What’s Up With BLN: January 2013

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Ever wonder who the writers at BLN are and what we’re up to? We thought we’d share some of our current projects!

Damien Walters Grintalis

Ink Cover Art - Resized My debut novel, Ink, was released from Samhain Horror in December. The Horror Fiction Review said, “… even when you might think you know where the story’s going, you’ll be in for some clever and nasty surprises.” and “Debut novels should not be this good.”

A tattoo can be a work of art…or a curse.

The fearsome griffin inked on Jason Harford’s arm looks real enough to climb off and take flight. Jason thinks his new tattoo is perfect. Until he wakes up one night to find his arm temporarily ink free. Until he finds a brick wall where the tattoo shop should be.

As Jason’s world spins out of control, he comes to realize a truth as sharp as the griffin’s talons. The tattoo is alive, it’s hungry, and if Jason tries to kill it, he’ll die. The artist will remove it for a price, but he’s not interested in money or Jason’s soul. He wants something far worse…

Ink is available in both trade paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and others.

So far for 2013, I will have new short fiction published in Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Apex Magazine, and others. My agent has my next novel, entitled Paper Tigers, in her hands, and I have two other novels and a handful of recently completed short stories that need editing.

Lillian Cohen-Moore
I’m continuing work on my statless setting book, Guide to the Village by the Sea. Outside that, I’ll be keeping up with a little client work, and  trying to clear a few short stories and essays off my plate to formally close out 2012. I’m also looking for a job in Seattle, which is trampling a lot of my writing time. On Dec 17th, I started an 8 week long guest blog at Bitch Magazine, “Save vs Sexism,” which is about sexism in tabletop games.

Galen Dara
I’m working on wrapping up the Geek Love anthology, finishing a cover for a historic ghost story, working out the contract details for cover art for a YA novel and an anthology about body modification, plus my usual 2 to 4 illustrations a month for Lightspeed. Also, I have GOT to get my work space in better order; it’s still in boxes and piles after moving this summer.

Jaym Gates
I’m finishing up and submitting a handful of short stories to clear my slate for 2013, wrapping up the Geek Love anthology, promoting Richard Lee Byers’ “Called to Darkness” for Pathfinder Tales, and starting on the Nebula Awards. Also working on a shared-world anthology, and getting ready to move up to the ranch for a few months.

Adam Israel
I’m doing long overdue rewrites and revisions on a dozen or so short stories, and finishing the first draft of my first novel. I’m also polishing up my EBook Store, currently live on Nightmare Magazine. Finishing things is my mission over the next few months.

Caroline Ratajski
Right now I’m editing my novel, YA scifi action, trying to whip it into shape so it can maybe go on-sub someday soon. Also I’m in a recently-released anthology titled Danse Macabre with my short story “Death in the Family,” a retelling of the classic folk tale Godfather Death.

Bear Weiter
I’m working on wrapping up edits for my first novel (tentatively titled The Arrival) while working on my second (Mirrors Stairs and Doors). I have short stories coming out in Atomic Age Cthulhu (story title: Within the Image of the Divine), The Speculative Edge (story title: Dear Diary – my first reprint sale!), and Fish (The Talking Fish of Shangri-La). While I’ve worked as a designer for almost twenty years, I recently did my first book design project (Geek Love) and it’s been a great experience (if not a lot more work than I had expected). My plans and goals for this year – research agents and try to find one, sell the first novel, finish the second, start the third, write and publish more short stories, and maybe even dabble in a personal graphic novel idea.

Blogging Through the Doubt

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Blogging consistently is hard.

It doesn’t seem hard on the surface. Pick a topic, hammer out some words, spell-check it, call it a day. And to support this thesis, there are tonnes of blogs out there, on every single topic imaginable. Writing, art, money, knitting, the same picture of Dave Coulier every single day. And they seem to constantly have fresh posts daily, sometimes hourly, post after post about new topics, fresh advice, brand new content. Well, except for the Dave Coulier one, I guess.

