer+Bray marketing team told us it was time to make a book trailer, my editor and I very staunchly didn't want a cheesy, wannabe movie trailer, so we looked in other places for inspiration. We were in the middle of a fun project at the time, creating short "supplementary materials" for the ebook, sort of like the special features on a DVD. Our idea for those, rather than a series of short stories, was to do a series of in-world documents collected by a mysterious figure, chronicling the rise of biotechnology and the creation of the Partials. We thought the book trailer would be an awesome opportunity to do the same kind of thing, so we pitched the trailer as an investor video from ParaGen, the biotech company that created Partial technology. You can watch it here:

I love it, and I especially love how subtle it is: it doesn't tell you anything about the book, really, or the story, and certainly not the characters. On the other hand, it does tell you what a Partial is, and it sets a slightly ominous tone of pride and greed–people who think they can do anything, especially if it will make them rich, will often overstep their bounds. They'll push too hard and go too far and cause more problems than they know how to deal with. The happy, smiling people in the video are only happy and smiling because they think they have everything under control. They've accomplished a lot, and they're justifiably proud.

But pride cometh before the fall….

On a completely different subject, we have new shirts in the store, including my favorite: "I Am Not A Serial Killer" t-shirts with glow in the dark words! Well, all except the word "not." Sorry about that. Sure, it changes the meaning in the dark, but I'm sure your friends won't mind. Why are they alone in the dark with you anyway? Serves them right. Also available in a hoodie.

Oh! And we also have a PARTIALS shirt. The first of many!

A new year, a new outline

Happy New Year! I haven't posted here in a while partly because of the holidays, but mostly because my entire brain has been focused on finishing the outline for FAILSAFE, the second book in the PARTIALS series. PARTIALS is my newest book, launching out into the world on February 28, and I'm really excited about it–it's a post-apocalypse science fiction series about a girl named Kira helping to rebuild civilization after an engineered plague wiped out 99.99% of the human race. I love it, and I'll post a tour schedule as soon as it's finalized. It was also a little more ambitious than other books I've written, certainly my longest (about twice the length of I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER), and with a little more going on plot-wise. That made outlining a sequel for it very difficult.

Obviously a lot of the sequel was already suggested by our series outline. My editors and I sat down over the phone, way back a year and a half ago, and figured out where we'd like the series to go, what we'd like it to cover, and so on. There are a lot of big mysteries and conspiracies involved in the series, and I didn't want to get into that situation that seems to happen to every serialized TV show where they claim to have a plan (Battlestar Galactica was very upfront about this), but then eventually you realize they don't really know what they're doing. I went to great lengths to figure out what the plans are, who's behind them, and so on. But just because I know where I'm going and why doesn't mean I know the best way to get there.

FAILSAFE turned out to be even more ambitious than PARTIALS, especially when we decided to branch out into multiple viewpoints. Kira is an awesome character, but the story we needed to tell desperately wanted to be in two places at once, and sometimes even three. Luckily, we had some fantastic secondary characters in book 1 that we kind of accidentally fell in love with (always a good sign), so we decided to break things apart and tell two parallel plotlines. Kira still gets most of the screen time, but some other cool people get to step up and be heard. I knew I'd made the right choice when I mentioned some of these secondary characters to a friend in my writing group, and he said "We get to see HER again! Sweet!" One of the weirdly surprising things about this decision was how hard it was to avoid using one of the main adults as a point-of-view character; this is a YA series, and I wanted to keep it that way, and I worried that an adult as a main character would dilute that too much and hurt the book's relatability. Maybe I'm totally wrong and I should have just done it–I might still do it in book 3–but for now I think this was the right decision.

I don't want to talk too much about FAILSAFE because you haven't even read PARTIALS yet, so maybe I'll leave you with a weird little piece of info about book 1. I used to live in Mexico, and I love everything about it, so this was also my opportunity to fill the book with Mexican characters. Why? Why not? Kira herself is Indian, but her best friend and her boyfriend are both Mexican: Marcus Valencio and Xochi Kessler. Others will show up in future books and stories. Xochi was especially fun because, as you may have noticed, Kessler is not a very Mexican last name. When the world "ended," Xochi was only 5 years old and completely on her own; she was adopted by another survivor with Irish heritage and has thus been raised as Irish for the last 11 years. This gave me a Mexican/Aztec character who occasionally slips into an Irish accent when she gets angry, which doesn't matter for the story, I just though it was fun. Which is all just my way of saying that in 50+ years, we won't be (or at least I hope we won't be) defining race the same way we are now. It will be a little more inclusive and a little less of a hot button. I think that's awesome.

Game Review: Gears of War (the boardgame)

I'm not a Gears of War fan in general–I've never played the video game, and my knowledge of it was mostly limited to "wasn't that the shooter game that used 'Mad World' in a TV commercial once?" I may be thinking of a youtube video, I'm actually not sure. I knew it was an FPS, and that it used a cover system, and it had aliens, but I haven't really played an FPS since Battlefield 2, so my knowledge ended there.

