Myth, the Universe, and Everything

A few weeks ago, Bill Bodden, one of my fellow contributors to Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror, graciously hosted me as a guest post on his blog. Today, I'm delighted to return the favor! Bill is a fantastic writer and was a driving force behind getting Haunted attention online, and it's been a delight to work with him. So without further ado: here's Bill!

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Myths and Mysteries

I've been thinking about mythology quite a bit lately. Much of my more recent writing work has involved the Cthulhu Mythos; I've been doing quite a bit of work for Modiphius Entertainment at their Achtung! Cthulhu tabletop role-playing game line. This mythology, created by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton SMith, August Derleth and many others, postulates that the universe is a vast place and that human beings are not the center of it, as we had supposed for centuries. This was a new concept in the 1930s, and as one can imagine, not a popular one with scholars, academics and the clergy. Regardless, it caught on with readers to some degree, and was rediscovered -- thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of August Derleth to keep Lovecraft's writing alive -- in the late 1960s.

One of the more interesting aspects of this mythos is its inclusivity; anyone can add to it. There are no official high priests to declare what is and is not canon -- only self-appointed ones. That others could build on his work was Lovecraft's wish, stated explicitly in letters to friends who had also contributed stories and ideas. I believe it was the first shared-world concept in literature, and remains a successful one to this day. That inclusivity has brought new blood and new ideas to the fold -- not all of it good, of course, but the vast majority of the material is well worth reading, if you like reading that sort of thing to begin with.

I cut my teeth on classic mythology: the Greeks, the Norse, the Egyptians, the Aztecs, all had fascinating stories designed to explain why Things Are The Way They Are. In this day and age we have a greater understanding of science -- mostly -- and have a better grasp of which things are natural phenomena and which are not. Science itself has nearly become a religion, supplanting the hazy explanations of the past with facts and logic of today. As our knowledge increases, we will doubtless learn more about the supernatural and paranormal, and when we do we may find, like so many of the protagonists in Lovecraft's work, that the real story is both far more interesting and vastly more terrifying than we had imagined.

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Bill Bodden has been writing in the tabletop gaming industry for more than a decade. His latest works include material in the Achtung! Cthulhu Keeper's Guide, and is currently working on a project for White Wolf Publishing/CCP. His most recent fiction is the story "In The Shadow Of His Glory" in Sidekicks! from Alliteration, Ink. Visit Bill's website at www.billbodden.com

There it is, folks! Lindsay Archer finished the cover art, and I could not be happier with her work. If you're interested in getting prints of her other projects, I noticed she has a number of things on sale at her store right now -- it's worth browsing through just to see her other projects!

And with that, I just have some random thoughts from an extra-tired weekend.

• My characters really need to stay out of other people's worlds while I'm dreaming. First Lydia and Kennerly were on a train facing off with a changeling magician (reminiscent of Xen'drik) and the next night, Taru and Nara were in the middle of bad things happening in Skittersill, a bad neighborhood from Max Gladstone's Two Serpents Rise. They're really not equipped to handle such things...


• As I was losing coherent thought, I wondered what it might be like if, in times of tiredness nearing dreamstate, you also lost your coherent physical structure. Would some people wander about with fuzzy edges all the time? Would the best rested among us have sharply defined exteriors?


• Playing the voices of Elsa and Anna from Disney Frozen at the request of Bug has led me to wonder about the history and future of Arandell. According to my improvisational dialog, Anna's idea of national defense is to have Elsa craft an army of snow monsters, while Elsa prefers creating situations in which friction is reduced (as if gliding over ice), and conflict can be avoided. I also wonder what kind of adventure Rapunzel and Eugene had during the summer freeze that got them stuck with the rest of the courtiers attending the coronation. I suspect it was one of their first official state visits (what with neither of them having any sort of international relations training prior to marriage), and that they probably got up to some trouble preventing the Duke of Weaselton from getting away with something dire while Elsa and Anna were otherwise occupied...

I got to write about Frozen over at Questia, and I've been having fun with webcomic and game reviews at Black Gate Magazine. Otherwise, back to revisions for me!

(Crossposted at Substrate)

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I went to hear Max Gladstone read at Enigma Bookstore in November. I was playing around with my camera's video capture, and I successfully recorded Max's section of the reading. It's about twelve minutes, and if you've not had the chance to hear Max read in person (or if you've not heard an excerpt from Two Serpents Rise,) check it out!

