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privateer press

Year Coming Down

December 25, 2023
cinema, freelancing, how to see ghosts, lists, news, on writing, privateer press, thoughts, year in review
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Writing can be a difficult, lonely, and discouraging path, and I’ve rarely felt any of that more keenly than I did this year. The fragmentation of social media and a long stretch of not going to conventions has left me feeling more cut off from my writerly peers than at perhaps any other time since I started publishing, and there are plenty of other things in the world to feel depressed about, both directly related to writing and otherwise.

I don’t know if it’s the aforementioned isolation from social media or an accurate reflection of the state of the industry, but it feels like there have been fewer good publishing opportunities, and I’ve watched a lot of presses and publications struggle or shut their doors entirely over the past year.

My fourth short story collection, How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, came out just over a year ago and seems to have made not so much as a ripple. This is not a call for pity, just a reality of the job. Some books do well, some don’t. Some catch on right away, others take time to find their audience. There are a lot of reasons why How to See Ghosts may not be performing as well as my previous collections – and it may be that it just seems to not be from where I am sitting, and time will prove otherwise.

Though I ultimately sold a few other stories that have yet to see the light of day, I only actually published two new ones in 2023. “The God of the Overpass” in the June issue of The Dark magazine, and “The Doom That Came to Wyrock” in Mystery, Murder, Madness, Mythos from PS Publishing.

As has generally been the case lately, a lot more of my time and energy went into nonfiction and freelance projects. As I have done for every expansion since the launch of Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, I worked on the latest stuff for that game from Privateer Press, and also wrote four regular columns and extensive nonfiction pieces on everything from Halloween haunted houses to Marvel’s Man-Thing to the problem with the Warrens.

Besides all of that, I also continued to host monthly screenings at the Stray Cat Film Center with Tyler Unsell as part of the Horror Pod Class, where we show free horror movies and then discuss how they might be used in a classroom – or just vaguely talk about them, perhaps more accurately. And this was my first full year as movies editor at Exploits (I started in May of 2022), where I was able to acquire some great essays covering films like Mad Love, Hercules in the Haunted World, Freaks, and Dark Night of the Scarecrow, to name just a few.

Probably the biggest news is that I have a new book coming next year, though I don’t have a release date for it pinned down just yet and can’t give out any details. It’s not another short story collection, and it’s not a novel. What is it? You’ll just have to wait to find out, unfortunately, but I hope you’ll all enjoy it.

None of which is to suggest that there has not been some very good stuff that has happened to me, writing-wise, this year. For starters, I continued to freelance full time, and anyone who has ever tried such a feat knows that every year you manage to keep doing that is a victory.

The two biggest events in my year, where my work was concerned, were probably things that only tangentially tied into my own writing. One was seeing a monster that I had designed turned into a tabletop miniature for the first time, as part of the new Warmachine Mk 4 from Privateer Press. The other was the surprise of seeing my own name in the front matter of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest book, Silver Nitrate, which she very kindly dedicated to me – one of the most touching gestures I have ever been on the receiving end of. I also did some work putting together a “film festival” for the official Silver Nitrate book club kit.

And, of course, lots of things happen in a year besides just work. This was also our first full year in the new house, which has been a year filled of joys as well as frustrations. It has required a lot of changes to my lifestyle, as the house simply demands more work than the places I have lived before, but it has been much more pleasure than pain, with beautiful flowers in the springtime, and fallen leaves in autumn. Most importantly, this place just feels like home in a way that no place else ever really has.

As has been my habit for some time now, I kept a tally of the books I read and movies I watched in 2023. I also made it a point to try to read more novels and nonfiction books than I had been getting through in recent years, setting myself a goal of at least one per month. I’m happy to say that I managed it, and read around 65 books this year of various kinds.

Going into 2024, I’m hoping to keep up a similar reading pace, but I’m setting myself a new goal: One short story per week, regardless of what else I’m reading. The parameters are simple enough. I have to read a short prose story each week, and I can’t bank them. Meaning that if I read eight short stories in one week, I still have to read one the following week. We’ll see how this affects my overall book totals by the end of next year, but I think it will be good for me and, hopefully, good for my writing overall.

A surprising number of the books I read in 2023 actually also came out this year, and among those were several favorites, including the aforementioned Silver Nitrate, Jonathan Raab’s Project Vampire Killer, Trevor Henderson’s mid-grade debut Scarewaves, and Deephaven by Ethan M. Aldridge. As in previous years, many of the books I read were graphic novels and collected manga, with high points including the long-awaited English-language release of Junji Ito’s Mimi’s Tales of Terror and a deluxe edition of Kazuo Umezo’s Cat-Eyed Boy.