What I did know, on the other hand, was that the board game version was designed by Corey Konieczka, who is pretty much my very favorite game designer working today. He's worked on some of the best games in my collection–Battlestar Galactica, Mansions of Madness, and Rune Age–and he's had a hand in some other great games that are a lot of fun (Runewars and the World of Warcraft Adventure Game, to name a couple). His designs show an amazing ability to combine mechanics and flavor; my gaming tastes, as you may have noticed, lean very heavily toward the "thematic" end of the scale, focusing on games about monsters and space ships and wizards and so on, and Konieczka does that better than anybody, hands down. The Galactica game, for example, manages to replicate not only the many different elements of the show (politics, military command, fleet management, spaceship combat, paranoia, treachery, and so on), but also the feel of the show. While playing the game the mechanics almost melt away, leaving nothing but a tense, desperate atmosphere that pulls you through to the end. The rules and the flavor blend together almost seamlessly. Corey Koniezcka does that in all of his games, and I'll follow that kind of talent anywhere.

So when Gears of War came out, I picked up a copy.

First things first: the models in this game are so amazing they got me back into miniatures painting after a ten year hiatus. The aliens/monsters are cool, both in design and in sculpt, and the four hero figures are appropriately tough-looking. The hero figures are also, unfortunately, very hard to distinguish, which is what led me to the mini-painting–I figure if I paint them I'll be able to tell them apart without picking them up to see which one has the tiny goggles on his forehead. The other components are cool as well, with sturdy plastic, nice cards, etc. They also all fit in the box pretty neatly, which is a nice bonus considering how tightly a lot of other games get crammed together.

In play, the game is very much like a fantasy dungeon crawl, a la Descent or Castle Ravenloft. Each player takes a hero, who has special powers and equipment, and together they explore a maze/building/cave full of monsters and loot. The main difference between this and a traditional fantasy game are the guns, and I love the way the game handles ammo; it's a driving concern without being an onerous chore. The bad guys are fully automated by a couple of decks of cards, so there's no Overlord or Dungeonmaster; the players are all on the same team.

What separates Gears of War from the many, many other dungeon crawls I own is the card system, which governs not only moving and attacking but wounds and healing as well. See, your hand of cards is also your life points, which has a massive web of fascinating and delicate interconnections. You play one card on your turn to act, and you can play several cards out-of-turn to react to enemies and other players, but every time you do you get closer to death. Even more interesting, when an enemy hurts you it doesn't just tick a few hit points off a list, it directly affects your ability to act and react. A hero caught in a hail of fire will find himself with only one or two cards left, which might not be the right ones to help him escape; conversely, a hero who over-extends himself moving around and playing actions might find himself with too few cards left to survive the next monster attack. On the one hand this is a smooth and strategic system of resource management; on the other hand, true to form for Corey Konieczka, it's a hugely thematic storytelling device that creates, without any extra effort, a lot of great character moments. Taking too much enemy fire, for example, causes you to instinctively dive for cover, retreating from the battle for a few seconds while you draw more cards and get your health back up. The first time this happened to my friend Steve, a big fan of the source material, he nodded and said "wow, just like in the video game." The rules and the flavor go together perfectly.

My only major complaint about the game, which has made our playgroup skip over it more than once when deciding what to play, is the huge variance in difficulty. Sometimes the game is way too easy, and sometimes (though less often) it's way too hard. Worse yet, it doesn't seem to have any knobs you can adjust to tweak the difficulty, so there's nothing you can do about it–it all depends on which enemy cards you draw and when. When the game randomly decides to be challenging, it's incredibly fun and I recommend it highly. When it just rolls over and lets you win without a fight, the playing time is still just long enough to feel disappointing.

The Children's Story

Last week I had the opportunity to write a blog for another website about dystopian fiction, so I wrote one and realized that it was way too big. I wrote a shorter one and sent it in, and you'll see it soon, but here's the first one in all it's glory. (It's actually not super long, but the other place was a short venue.)

I grew up in the Cold War, so I was surrounded by dystopian fearmongering for most of my formative years: stay vigilant, or the evil communists will get you and the world will turn into Animal Farm. We concocted, and continue to concoct, elaborate and terrifying scenarios of how horrible the world would be if the wrong people got into power, and how our freedoms would be curtailed and our rights would be stomped on, and we used those scenarios to develop a culture of fear. If you're scared to death of The Enemy, you'll never let The Enemy take control of you. And yet it doesn't take a genius to jump on the Internet and see a million images and videos of curtailed freedoms and stomped-on rights, right here in our own allegedly non-dystopian country. What happened? How did these dystopian scenarios come true? Why didn't our fear protect us?

Because fear breeds ignorance, and ignorance is the worst protection in the world.

My favorite dystopian novel is actually just a novella, practically a short story, by one of my favorite writers: The Children's Story, by James Clavell. One day Clavell's 6-year-old daughter came home from school to announce that she had memorized the entire Pledge of Allegiance–or as she called it (and as my children call it) "The Pledge Allegiance." She parroted the entire thing from memory, pleased and punch, and then Clavell asked her what it meant…and she had no idea. The school had taught her what to say, but not why. Clavell walked around the rest of the day asking everyone he met about the Pledge of Allegiance, and all of them said it–usually with the same words slurred together in the same way–but none of them could tell him what it meant. Most of you can probably recite it as well, and odds are that you're all pausing in the same places as you do so, but how many of you have ever really thought about the words themselves? How many 6-year-olds even know what "indivisible" means–or how many 30-year-olds, for that matter?