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Today's Friday, and it's supposed to be a guest blog day, so I was planning to write an entry about going to a fantastic reading/panel/signing at Enigma Bookstore last weekend to see Max Gladstone, Laure Anne Gilman, and Hal Johnson. But, you'll have to check back later this weekend for notes on that -- because it's the release day for Showdown at Willow Creek! The game hit the stands today, and I couldn't be more excited to have it out there in the world. To make things even more exciting, Noble Beast Classics launched its Kickstarter, and presuming it funds, I'll be writing a twisted version of The Jungle Book with shapeshifters for that project.

So, go check out the Kickstarter, and then read the fun official announcement for Showdown from Choice of Games (with the fantastic cover art, below, by Ron Chan) -- I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed working on it!

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We’re proud to announce that Showdown at Willow Creek, the latest in our popular “Choice of Games” line of multiple-choice interactive-fiction games, is now available for iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and, via the Chrome Web Store, Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Saddle up and defend the town of Willow Creek from nefarious outlaws and city slickers! It all starts when a rancher’s daughter goes missing, and it ends at the showdown at Willow Creek, where greed, lust, science and Mother Nature will face off at high noon.

“Showdown at Willow Creek” is the interactive western mystery novel by Alana Joli Abbott where your choices control the story. The game is entirely text-based–without graphics or sound effects–and driven by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.

Gamble, seduce, brawl, or shoot your way through Willow Creek, where gunslingers make the laws, and everybody has secrets. Will you romance the gambler or the soiled dove (or both)? Will you side with the scientists bringing electricity to the Old West, or with a tribe of Native American Utes? Will you unravel the conspiracy that threatens to tear the town apart, or will you light the fuse to blow it all sky high?

Note: With “Showdown,” we’re experimenting with “try before you buy” on iOS, where the first three chapters are available for free. Android and Chrome users can try the first three chapters for free on the web. You can buy the rest of the game for $1.99–the same price on iOS, Android, and Chrome.

We hope you enjoy playing Showdown at Willow Creek. We encourage you to tell your friends about it, and recommend the game on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. Don’t forget: our initial download rate determines our ranking on the App Store. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better our games will rank.

Way back in 2006, one of the first places where Into the Reach was reviewed was over on Flames Rising, which was the start of a long relationship I've had with the site as an occasional contributor -- and the start of my relationship with DriveThruFiction and the other DriveThru incarnations. Matt McElroy who runs the site has been awesome to work with, and it's through Matt and the Flames Rising team that I got to work on the anthology Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror.

So it's with great pleasure that I've now come full circle with Flames Rising: Matt posted the chapter one excerpt of the revised edition of Into the Reach at the site today. Thanks to all the people who posted the news on Twitter! I saw it from you first!



In other news, I am working on Choice of Pirate for Choice of Games, and the folks over at Facebook have been helping me come up with pirate shanties to listen to while I'm writing. Matt Ledder of Renaissance Festival Podcast had perfect timing with his Pirate Show Special, which he posted on the 24th. The stars must have aligned just right for that to come together just when I needed it. Thanks, Matt!

Several of my friends from the Michigan Renaissance Festival helped me remember the name of a group I'd always tried to catch back between sets when I was singing with the Arbor Consort -- the Corsairs, who sadly disbanded in 2008. Luckily, The Jolly Rogers are still performing and selling CDs, so there's pirate music to spare!

What pirate music and sea shanties do you recommend? If you'd like to recommend the pirate movies in your top ten, come join the discussion on Facebook.

Back in 2008, I gave a very short but glowing review to a debut novel, Standard Hero Behavior, by John David Anderson. When I discovered earlier this year that his second novel, superhero book Sidekicked was coming out, I rejoiced, not only because it meant more by Anderson, but also because Anderson was now an online presence: he's got a blog and is on Facebook. His blog used to allow comments, so I did get to gush on how much I was looking forward to the new novel before comments were disabled. (He was very humble in response, as I recall, though I can't find proof of that now.)