Probably my favorite book of 2023, though, is one that was originally published in 1943. City of Unspeakable Fear is the latest in an ongoing collaboration between Wakefield Press and Scott Nicolay to translate the many weird tales of Jean Ray into English, often for the first time. As has been the case with virtually every prior volume in the series, it is a gift to those of us who love a classic weird tale, and as Ray’s “other” novel besides Malpertuis, it is particularly welcome.

As for movies, at the time of this writing the year is not quite over, but so far I have watched 301 movies total in 2023, 219 of them for the first time. This keeps me well within my goal of having half or more of the movies I watch in a year be first-time watches, and puts me (unsurprisingly, given other factors) at slightly fewer movies than I watched in 2022.

Of those movies, some 32 were released this year. That’s a small proportion of my overall total, but a decently high number for me in recent years. Of those, my favorite was The Primevals, a flick that, unfortunately, most people have not gotten a chance to see. Other high points include Dark Harvest, A Haunting in Venice, A Corpse for Christmas, Megalomaniac, and Talk to Me.

When it comes to new-to-me movies that were released in years past, this year had no standout so obvious as some previous years, though I saw plenty of solid films. Though there was no equivalent of 2022’s instant favorite The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964), the top of the heap was probably the old 1958 BBC production of Quatermass and the Pit, with The Sea Hawk (1940), Monster of the Opera (1960), The Milpitas Monster (1976), Warlords of Atlantis (1978), and The Dunwich Horror & Others (2007) all hanging around for honorable mentions.

As I did last year, I’m working on a Letterboxd list of my 23 (this time) favorite new discoveries of 2023, though the final list is still a work in progress at the moment.

In all, I was feeling a bit down when I started this post, and I’m feeling better as I come to the end of it. Hopefully that says something about the kind of year it’s been, and bodes well for the year that is on its way.

Cat Scratch Fever

May 27, 2023
news, privateer press, tabletop
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Back when I was working on the Borderlands & Beyond expansion for Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, I got the privilege of creating several new monsters for the accompanying Borderlands Survival Guide. Among these were a handful of critters that were essentially my take on Iron Kingdoms versions of classic monsters from mythology, inspired by the fact that several of the big robots from the Retribution of Scyrah faction were named after beasts of legend that did not yet have representatives in the Iron Kingdoms.

One of these was the manticore which, in my version, became a feline predator covered in onyx-like spines. “In outline, a manticore resembles a large lion or other hunting cat. Seen up close, however, the similarities end. Rather than fur, the manticore is covered in jagged spines of glassy chitin that sweep backward from its beak and end in a tail like a morningstar.”

For those who don’t already know, Iron Kingdoms: Requiem is the latest iteration of a tabletop roleplaying game that takes place in the same setting as the hit tabletop wargames Warmachine and Hordes. These have been around for more than two decades, and have recently released their fourth incarnation, which takes place some 15 years in the future from the time that Iron Kingdoms: Requiem is set.

The previous version of Warmachine and Hordes culminated in a world-changing cataclysm, while Requiem takes place in its shadow, as the world is just beginning to rebuild. By the time Warmachine Mk. IV is happening, things have changed considerably from what they were like at the end of Mk. III.

One of the biggest of those changes is to the elven nation of Ios, where those manticores I mentioned up above live. I won’t get into the nature of the change, except to say that the new elven faction, Dusk House Kallyss, is largely unrecognizable from the previous Retribution of Scyrah. For one thing, the cavalry of Dusk House Kallyss ride those manticores I created.

This is all a very long winded way of saying that, for what I believe is the first time ever, official wargaming models have been made of something that I created. As was revealed in the latest episode of Privateer Press’s regular Primecast, there are now official models of Dusk House Kallyss cavalry riding on top of monsters that I dreamed up.

As someone who has been a nerd about these kinds of games since small times, and a fan of Warmachine for more than twenty years, this is a bit of a dream come true. At one time, seeing my name on a product put out by Privateer Press was something that I never imagined would happen, but over the last decade, having worked on literally dozens of projects for them, I’ve grown used to it (not that it isn’t still cool). This, though, is something else entirely.

See You Later

April 25, 2023
freelancing, privateer press, tabletop
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For nearly three years now, I have been working on and off for Privateer Press as a freelancer, writing large swaths (roughly 50,000 words each) of their Iron Kingdoms: Requiem RPG. It isn’t the first time I’ve worked with the folks over there, either. Those who have been around for a while remember that I worked in a more limited capacity on the previous Iron Kingdoms RPG, and also wrote some considerable amount of fiction for the brand, including my first (and thus far only) novel.

