Category Archives: calling on the legions

Published: January 24, 2012

Hugo Nominations

So a couple of weeks ago I was reading one of my favorite webcomics, and I noticed the author (Tarol Hunt) talking about the Hugo nominations in his blog.

(For those of you who don’t know, the Hugo Awards are a Pretty Big Deal in the sci-fi and fantasy publishing world. Winning a Hugo is kinda like getting a Grammy, or an Emmy, or an Academy Award.)

Anyway, I was really excited when I read Tarol’s blog, because it made me realize I still had a chance to submit my nominations for this year’s Hugos.

And, embarrassingly enough, I don’t think that’s something I’ve ever done before.

It’s something I *mean* to do every year. And it’s something I *can* do because I almost always go to Worldcon. And it’s something I *should* do in order to be a responsible member of the publishing community….

But the truth is, I’m King of not having my shit together.

Well… that’s a little extreme. Maybe I’m only the Duke of not having my shit together. But I’m probably also the Marquis of forgetting what day it is sometimes, and the Earl of losing track of things when I get busy, and I own substantial lands in the Barony of being profoundly fucking clueless.

It’s pretty complicated. There’s a lot of subinfeudation going on.

The upshot is that I was the kid who couldn’t go on the field trip because he forgot to get his permission slip signed. And I grew up into the guy who typically thinks about voting on the Hugos two or three days before the award ceremony.

But I’m getting better. Last year I managed to vote on the Hugos. And this year, thanks to that well-timed blog, I’m going to submit my nominations and help determine who gets on the ballot in the first place.

Which leads me to the point of this blog.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here. If you’re eligible to vote, I’d like you to consider nominating my editor, Betsy Wollheim, for Best Long Form Editor.

The simple reason is this, if not for her The Wise Man’s Fear simply wouldn’t exist.

Not only did Betsy take a risk on publishing big fat novel by an unknown author back in 2007. But when I was struggling with The Wise Man’s Fear, she gave me the time I needed to finish it.

She didn’t give it grudgingly, either. When I turned in my horrendously rough, patchwork first draft, Betsy told me that we needed to move the publication date so I had the time I needed to make the book better. I fought her on it, but she insisted. In doing so, she not only kept book two from being a incoherent, patchwork mess, but she she probably saved my entire career as well…

Luckily, Betsy knows what she’s doing. If not for her, I would have panicked, rushed, cut corners, and the end result would be that The Wise Man’s Fear would have been ‘meh’ at best. And more likely it would have been an absolute pile of shite.

So yeah. That’s all. I’m not going to go on singing her praises. That makes me feel like a lobbyist. The simple fact is that Betsy Wollheim was responsible for a lot of the goodness in The Wise Man’s Fear. She supported me when I really needed it, and gave me time to write you a book that I’m proud of. I’d like to see her get some recognition for that.

If you’re interested in nominating people for Hugos, here’s the link.

The deadline is for nominations is January 31st. If you’re like me, you might want to go in and vote now, before you forget.

pat

P.S. Some of the Worldbuilders auctions will be ending soon. If you know of someone who’d be interested in getting their unpublished manuscript read by professionals, I’d you might want to point them in the direction of this link.

Also posted in accolades
|posted by Pat 20 Comments
Published: December 2, 2011

Worldbuilders 2011

What’s that you say? You want to make the world a better place while simultaneously winning fabulous prizes?

Well today is your lucky day.

Heifer International is my favorite charity. It helps people raise themselves up out of poverty and starvation. All over the world Heifer promotes education, sustainable agriculture, and local industry.

They don’t just keep kids from starving, they make it so families can take care of themselves. They give goats, sheep, and chickens to families so their children have milk to drink, warm clothes to wear, and eggs to eat.

(Are you ready? I’m so ready. Let’s do it.)

This year we’ve got a couple different options for donating.

Option 1: The Lottery.

This is the option most people will want. It’s simple. You hop directly over to the page I’ve set up on Team Heifer, and donate.

When you donate on that page, two things happen.

1. Worldbuilders will match 50% of your donation. That means your ten-dollar donation becomes fifteen dollars. If you donate two goats, it becomes three goats. And so on.

2. You’ll be entered in the lottery.

After the fundraiser is over on February 7th, we’ll have a random drawing for all the swag that’s been donated. More than a thousand books, comics, DVD’s and other cool miscellany.