Sidekicked did not disappoint. The book stars Drew Bean, the Sensationalist, a sidekick who doesn't have much in the way of combat ability; instead, he's got heightened senses, which is as much a pain on meatloaf day at school as it is when Drew is hanging over a swimming pool full of acid, waiting to be rescued. (Hey, at least he can tell you what kind of acid it is, just by smell.) When a major villain, thought to be dead, returns and frees his henchmen from the prison for supervillains, everyone is looking for Drew's hero, who defeated the villain the last time, but who has since vanished from the public eye. Drew's looking for him, too -- the man who was once his idol has left him on his own, making him less of a sidekick and more of an aside thought. It's tough to be Drew, but this young teen never gives up, and when he believes his friends are in danger, or just that someone has to do the right thing, he's willing to throw himself in the thick of things. Even when the results are disastrous.

While Standard Hero Behavior was a quest novel that ends up being as much about the relationship between father and son as it is about going on a heroic journey in a high fantasy setting, Sidekicked is about learning who -- and how -- to trust if you're a superhero in training whose Super has left the hero scene. But while I expected that mentor/mentee relationship to be the most important, it turns out that it's an entirely different relationship on which the plot hinges. I figured out the big reveal a little ahead of the characters in the book, but Anderson kept me guessing much longer than I expected.

From what I've been able to gather, Anderson is extremely under-read and under-known for the quality of his work. I think this should be remedied, so I hope you'll go check out his books, and then tell someone else about them, too. Anderson is off to a really strong start with his first two novels, and I hope that the book market will support him in publishing many more!

One of the Redemption Trilogy Kickstarter stretch goals that got funded was the re-editing and prettification of Into the Reach and Departure to be re-released as new editions. At long last, Into the Reach has been re-released! It's currently available through DriveThruFiction and Smashwords. I'll be releasing it at Barnes and Noble and Kobo as well -- and probably Amazon, though I'm hesitant about that for numerous reasons (but Bottom Line dictatese that it's a necessity) -- but I'm more concerned at the moment about getting Departure cleaned up and off to the backers than getting the widest distribution possible on Into the Reach. If all goes well, all three novels will be up everywhere by the end of the year.



So hurray! That's a big hurdle jumped, and I can move on to the next things. Or, rather, I can keep working on finishing up the details on Showdown at Willow Creek (renamed to give it more Western flair), which is in beta, and get prepared for that release, while also moving on to the next things. What's in store here for the next few months?

• Edits and formatting on Departure


• Work on Choice of Pirate, my next game for Choice of Games


• Finishing up coding on the autobio project. The project is now in four batches per year instead of two, which means more authors and more fun. This batch features Shiloh Walker and Margaret Weis, who were both fantastic to work with!


Speaking of the autobio project, we've added some fun new structure, so along with the long essays, like Shiloh wrote for this batch, there are also interviews, like the one Margaret participated in. I tend to feature a lot of SFF writers, partly because I'm more familiar with their work, and partly because SFF writers respond really well to being invited. (Graphic novelists tend to be excited to be invited but too busy to contribute, though I keep following up!) I've been focusing on inviting romance novelists and have had a little success there, but I am looking for more mystery novelists, nonfiction writers, playwrights, and literary writers to invite. If you've got recommendations of approachable writers who interact with their readers online (that seems to be the recipe for successful responses to my invitations) who fit into those categories, I'd love to hear them!

I'd like to welcome Sarah Schanze, also known as depleti, back to Myth, the Universe, and Everything. Sarah was a huge help with pointing people to my Kickstarter, and now she's got a Kickstarter of her own that I'll let her tell you about in her own words. You can check out her original guest post, about mythology in her excellent webcomic (soon to be print, we hope!) Thistil Mistil Kistil here.

Please give her a warm welcome -- and then go contribute to her Kickstarter!

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Hey everyone! My name is Sarah Schanze and I recently launched a Kickstarter to get my webcomic Thistil Mistil Kistil printed into a collected volume. Alana was nice enough to invite me to plug it and talk a bit about the comic, so here I am!

TMK is a fantasy adventure webcomic featuring Vikings, Norse gods, weird magics, and weirder creatures. The story focuses on Coal, a recently deceased warrior, who has to complete a quest for Odin in order to reach his promised afterlife. Things get tricky quickly since Coal needs Loki’s help to complete this quest, and it’s not clear how helpful Loki actually is.

One thing I’ve tried to do with TMK is show some of the more historical aspects of Vikings and the time period they lived in. While researching I was really surprised at how far Vikings actually traveled, not only to plunder and raid, but also to settle. Because of this, most of the main characters aren’t warriors, but characters originally from other lands. There’s Hedda, a Christian slave kidnapped from Ireland; Ibrahim, a young Muslim scholar from Al Andalus; and Arne, a found Native American child raised in Iceland. Of the main protagonists, Coal is really the only one that most might consider a “Viking”.