Working on Iron Kingdoms: Requiem has been something special, though. More than any other time, I have been able to help shape the fate of a setting that has been an important favorite of mine for more than 20 years. I’m proud of the work that we’ve all done to help update the Iron Kingdoms and bring them back to tabletops in a whole new form, so I’m happy to announce that the fourth series of books in this run is now up on Kickstarter.

Into the Deep Wild goes right where that title suggests, delving into the wilderness of the Iron Kingdoms in ways both familiar and entirely new. Perhaps most exciting for me, personally, it also brings to the tabletop (for only the second time, in RPG form) my favorite faction from the wargame: the gatorfolk.

As I mentioned, I’ve been playing Warmachine and Hordes since the very beginnings of both games, and I’ve tried my hand at a handful of factions in that time, but ever since they were first released, the gatorfolk of the Blindwater Congregation have been my go-tos. Delightful cartoon alligator people that are like if the voodoo alligators from a Disney movie got a (slightly) more serious makeover, they have delighted me from the moment they arrived on the scene, and I’m very happy to have played a role in this book.

As has been the case with the last couple of launches, I did quite a lot this time around. I wrote most of the setting gazetteer, as I have done throughout Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, and I also created some new subclasses, designed new feats, and did plenty of other fun stuff. There are a lot of cool new toys in these books, including an entire new bestiary which, if you know me, you know I love few things more than a good bestiary.

Perhaps most importantly, I have loved working in this sandbox again, and if these books continue to sell, I should continue to get more chances to flesh out this incredible world. And given that Into the Deep Wild has nearly doubled its funding goal in a matter of hours, that’s looking pretty hopeful. If you’d like to see what we’ve been up to, this Kickstarter is a great place to dig in to a world filled with monsters and robots and, yes, my beloved gators.

What We Talk About When You Buy My Books

March 13, 2023
freelancing, guignol, how to see ghosts, monsters from the vault, never bet the devil, on writing, painted monsters, privateer press, revenge of monsters, thoughts
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As of this writing, I am the author of some seven full-length books with my name on the spine. I have contributed to plenty of others, edited one more, and published a handful of chapbooks and zines. But these seven books are all me, from start to finish, minus the occasional introduction by an esteemed colleague.

Four of them are short story collections, because short stories are my primary raison d’etre. Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, my first collection and first full-length book, has actually been published twice. First back in 2012, in softcover, and then reprinted in a (gorgeous, frankly) deluxe hardcover in 2017 by Strix Publishing. The latter adds new illustrations by Mike Corley and a couple of new stories not collected in the previous edition.

The other three collections are all out from Word Horde, who has been my most reliable and frequent publishing partner. These include Painted Monsters, Guignol, and, most recently, How to See Ghosts. I’m proud of all of them, and all three boast phenomenal cover art by Nick Gucker, who has probably been responsible for selling more copies of any of them than my name ever has.

My other full-length books include two collections of short, informal essays on vintage horror films – Monsters from the Vault, reprinting a column that I used to write for Innsmouth Free Press on the subject, and Revenge of Monsters from the Vault, which continues the theme.

Rounding out the list is Godless, my only published novel to date, written for Privateer Press as work-for-hire, and intended as the first book in a proposed series that never came to pass for various reasons.

Recently, I got royalty statements for most of these books from the publishers, and I thought it might be a good time to talk somewhat transparently about royalties and the writing life and what it means when you buy one of my books. I believe in transparency, in general, and I’ve only gotten where I am thanks in part to the generosity of my fellow writers in this regard.

I am a full-time writer, which most people assume means that I make a living writing novels or even – absurd as the proposition actually is – short stories. This is far, far from the truth. There are writers who make a living writing novels, but I’m not one of them. (I don’t think there have been any writers who made a living writing short stories for… many years.) Instead, my income comes, primarily, from writing “content,” which means any number of things. I write marketing copy of all sorts, from the words on websites and corporate blogs to social media posts to “white papers” and press releases.

I also write for a number of what are sometimes derogatorily called “content mills,” websites that busy themselves with generating a never-ending stream of listicles, articles, and other odds-and-ends. Of these, I am probably most closely associated with Ranker and The Lineup. Ultimately, though, all of this is my “day job,” the work I do to bring in the money to write my goofy little short stories about monsters and ghosts.

