Flames Rising » Interviews

Interviews on Flames Rising

Flames — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 21:26:40 +0000

From artists and authors to RPG line developers, Flames Rising specializes in bringing you interviews with professionals from all aspects of the fiction, gaming industry and beyond. Our mission has been to interview both creative professionals that are top names within the entire entertainment industry, as well as and up-and-coming people to watch for as they embark on their horror-ific career. We invite you to read these interviews to learn more about these talented folk, and are happy to entertain suggestions for new people to interview.

Elaine Cunningham – Author (September ‘08)
Matt Forbeck – Author (August ‘08)
Z. A. Recht – Author (August ‘08)
Jess Hartley – Author & Game Designer (August ‘08)
Tad Stones – Screenwriter (August ‘08)
Judd Karlman – Game Designer (August ‘08)
Jeff VanderMeer – Author (July ‘08)
David Drake – Author (July ‘08)
Andy Looney – Game Designer (July ‘08)
James Lowder – Editor “Worlds of Their Own” (June ‘08)
Chuck Wendig – Hunter Developer (June ‘08)
Ed Wetterman & Preston DuBose – Game Designers (May ‘08)
Tad Williams – Author (April ‘08)
Yasmine Galenorn – Author (March ‘08)
Paul S. Kemp – Author (March ‘08)
Martin Klimes & Aaron Acevedo – Game Developer & Artist (February ‘08)
Ralan Conley – Author & Freelance Guru (February ‘08)
Nathan Tucker – Author (February ‘08)
Eddy Webb – Developer & Game Designer (September ‘07)
Rich Thomas – Artist & Creative Director (August ‘07)
James Lowder – Author & Editor (October ‘06)
Joseph Vargo Artist & Musician (September ‘06)
Laurell K. Hamilton – Author (June ‘06)
R.A. Salvatore – Author (May ‘06)
Brett M. Bernstein (May ‘06)
E.E. Knight (May ‘06)
Cathy Wilkins – Artist (March ‘06)
Joseph Nassise – Author (March ‘06)
Jonathan Ridd – Game Designer (February ‘06)
Scott Glancy – Author & Publisher (February ‘06)
Jennifer Rodgers – Artist (January ‘06)
Dominic St. Charles – Musician (December ‘05)
Caitlin R. Kiernan – Author (December ‘05)
Kelley Armstrong – Author (November ‘05)
Malcolm Craig – Game Designer (October ‘05)
Amber Benson – Actress & Author (October ‘05)
Gavin Goszka – Musician (October ‘05)
Christopher Golden – Author (September ‘05)
Patrick Younts – Freelance Writer (September ‘05)
Aaron Dembski-Bowden – Freelance Writer & Game Designer (September ‘05)
Clash Bowley – Game Designer (September ‘05)
Michael Tresca – Freelance Writer (June ‘05)
Krister M. Michl – Freelance Writer (June ‘05)
Elizabeth McCoy – Editor & Developer (May ‘05)
Greg Stolze – Author & Game Designer (March ‘05)
Wil Upchurch – Freelance Writer & Game Designer (February ‘05)
Keith Senkowski – Artist & Game Designer (February ‘05)
Shane Coppage – Artist (January ‘05)
C.J. Carella – Game Designer (January ‘05)
Stuart Renton – Game Designer (January ‘05)
Derek Stoelting – Freelance Writer (January ‘05)
Richard Lee Byers – Author (December ‘04)
Ken Meyer Jr. – Artist (December ‘04)
Andrew Bates – Artist & Managing Editor (December ‘04)
Melissa Uran – Artist (December ‘04)
Veronica V. Jones – Artist (December ‘04)
Scott Mitchell – game Designer (December ‘04)
Michelle Lyons Author & Editor (November ‘04)
Justin Achilli – Author & Developer (November ‘04)
Toren Atkinson -Artist & Musician (November ‘04)
Talon Dunning – Artist (October ‘04)
C.A. Suleiman Author & Developer (September ‘04)
Ron Edwards – Game Designer(July ‘04)
Shane Hensley – Game Designer(July ‘04)
Jason L Blair – Author & Game Designer (June ‘04)
Monte Cook – Author & Game Designer (June ‘04)
Micah Skaritka – Game Designer & Musician (May ‘04)
Robert Baxter – Freelance Writer (May ‘04)
Richard E. Dansky – Author (May ‘04)
Stefan Petrucha – Author (May ‘04)
Kraig Blackwelder – Author (May ‘04)
Matt Forbeck – Author & Game Designer (May ‘04)
Bruce Baugh – Author (May ‘04)
Sam Chupp – Author (April ‘04)
Dav Harnish – Author (March ‘04)
Pat Loboyko – Artist (March ‘04)
Fred Hooper – Artist (March ‘04)
Heather Grove – Author (March ‘04)
John Tynes – Author (March ‘04)
M. Alexander Jurkat – Editor (January ‘04)
Sarah Roark – Author (January ‘04)
Mark Bruno – game Designer (December ‘03)
Echo Chernik – Artist (December ‘03)
Jackob Klunder – Freelance Writer (December ‘03)
Ann Koi – Artist (December ‘03)
Matt McFarland – Author & Developer (December ‘03)
Robert McLaughlin – Game Designer (December ‘03)
Lucien Soulban – Author (December ‘03)
R. K. Post – Artist (December ‘03)
Ari Marmell – Author (December ‘03)