For every 10 bucks you donate, your name will get entered into the drawing once. If you donate thirty bucks, your name goes in three times. Think of it as buying tickets, if you like.

We’ve had *way* too many books donated for me to post them all up at once. So I’ll be putting up a blog full of donated books every few days, just to keep people from being overwhelmed with all the awesome.

Make sure to check back often to see the new cool.

Last year, readers and geeks of all creeds and nations donated over $190,000. It was a stunning display of generosity and goodwill.

Still, I think we can do even better this year.

But rather than set our goal too high, here’s what I’m going to do.

I’m going to set our initial donation goal at $50,000. As soon as we meet that goal, I’ll personally add a blog full of new stuff to the lottery. Then I’ll raise the bar to $100,000. We’ll repeat this in $50,000 increments until I am penniless, living on the street. Or until the end of the fundraiser on February 7th.

Link to the donation page is HERE.

Option 2: The Sure Thing.

Or, as I like to think of it, the Christmas Present Option.

For those of you who aren’t interested in the lottery, we have some stuff you can just buy.

Our store, lovingly named The Tinker’s Packs, has posters, signed books, and other delicious miscellany available for purchase. All proceeds go to Worldbuilders, of course.

Last year, we printed up some t-shirts and were amazed at how much people liked them.

So this year, we’re adding something new to the mix. In keeping with our bookish theme, we’ve teamed up with artist Lee Moyer to produce a pin-up calendar with a literary theme.

Here’s the picture for May:

You can read the blog I wrote about the calendar or head over and buy it on the store.

We’ll be posting new stuff in the store over the next couple months. So stay tuned….

Option 3: Auctions.

Last year we did a few auctions and they seemed to work out pretty well. So this year we’re continuing in that fine tradition, auctioning off some of the rarer and more specialized services people have donated.

This year we have professionals who are willing to read and critique your manuscripts. We have signed art and rare books. We have the chance to win guest appearances in comics and get your name into upcoming books.

Stay tuned, as we’ll be adding new auctions all the time.

For a full listing of all current Worldbuilders auctions, you can CLICK HERE.

A Plea For Sanity

Lastly, I’d like to ask everyone to please read the instructions/directions carefully before they donate.

I know you’re excited. I’m excited too. We’re going to raise some money, make the world a better place, and end up with big warm fuzzy feelings.

But here’s the problem. If you’re *too* excited, you’ll end up clicking buttons all higgledy-piggledy, forgetting vital steps and leaving things out. (Especially when buying things with Paypal) Then you’ll send me an e-mail that says something like: “I’m sorry, but I forgot to include my shipping address/t-shirt size/signing instructions. Could you please fix it for me?”

I know I’m bound to get one or two e-mails like this. No biggie. But each one is like a cold drop of water eroding my warm fuzzy feeling. If I get, say, a hundred of these e-mails, I’ll have no warm fuzzy left at all. I’ll be left with nothing but a cold prickly feeling.

You don’t want to give me a cold prickly, do you?

I’m sure you don’t. And I’m sure that you’ll read the instructions carefully.

FAQ.

Have questions? Most of them are probably answered over in the FAQ. (Even if your question isn’t answered, I talk about Batman a bit, so it won’t be a complete waste of your time.)

Lastly, just in case you missed it, here’s one more link to our Team Heifer donation page.

Let’s do this thing.

pat

Also posted in Worldbuilders 2011
|posted by Pat 40 Comments
Published: November 15, 2011

Fanmail Q&A: Worldbuilders

Hey Pat,

Are you doing Worldbuilders again this year? I understand if you don’t have time, what with your dad an all….

But I will say that I’ll miss it if you don’t do it again. I usually ask my family to donate a goat to your fundraiser for Christmas, that way it’s really like I’m getting a goat and a half.

If there’s anything I can do to help, let me know. I only live 40 minutes away from you, and I can help lift boxes if nothing else.

Worldbuilders fan since 2009,

Brad

Those of you who have been following the blog for a while know that this is the time of year when we typically kick off Worldbuilders.

Well… actually, we tend to start up Worldbuilders a little earlier than this, which explains why over the last couple weeks I’ve been getting a slurry of e-mail asking about it.

We’ll be officially launching the fundraiser next week, but before we pull the trigger on that, I thought I’d take this chance to answer a few of the questions people have been asking in their e-mail.

  • Are you still doing Worldbuilders?

Yes. Very yes.

  • When are you starting it?

The official launch will be next week.