Besides all that, I currently produce four regular columns: one on folk horror, one on old horror TV shows, one on board games, and one about… pretty much whatever I want to write about, ranging from muck monsters to Ultra Q and beyond. And I continue to regularly write for Privateer Press, including putting together a large swath of their new Iron Kingdoms: Requiem 5e-compatible RPG.

All of that (with the exception of the columns) is work-for-hire stuff, meaning that, once it is published, I no longer own it. I get paid my fee, and that’s the last recompense I will ever get for the work. Fiction and such is, however, a different beast. When I sell a short story, I am likely to sell it again, at least into a collection down the road. Then, when I publish said collection, I will get a small advance.

Short stories do not pay well, nor have they for many, many years. Short story collections do not pay any better. While advances on novels may vary considerably, one can still potentially expect a few thousand dollars, maybe even five figures, if one is publishing through a larger press. Publishing a short story collection through a larger press is mostly unheard of unless one is already a best-selling author. So, you’ll be going through smaller presses, and your advance is more likely to be in the neighborhood of a few hundred to a thousand dollars, at least in my experience.

The advance is an “advance against royalties,” which means that you have to “earn out” that advance before you start making any royalties. Royalties on a collection are a fraction of the total price of the book. This fraction varies depending on your contract and the form of the book, but let’s say around 5-10% for physical copies, around 25% for ebooks. So, to make the math easy, if you sell a physical book for $1, you’ll make a shiny nickel. If you sell an ebook for the same amount, you’ll get a quarter.

Once you’ve accrued enough nickels and quarters, you will eventually have gotten enough money to pay back your advance, at which time those nickels and quarters start coming to you as royalties. At this point, most of my books (that pay royalties) have earned out, with the exception of How to See Ghosts, which literally just got published at the tail end of last year.

And yet, part of the reason why short story collections don’t pay as well as other books is that they also don’t tend to sell as well. I have been very fortunate, but even then, the number of copies of all my collections that are in circulation – including ebooks – still numbers only a few thousand, less than the print run of the average single novel. This is not a cry for pity or any such thing, but a bid toward transparency. I knew the marketplace of the short story when I got into this business, and I make a nice living with my writing, despite that it isn’t in the form of story sales.

What’s more, as I promised at the beginning of this surprisingly lengthy essay, I want to talk about what happens when you buy one of my books, in any form: I get some money. One way or another, sooner or later. Maybe it’s those nickels and quarters, but they add up. Every three months or so, I get a check from my publishers for enough money that I can buy a couple of nice Blu-rays, or pay part of one of my utility bills. It’s appreciated, and it helps, and that only happens when you buy my books.

And if you’ve already bought my books (thank you), it helps further to blog about them, review them, ask your library to order them. Little books like mine only do well thanks to word of mouth. That’s just the nature of this business. Without people talking about them, posting about them, leaving reviews, and telling their friends, they sink out of existence and into oblivion.

Perhaps even more important, those books selling as well as they do – the numbers might be relatively modest compared to a novel, but they’re pretty nice for short story collections – helps ensure that I’ll have the opportunity for more down the road. I look forward to a nice, long career writing various other stuff on the side so I can keep publishing books filled with stories about ghosts and monsters. And if you look forward to reading more of them, then I hope you keep buying! And for all those who have bought my books so far – I literally couldn’t keep doing this without you!

NoGL

January 18, 2023
freelancing, privateer press, tabletop
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What a quiet and uneventful year 2023 has been so far in the tabletop gaming space, huh folks?

I’m honestly not sure I’m equipped to even provide background here. Back near the beginning of January, a leaked document from Wizards of the Coast, owners (under Hasbro) of Dungeons & Dragons, revealed draconic (pun intended) planned changes to the Open Gaming License, or OGL, which the company first rolled out back in 2000 when the “world’s most popular roleplaying game” was still only on its 3rd edition.

In a nutshell, the OGL was a license for third-party companies to make and distribute stuff using certain select parts of D&D’s product line. It’s something of a weird area, because game mechanics are already not copyrightable, so the ability (or not) for people to do that even without the license is somewhat nebulous and always has been.

There has already been considerable writing, both before and after the leaked OGL draft, about whether or not the OGL was ever actually good for anything besides helping D&D to achieve and maintain market dominance, and I am neither a lawyer nor an industry insider, so there are certainly better voices than mine that you should be listening to in the midst of all this.

