HUNTER is coming…

Check it out:

A little excerpt from Hunter can be found in this post. Or you can keep reading here:

Pyke chased the girl down a street still wet with the afternoon’s rainfall. A thin sliver of moon was glowing behind the thinning clouds, but it wasn’t bright enough to pierce the darkness between thefew street lamps that still worked. The girl was fast. He had to stay close, or she’d escape.

Pyke had let the girl put about 500 feet between them when she ranthrough a bright pool of light and was swallowed by darkness. When she didn’t reappear, Pyke knew he had her, for there was only one place she could have gone. He followed her through a once-ornate gateway into the old city, where the colony had been founded a century before.

Her footfalls echoed off rows of empty windows down narrow streets that seemed to turn back on themselves, an ancient trick intended to confuse invaders. When the Gan arrived, they solved this puzzle by simply bombarding most of the buildings and walls from low orbit until there weren’t many places left to hide. Hunters like Pyke—a second-generation Goa colonist who’d grown up in the old city—knew every twist, every turn, every blind alley and every hidden basement.

It wasn’t the first time Pyke had pushed a rebel into the avenues. In the six months he’d been working for the Gan, he’d let dozens of terrified patriots think they were making their escape into the old city’s maze-like streets, only to trap them in one of its countless dead ends, where he’d have a little fun before turning them over to his masters.

He heard a splash just down the block, followed by a yelp. She must have fallen in a puddle, Pyke thought. Shallow craters were everywhere in these streets; filled with water, they made quite effective traps. Pyke slowed to a jog and grinned. It was only a matter of time now.

Hunter will be released a little later today, and I'm starting to feel some apprehension breaking through the excitement. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I would do this, from putting epub and mobi and pdf files at Lulu and smashwords for 99 cents, to putting it here for free.

Because I've never done anything like this before, I ultimately decided to do the pay what you want model. I hope it works, because I'd like to use it in the future for short fiction projects, until I have enough short works of fiction to make a collection that's worthy of the printed page.

10 seconds of geek

Here's a stupid cell phone video I made with Chris right before we did the @nerdist podcast at Smodcastle last night.

Chris and I have known each other for 20 years, and we were roommates when we were in our early 20s. I'm happy to say that we haven't really changed all that much since then, as this video demonstrates.

The podcast was incredibly fun to record, and will be released on Monday.

in which Highlights for Children is discussed at great length

Last night, on the way home from dinner, I asked Anne, "Do you remember Highlights for Children?"

"Of course I do," she said, "I remember how I hated going to the doctor when I was a kid, until I started reading Highlights in the waiting room."

"Turn right at this intersection," I said, "and Trader Joe's will be on the left in a block. She turned right, and I realized that Trader Joe's was actually to the left. "Oh, my bad. It's actually back there."

As we drove under the freeway to a place where we could make a U turn, I said, "Did anyone ever read Highlights in someplace that wasn't the doctor's or dentist's office?"

"The library at my school had a subscription, so we'd read it there," she said.

We got to the next intersection, which featured a nice big NO U TURNS sign.

"Well, this quick stop at Trader Joe's is turning into quite an adventure," I said as we waited at the red light.

We were quiet for a second, and I said, "I bet seeing Highlights in someone's house would have been like seeing your teacher at the grocery store, you know? Like it was something familiar, but totally out of context so you wouldn't know what to do."

The light turned green and we made a left onto a dark, industrial street.

"You know what I always hated about Highlights?" Anne said, "some idiot kid had always circled the hidden pictures."

"Seriously!" I said, "fuck that kid, man. That kid's a dick."

"And what kind of parent gives their kid a pen to draw all over a magazine that's obviously intended for more than one kid to read?"

"Asshole parents," I said, "it's called Highlights for Children, you jerk, not Highlights for your Children."

"Because doctor's offices don't exactly have pens just lying around," she said. She pulled into a driveway about halfway down the street and turned around.

"Yeah, some mom had to go into her purse, dig around the used Kleenex and that giant checkbook/wallet thing moms carry, and find the pen." We turned back toward Trader Joe's. I raised my hands over my head as we went through the freeway underpass. "Wheee!" I put my hands back in my lap. "I mean, that's a lot of time for her to think, 'Hey, maybe I shouldn't be giving little Johnny Snotface this pen to ruin the magazine for all the other children.'"