Based on this experience, Clavell wrote a novella about a generic American classroom in which the teacher is replaced by a New Teacher, a trained propagandist from what we assume is a conquering foreign power, though this is never explained in any detail. The story isn't about who's in charge or why, it's about how easy it is to use words to create ideas, to change attitudes, and to form entire ways of thinking. Bit by bit, word by word, the New Teacher deconstructs the Pledge of Allegiance as a stream of nonsense: what does allegiance mean? Why would you show allegiance to a flag? Can a flag give you anything? Ask it for candy–did you get any? Now ask me for candy. See? Now you have candy. Isn't this pledge thing kind of ridiculous? The New Teacher's arguments are subtle and convincing and shot through with dramatic irony: a wise reader will see every ideological trap she sets for the children, and yet will also see exactly why and how those children will fall straight into them. We boo and hiss at the New Teacher for creating a new dystopia where children are told exactly what to think without knowing any of the reasoning behind it, or being given a chance to make up their own minds, and yet we can't lay all the blame at her feet: the Old Teacher, the one they dismissed at the beginning of the story, did exactly the same thing. She told the children what to think and what to say without ever telling them why it was important. She failed to prepare them for the challenge they're facing and the very important decisions they now have no idea how to make. The leadership has changed, but the dystopia of ignorance and miseducation was there all along.

Why is our society collapsing into a new dystopia? Because we've trained our children to fear a certain form of control, without ever teaching them how to recognize the real threat behind the form–the control itself, and the power that makes it possible. We've created a culture where ignorance is applauded, literacy is for losers, and being cool means not caring about anything. Somehow, despite all our fears and safeguards and precautions, we've stumbled backwards into a world that looks more and more like 1984, or Fahrenheit 451, or the rest of the dystopias that used to haunt our nightmares–and we've done it not because an evil overlord was creating such a world on purpose, but because we've been too lazy/short-sighted/misinformed/comfortable to either notice it or do anything about it.

You want dystopia? Look around. You want to do something about it? Read.

Wrestling with Death

I apologize for failing to post anything last week: no blog posts (despite my goal of two per week), very few emails, and not even any facebook updates or twitter posts–I retweeted a few interesting things when I got the chance, but I didn't really say anything new. This is because, as my Cheerfully Flexible post two weeks ago may have suggested to you, I was attending a funeral.

The funeral was for my sister-in-law, Natalie, who fought long and hard and eventually succumbed to cancer. I didn't post anything last week in part because I was busy (5-day trip to Sacramento with all five kids), but mostly because I did not then and still don't know now exactly how to talk about it. This feels especially odd for me because I'm rarely ever at a loss for words: not only do I write for a living, I write about death. You'd think I'd be better at this. But the things I write about are either goofy, or sensationalized, or at the very least imaginary. Natalie was real. What do you say about a real person who's there one minute, and then isn't there the next? I saw the body at the viewing, and I couldn't help but feel a bit like John Cleaver, staring and wondering what all the fuss was about, while the other half of me knew exactly what all the fuss was about. There is a cognitive disconnect with death, as if our minds rebel at the concept of it. People do not cease to exist, and our spirits know this even as our eyes are telling us something different. It's like a form of psychic carsickness, your eyes telling you you're sitting still while your inner ear screams that you're moving. It disorients you, and your brain can't quite express itself through the dissonance.

I've dealt with death before–I've spoken at both of my grandparents' funerals, for one thing–but this was different. Maybe it's because she was so young, and because of how she left and who she left behind. My grandparents were old and their minds were failing them; it was "their time to go," if that's the way you want to think of it. My grandfather in particular, one of the foundational influences of my life, was healthy as a horse but deeply scarred by Alzheimers, and it hits a point where it isn't really your grandfather in there anymore anyway, just a semi-coherent shell. A car without a driver. He died (on Thanksgiving, ironically) of a heart attack, and while we were sad–perhaps devastated–to see him go, we were more or less okay with it because we'd already lost him months before. Natalie, on the other hand, was 24 years old, with a young husband and a two-year-old son. You can't say that it was "her time to go" without straining the definition of what that even means, and you can't give a speech looking back on a life of accomplishment and legacy when there are only 24 years to look back on. Natalie's eulogy–a joyful, powerful speech given by her sister–was full of memories and laughs, but they were memories of potential. She was a wonderful baker and decorator, among other things, and tried to start a cake business just a few weeks before she died. This was a woman who never gave up, who always strived to do and be more. From a certain point of view, doesn't that make it even worse that she's not here anymore to do or be anything?