For more information about interviews on Flames Rising, please feel free to e-mail flamesrising01@yahoo.com.

Interview with Mouse Guard Creator David Petersen

Flames — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:05:24 +0000

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with an interview with David Petersen, the creator of the Mouse Guard graphic novel series. Published by Archaia Entertainment, Mouse Guard tells the story of a few brave mice dedicated to protecting their fellow mice from dangerous predators and other threats.

The graphic novels are widely popular; just Last summer we learned that Mouse Guard: Winter 1152 hit the New York Times Best Seller List. Because of the comic’s popularity, Archaia Entertainment recently announced that Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 hardcover is going into a third printing. The series is also a big hit among hobby gamers, too, who enjoy playing the Mouse Guard RPG.

We had the chance to ask David a few questions about the Mouse Guard series, including his upcoming Mouse Guard-related titles like Black Axe and Legends of the Guard.

What was your first reaction when you heard that Winter 1152 was on the NYT Best Seller list?

DAVID PETERSEN: I was dumbfounded. I had no idea that The New York Times had a subcategory for graphic novels, but I’m sure glad they do! I was at the Wizard World Chicago show last summer when I found out. I started getting text messages, voicemails and e-mails about being a “New York Times bestselling author.” I thought there must be some confusion… but it turned out to be true. I’m really proud of Winter 1152 as a book, so to see it rewarded and honored makes me happy.

Of all the Mouse Guard characters you created, which one is your favorite and why?

DAVID PETERSEN: While I have reasons for liking them all, Saxon has a soft spot in my heart. I modeled some of his character flaws on my own, and so I can sympathize with him when he screws up.

Where any of the other characters inspired by or modeled after other people?

DAVID PETERSEN: Sure, several of the main characters. Kenzie is based on one of my oldest friends. He was best man in my wedding. The real-life inspiration for Rand also stood in my wedding. June, the inkeep at Barkstone, is based on my wife Julia, and I have made mouse counterparts for her two sisters in the Guard (Landra and Isabel).

Which collection did you enjoy designing more? Fall 1152 or Winter 1152?

DAVID PETERSEN: Winter. But only because I had Fall under my belt. We set a template with Fall. Before I did the Fall collection, I didn’t know what we would need as extras, or how many pages we had to fill. The “Common Mouse Trades” pages came up because we were two pages short. So with Winter, all of that was mapped out because of Fall. All I had to worry about was filling the spaces with relevant and fun extras.

What experience did you have with RPGs before working on the Mouse Guard RPG?

DAVID PETERSEN: I did a lot of roleplaying from middle school through college. Some Dungeons and Dragons, Shadowrun, Champions, Ninja Turtles, Robotech, GURPS and a bunch of no-system, free-form sessions (that I generally ran). So I knew what I liked and didn’t like in an RPG system. I also knew, through having tried to make up systems for fun or modify existing systems, that it’s a really hard thing to get right, so I was unqualified. Luke Crane and I had a few talks about systems and some game theory, but I let him do his thing in his own way and I’m glad I did. The system has won some RPG awards.