Chapters of TMK also occur in places other than Scandinavia, such as Scotland, Ireland, Spain, the city of Constantinople, and of course Iceland and the “New World”. Not to mention the more fantastic places like Asgard and wherever Loki actually lives.

While I try to remain fairly close to historical sources, I do take some liberties. Funnily enough, my greatest liberty is taken with the myths themselves. Since they were all written down by biased sources and heavily edited, I don’t feel all that bad taking some myths and changing them around. So if you think you know where TMK’s story is going, you might find yourself surprised. Maybe.

If TMK seems like something you might enjoy, please take a look at the comic, which is free to read! If you like that, maybe think about pledging to get your own printed book. To sweeten the pot, I created an original bonus story just for the book about how Loki met Thor and ingratiated himself with the Aesir.

Thank you so much for reading! And thanks, Alana, for letting me ramble.

It's not Friday, but C. E. L. Welsh couldn't wait -- his Kickstarter, which features friends of the blog Jeremy Mohler, Emily Hall, and Scott Colby -- has left than a week left to fund! I asked him to talk a little bit about the world behind the project, Seven Stones, and I hope you'll be intrigued enough to go over to the Kickstarter an check it out!

Without further ado: C. E. L. Welsh!

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The World of The Wrecked Earth

In the summer of 2010 I saw a world where civilization was all-but-gone, where hordes of mutated animals roamed the wilds, and where shooting stars filled the sky, day and night, in a never-ending display of deadly celestial majesty. This world was, of course, all in my head, and there it remained until I managed to move a small part of it to paper, where it became CLUTCH: Book One of The Wrecked Earth. Now it is the summer of 2013 and I am trying to bring more of that world into existence, but this time I’ve enlisted the help of thirteen others to lend me a hand.

The project is Seven Stones, a collaborative short story & graphic novel effort with fourteen talented writers and artists. The idea: each of seven writers create a short story that centers around a meteorite (thus the title) in The Wrecked Earth. Then those seven tales are converted to comic scripts and seven artists bring their post-apoc vision to the table and create comics based on the stories.

We are at the short end of a crowd-funding run to pay for all this amazing work, and the logistics of coordinating so many moving parts form a complex and sometimes maddening spiderweb of tasks and roles—many of which I’ve had to learn how to fulfill on the fly. At the heart of it all is the world of the Wrecked Earth, a deliberately open playground that I created to give myself as much freedom as possible and, luckily, that worked out just right when it came to inviting others to the game.



Back in 2010 I wrote a three page comic script called “No One Escapes The Wizard”, with the idea that Danny Cruz would draw it and then we would pitch it to Mark Millar’s CLiNT magazine, which was having an open call at the time. The comic didn’t get made, but during the course of writing the script I had to answer quite a few questions, the answers to which later became the foundation for my world. It was to be a post-apocalyptic comic, short and sweet in the manner of the old Judge Dredd comics. Something filled with big ideas and over-the-top action, a pulpy-feel that didn’t require a great deal of scientific explanation behind why things were the way they were. Just some short-hand, thinly veiled reasoning and then we could get on with the action. As I developed the world I deliberately made choices that would give me maximum freedom for future stories (at this point I knew, regardless if this comic got made, that I wanted to do a lot of work in the world I was creating).

I didn’t want to be too tied down to the facts. If I wanted to tell a story where the hero fought his way through a ravine filled with mutated cows, but there was no ravine in that location in the real world, I didn’t want that to stop me! So I set to work creating the world my way.

What was the apocalypse? Meteor strikes! LOTS of them, all over the planet, for thirty days straight. Add the impacts to triggered earthquakes and screwed up weather systems and I could re-shape the landscape however I wanted. Keep the meteors falling, but make them sporadic and unpredictable to keep everything on a constant edge.

Where did the monsters come from? Radiation! Strange radiation that SOME of the meteors leaked, creating unpredictable mutations. (There are other reasons for the monsters I can’t go into yet… )

With these two elements in play, I could really come up with a ‘logical’ explanation for whatever I wanted/needed to inject into the world. From there other aspects of The Wrecked Earth started to take shape on their own, and I found myself discovering as much as I was creating.