The hardest part for me was her son, a happy little boy who only kind of understood what was going on. My wife will tell you that she's only seen me cry three times: at my Grandma's funeral, at my Grandpa's funeral, and while watching a movie about Alzheimers that reminded me of my Grandpa. I'm not heartless, I just have a very male tendency to keep my emotions well below the surface (though this is changing as I age). I was fine all through the preparations for Natalie's funeral, and all through the viewing, and then when it came time to close the casket my brother-in-law lifted up his son to say goodbye, and the boy started crying, and it just tore us apart. It's getting to me again right now as I write about it. She wrote him a letter before she died, and imagine it will be one his most prized possessions as he grows up and remembers her. I hope it will.

I try not to get very religious on this blog, because my religion is not a part of why most of you read my work, but it is a very big part of who I am, and I hope you'll indulge me for a moment here. I'm a Mormon, which means that not only do I believe in life after death, I believe that families will be reunited and will live together forever. This is the single most wonderful thing that I can think of, even when I'm not preoccupied with death. I love my wife, my children, my parents and siblings, my grandparents and my vast extended family, and it comforts me more than words can tell to know that no matter what happens, no matter how bleak the situation may look, I will see them again. I'll see Natalie again, and more importantly her husband and son will see her again. Death is sad and cancer sucks and life is sometimes a brutal kick in the face, but life is not everything and death is not the end. It will be a while before we're all together again, but meanwhile we've got important things to do on Earth, and I'm sure God can find a lot of uses for a woman so eager to work she tries to start a bakery while half comatose from cancer and painkillers. We'll all stay busy, and by the time we're reunited we'll see if maybe we can make the world a little better than it was when we parted.

I set a goal for myself to memorize a poem every week this summer, as longtime readers of the blog will be aware, and one of those poems has been prominent in my mind ever since we got the news that Natalie was nearing the end. It played in my mind during her funeral, and when her son cried and my heart started to break it came back again, comforting me and inspiring me. I think it's the perfect note to end on:

Mother to Son, by Langston Hughes

Well, son, I'll tell you:

Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

It's had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor –

Bare.

But all the time

I'se been a-climbin' on,

And reachin' landin's,

And turnin' corners,

And sometimes goin' in the dark

Where there ain't been no light.

So boy, don't you turn back.

Don't you set down on the steps

'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.

Don't you fall now –

For I'se still goin', honey,

I'se still climbin',

And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

Cheerfully Flexible

I did a lot of theater when I was younger, and one of our directors started the first day of rehearsals by teaching us the phrase "Cheerfully Flexible:" stuff will happen, plans will change, and you can either be a pill about it or take it in stride. I've tried to keep that as a mantra ever since, and I'm teaching it to my children now. Sometimes thing have to change, so you may as well be cheerful about it.

I've had to keep myself cheerfully flexible several times lately, as different circumstances both good and bad have cropped up to smack me in the head. Some of them are pretty much all upside, like the news on my ebook, A NIGHT OF BLACKER DARKNESS. I launched this ebook back in August, and while it didn't make me a ton of money it still made me some, and I'm pretty happy with it, and people continue to buy it at a pretty steady trickle so hooray. One of the big things that happened was that an audio company bought the rights to turn it into an audiobook, which is totally awesome. Their contract included a six month exclusivity deal, meaning that for the first six months in which the audiobook was available, it got to be the only version available, and since the audiobook is now ready to go I took the ebook down on Tuesday. What I was not expecting was the deluge of questions saying "what happened to your ebook? I want to buy it." I'm delighted there's so much interest, and I assure you that the ebook will return in six months. Until then, please enjoy the audiobook, which will launch sometime next week–I'll be sure to let you know as soon as it's available. I wish I could offer you both, but…cheerfully flexible.

Some of the circumstances in which I find myself are harder to be cheerful about. I've known since the Summer that I would need to start working full time on the second PARTIALS novel (tentatively titled FRAGMENTS) in early November, which meant that I had to finish EXTREME MAKEOVER before Halloween. I did my best, but I didn't get it done. FRAGMENTS easily wins the competition here–it's a bigger project, which I've already sold, and which is under a tight deadline, whereas MAKEOVER is just a goofy thing I want to write–but that doesn't make it any easier to set down one book and move on to the next. I can't help but feel a little depressed about failing to finish MAKEOVER in time, despite the fact that it was a pretty optimistic deadline to begin with. FRAGMENTS is going to be a really fun project, though, and you guys are going to love PARTIALS when it debuts in February, so I'm very excited to work on it. And I do intend to go back and finish MAKEOVER eventually. For now, though…cheerfully flexible.