How did the creative process with Luke Crane work?

DAVID PETERSEN: It started with that discussion I mentioned where we talked theory. It was like a “highs and lows” of our experiences as players. I told him a few of my ideas for how to streamline aspects of a Mouse Guard RPG. A good example is: “Mice are small and can’t carry much, so instead of calculating weight, let’s just limit what they take with them to three items.” Luke took that and just made limited space on the character sheet for equipment, so it’s not nailed down to a set number, but ultimately has the same effect. After that, I just let him do what he does. He would bombard me with e-mails about how the Mouse Guard world functions: How does one become a Guard, what is such and such training like, what animals are predators limited to, how does money work, what do all these cities function like, etc. Every time I’d tackle a batch, he’d hit me with more. So I was there to make sure the system was as much like Mouse Guard and as true to the books as possible. Luke was there to turn that information all into a good game.

How much research went into the world of Mouse Guard?

DAVID PETERSEN: I try and make sure everything I draw or write feels believable and authentic. I’m not strict about the time period, though. A lot of that comes down to being “medieval” in general or picking something that has an aesthetic I like that could fit, even if it’s a century or three too late. I gave Luke some guidelines for the game, too, specifically things having to do with the environment being similar to Michigan. He took this very seriously and used three or four wildlife/plantlife/almanacs of Michigan to get information for the rules.

How challenging was it to translate Mouse Guard from a comic to a game?

DAVID PETERSEN: That was really more Luke’s job, but I know that as we went we did some things to deviate from the comics. Specifically, that characters in books tend to do amazing things and achieve great feats. You can’t allow players all those abilities in their path to greatness. So we capped some things that I know I will or already have broken in the comics…or that is to say, you can’t roleplay my stories to the letter.

How did you select the creative teams that will be working on Legends of the Guard?

DAVID PETERSEN: The project started with seeing Jeremy Bastian and Mark Smylie’s pinups for Fall 1152. I loved what they did so I told them they had free reign to do what they wanted in my Mouse Guard world. So those two were set from the start. I wanted to focus on individuals who are both writer and artist in one (like what I do), though we didn’t limit the scope to individuals only. The picking came down to seeing work of people I respect and admire and thinking, “They would do a nice Mouse Guard story, they get Mouse Guard.” Ted Naifeh just turned in some amazing pages that he wrote, drew and colored himself. Alex Sheikman, whom I know through Archaia because of his book Robotika, and I chatted about old folk tales before he started his nine pager.

Any hints about the story we’ll get in Black Axe?

DAVID PETERSEN: Celanawe will be led into a voyage across the northern sea off the map to a land no mouse remembers going to or coming back from. It will explore how Celanawe got the Axe and what he lost to get it.

Can you tell us about some of the other projects you have in development?

DAVID PETERSEN: I have a children’s book coming out from Harper Collins in a few years. The children’s book publishing schedule is very different from that of comics, so though the book is done, there are still a few years before it’s out. I’m also continuing to do covers for Boom’s Muppet fairy tales, but Mouse Guard will always be my main focus.

Visit MouseGuard.net or Archaia.com for more information about the Mouse Guard comics and other projects.

Interview with Peter Straub for A DARK MATTER

Flames — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:45:24 +0000

FlamesRising.com is proud to present you with an in-depth look into A DARK MATTER. Written by New York Times bestselling author Peter Straub, this novel is already getting rave reviews from places like Publisher’s Weekly well before its official release date of February 9, 2010. Over the next, few weeks we’re going to share with you more about this modern horror novel which has been billed as “powerful” and “brilliantly terrifying.”

Here is a quote describing what A DARK MATTER is all about:

The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body—and the shattered souls of all who were present.

Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. — Pre-Order A DARK MATTER on Amazon.com.

To kick off our in-depth look at this new horror novel, we’d like to share with you Peter’s answers to a few of our questions.

Can you tell us how you came up with the idea for A DARK MATTER?