  • What is Worldbuilders? (For those of you that are new to the blog.)

Back in 2008, I thought it would be fun to see if I could raise some money for Heifer International. So I posted up a blog and told people if they donated to Heifer International, I’d match their donations. What’s more, I’d give away some free books to the winners, lottery style.

I was kinda hoping I could raise 5000 dollars, but things quickly spiraled out of control. Other authors donated books, people spread the word, and by the end of the fundraiser, we’d managed to raise more than 100,000 dollars.

I decided to make the fundraiser a yearly thing. I got more organized, hired an assistant, and had a friend make up a logo:

We got an office, ran some auctions, started running an online store, and last year we finally became an official not-for-profit charity.

Over the last three years we’ve raised more than $500,000 for Heifer.

(You can peek at last year’s fundraiser over here if you like.)

  • What’s going to be new this year?

Lots of stuff. One of our big projects this year is the literary pin-up calendar I already mentioned on the blog.

We’ve also got more publishers donating than ever, so that means more books this year. So many books we’ve had to put up new shelves just to hold them all.

I’ve got fun interviews scheduled with folks we’ve we’ve never seen on the blog before.

And more cool rare books. Some of them we’ll be auctioning off, others we’ll be giving away lottery style.

On top of that, this year the fans have really stepped up, donating cool collectibles and things they’ve made with their own, lovely geeky hands. Some of those things we’ll be auctioning off, some we’ll be selling in the store.

  • Where can I donate?

Hold your horses, buckaroo. You can’t donate quite yet. Like I said, we haven’t officially started this year’s fundraiser.

But we will be starting soon.

Soon…

  • What can I do to help?

There are two main things Worldbuilders needs to succeed.

1. People willing to donate. (See above.)

2. People willing to spread the word.

That means for now, the best thing you can do is wait.

If you’re exceptionally eager, you can go digging around in the sofa cushions to gather funds or talk to your family about maybe doing an animal exchange as part of your holiday festivities.

But for the most part, you can help by staying tuned to the blog and preparing to tweet to your friends when we launch the fundraiser in about a week.

  • I *really* want to help. Are you sure I can’t do anything?

If you *really* want to help, and you feel like you have a skill/cool book/rare collectible/mutant power that would be helpful to the cause, you can drop a line to: worldbuilders.2011 [squiggly at-sign thinger] gmail.com

  • I know I can help. Seriously. How can I send you something?

If you’re an author, publisher, comic artist, etc and you’d like to donate some books to the fundraiser, we would absolutely love to have them.

You can mail them to:

Worldbuilders
PO BOX 186
Stevens Point, WI 54481

Three things:

1. If you’re the author, we’d love if you signed the books before sending them to us.

2. If you’re thinking of sending a collectible of some kind, please contact us first.

3. Please package the books carefully. It breaks my heart when books arrive damaged.

If you’re a journalist, blogger, webcomic-er, a celeb with a huge twitter following, or just someone who has a cool idea about how to spread the word, drop us a line at the aforementioned e-mail: worldbuilders.2011 [squiggly at-sign thinger] gmail.com.

Pretty much if you have any questions about the fundraiser, that’s the e-mail to use. You’ll get a response much more quickly than if you use the contact form on my website.

  • You asked me to donate books last year. Why haven’t you invited me this year?

I should have said this first: Worldbuilders isn’t an invitation-only party. There is no velvet rope. No bouncer at the door. We welcome any authors, any books. (Though I will admit we have a definite lean toward fantasy and sci-fi going on here…)

So if you’re an author/publisher I know, and I haven’t sent you an e-mail asking if you’d like to donate, it’s not because I’m snubbing you, or because I don’t want your books in the fundraiser.

No. Far from it. Of course I want your books in the fundraiser. It would fill me with joy to include them.

If you haven’t recieved a specific invite from me already, it’s probably because you’re way cooler than me, so I was embarrassed to bother you with an e-mail. Or it’s because I’m from the Midwest and asking for things makes me kinda uncomfortable. Or, you know, because with all the things going on in my life now, I’m kind of a disorganized idiot.

Seriously. If you don’t believe me, just look at this picture:

There. Anyone can see that I am clearly a fucking idiot. A person who wears this expression does not have the mental wherewithal to snub you or purposefully exclude you from any of his reindeer games. In fact, it’s quite possible that a person wearing this expression entirely lacks the capacity for intentionality, let alone rational thought.

