Category Archives: Nathan Taylor

Published: April 4, 2013

Final Call for Torment….

As I write this, there are less than two days remaining to the Torment Kickstarter I mentioned a couple weeks back on the blog…

I hope you’ll forgive me for bringing it up again, but I’m a little excited about the project. Plus the clock is ticking, and a few things have happened since my original post.

Actually, a LOT of things have happened, but I’ll just hit the high points here…

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1. Support

First I want to thank everyone that stormed over to the Torment Kickstarter and signed up. The folks running the show tell me that the day I announced my involvement and posted up my blog was the second biggest day of the kickstarter so far.

I can’t thank you enough for that. It’s not often I get to look cool, but you guys made me look cool.

Also, your comments in that blog were delightfully supportive and encouraging. A few were kind enough to make me weepy.

So… yeah. Thanks for being lovely humans. And double thanks for proving that the internet is peopled with something *other* than wankers, whiners, and people that type “first.”

2. The Stretch Goal

The kickstarter has flown past 3.25 million, which means I’m officially going to be helping write a piece of the game.

Woo!

3. Character

After I was officially part of the team, I started to think about what I was going to write. And my thoughts kept coming back to what I really liked about some of those older games. Specifically, the companions your character travels with as you move through the story.

How cool would it be, I thought, to write the dialogue and story arc for one of these secondary characters?

So I called Colin and asked him how he’d feel about me writing a companion.

He asked me if I had any ideas for a character.

I told him I did. I explained the character.

He said it was weird. Not the sort of character that normally gets written into games.

But he also said I could do it.

So now I’m excited. I get to write a companion for the game.

I can’t tell you anything about her except that it will almost certainly be a she.

And she’s not going to be the usual sort of thing, because this isn’t going to be your usual sort of game.

4. Extras

They’ve added some new stuff to the Kickstarter since my last post. You can be a Beta or an Alpha tester now. (So if you’ve ever wanted to be a beta reader of mine, now’s your chance.)

I’ll also be doing a comic for the game, because comics are another form I’m looking to experiment with a little more, and it gives me a chance to work with Nate Taylor again. I’ll be using that story to introduce my character, and flesh out my little corner of the world. Plus writing comics is easier for me, as the artist has to do most of the heavy lifting.

If you’re interesting in adding stuff like being an alpha tester and/or getting some of the comics being written for the game by me and other folks, you can increase your bid over on Kickstarter.

5. The Final Days

As I mentioned before, the kickstarter is about a day and a half from being over. Right now we stand at about 3.6 million, making us the second-highest game ever funded on Kickstarter.

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If we can hit 3.99 before it ends, we’ll be *the* highest funded game ever. I’m thinking we can do it if we can just get the word out to enough people…

So if you’re interested in getting in early, now would be a great time to jump on board. Supporting the game now is much better than doing it later, because if you buy in now, that money goes toward making a better game. Plus it’s cheaper to buy now. Plus you get the chance of cool extras and add-ons that won’t be available after the kickstarter closes.

Yeah. There you go. That’s my final pimping of the Kickstarter.

Here’s the link,

And I’m done.

pat

Also posted in calling on the legions, cool things, video games | By Pat67 Responses
Published: February 21, 2011

A taste of things to come…

I got an unexpected package in the mail the other day. It was a poster tube from my good friend and Nathan Taylor.

Nate is the guy who illustrated The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle. He’s also the one who did the Kvothe Online comic I put up on the blog a while back.

I thought he might have sent me some of the sketches for an upcoming project we’re working on. Or maybe the original art for the Kvothe Online comic.

But what I found inside was treasure of an entirely different sort.

You see, Nate is one of the few people that read The Name of the Wind long before it was ever in print. I met him when I was in grad school back in 2000.

Even rarer, Nate is one of the people who has role-played in my world. I’ve run a few games over the years.

He’s also one of the people I recently trusted to read a beta version of book two and give me some feedback on it.

That means Nate knows all kinds of things about the world that other people don’t. Nate knows all manner of secrets.

This is what he sent me:

When I unrolled the poster, I laughed. It was a big evil-mastermind kind of laugh. Because once again Nate has managed to ring the bell beyond all reasonable expectation. This is the perfect depiction of the Amyr. It fills me with a dark and terrible joy….

In other news, for those of you who would like a small, pretty-much spoiler-free peek at a piece of book two, you can find a small scene over here.

Share and Enjoy,

pat

Also posted in book two, cool things, delicious fanarts | By Pat105 Responses
Published: October 19, 2010

A New Addition to the Family: Tuulen Nimi

Guess what showed up in the mail today?

(Click to Embiggen.)

It’s the Finnish translation of The Name of the Wind. Huzzah!

I suppose I might get jaded about this stuff eventually. But the truth is, I still love seeing the new editions of the book. I love trying to figure out how to pronounce the title. I love seeing which map they end up putting in the front. (Usually it’s Nate’s version, but not always.) I love flipping through the book and seeing if I can figure out what’s going on.