A DARK MATTER evolved out of a desire I had to think about the various sages and gurus I had seen pass through Madison, WI, in the mid-sixties. I think there were three altogether; at least, I witnessed the actions and behaviors of three of these gents. They were all articulate, interesting, and predatory. Almost all of what they said was nonsense, but they did get a bunch of kids to look into the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I started to wonder: what might happen if one of these sleazy wisdom-merchants did actually reveal a portion of the Other World, the World Unseen, in the course of a home-made ritual.

Can you share with us a little bit about your writing process?

My process is intuitive and a bit hit-or-miss. I did have a kind of outline for A DARK MATTER, which plotted out a novella of three parts, each comprised of three sub-sections. Some of this material survives, but it should be obvious that the original, rather elegant structure I had in mind disappeared very quickly. Over three or four years, I wrote about my characters acting together back then, in 1966, and in the present, where they acted separately but managed to reunite one last time. It became a novel about the telling of stories as much as anything else, about the partiality of individual stories and the power of imagination.

How do you feel A DARK MATTER will appeal to your existing fans?

Those people already disposed to like my work should have a field day with A DARK MATTER. I’ve never written anything quite like it before, its structure is eccentric and unconventional, but I think my fans will like the daring involved. Also, there is plenty of material that should make them feel right at home.

What do you like the most about A DARK MATTER? The least?

I guess what I like most about the book is the note of warmth and hope that suffuses the ending, when Lee Harwell is alone in his kitchen with his wife, the former Eel. And what I like least is probably that I could think of no better way to present a long section of material in which the first-person narrator played no part than by interpolating it into the novel as a work of fiction written by that narrator. What made it more or less okay was my certainty that by the time the reader reached the end of this section, she would very likely have forgotten that it was supposed to be a short story.

To keep up-to-date with news about Peter’s work, we encourage you to visit the official Peter Straub Facebook fan page or his website located at www.peterstraub.net. If you’re interested in pre-ordering A DARK MATTER, you can get your copy through Amazon.com today.

Interview with A.P. Fuchs of Coscom Entertainment

Flames — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 14:59:17 +0000

I recently spoke with A.P. Fuchs of Coscom Entertainment about the mix of comics and fiction available for fans of zombies, super-heroes and other dark, twisted tales.

How did Coscom Entertainment get started?

Well…long story short, the company originally began as a “goal” I had in high school. I wanted to have my own comic book company, publish a few monthly titles with some friends, that sort of thing. Obviously, things didn’t pan out that way. I switched to writing when the art school I was attending after graduation didn’t deliver on the promised curriculum. So, after a few years of writing, I self-published my book via a vanity press called 1st Books, which now goes by the name of AuthorHouse. The whole thing was a nightmare start to finish.

Ironically, I did fall in love with the book publishing process throughout the ordeal so officially formed Coscom Entertainment in 2004 to publish my own work. It became a traditional press almost immediately after that when author/editor Keith Gouveia asked me if I would publish a benefit anthology for the late Charles Grant. I did. It was called Small Bites and featured loads of flash fiction by authors both well known and up-and-coming.

Call you tell us a little about Axiom-Man?

Again, this will have to be another “long story short.” Axiom-man–the concept, anyway–was a superhero I invented while delivering newspapers as a kid, something to keep my mind busy while I went door to door. I’d daydream adventures, create story arcs, etc. Then, I created the version you know in high school. In 2005, I was inspired by the surge of independent superhero fiction being published and in January of 2006 began work on the first installment in the series. Here we are, three years later and the character has four books and one comic to his credit with more to come.

The story follows a young guy named Gabriel Garrison who one night was given power by a nameless messenger. The problem is the messenger doesn’t tell him what this power is, he just simply gives it to him. Gabriel has to discover on his own what his new abilities are. After that, he decides to become a superhero, namely as a way to deal with his own self-esteem issues and actually feel like someone of value. Turns out the messenger was but one player in a cosmic war and another being is out there, who ends up bestowing a set of superpowers on an another individual, who eventually goes by the name Redsaw.

That’s the main arc.