That means if you haven’t recieved an invite from me, it was clearly an oversight firmly rooted in my own stupidity. Q.E.D.

So yeah. Books = Yes. Worldbuilders = Soon.

Me = Bed. I really shouldn’t be writing anything resembling a serious blog when I’m punchy like this.

Later space cowboys,

pat

Also posted in FAQ, Fanmail Q + A, Worldbuilders 2011
|posted by Pat 25 Comments
Published: April 1, 2011

Photo Contest II: The Return

So I’ve been slowly digging through my backlog of fanmail. Most of it has been extraordinarily pleasant. There have been a few turds in there, but they’re so rare as to be statistical anomalies.

While reading them all, I’ve also found three letters similar to this one:

Dear Pat,

I read name of the wind long, long ago back in 2007. And I’ve been a reader of your blog for just about as long.

Back in 2008, when the paperback version of The Name of the Wind came out, you did a photo contest. I remember it was a ton of fun seeing all the photos people took of themselves and your book. Do you remember the girls that got naked and painted themselves with your book covers?

So I was mostly wondering, are you going to do a photo contest again? I remember you saying you were planning on it, but that was a long time ago…

Best Wishes,

Sandra

“Do you remember the girls that got naked and painted themselves with your book covers?”

This is perhaps the most ridiculous question in the history of ever. Of course I remember that picture. I still consider it one of the absolute high points of my writing career. The blog I wrote about that picture back in 2008 is as true today as it was back then.

You want to know one of the best things about this picture? The women were honest-to-goodness rocket scientists. I shit you not. They were aerospace engineers.

The truth is, Sandra, I planned on doing a photo contest as soon as the second book came out. But with the chaos of revision followed by the book tour, I just plain forgot about it.

But now my failing memory has been jogged by you and several other diligent readers. Looking over the blogs from the first contest has warmed my heart and reminded me how much fun it was seeing all of those pictures.

Like this one of the most furious baby in the world:

Or the one where someone made pants for my books:

(Yes. Pants. For my book.)

All the entries from Captain Joe. My favoritest fan I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting yet.

(The name of his steed? Thunderplumb.)

Or one of my favoritest, simplest pictures:

So hell yes. Photo contest. Let’s do it again.

Here are the rules.

1. The picture doesn’t need to include you, but it does need to include the book.

2. Photo manipulation is legal, but by no means required.

3. Multiple entries are allowed.

4. Pictures will be judged on their general coolness. Categories will include anything I feel like, for example: “Most Awesome,” “Most Funny.” “Most Sexy” “Most Dramatic” and “Most Best.”

4b. I reserve the right to add extra categories, remove categories, and pretty much do whatever I like when it comes to the organization and presentation of the pictures.

5. You can’t do anything illegal or recklessly dangerous.

5B. Yes. Even if it’s cool.

5c. Yes. I’m serious. I won’t post up your picture at all if it’s obvious you’re playing in traffic or climbing a fence into a military base. Play nice. Be smart.

6. Winners will win. Winning will include some manner of prize. The nature of the prizes is yet to be determined, but I’ll do my best to make them cool.

7. All photos will be judged in a completely arbitrary and subjective manner.

8. Pictures should be jpgs no larger than 4 megs each. (Lest y’all crash my gmail account.)

9. You have one month to get your pictures submitted. The contest is over April 30th at Midnight.

[Edit April 25th] Contest Deadline Extended! New deadline is May 15th.

For those of you that are interested, here are the blogs that show some of the best pictures from the last contest:

Photo Contest Part I – Shrines

Photo Contest Part II – Babies

Photo Contest Part III – Anthropomorphic and Athletic

Photo Contest Part IV – Celebrities and Foreign Climes

Photo Contest Part V – Driving, Reading, and Animals

Photo Contest Part VI – Miscellaneous

Photo Contest Part VII – Drama

Photo Contest Part VIII – Eros, Filius, and Agape

Photo Contest Part IX – Covers and Cosplay

Photo Contest Part X – The Grand Prize Winner

If nothing else, you really need to check out that last one. The grand prize winner was awesome to such a degree that I’m still stunned by it. Time has not dimmed its luster by one iota. Their prize was that they got to beta-read book two.

How to Submit Your Picture.

E-mail your pictures to the following address: paperback.contest {swirly at sign} gmail.com

If you send a picture to that e-mail address, make sure to include:

  • The photo(s). (duh.)
  • Your name.
  • How you want the photo to be credited, if it’s different than your name.
  • Your mailing address. (Where to send your fabulous prize.)