What’s relevant here is that this bombshell leak showed the hand of Wizards of the Coast in a way that seemingly destroyed a decade’s goodwill in one fell swoop. The fallout was immediate and considerable. So many people canceled their D&D Beyond subscriptions that it forced the company to do some damage control by attempting to backpedal the most egregious aspects of the proposed new OGL, which they did in a pair of statements released after a damning week of silence.

The damage had already been done, however. In the time between the initial leak and WotC’s statements, easily half-a-dozen of their largest competitors had already announced plans for OGLs of their own, and seemingly everyone in the tabletop hobby space had drawn battle lines in response to the proposed changes.

Those who have been following along for some time know that I’ve been working on and off in the tabletop field for some years now, primarily for Privateer Press. In that time, I’ve worked on several 5e-adjacent books for the new Iron Kingdoms: Requiem setting and system, all of which have made use of the OGL. In fact, I’m in the midst of a new project in that vein as I write this, which is partly why I’m just now getting to it. As such, it seems that I’m obliged to have at least some opinion on this.

I like 5e. It’s been easy to work with, and while it has its drawbacks, it’s fun to play. And I’m still extremely proud of the work that I and others have done on the three sets (and counting) of books for Iron Kingdoms: Requiem. I hope IK:R keeps going for a long, long time, in whatever ultimate form.

But I also recognize what WotC doesn’t seem to, which is that the OGL was, in actual fact, a boon to them more than anyone. Sure, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons may have achieved a similar market saturation back in the ’80s, without the aid of an OGL. (I’m not sure we’ve quite hit “D&D big wheel” levels in 5e just yet, honestly.) But it’s also true that both 3e and 5e would probably not have enjoyed their respective popularities had it not been for the OGL, and D&D’s current dominance of the field is likely as much a result of that as Hasbro’s considerable marketing budget.

Again, I am not a lawyer nor principally a game designer, but as near as I can tell, the biggest benefit that the OGL brought to the community was community itself – a way for lots of folks operating in disparate circles to speak the same language. It made things welcoming that might have previously been opaque, while also opening up the scene for countless newcomers.

I don’t know what the way forward is, really. The damage that WotC has done to their product and their brand is considerable – and maybe insurmountable. If that’s so, I hope that the folks who next pick up the reins are better stewards. What I will say is this: Over the last few years, I’ve gotten back into tabletop gaming in ways that I haven’t been in close to two decades, and in that time, some of my best experiences have come from games that were built only to do what they do, not to be the sort of one-size-fits-all solution that the OGL has often prompted.

Take, for example, the short campaign I played in the Alien RPG from Free League. Though built on their Year Zero engine, the game incorporated plenty of things that would really only work in a survival horror type setting – but in that setting, they worked like gangbusters.

What I’m saying is, whatever happens with D&D, it’s always been good that it isn’t the only game out there, and hopefully, if nothing else, this will remind us all to look to other pastures now and again.

This is the End

December 30, 2022
appearances, cinema, freelancing, how to see ghosts, lists, privateer press, reading materials, secret identity, tabletop, year in review
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As I write this, we are less than two days away from the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. I’m not going to pretend that 2022 has been an especially good or easy year for… well, anyone, really. Or that 2023 looks inclined to change that trajectory overmuch. But some big things happened for me this year, most of them in the last couple of months.

Earlier in the year, the third set of books for the Iron Kingdoms: Requiem 5e RPG setting hit Kickstarter. As was the case in the previous two installments, I wrote a huge amount for these books, including some very fun stuff that I’m really looking forward to people getting to see. And, as I write this, I’m working on some future stuff in the IK setting, as well.

As usual, I wrote a lot of movie reviews (mostly for older movies getting released onto Blu-ray) and attended Panic Fest back in April, covering it for The Pitch. I also became the movies editor for Exploits, an Unwinnable publication, and acquired some fun essays on movies like The Monster Club, Night of the Devils, Anna and the Apocalypse, The Ghosts of Hanley House, and more. In fact, I kicked off my tenure by immediately making them regret putting me on staff, acquiring an essay from Perry Ruhland on Mermaid in a Manhole. And I “helped” (by not actually contributing much, ultimately) with the movie programming for the NecronomiCon in Providence, even though I then wasn’t actually able to attend due to various circumstances beyond my control.

I also continued to write three regular columns (two monthlies and one quarterly) and added another monthly, while I was at it. So, currently, I write about board games at Unwinnable, folk horror and old anthology TV shows at Signal Horizon, and whatever tickles my fancy, pretty much, at Weird Horror. (You can read my latest, on Man-Thing and Swamp Thing and the weird history of muck monsters, here.)

