Kicks and Glass and Skulls and Stuff

I'm about to go on vacation for four days, but before I leave I want to point you at some stuff.

First, as you may recall, my favorite fantasy comic (the one I wish I'd written) is Skullkickers, by my good friend Jim Zub. Well, Image has just released the Skullkickers Treasure Trove, 300 pages of full color optical comestibility which you can acquire wherever comics are sold, or through Amazon via that link back there. This is not the collection that has my contribution in it, but it's still a great book, and a fantastic way to get your paws on a big ol' chunk of fantasy hilarity, complete with sword-swinging, axe-throwing, arrow-shooting, and (of course) skull-kicking mayhem.

Speaking of kicking, my friend Julie Czerneda, author extraordinaire with a long list of excellent titles to her name, is part of a fascinating Kickstarter project, Tales of the Emerald Serpent: Shared World Mosaic Anthology. As the name implies, it's a shared world anthology with several authors of note sharing the sweat of the world-building and contributing short stories. I'm supporting it at the $30 level because I want the poster and some other goodies, but for just $5 you can get in and out with the anthology in electronic format.

The project is important to watch. There's a lot of noise these days about how the conventional commercial publishing system is being disrupted by electronic publishing. Me, I believe that the large commercial publishers will weather this disruption just fine, but I also believe that the market is going to be a lot richer, content-wise, than it has been in the past. This Kickstarter project serves to both to illustrate that point, and possibly to pave the way for lots of other projects like it.

As of this writing the project has funded and you have about a week to get in on the fun.

Finally, my friend and Writing Excuses cohort Mary Robinette Kowal just launched Glamour in Glass, the second title in her regency fantasy series. As an added incentive to go pick up the hardcover right now, somehow the very first line in the book got removed. At the very least, go read that blog post about the missing first line, and see how smart you are about the second lines of famous books.

So... off I go on vacation. If you run out of things to read while I'm gone, it's not my fault. Especially since I'll probably be posting pictures of southern Utah to my Twitter account.