And I *love* the versions with new covers. For this one, I’m willing to bet that the artist actually read the book. I can tell because of how the lute looks. The pegbox isn’t cantilevered, and there’s only three pegs on this side (so four on the other side would make seven.) I also like the hood of his cloak.

That’s all for now, T-shirts will be showing up soon. So keep an eye out here if you’re looking to vote on which ones are your favorite…

pat

Also posted in book covers, cool things, foreign happenings | By Pat52 Responses
Published: April 16, 2010

And it’s off to the printer….

For those of you who haven’t heard the news, my new pet project is going to be coming out at the end of June.

While I’ve mentioned the book on the blog before, it’s only been while talking about something else, like the fundraiser or my recent road-trip.

Today, after talking about the final edits before we send the book off to the printer, I figured it was time that I give The Princess and Mr. Whiffle its very own blog. Especially as it will be coming out in just a couple months.

The other reason I wanted to mention it here is so that you folks who care enough about my stuff to check the blog regularly have a chance of actually buying one.

So here’s the brief pitch. It looks like a children’s book, but it’s really not. Seriously. It’s more like an old-school faerie tale, and I’m profoundly, almost ridiculously proud of how it’s turned out. If you have a dark sense of humor, odds are you’ll enjoy it. If not, you probably want to avoid it.

Here’s the deal: this book’s print run isn’t very big. And I have a lot of readers. That means there’s a very decent chance that the book will sell out.

In fact, there’s a good chance it might sell out really, really quickly.

That means if you want to make sure you get one, you should probably pre-order a copy. Here’s a link to the publisher’s website.

And before somebody says, “why don’t you just print more books?” let me explain that I’m just the writer here. The publisher makes all those decisions. I don’t have any say in how big the print run is.

Okay. My work here is done. Consider yourselves fairly warned.

Hope y’all have a lovely weekend, folks. Myself, I have to go dress up as Zeus for a parade….

pat

Also posted in cool news, The Adventures of The Princess and Mr. Whiffle, upcoming publications | By Pat132 Responses
Published: December 8, 2009

Coming Soon: The Adventures of The Princess and Mr. Whiffle.

Let me tell you a story.

Or rather, let me tell you a story about a story. (For those of you who know me, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.)

Back in 2001, when I was toiling in the salt mines of grad school, my girlfriend Sarah and I had very different sleep schedules. I was up late, and she went to bed early.

One night, when she was going to bed, she jokingly asked me to tell her a story.

So I did, starting with with the most saccharine faerie-tale beginning I could think of: “Once upon a time,” I said. “There was a Princess who lived in a Marzapan castle….”

The story was so cute and sweet that it began to irritate me even as I was telling it. And so I twisted it around until it was something entirely different. Something dark and strange. An older sort of Faerie tale.

When I finished, Sarah lay in bed, looking up at me with big eyes. “Now I can’t sleep,” she said.

So I told a second ending to the story. A sweet ending. A funny ending. A happy ending. An ending that made everything all better again. Sarah relaxed.

But that second ending irritated me again. It was too sweet and perfect.

So I gave the story a third ending. The perfect ending. An ending with teeth in it.

That night Sarah didn’t get to sleep in any sort of timely fashion, but the next day she told some friends about it. I repeated the story for them, and one of them said, “I’d love to draw that.”

Now a lot of times, that’s where things would stop. But the friend who spoke up was none other than Nathan Taylor: he’s the guy that drew the map for the US edition of the book. And he turned my puerile scrawlings for the Worldbuilder logo…

Into something cool and respectable looking:

I knew Nate was a great cartoonist and illustrator, as you can see for yourself over here or here.

But he completely blew me away with the illustrations he did for the Princess book. Here’s a little taste:

(Awww…)

Just yesterday, Subterranean Press announced The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: the Thing Beneath the Bed on their website, making it available for pre-order.

So I wanted to mention it here on the blog as quickly as possible. Apparently it’s been selling really quickly, and the limited leatherbound edition they’re printing is already half sold-out. So if you want one of those, you should get over there and order it sooner rather than later.

Edit: Apparently everyone wanted a limited edition, so they sold out about 9:00 this morning. Sorry about that. I don’t think anyone expected it to sell quite so quickly as that.

That said, it’s only the limited edition that sold out. There are still regular hardcovers available.

Also, Bill over at Subterranean Press has offered to throw five ARC copies of the princess book in with his other donations to Worldbuilders. If you win one of those, you get to see the finished product months before it comes out.

  • Five ARC copies of The Adventures of the Princess and Mr. Whiffle: the Thing Beneath the Bed by Patrick Rothfuss and Nathan Taylor. Signed by the Author.

It’s a picture book that’s not for children. I can say with some certainty that it should never be read to children. But it’s perfect for adults with a dark sense of humor and a love of old-school faerie tales.

Stay tuned. We still have a lot more to come. New blogs every day or so…

pat

As always, with thanks to: Subterranean Press.



(Huzzah for Subterranean Press! Double Huzzah!)
Also posted in cool things, Sarah, side projects, Subterranean Press | By Pat54 Responses

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