I continued to co-host the Horror Pod Class with Tyler Unsell of Signal Horizon and, more to the point, we switched over from just doing a standard talking heads podcast to actually hosting the movies we discuss and then recording live at the Stray Cat Film Center. We kicked that off back in March with 976-Evil, and since then we’ve shown Someone’s Watching Me!, Doctor Mordrid, The Mask (not the Jim Carrey one), Night of the Creeps, Uzumaki, Ghostwatch, Yellowbrickroad, and we sadly had to cancel Bloody New Year due to inclement weather. We’ll be kicking off the first part of our 2023 season with The Undying Monster on January 26, so if you’re local, come join us at the Stray Cat for one of my favorite werewolf (?) movies from the ’40s!

Over the course of 2022, I read 42 books, the lion’s share of which were graphic novels. That’s… far from ideal, but here we are. Of those, some notable titles include Jonathan Raab’s The Haunting of Camp Winter Falcon, Victoria Dalpe’s collection Les Femmes Grotesques, Abby Howard’s 2020 graphic novel The Crossroads at Midnight, all of the Orochi volumes that Viz has put out so far, and John Dickson Carr’s 1932 novel The Corpse in the Waxworks.

I also watched an impressive 345 movies so far in the year, though that number may increase by, like, one or two before the year is out. That’s also perilously close to an average of a movie a day, a feat only accomplished by a few days in which I watched several movies in 24 hours, such as during Panic Fest and my annual attendance of Nerdoween. At a glance, that appears to be the most I’ve watched in a single year since I started keeping a journal, which I guess is an accomplishment.

Of those, more than 265 were first-time watches for me, easily demolishing my goal of keeping to at least half “new-to-me” movies each year. Of those, some of my favorites that didn’t come out this year were The Medusa Touch (1978), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Glass Key (1942), The Psychic (1977), Jigsaw (1962), War of the Gargantuas (1966), The Flying Phantom Ship (1969), and Mute Witness (1995). You can see the rest of the list over here. By far the best new-to-me movie that I saw in 2022, however, was The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964), one of my favorite new discoveries in a long, long time.

As for movies that came out in 2022, I saw a surprising number of those, as well. Around 35, in fact. We’ll be discussing our favorites on the Horror Pod Class in January, so I won’t do a top 5 or anything, but despite a lot of perfectly good movies this year, very few of the year’s new releases (that I saw) were anything that I fell in love with. There was no Malignant this year, is what I’m saying.

So, that’s all the (substantial, as it turns out) bookkeeping stuff taken care of. With all that going on, it is perhaps unsurprising that I didn’t publish a lot of new fiction in 2022, and of the five or so stories I did put out, two are original to my newest collection. And maybe that’s the biggest news, at least from a professional standpoint: How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, my third collection from Word Horde and my fourth overall, came out in October, though at the time I was a little distracted.

You see, in October we also bought a new house! And I’ve been a little distracted ever since then because, to be frank, a lot has gone wrong since we moved in. We still love the house, though! It just seems that the people who sold it to us don’t particularly love us. (And we’re not terribly fond of them, at this point.)

Those have been the two biggest changes in a year filled with personal milestones – my twentieth wedding anniversary was also earlier this year, for example. As I said, 2023 promises to be filled with new challenges along with a bunch of the same old challenges and honestly, the world is probably just going to be on fire for the foreseeable future. But I’m hopeful that I can achieve some more milestones, too. My goals for 2023 include more reading, publishing more stories, and hopefully some exciting surprises for my readers. Plus, of course, more of the same, too.

When You Don’t See Me

July 14, 2022
appearances, how to see ghosts, news, privateer press, tabletop
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Let’s start with the bad news: I won’t be at NecronomiCon Providence this year. Which is a bummer for any number of reasons, not least because I’ve been helping out (in very small ways) with the film programming, and I’m excited to see that come together. But alas, this year it just isn’t in the cards.

(Also, my contributions to the film programming are borderline nonexistent, so all the good bits are going to be Phil Gelatt’s fault. You can blame me whenever something goes wrong. I won’t be there anyway.)

There are a lot of you that I’m going to miss seeing, which makes me sad. But with any luck we will mostly survive until the next convention (though that seems more touch-and-go than we’d all like these days) and I’ll see you all again soon.

With that out of the way, here’s some better news: It has recently come to my attention that I have not been sufficiently vocal about the fact that I have a new collection coming from Word Horde later this year.