With the re-sculpted (and still changing!) landscape, those that survived Rockfall (the initial meteoric destruction) were cut off from one-another. This meant that two towns only a few miles apart might evolve very differently over the years, creating perhaps radically different societies. Yet another advantage when it comes to storytelling.

There is a meta-plot involved in the arc of The Wrecked Earth’s creation and history. I am taking things in a specific direction. But along the way there are so many stories to be told… and not just by me. I have my way of writing, my voice, as it were. Even when I choose to tell different kinds of stories in this setting, they are still my stories. The setting is bigger than I am, and I just knew there were things that could be done with it that I wouldn’t be able to do, because I’m just one writer.

So I invited a few others to come and play.

I did my best to give them the rules; I wrote a Writers Guide to The Wrecked Earth, and I laid out the parameters of this specific project. Inside that framework, however, I not only gave them the freedom to write whatever kind of story they wanted, I encouraged them to do so. I wanted to see The Wrecked Earth through their eyes, and I have been delighted with the results.

I get to become a reader in the world I created, and that is an amazing thing.

What a wacky month it's been! We had a great family vacation, a fantastic visit from my mother, and then a not-so-terrific summer-cold-gone-feral that the house is still fighting off. (Bug manages with a few coughs here and there, while Threestripe and I have been dealing with what my friend Jess calls the "Peruvian Death Cough." It's an evocative description to say the least.)

While I've been away from the blog, things have definitely been happening in the world of publishing:

• Apple lost the e-book price fixing case (covered a bazillion places, and here by Forbes contributor Connie Guglielmo).


• Amazon went into a price war with Overstock.com to see who could discount bestsellers the most (story broken in a Shelf Awareness article by John Mutter).


• B&N's a mess, with its CEO resigning (he was the head of the digital initiative, which lost a ton of money, despite how much I and others love our nook devices). Again, coverage is everywhere, but here's Danielle Kurtzleben's coverage at US News and World Report.


• Mythcon 44 happened, and the Mythopoeic Awards for 2013 were announced. I had a great time reading both the kids and adults fantasy lists this year, and can recommend every book that made the kids finalist list. I can also wholeheartedly endorse the adult list winner, which Max Gladstone had recommended to me as a web comic years ago. (I was conflicted about some of the adult finalists, but they were all solid books.


• Speaking of Max, he's nominated for two awards this year -- the Campbell and the Legend awards. You should go vote for him. Details at his blog.

If that's not enough for one post, I also am delighted to share some thoughts on Jennifer Estep's two latest Mythos Academy installments, one of which, Midnight Frost releases today. Jennifer's been a guest blogger with this series for several installments, and I'm a fan of what she does working in world mythologies into a fun, YA mystery/adventure series. She very kindly gave me the NetGalley links for Midnight Frost and her e-novella Spartan Frost, and both were perfect additions to the developing world.

The series so far: Gwen Frost, a Gypsy who is Nike's Champion and uses psychometry, has accepted that it's her duty to fight Loki -- in this series, the big evil god -- and save the world. She has a fantastic growing sense of responsibility, despite being arrested by the supposed good guys in a previous book, and despite nearly dying by the hands of her then-possessed boyfriend in Crimson Frost (in a very Buffy vs. Angel-like encounter). It's that growth throughout the series -- accepting that this is her job, whether she likes it or not -- that makes Gwen such a great heroine to me. Not that she's getting better with a sword or that her magic's growing stronger. No, she's accepting that if she doesn't step up, the world will lose -- and if she doesn't accept her friends' help, she's going to lose. That gets intensified in Midnight Frost, where, when her boss and mentor (even if she doesn't think of him that way) Nickamedes accidentally takes poison meant for her. Despite knowing that saving him will put her into a trap set by Loki's minions, Gwen knows there's no question: she and her friends have to try to save him. And despite being burned by trusting the wrong people before, she's willing to accept new allies when the time comes. The villains in this series are still sadistic servants of an evil god -- there's no gray spectrum among them -- and most of Gwen's friends never get to experience the level of growth that Gwen's first person narration reveals about her. But that doesn't stop the series from being fun, and Jennifer does a great job of using the Chekovian guns that she sets up -- even if readers have to wait awhile for them to go off. All in all, this series keeps getting stronger, and I'm incredibly pleased that I keep getting the chance to read the books in advance. (Thanks, Jennifer!)