I started the series as a “what if this happened tomorrow?” kind of thing, something folks have either loved or hated. A lot of people just want a wham-bam action novel, something similar to the superhero movies coming out nowadays. I’m more of the mind that if a superhero showed up tomorrow, there suddenly wouldn’t be a supervillain out to get them. Instead, that superhero would do more mundane things first, like stopping robberies or helping old ladies across the street. Then, if a supervillain did emerge, the villain wouldn’t just go after the hero because that’s the thing to do. If anything, he/she would leave the hero alone and go about their business of stealing or whatever. Things would only get messy if the hero and villain crossed paths. Maybe then and only then a vendetta would start. So, yeah, it takes till the second full-length novel, Doorway of Darkness, for things to kick into high gear, with Axiom-man and First Night Out being more origin-oriented.

What challenges do you face when writing a comic vs. a novel?

Keeping it brief. I’m a long-winded writer. You got a short amount of pages to portray a lot of information. In a novel, there’s no set page count or word count, really. In a comic, 22 pages is standard for a self-contained story, more if you’re doing a one-shot.

I don’t usually work with outlines but for comics I almost always do as I need to know where I’m going so I can pace how I’m going to get there.

What can you tell us about The War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies?

War. Aliens. Zombies. Humanity fleeing for its life. You can’t get any cooler than that.

But seriously, I thought–what with all the hoopla about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies–why not take the undead and have them added to the father of science fiction stories?

I’m all for classic monster scenarios and to me martians and zombies together was just too cool an idea to pass up.

I asked Eric S. Brown if he was interested in writing it. He was. He did, and delivered it in spades. Like I’ve said before, zombie bits aside, unless you know Wells’ original off by heart, you won’t know where Wells ends and Eric begins.

Were you and Eric fans of H.G. Wells before working on this book?

Oh yeah. Speaking for myself, what impressed me the most about Wells was how he was insistent on making his stories scientifically possible/realistic. Though writers try to do that now, Wells was doing it waaaaay before anyone else.

Zombies?

We got so much undead stuff happening over here it’s like a cemetery.

So far, there have been two anthologies. Bits of the Dead, which was an amazing collection of flash fiction from such notable authors like Piers Anthony, Nancy Kilpatrick, Michael Laimo and others. Then there was Dead Science, which was very unique in that its focus was “science gone wrong that resulted in zombies.” Very cool. Coming up is Vicious Verses and Reanimated Rhymes: Zany Zombie Poetry for the Undead Head, which, so far as I know, is the first of its kind, that is, a zombie poetry anthology.

There’s another one that’s in the works as well. Something very, and I mean very, cool. You’ll just have to wait and see about that, however.

What is next for Coscom Entertainment?

Loads of great stuff.

We just released the third book in The Wraith series called Cult of the Damned by Frank Dirscherl. We also just put out our first full-color graphic novel–one about zombies–entitled Zombifrieze by the brilliant W. Bill Czolgosz and drawn by underground favorite Sean Simmans.

Coming up real soon are two new zombie releases: World War of the Dead by Eric S. Brown, an awesome World War II zombie yarn. Likewise, there’s Don of the Dead by Nick Cato. Think Godfather meets zombies.

Plus a whole bunch of other stuff including some more work from myself, Gina Ranalli and Zed Zefram.

Readers can keep up to date with us at www.coscomentertainment.com.

Stop by the Coscom Entertainment Publisher Page at DriveThruComics.com to download these great titles today.

Editor’s Note: This interview originally appeared in the DriveThruComics.com Newsletter and is re-posted here for folks who may have missed it.

Interview with Geno and Bob Salvatore

Flames — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:51:22 +0000

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Bob Salvatore and his son, Geno. R.A. Salvatore has written dozens of best-selling books such as The Ghost King, Road of the Patriarch and Highwayman. The Stowaway, the first in the Stone of Tymora series, is Geno Salvatore’s debut novel.

In this interview, we discuss the young adult series entitled Stone of Tymora which is co-written by Geno and R.A. Salvatore.

1 ) Can you share with us your thoughts on how the Stone of Tymora series came about?

Bob: Wizards of the Coast and I are very aware of the great range in the age of my readers. My signings look like Fleetwood Mac concerts, with a father in his forties or fifties with his twenty-something son whom he introduced to the works. And the son has his six-year-old daughter with him. He’s now reading the books to her.