You can expect to hear a whole lot more about How to See Ghosts & Other Figments, my fourth collection of short, spooky stories and, somehow, my seventh full-length solo book in the weeks and months to come, including cover reveals, a table of contents, and other goodies. For now, though, I can let you know that it’s going to be my longest collection to date, with 18 stories from across my writing career.

Also, if you happen to be a reviewer and you’re interested in getting your hands on How to See Ghosts a little early, you can reach out to the folks at Word Horde by emailing publicity[at]wordhorde[.]com, and they’ll hook you up.

That’s about it for now but, if you haven’t already, head over and check out the Kickstarter for the latest thing I worked on at Privateer Press. It’s in its final days and it’s pretty cool, if I do say so myself. You can also read a little more about my involvement in it here.

Dead Men Tell No Tales

July 5, 2022
freelancing, news, privateer press, tabletop
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All the way back in 2013 – nearly ten years ago now – I wrote my first story for Privateer Press. It was a novelette called “Under the Shadow,” a retelling of the Demeter portion of Dracula, centered on the Cryxian general Gerlak Slaughterborn.

By then, I had already been a fan of the setting for… many years, and getting to play in that sandbox was a dream come true. A dream that I got to relive many times in the years that followed, writing additional short stories, novellas, and even a novel set in the Iron Kingdoms world, not to mention contributing plenty of content to the previous iteration of the Iron Kingdoms tabletop roleplaying game.

Then, back in November of 2020, I was asked to work on something new. Iron Kingdoms: Requiem would be the newest attempt to bring my favorite fantasy setting to the TTRPG sphere, this time powered by the popular 5th edition of the world’s oldest roleplaying game.

For that first installment, I wrote more than 50,000 words of mostly setting text, detailing the world and the ways in which it had changed since the last time such a book had been put out. I got a surprising amount of control over some of those changes, and the relationship I had with the material went from adapting it to, in many cases, inventing many aspects whole cloth.

About a year later, and the first expansion for Requiem hit Kickstarter, in the form of Borderlands & Beyond. This time I had written just as much, maybe more, but I also got even more freedom to add to the setting that I loved so much. Perhaps most notably, given that this is me, I got to design a bunch of weird fucking monsters from scratch. If you got the book, see if you can guess which ones I did.

We haven’t been sitting idle in the months since, either. Almost as soon as we had finished Borderlands & Beyond, the same team that had been working on Requiem all this time had already started work on the next installment, which just hit Kickstarter today.

In many ways, this is the most exciting one that I’ve worked on so far. For those who don’t know the Iron Kingdoms setting very well, it has primarily existed in the form of the tabletop wargames Warmachine and Hordes. And one of the four core factions of the former, since the game first launched back in 2003, has been the Nightmare Empire of Cryx.

Ruled by a dragon, Cryx is primarily occupied by the undead, which their necrotechs experiment on to create cyborg undead war machines. Despite its prominent position in the narrative of the game, however, there has never been a sourcebook released to bring Cryx to the table in roleplaying game form. Not in all the years that Privateer Press has been releasing books and games set in the Iron Kingdoms.

Certainly, Cryxians were available as antagonists in previous editions of the game, but there were precious few resources available to play as them, or to explore, in detail, their haunted and haunting empire. With the new Nightmare Empire expansion for Requiem, though, all that changes.

With each new iteration, I have gotten to leave more and more of my stamp on the Requiem roleplaying game and the world of the Iron Kingdoms – along with a talented and dedicated team of writers, artists, designers, and more, all headed up by Matt Goetz, who is as much the captain of this vessel as anyone.

This time around, I got to introduce new places and organizations, flesh out things that had been throwaway mentions in the past, and, most exciting for me, work on developing some of the new subclasses that are presented in the book. I’m very proud of my work there, and I can’t wait for fans of the setting to see it – not to mention newcomers to the world of the Iron Kingdoms, who I hope grow to love it just as much as I always have.

Nightmare of Empire

April 18, 2022
freelancing, privateer press, tabletop
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By now, it is no longer a matter of much surprise that I have been working extensively on the newest attempt to bring the Iron Kingdoms, setting of games like Warmachine and Hordes, to the world of tabletop roleplaying. And I think that I’ve made it pretty clear already that our latest project has been a long-awaited sourcebook for one of the game’s original factions – the Nightmare Empire of Cryx.

For those who aren’t familiar with the setting, the Iron Kingdoms were first introduced more than 20 years ago – in a trilogy of adventure modules for what was then 3rd-edition D&D called the “Witchfire Trilogy.” Within two years, it had given rise to Warmachine, the first tabletop wargame to make use of the setting, and one that’s still being played today.