Are you ready? I’m so ready. I think this is going to be awesome.

pat

P.S. If folks want to suggest things that might make good prizes, I’m open to suggestions in the comments below.

Also posted in contests, cool things
|posted by Pat 90 Comments
Published: November 13, 2010

Worldbuilders 2010

[Edit: This is the Worldbuilders Fundraiser for 2010. Worldbuilders 2011 is here.]

What’s that you say? You’d like to make the world a better place while simultaneously winning fabulous prizes?

Well today is your lucky day.

Heifer International is my favorite charity. It helps people raise themselves up out of poverty and starvation. All over the world Heifer promotes education, sustainable agriculture, and local industry.

They don’t just keep kids from starving, they make it so families can take care of themselves. They give goats, sheep, and chickens to families so their children have milk to drink, warm clothes to wear, and eggs to eat.

(Are you ready? I’m so ready. Let’s do it.)

This year we’ve got a couple different options for donating.

Option 1: The Lottery.

This is the option most people will want. It’s simple. You hop directly over to the page I’ve set up at Team Heifer, and donate.

When you donate using my page at team Heifer, two things happen.

1. Worldbuilders will match 50% of your donation. That means your ten-dollar donation becomes fifteen dollars. If you donate two goats, it becomes three goats. And so on.

2. You’ll be entered in the lottery.

After the fundraiser is over on December 13th, we’ll have a random drawing for all the swag that’s been donated over the last couple months. More than a thousand books, comics, DVD’s and assorted cool miscellany.

[Edit: The end of the fundraiser is now noon on Dec 17th (12:00 PM, pacific standard time.) If you want to know why, you can read the explanation here.]

For every 10 bucks you donate, your name will get entered into the drawing once. If you donate thirty bucks, your name goes in three times. Think of it as buying tickets, if you like.

We’ve had *way* too many books donated for me to post them all up at once. So I’ll be putting up a new blog full of donated books pretty much every day or two, just to keep people from being overwhelmed with all the awesome.

Make sure to check back often to see the new cool.

Last year, readers and geeks of all creeds and nations donated over 125,000 dollars to Heifer International on our team page. With help from a few sponsors, Worldbuilders matched 50% of that, bringing our total for the year to over 190,000 dollars.

Personally, I think we can do even better this year.

Nov 13th – Worldbuilders begins.
Nov 17th – $10,000 raised.
Nov 23rd – $25,000 raised.
Dec 1st  – $50,000 raised.
Dec 9th – $100,000 raised.
Dec 14th – $128,926 raised. (Last Year’s Total Beaten! Woo!)
Dec 16th – $150,000 raised.
.

Our last goal, the goal that I really don’t know if we’ll be able to meet, is going to be 166,700 dollars.

Again, it’s a rather odd number. But if we raise that much it means that after Worldbuilders makes its matching donation, we will have raised a quarter million dollars this year.

I don’t know if we’ll be able to make it. But I’m excited to try…

[Edit - The donation thermometer doesn't work any more, but in the end we raised more than $192,000.  It was awesome....]

You can use this link to check out the Team Heifer page and make a donation.

Option 2: The Sure Thing.

Or, as I like to think of it, the Christmas Present Option.

For those of you who aren’t interested in the lottery, I have some stuff you can just buy. All the proceeds go to Heifer International.

Here’s a link to our new store. Lovingly named The Tinker’s Packs.

Option 3: Auctions.

Last year we did a few auctions and they seemed to work out pretty well. So this year we’re continuing in that fine tradition, auctioning off some of the rarer and more specialized services people have donated.

We’ve got industry professionals willing to read your fledgling manuscript and give you feedback. We’ve got a limited edition Stardust ARC signed by Neil Gaiman and a copy of The Gathering Storm signed by Brandon Sanderson and the production team at Tor. We’ve got rare manuscripts, computer software, a signed Brett Favre Jersey, and much more. Stay tuned for details.

You can see all current Worldbuilders auctions here.

A Plea For Sanity

Lastly, I’d like to ask everyone to please read the instructions/directions carefully before they donate.

I know you’re excited. I’m excited too. We’re going to raise some money, make the world a better place, and end up with big warm fuzzy feelings.