My brother had the chance to flex his cheerfulness recently as well, when he got laid off from his job last week. He's been struggling for a long time with Severe Panic Disorder, which is kind of like always being terrified of everything: his brain chemistry is literally telling him that he's in horrible danger all day, every day, and as you can imagine that gets very old very fast. He's had a terrible time trying to finish his new book (the sequel to VARIANT, which came out last month), and it's been all but impossible to do his real job as a Marketing Director. His company hung on to him valiantly, honestly much longer than any company I've ever worked for would have hung on to an employee who couldn't work, but last week they just couldn't anymore, and they had to let him go. Rob buckled down and tried to be cheerfully flexible, and meanwhile Larry Correia and I decided to flex an entirely different kind of muscle: the awesome might of the Internet. We organized a Book Bomb for yesterday (November 10), and tried to get as many people as possible to buy his book all at once, thus boosting its Amazon ranking, thus raising its visibility, thus creating (we hope) a bunch of extra sales from people who'd never known about it before. Success, as they say, breeds success. We spread the word and were stunned by the response: by the end of the day VARIANT had gone from #6847 to #51, reaching the top ten of Teen SF (#7, right behind the Hunger Games trilogy), and gaining notoriety as the #1 "Mover and Shaker" (ie, the biggest percentage of change) on all of Amazon. It was such a crazy jump in ranking that his friend who works at Amazon actually called to ask what the frack was going on. I spent most of the day watching Twitter and Facebook and Amazon, pushing the book and spreading the word, and it was a little like the finale of "It's a Wonderful Life," watching a whole community come together for George Bailey. My brother's a great guy, and it was awesome to see so many people leaping up to help him out; today, long after we've stopped the book bomb, he's still #128 overall and hasn't left the top ten in Teen SF. Sometimes (most of the time) being cheerfully flexible means working extra hard to roll with the punches and make the best of your new situation. We worked hard for Rob, and it paid off.

And then sometimes, being cheerfully flexible means you just have to grit your teeth and deal with it. In the midst of yesterday's book bomb I got the word that my sister-in-law had all but lost her years-long battle with adrenal cancer. She's gone non-responsive, and we expect her to pass away within the week. She's an incredible woman with a wonderful personality who never stopped fighting, and now she's lying comatose in bed, 24 years old, with a devastated husband and a 2-year-old son. And all I could think was: I can't Book Bomb cancer. I can be as helpful as I want, and as cheerful and as flexible as I can, and it's not going to turn this around. Sometimes you can beat the bad stuff, and sometimes all you can do is hope there's enough pieces left to pick up and move on. But even when life sucks, there's still so many things you can do. We can help her family. We can help her son. And we can learn from her example and fight back against our own problems, which completely pale in comparison.

Cheerfully flexible.

Cool PARTIALS news plus Game Review: Rune Age

First of all, I'm pleased to finally be able to announce that there is an exclusive 3-chapter preview of my new books, PARTIALS, available on Facebook. Assuming you have a Facebook account, just "like" the page and you'll get to read chapters 12, 13, and 14. They're pretty cool. We're getting closer and closer to the release of this thing, and I can't even tell you how excited I am. It's going to be huge and awesome and you'll love it.

Now, on to the game review. A month or so ago I posted a review of Nightfall, one of my favorite deck building games. Rune Age is not yet, but has the potential to be, even better, and it does this by breaking some of the traditional rules of the genre. Why should you have to win the same way every time? Why should you only have one resource to buy new cards? Why can't a deck-building game be directly confrontational? Why not indeed.

Rune Age is set in the world of Terrinoth, Fantasy Flight Games' go-to setting for sword and sorcery-style fantasy; their other games Runewars, Runebound, and Descent are all set there as well, along with some others that I'm probably forgetting. The land is divided into four main factions–humans, elves, demons, and undead–and each player picks a faction which thus determines his or her starting card pool. The factions are one of the most interesting aspects of the game, because they're carefully designed and play very differently from each other. Three of them are fairly well-balanced against each other, with no runaway leader, but the elves are a bit of a letdown, turning an interesting subtheme (the "get lots of influence" race) into an unfortunate disappointment (by the time the elves get their influence running, everyone has used their military to conquer a bunch of cities and has just as much or more influence anyway). I'm sure some more experienced player will hop into the comments and tell me how strong the elves are, but no one in my play group has ever been able to make them work. It's a problem we hope gets fixed in the inevitable expansion.

In addition to your faction cards there are a bunch of neutral cards that any player can acquire for their deck, based on the scenario: cities you can conquer with military might, monsters and other neutral units you can recruit to your team, and of course extra gold to get access to the biggest and most powerful tactics. The scenarios are where it really gets interesting, because depending on which one you pick the entire flavor of the game can change drastically. The basic scenario is simple: you win by attacking a giant dragon, and thus have to craft your deck such that it can produce an enormous amount of power in a single turn; the first player to kill the monster wins. The scenarios come with a deck of event cards, and in this scenario they will either hurt or help you on your quest. Other scenarios are different: one asks you to build a monument, causing you to focus more on gold production than military, but the event deck is full of smaller monsters you can fight for extra treasure. One scenario is fully cooperative, pitting all the players together against a demonic invasion, and this one's event deck is a brutal slap in the face–it takes a shocking amount of planning and coordination (and luck) to live through this one. Last of all is the full-on PvP scenario, which is just an outright war between the players. This is what really separates Rune Age from any other deck builder, because the player-vs-player combat system is tight and tense and incredibly tactical: you choose targets, you play cards back and forth, you go up and down, and finally one of you wins and actually takes something from the loser. In a multiplayer setting this takes on an added political tone as you try to form and break alliances. It's loads of fun, and unlike any other deck-builder you've played.