With this overwhelming volume of words being put online, wave after wave, it might be hard for someone to continue their own blog. It’s easy to ask yourself, “What’s the point? Someone else has probably talked about this. They’ve probably talked about it better. Why should I cover it?” Or perhaps even the more insidious, “Who am I to even blog about this topic? Who on Earth would listen to me?” (I personally deal with this last one quite a bit.)

That first batch of questions, the one where you’re wondering why blog about something someone else has likely blogged about before, has some weight to it. It feels right. Why duplicate information? It’s all already out there.

But the thing is, sometimes it isn’t. Or sometimes it is, but it’s too old, too far back, people have forgotten about it. At the speed the Internet works, something that was new a week ago is already old news. And if it’s a year old? Yeah, go right ahead, that thing needs a refresher. There are very few blog posts that really survive year after year. So go ahead and write about that subject again, with your own personal take.

Furthermore, when it comes to writing about writing, bear in mind: there are new writers coming up every day, who need to hear these things. They haven’t read the blog posts. They haven’t been around long enough to know what the veterans consider obvious. They don’t know, but they want to know. And maybe you can be the one to teach them about the submission process, about editing, about contracts, about whatever a newbie must learn.

But what about that other question? The one that asks who are you to speak on such things?

Creative-types, we all know this voice. This is the voice of self-doubt. It haunts you in all the things you create, asking you who would care about this story you’re working on, who would care to slough through these words. This story has been told before anyway. Nothing new under the sun. Who would bother to read yours?

This is a terrible voice which you have to ignore if you’re going to get work done. Fear and self-doubt are killers of the creative process, and that includes blogging. If you worry about not being an expert on a topic, then do some reading, do some research. Draft your opinions and analyze them critically. Discuss them with others, to get feedback. If you put in the energy into developing a thoughtful opinion on a subject, whether through active effort or through experience, then you are exactly the person who should be discussing that topic.

Don’t be shy about blogging. If you have a subject you feel passionate, disregard the fact that anyone else has done it. Contribute your voice to the conversation, share your own experience. And don’t worry if you’re the right person to discuss the subject. If it’s on your mind, if you have thought-out opinions and clear, researched information, don’t let doubt get in your way.

Why You Should Love Fanfiction

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I know I’ll have “made it” as a writer when there’s fanfiction of my work.

For those of you who might be unaware, fanfiction is, well, exactly what it sounds like. Fiction produced by fans, relating to the thing they are a fan of. There’s fanfiction for books, movies, television series, anime, comics, the list goes on. Some of it is bad, some of it is good, some of it is even published. (For example Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald is Cthulhu/Sherlock crossover fanfic, and I say that because well he said it first.) There has been endless e-ink spilled about fanfiction, either slamming the practice and mocking the practitioners, or rushing to its defense and calling it appreciative art in the highest form. And author responses vary along those same lines, from the enthusiastic to the litigious.

If you’re an author and thinking about openly slamming fanfic and hunting down fan writers, I suggest you think again.

Fanfic Is Awesome, Fanfic Writers Are Awesome

So, confession, I totally wrote fanfic in high school. (I know, let us all gasp and clutch our pearls.) In particular Harry Potter, but other fandoms as well. I was a huge fan, and I let that fannishness all hang out. I could go into a lot of details about fandom and my personal experiences, but I’ll go into the part that is relevant to authors: money.

As a result of being a huge turbo fan zomg, I bought books. Plural. I have Harry Potter in hardcover, paperback, and a set from England. I have the little supplement books, you know the ones, Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Tales of Beadle the Bard. I’m the one there in line waiting for the book to come out at midnight, staying up all night to read it.

You know what other books I hunted down on their release dates? Recently, the Hunger Games series. The Curse Worker series. Everything by Neil Gaiman. Everything our own Robert Bennett puts out, on release date. Because why? Because fangirl.

And when I wasn’t buying these books, I was convincing others to buy them. I was buying copies and thrusting them into my friends’ hands, shouting, “Read this thing, it will consume you.” I have carefully lured many friends towards series and writers now they stand in those midnight book lines with me, wearing the licensed t-shirts.

Fan’s like this? We are not people you want to alienate.