But here’s the problem. If you’re *too* excited, you’ll end up clicking buttons all higgledy-piggledy, forgetting vital steps and leaving things out. (Especially when buying things with Paypal) Then you’ll send me an e-mail that says something like: “I’m sorry, but I forgot to include my shipping address/t-shirt size/signing instructions. Could you please fix it for me?”

I know I’m bound to get one or two e-mails like this. No biggie. But each one is like a cold drop of water eroding my warm fuzzy feeling. If I get, say, a hundred, I’ll have no warm fuzzy left at all. I’ll be left with nothing but a cold prickly feeling.

You don’t want to give me a cold prickly, do you?

I’m sure you don’t. And I’m sure that you’ll read the instructions carefully.

FAQ.

Have questions? Most of them are probably answered over in the FAQ. (Even if your question isn’t answered, I talk about Batman a bit, so it won’t be a complete waste of your time.)

Lastly, just in case you missed it, here’s one more link to our Team Heifer donation page.

Let’s do this thing.

pat

Also posted in Worldbuilders 2010
|posted by Pat 35 Comments
Published: November 9, 2010

The Long-Awaited T-Shirt Blog

Back in June, I asked y’all if you’d like to see some Name of the Wind t-shirts.

When the answer came back a fairly resounding “Yes.” I decided to do a T-shirt design contest.

We got more designs than I expected. So many designs I knew I wasn’t going to be able to include all the ones I liked in the voting.

It took a while to sort through them all. Then we ended up having to do a bunch of secondary research as well. Apparently, if you want to sell something on your website, you need a store or somesuch thing.

I know. It’s crazy.

Anyway, we’ve finally got most of that figured out. So now we have the moment of truth. Now I’m going to ask y’all to vote on which shirts you would actually like to buy and/or wear.

You’ll notice that we’ve included a few of the designs that I initially said we were going to pass over. That’s partly there were a few persuasive blog comments and e-mails sent in. Also, Sarah and Valerie stood up for some designs. Sarah loved the little anime Kvothe with his speech bubbles, and demanded that I include him. I’m growing increasingly fond of the little guy myself.

Before you vote, a few polite requests:

  • Let’s not descend into internet jackassery here. We’re better than that. Don’t vote a bunch of times. That’s not cool.
  • If you know deep in your heart that you’re never going to buy a shirt, it would be nice if you didn’t vote. It’s not that your opinion doesn’t  matter…. It’s just that it doesn’t matter in this particular instance.
  • You can vote for two shirts. That means you should vote for the shirt that you’d really love to buy. And then the shirt that you’d love to buy if your first choice isn’t one of the ones we print.
  • When you’re voting, double check the name of the shirt to make sure you’re casting your vote correctly. The name of the shirt is ABOVE THE PICTURE. ABOVE.

Names Compilation

Dangerous to Go Alone

Denner Toothpaste

NOTW Kvothe Symbols

Lute Design

Sweets Draccus

Denner Fishing

Eolian Bar Shirt

NOTW Tree

NOTW Speech Bubbles

NOTW Fancy Design

Kingkiller

Hello My Name Is

(Note: This design will be the size of an actual name sticker.

Also, “You may have heard of me” will be printed under the sticker in smaller text, not on the back.)

Lute Hero

Choose your t-shirt!

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

A few additional notes:

  • Vote soon. Tell your friends. The poll will be closing in a week.
  • We will be printing at least two different designs. Maybe three.
  • Colors are to-be-determined. (Though the sweet-eating draccus will probably be blue.)
  • T-shirts will be high-quality material, and probably cost around 20 bucks.
  • All proceeds from the t-shirt sales will go to Worldbuilders.

Later all,

pat

Edit: We will, of course, have lady-sized shirts. Because I want to do something special for all the ladies in the world.

Also posted in Dionysian force, cool things
|posted by Pat 207 Comments
Published: September 20, 2010

New Publication: Clash of the Geeks.

When The Name of the Wind came out back in 2007, something strange started to happen. Occasionally someone invited me to write something, usually a story for an anthology.

It was a new experience for me. But despite the fact that I was flattered, I turned all the invitations down saying, “I don’t really write many short stories. Besides, I really have to work on getting my second book out.”

I didn’t meet that first deadline for book two for various reasons. But still, I felt like turning down those offers was the responsible thing to do. I was trying to behave like a grown-up, you see.

In 2008 the paperback came out and I hit the New York Times Bestseller list. Because of that I got even more attention. Offers to write comic books, video games,  and more invitations to anthologies.