That said, like I foreshadowed in the beginning, the game does have some problems. The Elves, for example, are grossly underpowered in comparison to the other factions. Worse yet, the factional nature of the card pool cuts down on the replayability a lot–in most games you play your deck will turn out more or less the same, because the eight card types available to you (four determined by your faction, and four by the scenario) will be identical. Far from the huge, varied card pool you get in something like Dominion or Nightfall, there are literally only sixteen combinations of cards possible in the entire game, and only four of those (the factions) really matter; playing the human nation in one scenario is essentially the same as playing them in any other. "This needs an expansion" is pretty much the rallying cry of the deck-building genre, but that has never applied more fully than it does with Rune Age.

So in short, the game engine itself is stunningly brilliant and very fun, but the card pool is shallow and you'll be wanting more after just a few plays. Honestly, though, this is a great example of why I love games, because your "money to entertainment" ratio is still enormous. Think of "dinner and a movie" as the standard unit of entertainment value: that's about three hours long, and costs about $20 per person (assuming you eat at a mid-range place and don't go 3D). (And don't get me started on the cost of a babysitter.) Four people can spend $80 total on three hours of entertainment with dinner and a movie, and for two of those hours they won't even talk to each other, or they can spend $35 total on Rune Age and get ten or twelve hours of engaging, interactive entertainment spread out over several nights. When you look at it like that, you can't afford NOT to buy a board game.

MONSTERS & MORMONS is here!

Remember last year when I wrote a short story (that turned into a novella) and cataloged the entire process on my blog? That was for an anthology called Monsters & Mormons, which later accepted the story, and last week the final anthology is now available! I would have written about it earlier but I've spent so much dang time reading the thing, and guys, it is awesome.

The idea is to take pulp-style horror and fantasy tropes, in the style of old masters like Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and the two-fisted Hollywood serials and radio shows, and then add Mormons. Why? Because it's awesome, and because no one had ever done it before. The Catholic church, for example, is hugely prevalent in genre fiction: it's been around so long, and has such amazing cultural penetration, that it shows up in SF (A Canticle for Leibowitz, Warhammer 40,000), comic books (Magdalena), thrillers (Dan Brown), and of course horror and all its various subgenres (The Exorcist, every vampire story ever told, etc.). Mormonism is smaller and newer and therefore far less well-known, but couldn't some of the same tropes be used with it? How would some of our classic horror stories change and grow when seen through the lens of Mormonism? It's a fascinating idea.

Consider one of my favorite tropes, mentioned briefly above with the comic book Magdalena: the idea that the Catholic church has a Black Ops division somewhere in the depths of the Vatican, trained from birth and armed with deadly weapons and holy weapons blessed by the priests and Pope. After all, if demons are real, a religion with the power of God should be uniquely equipped to deal with them, right? The first story in the Mormons & Monsters anthology, "Other Duties" by Nathan Shumate, takes this Catholic standby and warps it through the a Mormon lens, crafting a story that's not only exciting and creepy but deeply hilarious to anyone versed in Mormon culture. First of all, Mormons use a lay clergy–rather than lifelong, professional priests we use members of the local congregation, called and set apart for a short time to hold a particular position as a teacher or administrator. This means, of course, that the Mormon demon hunters are not finely honed super-soldiers but friendly neighborhood volunteers; the hero of the story is a Mormon bishop simply taking his turn as the "Agent Bishop" in charge of demon hunting. There's an agent Bishop for physical facilities (making sure the buildings are maintained, etc.), so why not for demon hunting as well? This brings up another distinctly Mormon quirk, which is our hilariously banal bureaucracy: the hunter learns about the demon via a phone tree, no doubt originating with a home teacher, and calls his counselors to accompany him on the mission; one is visiting Idaho for a baby blessing so they have to fill in with the Elders' Quorum President, who hasn't really been trained yet. They start with a prayer, load up on sacred weapons, and finish up with some paperwork and a phone call to the Relief Society. Like I said: Mormon culture insiders are going to find this anthology hilarious, but there's just as much fun for those who are only familiar with the other half of the equation, the elements of the story before it was Mormonized. Watching these authors play with the tropes, and discovering how each trope gets altered by the Mormon theme, is like a delicious little cultural/literary treasure hunt. I can't get enough it.

My own story, the last in the very large anthology, is called "The Mountain of the Lord," and follows the adventures of a young Mormon pioneer seemingly cursed with a tendency to turn into a giant rock monster. It's a Mormon Horror Wild West Superhero story, essentially, which makes me doubly grateful for this anthology because there's literally no other venue in which I could possibly have published it. Many of the contributing authors I've talked to have told similar stories: they wrote something, thought it was fun, but put it away because where can you sell a story about a Mormon missionary fighting monsters on the Amazon river? This anthology has discovered a bizarre yet wonderful seam of material far richer than any of the participants may have realized when they started last year. I can only hope we'll see a Monsters & Mormons 2 sometime in the future.

If you want a copy, you can have one in seconds: the book is available as an ebook here for only $4.99, which is a steal for a collection this big and varied and interesting. Buy it now, and let me know what you think. If you want an actual paperback, they're a lot harder to come by, but I can still hook you up–you can pre-order them on the same website, plus I'll have some at every convention and signing I go to next year, so you can pick one up from me then. The paperbacks are more expensive ($23.99), but I'll be selling them at cost to keep them as available as possible.