I feel like this point should be fairly self-evident, but in case it isn’t: when someone is a fan and inspired by your work to create things within your world, that is usually not where it stops. Fans like this are usually involved in communities, and are usually quite evangelical about the work they are a fan of. And as a result, they help your bottom line.

Personally, I would think it would be quite humbling to have fans like that, to have inspired others to create something based on your world. Regardless of the result, that spark is something very special. But if you don’t feel that way, if you see fanfiction as something negative, if you are repulsed by the idea, well, I would suggest you be a little more pragmatic about things.

Okay Sometimes Fanfic Is Not Awesome

So it’s not all sunshine and roses. I’m not talking about the resulting product, the varied levels of writing ability, the romantic pairings that might break your brain, et cetera. I mean when fans cross the line, legally.

Another Hope. Russet Noon. Marion Zimmer Bradley v Jean Lamb. Just to name a few.

The first two are quite clear-cut: a fan wrote a work set in someone else’s universe, and then tried to sell it, violating US copyright law. The fan writers were sued, and the fandoms largely backed the creators, and justice was done. The third, however, is a little foggier.

From what I’m gathering, the response to MZB’s situation was to suggest that authors completely disengage from fans and to disallow fanfiction of their work. While I can appreciate the reasons behind this response, I feel it’s a little strong. MZB’s reaction is her own, and I believe she is one hundred and ten percent justified to feel how she felt, given the situation.

But I might caution other authors on the outside, like myself, to take a different lesson: Support fanfic, but for the love of God, don’t read it.

When someone is attempting to make money off your intellectual property, you have every right to step in with lawyers and say Please Stop. But if money is not being made, simply look the other way. While it might be tempting to engage fans in what they create, you have to protect yourself against any liability. The good thing is, I’ve found most fans are pretty sympathetic to that, and those who aren’t get shushed by fandom fairly quickly.

Appreciate Your Fans

To put it in mercenary terms, fans are what keep the money coming in. They buy your current book so that you can sell the next book. But they also support what you’ve created, and are excited to see the next thing, which can be a great emotional buoy. And, in my opinion, that’s kind of awesome. I mean, I’ve received one fan letter in my life, who am I to talk, but it was pretty uplifting. I know that being part of a passionate fandom was a great experience, and having the creator’s support of that fandom made it all the better. Just like how creators enjoy positive responses to their work, fans enjoy that positive response coming right back at them. It’s a feedback loop of good feels.

If you can’t let yourself just love the fact that there are fans of your work who feel inspired reading what you’ve created, then just smile and move on, no need to call the lawyers. If you love your fans and want to share in that awesome energy, make sure you don’t open yourself up to liability. Regardless of what you do, be sure to thank your fans. Without them, you wouldn’t have much of anything.

Origin Awards Interview: Henry Lopez, Head Writer of Paradigm Concepts

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The 38th Annual Origin Awards were presented at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio on June 2nd. Arcanis from Paradigm Concepts, created by Eric Wiener, Pedro Barrenechea, and Henry Lopez, won the award for Best Role-Playing Game. The transcript of my interview with the head writer, Henry Lopez, follows.

Morgan Dempsey: You’ve previously described Paradigm as “a group of young IT professionals that share a passion for gaming.” When you began making games, what was the story you most wanted to tell?

Henry Lopez: I’m not sure that description still applies after the dozen or so years we’ve been in business. I’m in my late 40’s, but when we started I suppose we were relatively young. LOL.

Oddly enough, our original goal was to publish a game called Pulp!: The Age of Menace, which was my take on fast action/cliffhanger/masked avenger stories set in an alternate history to avoid the pitfall of the players knowing that ‘in such and such a year, Japan will do X so that can’t happen’. I have always felt that the one thing that Pulp RPGs failed to do in the past was to create an engaging and entertaining world setting that was not a boring Social Studies lesson from your High School days.

And without realizing it, that’s what set us on the path of living up to our tag line, “We create new worlds for you to play in!” without it having been a concrete plan of action to begin with.