Again, I turned them down, saying, “I don’t have much experience writing short stories. Besides, I really need to focus on book two.”

A lot of these offers were for really cool anthologies, mind you. It was hard to turn down the chance to be published alongside some other big-name authors. Still, I felt morally obliged to refuse and focus on book two. I was trying hard to be a professional.

I continued along these lines until early this year when Suvudu held their cage match. They paired up various fantasy characters in head-to-head fights. I was flattered that Kvothe was included, but looking at the brackets, I saw that if Kvothe made it to the second round, he’d have to go up against Aslan.

That’s not an easy fight to win, and I kept thinking about how the scene would play out. How exactly, I wondered, would Kvothe win that fight?

Then the folks at Suvudu asked if I’d like to write up my version of the scene. So I did.

And you know what? It was fun. It was amazingly, delightfully fun. I’d actually forgotten how nice it was to write something just for pure shits and giggles. It didn’t eat up my precious writing time as I’d been fearing. Instead, it reminded me how much fun writing could be.

I thought to myself, “Fuck being a grown-up. I started writing to have fun. Now that I’m published, I should be doing fun things…”

And you know what? As soon as I gave up trying to be all professional and responsible (things that don’t come naturally to me, as a rule) my writing immediately improved. I wrote faster, and better, and I had more fun doing it.

Fast forward to earlier this year. I get an e-mail from John Scalzi. He sends me an e-mail that says (This is a paraphrase, mind you.)

Question: Would you have space on your schedule for a short (about 2K) story? It would be for a short (silly) story collection designed to raise money for the Lupus foundation. Deadline end of July-ish. Story doesn’t necessarily have to be “good” in a classic sense; in fact, it might be better if it’s not.

I think to myself. This sounds fun. It’s for charity. It’s short (I can do 2000 words standing on my head.) And he’s pretty much said it’s okay if my story ends up sucking. He’s practically encouraging me to suck.

So I e-mailed Scalzi back, and our e-mail exchange went roughly like this.

ME: Okay, I’m interested. What are the details?

HIM: Write a story about the events leading up to, and culminating in, the attached picture (which is a rough sketch; final picture to come).

(Click to embiggen)

ME: WTF?

HIM: For the sake of clarity, the person at the top is Wil Wheaton; the person at the bottom is me.

ME: Merciful Buddha…. Can you give me any context? Some framework I can use to cage this madness?

HIM: No. No context. Just write something. No slash. Otherwise, knock yourself out.

So there I am, utterly confusticated and bebothered. This is the first piece of short fiction I’ve agreed to write, and all I can think is, “What the fuck can I possibly write about this?”

This question spins around in my head for a couple days. I think, “Can I write a story about Scalzi and Wheaton playing D&D? Is that too geeky?  A holodeck adventure? Too cheap? Do I dare write the absolutely forbidden, ‘It was all just a dream’ story?”

Then it occurs to me that I’m approaching this from the wrong direction. I shouldn’t be trying to turn this picture into a joke. I shouldn’t try to be cute or gimmicky.

No. The events taking place in this picture are obviously epic. My story needs to be epic. And since it can’t be epic in length, it has to be epic in form….

So that’s how I ended up writing a poetic edda. For those of you who aren’t complete geeks, an edda is an old alliterative poem. Like Beowulf. Or the old Norse legends Tolkien ripped off when he was writing the Lord of the Rings.

Once I knew how to handle the story, I ended up having a ton of fun with it. I even brought in a certain celebrity in a cameo role…

Of course poetic edda aren’t supposed to be written in modern English, so I ended up spending a ridiculous amount of time trying to get the meter right. But you know my motto: if it’s worth writing, it’s worth obsessively revising.

And now, months later, I’m finally able to present you with the finished project:

(Beware, lest the awesome blind you…)

Check it out. I get third billing. How cool is that shit?

You can download the anthology for free, but I’d like to politely ask y’all to keep in mind that we’re trying to raise money for the Lupus foundation. For all intents and purposes, these stories are brought to you by the Lupus Foundation.

That means if you can afford it, donating to the cause would be a terribly kind thing to do. I know you have it in you. Make me proud.

You can download the anthology and revel in its majesty over here.

Share and enjoy,

pat

Also posted in Felicia Day, Wil Wheaton, being awesome, book covers, cool news, side projects
|posted by Pat 80 Comments

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