I’ve been a fan ever since that time, and I’ve been working with Privateer Press as a freelancer – on and off – for about a decade now. I’ve written licensed fiction, including my first novel, and worked on the previous attempt at creating an Iron Kingdoms roleplaying game. Now, I’m working very closely on the creation of Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, which brings the setting to the 5th edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game system.

And here’s what makes our latest project, which should be hitting Kickstarter any day now, so exciting: Since that very first book, Cryx has been one of the core factions of the setting. An island nation of mechanical undead, ruled by a dragon who is essentially a living god, Cryx was one of the original four factions of Warmachine. And yet, despite no less than three versions of Iron Kingdoms roleplaying, dating back as far as 2001, there has never been a book that gave you the tools you needed to play as the forces of Cryx in a roleplaying game.

Until now. Recently, Privateer Press released their first sneak peek at the new material that’s coming in Iron Kingdoms: Nightmare Empire: a list of new classes and subclasses, several of which, I’m happy to say, I worked on designing.

But that’s far from all that will be included in the book. There’s all sorts of exciting stuff in there. A history and gazetteer of the Nightmare Empire, new spells, new monsters, rules for Cryxian warjacks, and even rules for making and playing an iron lich – one of the setting’s most iconic creations, and one that my regular GM and gaming buddy has been clamoring to play as for 20 years now.

I’ll be posting more about my work on the game as the Kickstarter launches but, for now, this is one of the big projects that has been occupying a lot of my time of late, and I’m very excited for people to get to see it come to fruition.

Of course, that’s not all I’ve been up to lately. Panic Fest is starting this coming weekend, and I’ll be covering it for The Pitch, and I’ve also got some other movie-adjacent announcements and things, but those I’ll save for their own post this week…

Kick! Punch! It’s All in the Mind!

January 31, 2022
cinema, privateer press, tabletop
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In the month of January, I watched eleven Shaw Bros. movies. This is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not the least of them because, prior to that, I had seen… one? Maybe two, depending on whether you count their joint production with Hammer, Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. It’s possible that I have seen others without remembering or realizing it, over the years, but the number is small, is the point, and over the last month I have certainly much more than doubled it.

This came about because I received a review copy of the very nice Shawscope Vol. One box from Arrow Video, and I have been trying to work my way through it for an eventual piece. I’m not quite there yet, either. There are two movies left to go – there’s a lot of movies in this box – but I’m getting close.

Interestingly, at the same time, I also watched a few of the latest Marvel movies that I had missed because there was a plague on. Now, those who have followed along for a while here know that I am, broadly speaking, a person who enjoys Marvel, and Marvel movies, and, more to the point, not someone who likes to rag on modern movies and go on about how movies were better “back in my day,” notwithstanding that every movie in this Shawscope set was made before I was born.

And yet, it bears mentioning that, with the exception of Mighty Peking Man, which really didn’t do it for me, the worst movie in this Shawscope set is at least several notches above the best offering from the latest batch of Marvel films. (The new Spider-Man possibly notwithstanding – I haven’t seen it yet.)

I’m not really here to rag on the recent slate of Marvel movies, though, as much as I am to just say what a joy it’s been to dig through all of these old Shaw Bros. pictures. I’ll have more coherent, and hopefully thoughtful, thoughts on them in the eventual piece (likely at Unwinnable) that will come out of all this, but it’s just been a lot of fun to get a much fuller view of a slice of cinema that I’ve long been aware of but have rarely seen.

That said, I’ll admit that these flicks (which are all kung fu pictures, with the exception of the aforementioned Mighty Peking Man) are not necessarily well-suited to binge-watching. Like any other very specific sub-field, even my beloved Hammer gothics, they get a bit same-y after you mainline enough of them all in a row. But thus far that hasn’t hampered my ability to appreciate the distinct pleasures each one offers, nor dimmed my enthusiasm to put on the next disc in line.

The other thing that makes it noteworthy that I watched all these movies in the month of January is that it’s vaguely miraculous that I managed to make time to watch anything at all. Chalk it up to basically not being able to leave the house because of the plague, I guess, but I’ve been incredibly busy in the month of January, working on a semi-secret licensed tabletop gaming project that is not terribly hard to guess the particulars of for anyone who has been following along at all.

It has eaten up pretty much all of my time that hasn’t been devoted to watching people kick one-another, and I’m looking forward to being able to discuss it at greater length hopefully very soon. In the meantime, you can read my weirdo thoughts on Matt Wagner’s Grendel and the Saw franchise in the latest issue of Exploits, if you’re so inclined…