Half way through designing Pulp!, the D20 license was announced and I saw an opportunity to delve into my favorite genre’: Epic Fantasy. So PCI put Pulp! on the back burner temporarily (I’m not sure if after 12 years we can still call it that) and quickly adopted a world setting I had been developing for a possible novel I had in my head.

But from the start, we wanted Arcanis to be different from what had come before. I knew that there were going to be those who were going to cover the “classic” model of D&D, so we decided to create a world for mature players who had been playing said classic style for years now and were craving something new. Thus, Arcanis became a world of deep shades of grey rather than stark blacks and whites so far as morality was concerned. No one in Arcanis was completely a good or evil. Like us, they had their virtues and their flaws and this created NPC’s that the players truly cared about.

The other mantra we had at PCI was: “It’s the story, not the stats!” The story was the driving force behind our setting and adventures. We felt that compelling stories that grabbed people’s attention and immersed them into the life and death struggles of those who walked the lands of Arcanis would create something really special and we like to think it did.

We had great success with D20 Arcanis and its Living Campaign, which WotC and the RPGA graciously allowed us to run as part of that organization. Our following swelled to worldwide proportions and pushed us to innovate even further. We ran huge events called Battle Interactives whose outcomes would shape the direction of the story and our players loved that. They wanted their actions to affect the world and the story being told. The tag line for the Living Arcanis Campaign was “Leave Your Mark Upon the Shattered Empires” and we certainly gave them every opportunity to do so – even as I pulled my hair trying to figure out how to salvage my storyline after the players did something completely out of left field. During the seven year run of Living Arcanis we gave away over 150 full blown adventures and still the players wanted more.

But there were times when trying to get Arcanis and its rich history to mesh with D&D rule ste was like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. So while we owe much to WotC and D&D, when 4th edition was announced, we decided it was time to forge out on our own. We labored for 3 years, designing and redesigning a new system and in 2011 launched Arcanis: The World of Shattered Empires RPG along with a new living campaign known as Legends of Arcanis.

With the achievement of winning the 38th Annual Origins Award for Best Role-Playing Game our time and efforts were vindicated, though I must say that the real reward was the knowledge that our fellow publishers and store owners believed in us enough to vote us onto the short list of nominees and that our fan base cared enough to carry us over the top. It was a great honor and a humbling experience.

I seem to have rambled on for a bit, so for those just skimming this article and looking for a quick answer, the stories we wanted to tell were those with strong, three-dimensional characters and compelling plots that drew the players in and led them on a wild roller coaster ride each and every time.

MD: What aspects of the gaming experience are important for you, both as a player and as a creator?

HL: First and foremost – enjoyment. These are games, after all and they need to be fun. No one wants to go on vacation and be stressed. Likewise, not many people want to sit down and play a game and end up bored to tears.

Secondly, but no less important, is that the players are pushed a bit out of their comfort zone. I normally do this by giving them an adventure that they think is going one way and then turns 90 degrees and everything they thought was right is wrong. The classic Arcanis twist is the “bad guys who are actually good guys, just with conflicting agendas”. I’ll never forget a table I ran during the D20 days when the Heroes discovered they were fighting a band of paladins. They weren’t evil or fallen – they just had a conflicting point of view that put them at cross purposes with the players.

And that’s when the Role Playing begins! When all your confidence and assurance that these evil guys have to be put to the sword is suddenly turned on its head and the villains turn out to be reasonable people with an agenda that’s no less noble, but at direct odds with yours.

Bottom line – as a player and creator, I want people to enjoy themselves and have a memorable experience! Sure, it’s great fun to blow off steam by mowing through a horde of orcs after a bad day at the office, but after the zillionth time that occurs, the retelling of that story grows stale. But pit them against a group of paladins that believed they had to sacrifice a village to save the entire kingdom and what you did afterwards, and you’ve got a memorable story to tell for some time to come.

MD: Looking at your library of works, it’s clear you are steeped in fantasy and horror settings. What sort of research do you do, and how do you decide what you’re going to work on next?

HL: I am a product of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, not to mention the reprints of those great old pulp stories of Doc Savage and the Shadow. Needless to say, they were a great foundation that led me to others such as P.J. Farmer, Asimov, Karl Wagner, Moorcock, Herbert and many others that gave me a large landscape of ideas for my mind to germinate within.