So Wizards really wanted a book from me that we could put in the young adult section, something to give to those Drizzt-reading parents to bring their kids into the world. I’ve been flat-out busy, and Wizards knew it, so they asked me if either of my sons would be interested in writing the books with me. They had worked with both Bryan and Geno for a long time, mostly on the editing process of my books, and had a good idea of what they could do.

I asked both. Bryan’s up to his ears designing the character classes for 38 Studios upcoming MMO, but Geno had a story he wanted to tell, and as we went through it and saw how it would fit in with the Drizzt saga, it seemed perfect.

2 ) How does the Stone of Tymora story fit into the Forgotten Realms setting?

Bob: The series starts in the time of The Halfling’s Gem (I got to rewrite some of my favorite scenes from that book from a different perspective) and continues from there, somewhat filling in the time between that book and “The Legacy.”

3 ) Why did you decide to write the Stone of Tymora story for young adults?

Bob: From a practical standpoint, see question 1. From a storytelling standpoint, I’ll let Geno explain.

Geno: I felt like the content for this story – which I’ll get into more later – the young adult format fits. We explore questions that I think are universal to teens – specifically, the search for an identity independent from that of one’s parents, teachers, mentors. Maimun’s search for himself is something all youths go through (if a bit more fantastical in content).

4 ) What role does Drizzt play in the series?

Bob: I think of Drizzt, not as the anchor of the books, but more like a rudder. If I were to write a book about a knight of Arthur’s roundtable, I’d use the characters of Arthur, Lancelot, Gwenivere and Merlin in the same way. I’m telling the story of my minor knight and weaving it around the macro tale of the movers and shakers.

5 ) Geno, can you tell us when you realized you wanted to be a writer?

Geno: I spent a long time denying any aspiration to write. In high school, I was always the math-science type, and I figured I would enter a field in that vein. I started college as a physics major, and after several changes graduated with a degree in Economics, not anything related to writing.

But throughout that time, I always wrote. I kept notebooks of musings, outlines, (bad) poetry, and short stories throughout high school; in college I had a notepad file on my computer, to save paper. I never intended (and still never intend) to publish any of those. The writing was simply an outlet for my creative energy, and I didn’t plan for it to be anything more.

Then, a few months after I finished school, my father approached me with the offer from Wizards. He didn’t come to me and say, “I think you should do this,” rather he asked, “what story would you tell for this?” And I realized I did indeed have a story, stashed away in one of those notebooks, that fit, that worked.

So, I suppose, I knew I wanted to be a writer professionally when I started writing professionally. But I have always been a writer.

6 ) How was your writing process for THE SHADOWMASK different from THE STOWAWAY?

Geno: The Stowaway was a collaborative experience. I did most of the writing in my father’s house (I was still living there when I started the project); I spoke to my father often, looking for advice on the specifics of the story. He wrote several of the passages.

For Shadowmask, I wrote mostly at my own apartment, and I wrote the whole book. He helped early, with the outlining process; he was available throughout for advice, just as he had been for Stowaway. But mostly he let me go, let me tell the story.

7 ) In your mind, what helps Maimun grow as a character in THE SHADOWMASK?

(Per Geno: For anyone who has not read Stowaway, ***this will contain spoilers.***)

Geno: In both books (and in the third), Maimun is searching for his identity, as represented through a series of objects (notably the Stone and the various objects given him by his mentor, Perrault). In the first book, Maimun has the stone given to him, and quickly comes to view it as a curse rather than a gift. He spends much of the book fleeing from it, and from what it represents; he muses often about being rid of it. In my mind, this is Maimun rejecting the mantle thrust upon him, and attempting to be rid of it. And at the end of the book, he succeeds. But not on his own terms – the stone is taken from him, not given away by him.

So during the second book, Maimun continues his search for his identity – but realizes he must first reclaim that which was taken from him. Whereas in the first book, he is fleeing this mantle, in the second, he seeks to regain it.

I also suggest the items Perrault gave to him – the sword, the cloak – represent another piece of Maimun’s character: that which he got from his mentor. So if you want to see his development, pay attention to these objects – how he got them, what the do for him, how he uses them and how he loses them.

