TBR-, Warp-, -lusions.
Hello,
issue three. It seems like only a month ago I was writing issue two. I hope you had a good holiday ordeal. Here is an image of the Author Enduring The Season.
I've finished the first draft of the second book of the trilogy that starts with THE SWORD DEFIANT, which is a huge relief. The secondU book's currently untitled (my working title was THE SWORD BELEAGERED, which does answer marketing's preference for connected and easily recognisable titles, but I'm not sure I can spell beleaguered correctly every time - and as I type that, I realise I missed a 'u' in the title above, so I'll just scroll up and fix that.)
Alternate titles include THE LAMMERGEIER'S WAR or THE SECOND SONG OF THE LAMMERGEIER or SMOKE FROM BURNING CITIES which people on mastodon like.
Typing 'people on mastodon' is weird. People on mastodon. Many people. Big clubs. Hunt elk in primordial forest.
I misspelled 'elk' as 'elf' there. And I deliberately messed up fixing the U earlier, as a little easter egg.
In case you can't tell, I'm a little giddy with a finished first draft. It is an immense, the-opposite-of-bone-crushing (skelexapanding?) relief to have the mental weight of a novel off my head for a few weeks. This one did not want to be written, and I spent many nights wrestling with it.
Of course, you won't see it for a year (May '24?), and I can't really talk comprehensibly about its contents at all until THE SWORD DEFIANT comes out in May.
Speaking of which:
I'm doing a live reading and Q&A on Wednesday Jan 25th as part of TBR Con. https://fanfiaddict.com/tbrcon2023/
I'm also on a panel the day before, about the Hidden Gems of Fantasy. (I'm totally going to talk about amethysts or something, and loudly protest when people move onto the topic of obscure but wonderful books.)
Both events will be live on youtube, and available in perpetuity thereafter. I hope to see you there if you can make it; if you can't, you can watch at your convenience in some future epoch many centuries hence.
At the end of that week, I'll be at Warpcon, my local games convention & spiritual home. It'd been several years since the convention's physically happened, and I'm looking forward to it immensely. I'm running a Trail of Cthulhu game there, as always.
I suspect several conventions at the bar will involve earnest discussion of the Open Gaming License. If you're unaware of this kerfuffle, you're blessed; for non-gamers, I might summarise as "someone invented the semi-colon, and said everyone else could use it freely subject to a very open license that was written to be permanent. Now that guy's heirs are trying to rewrite the license, and everyone's scrambling to work out if they can. Or if it's better to abandon the semi-colon; no-one actually needs it, but it's fun to use and lends a certain feel to writing." And I'm there with twenty years of extensive semi-colon usage, and a big giant campaign full of dragons and semi-colons in editing...
For those keeping track of upcoming projects:
I've a Black Iron Legacy story in an upcoming issue of Grimdark Magazine.
The long-awaited Moria is moving again at speed.
Two other RPG-adjacent projects are also demanding attention.
Black Iron #4 is going to get my novel-writing time for the next month, while Lands of the Firstborn #2 rests and I do a bit of plotting for Lands #3. Given there's a trilogy worth of plot in the second book right now, I'm unsure what to do for an encore...
Thank you for reading. I hope you have a skelexpanding month.
Gar