This was a fun project to write for, and even more fun to read. If you're Mormon and love genre fiction, you owe it to yourself to pick this up; if you're not Mormon, I think you'll still probably dig it.

Guest Post from David Farland: The Role of Enhanced Books in the Future of Publishing

David Farland, bestselling author of the Runelords series and others, is a good friend and a brilliant business-minded writer. He has a new book coming soon called Nightingale, and I'm happy to help promote it with a guest post today. Take it away, Dave!

Right now, the publishing world is in turmoil. People are buying electronic books in huge numbers. In fact, it appears that as of today, more than fifty percent of all sales are electronic. This puts traditional paper book publishers in a bind. You see, most books earn only a modest profit. But if paper books are shipped to bookstores and then returned, they get destroyed, and thus don't make any money at all. In fact, the publisher then goes into the hole on every book he publishes.

The losses right now are so large in the industry, that as one agent put it, "Nobody in New York wants to be in this business right now." That's why bookstore chains like Borders and major distributors like Anderson News have gone bankrupt.

So where do the publishers make up for those losses? By selling electronic books for the Kindle, Nook, iPad and similar devices. The problem is, so many electronic books will come out in the next year, according to Bowker's Identifier Services (the guys who make the ISBNs that you see on the back of a book), that the market will be flooded with over three million new books.

Why? Because authors who couldn't find agents or publishers last year are self-publishing their novels this year. I was talking to a bestseller last night who groused that in the past week, he'd run into three different "authors," none of whom had sold more than fifty books, all of whom were self-published.

That creates a problem for readers. It means that we now have to try to figure out which of those novels are worth buying and reading and which should never have been published in the first place.

Some of those novels may look good on the outside. They might have cover quotes from the author's friends. They might have gorgeous illustrations. But inside, maybe halfway through a book, you might find that the story falls apart.

In fact, a lot of criminals are out there right now trying to sell e-books which Tracy Hickman has labeled "Frankensteins." These are novels stolen from bits of other novels and cobbled together in a way to look like a legitimate book. The "author" hopes to steal a couple of dollars from unwary readers. Sure, it's not a lot of money, but in some countries, like Nigeria, a few dollars goes a long way. If there are no laws against it (and in some countries there aren't), the thief doesn't even have to worry about getting punished.

How are we going to combat crummy novels? How are we going to get past the Frankensteins? Ten years ago we had gatekeepers in the industry—literary agents and editors—who made sure that only the best novels got published. It's true that the system was flawed, but at least there was a system.

So who are our new gatekeepers going to be?

The truth is that there will be new kinds of publishers. Right now, I'm starting a company with my partner Mile Romney, called East India Press. We're going to published "enhanced novels."

Enhanced books are text files, like regular books, but they also combine elements like film clips, music, video games, author interviews, audio files, illustrations, and animations. They're part book, part movie, part game, perhaps. These books are then then sold electronically to be read on your iPad, phone, computer, and so on.

Are enhanced books the real future of publishing? There is good reason to think so. You see, making a beautiful book in this market will cost tens of thousands of dollars. That's a bar to most wannabe authors. So money alone will limit the competition.

These new publishers will still have to establish their own credibility. They'll have to select great books, create superior products, and develop a "brand" presence. In other words, you'll want to read the books because of who the publisher is and what they represent.

A hundred years ago, that's the way that books were bought in the first place. If you went to the bookstore, the books were ordered by publisher. You might pick through the piles and find that a certain editor liked the same kind of "science fictional stories" that you did, and that became the place that you visited over and over again.

There will be other ways to judge a book. It might come from an author with a long list of awards, or great cover quotes from independent review agencies, or maybe the fact that the book is a bestseller will give it a lot of credibility.

So I expect enhanced books to become the dominant art form for novels in the next two years, replacing and outselling simple e-books on the bestseller lists, and even outselling hardbacks and paperbacks within a couple of years. As my agent, Russell Galen put it, "Enhanced books are the entire future of publishing."

Now, I've published some fifty books in science fiction and fantasy. I've won a number of awards and my books have been translated into thirty languages. I worked for years as the lead judge for one of the largest writing contest in the world. I've trained authors like Brandon Mull, Brandon Sanderson, and Stephenie Meyer who have gone on to become #1 international bestsellers.

So I know books. I know a good story when I see one, and I know how to fix a story when it needs fixing. Given this, and my own background as a novelist, videogame designer, and movie producer, it seemed like starting a new type of publishing company was a must.

In fact, I believe in this new medium so much, I'm even putting out my next novel through this publishing company. It's called Nightingale, and tells the story of Bron Jones, a young man abandoned at birth and raised in foster care. He discovers that he's not quite human, and suddenly finds himself at the center of international intrigue.

This is a model for the new publishing industry. I think it's a great book, and I could have sold it through normal channels. But this is the best way to go. So we're offering the book on our site at www.nightingalenovel.com. You can buy it on November 4 in hard cover, for your e-reader, or in enhanced mode for the more advanced e-readers, or we even have an emulator so that you can run it in enhanced mode on any computer. It also has a forty-five minute soundtrack, lots of art, optional notes from the author and other features. In the future we may add a game or trailers. I believe this is the way books–good books–will be done in the future. I invite you to check it out, and check out our new company, East India Press.

