Friday May 4, 2012

My Avengers Tweets

I'm at a writing conference and you don't want movie spoilers so I'll make this brief. I saw The Avengers. These were my tweets:

Joss Whedon needs to write all the movies.

Yes, Avengers is my new favorite for the year. By a long, hard mile of very, very rough road. Good luck, Batman.

I'll be seeing it at least twice more. 

Thursday May 3, 2012

I Am Ten Years Old Again

I’m 10 years old again, and I’m reading a comic book. It’s 1978, and the ads in this book are the stuff any 10-year-old covets: X-ray glasses, footlockers full of plastic army men, and a game, some crazy game about a giant tank.

One player gets to be the giant tank. Giant? It’s less a tank and more a fortress on-the-go, a fully tricked-out armored cavalry division unto itself, only bigger, tougher, and more wonderful. The other player gets an entire army.
 
10-year-old me looks at this game, and thinks to himself “it’s not fair.” Because it’s not. One guy gets this “vehicle” so monstrous that it can only be named after a monster, while the other player just gets a plain old army. Also, it’s not fair because I’m 10, and Dad won’t let me buy this.
 
I’m 44 now. The game was Ogre, and I remember it as the game that was too cool, too dangerous, too awesome for my parents to let me have. No game could possibly live up to the memory forged in the crucible of a 10-year-old boy’s imagination. 
 
At least, not until now.
 
Steve Jackson is producing Ogre: Designer’s Edition. Steve is the designer, of course, and there’s no way he knew, 35 years ago, how he was shaping my brain with an advertisement. I never got to play the game! 
 
But I will, because my friend Steve is making a version of the game that CAN clear the bar set by 10-year-old Howard. It’s an expensive game, sure, but that’s because it’s enormous. The box is 21 inches by x 18 inches and is four inches deep. That’s 90% of the way to being a full cubic foot of gaming material: cool, dangerous, awesome gaming material.
 
Here’s the catch: the very most cool, dangerous, awesome version of the awesomeness that is Ogre: Designer’s Edition is only available if you support it on Kickstarter, and you only have a week before that opportunity is gone. Oh, you can get the Designer Edition through your FLGS, and it is certainly awesome, but some of the extras are only for supporters. Check the Kickstarter page for details.
 
(Note: I must confess a little reluctance when I point you folks at a $100 game just two weeks before I open pre-orders on my next book, but if you’re geeking out half as hard as I am over Ogre I’ll feel bad inside if you miss this opportunity.)
 
I played the video below for my 10-year-old son (okay, he’s nine, but let’s work the symmetry angle) and his eyes got wide. “I want that.” He looked at me. “It’s probably too expensive.” 
 
Son, I’m a darn sight cooler than my Dad was. I’m getting a copy for me, but I will share. It will be too cool, too dangerous, too awesome for me NOT to share.

Tuesday May 1, 2012

Myke Cole's Shadow Ops: Control Point

I finally got to meet Myke Cole at Lunacon back in March, and it was entertaining. He recognized my voice from Writing Excuses, which is always flattering. Why? Because it means that somebody who writes great books has been listening to me and my friends talk about what it takes to write great books. I mean, seriously, how could life be any cooler at that particular moment?

Anyway, he autographed and gifted me a copy of his debut novel Shadow Ops: Control Point. It’s modern military fiction, plus magic. 
 
No, wait… I can do better. It’s like if Tom Clancy decided to write urban fantasy. It’s what you’d get if Jason Bourne and a college-aged Harry Potter had to team up to win a much more realistically world-built version of The Hunger Games. 
 
I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I do need to say something to demonstrate how effective Myke’s writing is: I have never before read a protagonist whose mistakes have been more horrifically costly, and who I have gone on to love even more for his heroism. 
 
Honestly, I would never choose to live in the world Myke created, but if heroes like this come out of his brain consistently I want to be standing next to Myke Cole when somebody shouts “fire.” 
 
Oh, and I want to read all of the sequels.
Friday April 20, 2012

Pre-Orders Coming in May

In just under one month we'll be opening pre-orders for Book 8, Schlock Mercenary: Sharp End of the Stick. Sandra is building a new shipping system for this project, but hopefully the only changes you see will be better service from us. We're still planning to do sketch editions, and the prices will be the same as they were for Book 7 -- $20 unsketched, $30 sketched.

You have been warned. 

(Update: The advance copies arrived on Wednesday the 25th. Now there's a picture with this post!)

Saturday April 14, 2012

Lockout

Back from vacation, back to work.

(After a fashion, I guess. I went to the movies.)

Lockout kind of snuck up on me. I don't pay much attention to movie trailers outside of the ones I actually see at the movies, so it was only recently that I saw a trailer for this thing that looked ridiculous, kind of like Escape From New York in space.

Turns out it's almost exactly like Escape From New York in space, only without the charm inherent in turning that most magnificent of American cities into a tiny, uber-urban Australia. Also, the "science" in it promises to raise more complaints than my (utterly subjective) claim that New York is the most magnificent of America's cities.

The premise? The President's daughter has gone to MS1, a maximum security prison in low Earth orbit, to see if the conditions are humane. Surprise! They're not, and she gets caught in the first ever prison uprising in space. 

Enter our hero, a former agent of some federal agency or another who is about to get sent to that prison for murder. His former bosses at the Federal something-or-others decide to strap guns on him and sneak him onto the station, ostensibly because that was the first idea they had.

Man, I love this kind of movie. I had fun rolling my eyes at the contrivances of the plot and dreaming up bingo cards for the "Bad Science We Learn From Movies" game. So yes, I had fun. Also, the dialog was "action-movie clever." On a scale of "insipid" to "inspired," that puts it exactly wherever you think it fits. I'm not going to give it a numerical rating because you fine folks are still arguing over what I meant by "magnificent," and I don't think handing you more tomatoes to throw is particularly wise.

Let me wrap up this way: I don't want to live in New York, but I love to visit. I don't want to see this movie again, but I don't regret the one trip out. I wish the theater served better food, because I'd pay five bucks for a little bag of baby carrots. Most of the meaning you find is stuff you actually brought with you, so maybe next time I'll hide baby carrots in my pocket.

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