We turned into the tiny Trader Joe's parking lot and parked the car. As we got out and walked in, I said, "Highlights should have done a Goofus and Gallant about that, man."

"You've spent a lot of time thinking about this," Anne said.

"It's what I do," I said. I pulled a cart out of the stall and pushed it into the store. It had a wobbly wheel and pulled to the right.

I silently cursed the shopping cart gods, and caught up to Anne in the produce section.

Flash Fiction: Perchance To Dream

Commence Flash Fiction:

    The best part of my day? That’s easy: those few blissful seconds right after I wake up, when I just feel my head against the pillow and the warmth of the blanket, before it all comes crashing back down on me and I remember where I am. That’s when the worst part of the day begins.

    There are guys in here who talk about their dreams. Not like what they want to do with their lives or what they’d do with a million dollars; I mean their actual dreams, where they can fly and talk to animals and shit, but I never remember mine. I haven’t remembered a dream for … well, long enough that I can’t remember what the last one was, and I have a pretty good memory. Like, when I was a kid, there were these smokestacks that I could see from the motorway when we were getting close to home. They were tall, with four rings of red lights around them every five meters or so. The top ring of lights blinked slowly, and on nights when the weather was bad, I could still see the red glow reflecting off the clouds, even if I couldn’t make out the smokestacks in the dark. I would tell my mum, “I can see the smokestacks, mummy!” And she would reply, “That means we’re almost home, darling.”

   On cloudy nights, I lie back on my bed, look out through the bars, and imagine that I can see a soft red glow slowly blinking against the orange reflection of the lights, telling me that I’m almost home.

Notes: I recently drove up a freeway that I used to take all the time when I was a kid, but haven't taken for at least a decade. On my drive, I saw these smokestacks that I remembered seeing when I was a little boy. Like the protagonist of this little tale, I liked seeing them, because I knew that meant I was almost home.

That memory stayed with me, and refused to release me until I did something with it. This afternoon, this little story sprung into my head pretty much as you see it here; I just did my best to write it down before it got away from me.

back in flesh

I cleared two pretty big deadlines yesterday, both for RPG-related projects.

One of them I don't think I can talk about, but involved a fair amount of writing. It was one of the most enjoyable creative experiences of my life, and it excited and inspired me to pick one of the ideas in my notebook and transform it from notes into an actual story; it turns out this making-things-up-and-writing-them-down thing is a whole lot of fun. I'm not sure when this particular thing will be released, but you can be sure that I'll blagh and blagh and blagh about it when it is.

The other I can speak more freely about. My friend Will Hindmarch (who does all design and layout work for my books) asked me a few months ago if I would record some audio for a Trail of Cthulhu campaign he created with Jeff Tidball called Eternal Lies. I thought it was such a nifty idea to include an original score – I love the soundtracks that Flying Frog includes with their games – I jumped at the opportunity to provide some dialog to go with it. The way we did it was pretty cool, and appealed to the technology geek in me as much as the RPG geek: Will sent me the script, and I recorded a few rough passes in Garageband which I put into a shared Dropbox folder for him to listen to. He was able to give me nearly-instant feedback until we were on the same page, at which time I switched to uncompressed audio and Serious Business.

Some of the things I read for the game were quotes from Lovecraft. During one take I realized that, whenever I read a particular type of quote, I hear it in Fawkes' voice. Thanks for that, Felicia. (By the way, Felicia is working on a Secret Project™ that I'm lucky enough to know about … holy frakking shit balls on fire, you guys. When you know what it is, your mind will be blown right out of your skull so hard it will bounce off the wall and land on the ground next to your socks, which were also knocked right off your feet and through your shoes.)

The last few months were insanely busy, and I just didn't have much time or energy to do anything extra beyond a few Very Important Tasks. Now that I'm getting caught up on my deadlines, and I have more Me Time, I've been able to read more books, play more video games, and feed my inner geek, who it turns out was beginning to starve.

Since playing Cal & D, though, I have really felt the Gaming Monkey's claws digging into my neck, and working on these two RPG projects has made me realize just how much I've missed gaming. I really hate it that I can't go to PAX East this year; I didn't know how much I really wanted needed to go until I accepted that I couldn't.

I'm going to try to make it to OrcCon with some friends next weekend, because I'm starting to get the gaming shakes, man, and I've just got to get straight, you know? You know what I mean, Bubbles? Come on, man, just let me roll 3d6 and add my combat bonus … just once, man. I'm going crazy over here!