The research I do depends on what I’m writing. When writing for Witch Hunter: The Invisible World, a game I call a Colonial-Swashbuckling-Horror-game set in an Alternate History, I need to read up on the period and society I’m basing the story on and then find interesting and innovative ways to change or twist it.

When writing for Arcanis, I have to go back and research what I’ve already written – and between my work and those of freelancers and contributors that have added to the Arcanis milieu, that can be a chore. Luckily I have a pretty good memory and know where to find the answer if I don’t know it off the top of my head.

After coming up with an idea, I also do a quick reverse search (as I call it). Has this story already been told in this manner? I have a pretty extensive library of fiction and non-fiction books, but thank Heaven for the Internet and Google, which makes my life a lot simpler in researching this question.

As for what do I decide to work on next, that’s dependent upon production schedules and what needs to get done. We have production meetings where we plan out two years in advance (at least in broad strokes). Then it’s just a matter of following the “BIC” (Butt in Chair) approach to writing and get it done.

MD: What parts of creating Arcanis were rewarding for you? What challenges did you encounter that surprised you?

HL: I would say that the world creation process was the most rewarding on a personal level. I love to create long spanning histories whose echoes still impact upon the modern age of Arcanis. I wrote several thousands of years of history for Arcanis (no, not year by year, but in large swaths of centuries) and delight in having the players stumble across something that completely turns what they thought they knew upside down.

When we wrote the original Codex Arcanis, the source book that describes the world and its peoples, each chapter was written from the point of view of the (in character) writer. This leads to details in one chapter contradicting “facts” in others or evidence found during adventures that invalidates or overturns what was established in the Codex. That was all done on purpose and is a delight to see the players peel the onion a little more as they try and get to the core truth of what’s really going on.

The other byproduct of writing and creating Arcanis that is most rewarding for me is the community of players we’ve brought together. These men and women are all intelligent, good natured and good hearted people that truly love the world they’ve helped create by playing in it. I love it when they shake their fists at me and smiling say, “Darn you, Henry!” and I immediately know what adventure they just went through. But they love their “Oh No!” moments as much as I love crafting them.

The greatest challenge we’ve faced is the resistance of some players to learn a new game system and this truly perplexes me. I grew up gaming in the late ’70’s where part of the fun was learning how to play new games and seeing what new ideas and innovations they brought to the table.

Now, there’s been an entire generation of gamers that all they know is D20 and its iterations and feel that everything should fit into that box. Personally, I find that to be sad as they are missing out on some great stuff from lots of very talented and creative designers.

MD: What advice do you wish someone had given you when you started writing games?

HL: Develop a thick skin. By that I mean that you work into the late hours of the night, sweat over the most minute details, caring for your product like a mother cares for her newborn and along comes someone and calls your baby ugly.

It takes will power not to sock them in the mouth, but then you take a breath and think, “Different strokes for different folks”. Not everyone is going to like what you produce and though every mean spirited word is like a stake through the heart, you’ve got to smile and shake it off. Unfortunately there are some people who delight in bringing others down and that’s just a fact of life; the sooner that’s accepted the better off you are.

But I don’t want to end this interview on a down note, so I’ll also say that the best advice I can give any writer out there is to write what you enjoy. Sure, you may need to write what some editor assigns you to do and you need to do the best job you can while doing that, but put your own spin on things and make them yours. Don’t be discouraged when you get back a manuscript with more red on it than the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; learn from that and forge on. Little by little, you will find your own voice, leading anyone who reads something you wrote to say, “This has to have been written by X; it has his/her style all over it!”

About the Origin Awards

The Origin Awards are voted on by the attendees of the Origins Game Fair and presented annually by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design to recognize outstanding achievement in design and production in games and game-related material.

About Paradigm Concepts, Inc

Paradigm Concepts, Inc, is a Florida-based publisher which has been releasing its award-winning games for over a decade. They have previously won the Origin Award for Best Role Playing Supplement for “Codex Arcanis.” For more information, visit www.paradigmconcepts.com/.