If you're a writer, look into our short story writing contest while you're there. You could win $1000. You can find out about more about the East India Press or the writing contest at www.EastIndiaPress.com.

I've been getting into Warmachine

Yes, I know, two game-related posts in one the same week. I'll make it up to you on Friday with a guest post from David Farland, featuring: doom and gloom about the publishing world. It's actually a really fascinating experiment he's starting, and I'm interested to see how it plays out. If anyone knows enough about publishing to make it work, it's Dave.

So anyway, remember a few weeks ago when I posted about cutting back on the number of games I buy? That same effing night Howard Tayler invited me over to try Warmachine, a tabletop miniatures game similar to Warhammer and…other tabletop miniatures games. There's honestly not much sense comparing it to something, because you either know what I'm talking about or you don't. If you do, good, we'll get to you in a minute. If you don't, here's the basics: you have a bunch of toy soldiers that act as game pieces, and instead of playing on a board you play on a table dressed up to look like a battlefield, stretching anywhere from "pieces of cardboard that say 'forest' on them" to "fully-pimped model train-style scenery." Your soldiers can move a certain number of inches, shoot a certain number of inches, and so on. It's arguably one of the oldest forms of boardgaming–it's like Chess without all the layers of abstraction–and I used to be really big into it. As I sit here in my office, not six feet from me are two huge plastic bins full of all the old models and terrain I used to play with all the time; specifically, if you're interested, Space Wolves, Dark Eldar, and Warhammer Fantasy Dark Elves. I've got a lot of stuff. And pretty much the day my oldest child learned to walk, I put it all away and left it. I've moved it three times as we've changed houses, but I've never actually used it. I don't know what that says about me.

That's actually the reason I got into HeroClix, which happened to debut right about the same time my daughter's mobility did. Expensive metal models that I had painstakingly assembled and painted–and the paints that accompanied them–were too dangerous to have lying around where my daughter could break them, but HeroClix models are pliable, pre-painted plastic. Heroclix also had the benefit of using smaller armies and shorter games, which made the time investment much easier for a new father to deal with. In light of all that, it seems kind of weird that now, ten years and four kids later, I'd be getting back into the modelling aspect of the hobby, but what can I say? By the time you have five kids you either know what you're doing or you're wanted for murder–five kids are WAY easier than one, because you're going into it with four kids' worth of practice. Add in the fact that I'm self-employed in a job I love, so I have more time and less stress and a more established routine over which I have more control, and there you go. I started to feel the tabletop wargaming itch on my book tour last Spring, and Howard dealt the killing blow to my reticence with a quick game in his living room two weeks ago. I bought an army just a few days later and began putting it together.

Warmachine, specifically, is kind of a steampunk skirmish game; you have fewer models than in a Warhammer army, and they have more special powers. It actually plays kind of like Herocix in that sense, but with the focus shifted from action economy to action planning. If that makes any sense. Your team is centered around a warcaster, who channels magic into both spells and warjacks, which are giant, steam-powered robots. You can add in other little units as well, like infantry and cavalry and monsters and so on. Having spent copious amounts of time poring over the different kingdoms and factions, I eventually settled on my first instinct, which was the empire of Khador, a kind of czarist Russian-inspired army full of stern Kommanders and grizzled woodsmen and big, burly warjacks heavily reminiscent of early Soviet tanks. In case you're curious, my starting army box (the new two-player starter, which I split with my brother) included:

Kommander Sorscha, who can cast some cool freezing spells.

A warjack called a Juggernaught, which is kind of like a walking brick with an axe.

A warjack called a Destroyer, which is like a Juggernaught with a cannon.

A heavy infantry unit called Man-o-War Shocktroopers, who are kind of like men wearing mini-warjack suits. They also have the most ridiculous weapon I've ever seen, which is a snub-nosed cannon mounted on the front of a shield. I can suspend my disbelief for steam-powered magic robots, but a shield-mounted cannon aproximately as long as it is wide just makes me laugh and laugh and laugh.

This force I supplemented with a few extra units designed to fill out the "grizzled woodsmen" element of the army:

Widowmakers, a small, mobile unit of expert snipers.

Kossite Woodsmen, a unit of extremely light infantry with almost makeshift weapons, but with the ability to sneak in from any edge of the map and ambush the enemy from behind. They're the ultimate example of "this is our spooky, inhospitable forest, and we want you out of it."

Yuri the Axe, a solo character who's like a Kossite Woodsman amped up on "living alone in the wilderness and fighting bears for food."

A Wardog, which is just a heavily armored mastiff who tries to murder anyone who gets too close to your warcaster. I got him mostly because he looks like my dog, an English Bulldog named Charlie, and the thought of Charlie tearing up my enemies on the battlefield was too awesome to pass up.

So that's what I've got. I put them all together, added some texture to the bases, and am now slowly priming them in preparation for painting. I also modified the Destroyer model a bit, lengthening the stubby little barrel into something more approaching a traditional tank gun. I'll probably keep you updated on my progress, including pictures once I have something worth showing.