8 ) What was your favorite scene to write in THE SHADOWMASK?

Geno: In the Stowaway, we briefly meet Joen, an orphan girl about Maimun’s age. Well, she’s back in the Shadowmask. And the scenes she’s in are my favorites in the book. I particularly enjoyed Maimun and Joen crossing blades . . . but I shouldn’t spoil too much.

9 ) Do you have a secret about what’s next for Maimun that you’d like to share?

Geno: I have secrets about what’s next for Maimun. But I don’t plan to share them just yet.

Interview with Author Thomas Sniegoski

Flames — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:00:54 +0000

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present an interview with author Thomas Sniegoski. Tom is a veteran author who has written for dozens of comics titles (BONE, THE SISTERHOOD), media tie-in novels (HELLBOY, ANGEL) and his original fiction (The Remy Chandler Series). Fans of Christopher Golden might recognize Tom’s work; the two have collaborated on a number of projects. Our first Girls of Gore article highlighted their character named Eve from The Menagerie.

Tom’s books span multiple audiences from juvenile fiction to adult fiction and everything in between. His latest release is a young adult novel entitled LEGACY, about a young kid whose deadbeat father is actually a vigilante superhero.

In this interview, Tom Sniegoski discusses what he enjoys writing, monkeys and some of the challenges he faces.

1 ) You’ve written both original stories (THE REMY CHANDLER SERIES) and media tie-in fiction (HELLBOY). Which do you prefer writing and why?

Y’know, I really enjoy doing both. There’s a little bit different mind-set for each, but they’re both quite a bit of fun to do. With the media tie in stuff, I’m usually getting a chance to play with characters that I love, so there’s that whole geeky/fanboyish type feeling you get when you’re able to put your stamp on the stuff (characters, worlds) that you love. My Lobster Johnson novel came out in July from Dark Horse Comics and that thing—though a pain to work on sometimes I might admit—came out really great. I’m pretty proud of it. And right now I’m editing my first original BONE novel for Scholastic, and getting ready to write the second. Again, extremely exciting stuff because of my love and admiration for the stuff that came before.

But the original stuff is a complete blast as well… though a lot more work, y’know? I have to come up with everything for those bad boys… which is extremely rewarding. I think if I had to come up with what was harder… more mentally taxing… I would have to say the original stuff. But still, how cool is it to make a pretty good living coming up with stories, characters and the worlds they inhabit. I still find it all pretty amazing.

2 ) Can you tell us how you came up with the idea for THE REMY CHANDLER SERIES?

I’ll probably sound like a broken record here (Dating myself here? Records? Oh well!) But I was raised a good Catholic boy in Lynn Massachusetts, and used to attend this old, Polish church in my neighborhood. Inside the church were these ceiling murals and statues of Saint Michael with these gigantic wings spread, wearing this gray body armor, and wielding a golden sword. In some instances, he was standing on the head of a man, whose body morphed down into this green serpent. This serpent man was supposed to represent Satan. But I would stare at these pieces of religious art, and my brain couldn’t quite grasp what I had been taught about angels (cute little baby like things in diapers) and these almost frightening warriors that I would see every Sunday as I daydreamed during mass. The Remy Chandler novels, and my first Young Adult series The Fallen came out of those church visits. Remy allowed me to combine this fascination I had with the angelic, with my love of hard boiled mysteries and horror novels.

3 ) In addition to your adult fiction, you’ve also written both young adult (THE FALLEN) and juvenile (OUTCAST). How challenging is it to switch gears writing for kids, teens and adults?

Y’know, I really don’t have a problem with this at all. There is very little gear shifting to do. When I begin a novel, I have a pretty good idea who my main characters are, and how they work. In YA, they just so happen to be younger, and think younger than my protagonist in my adult novels. I think the only thing I have to be kinda careful with is my language. Sometimes I can be kind of filthy… or at least my characters can.

4 ) You’ve worked on several projects with author Christopher Golden. Can you tell us a little bit about how you met?

Chris and I met in the early nineties when I was writing for Harris Comics doing Vampirella and just about anything else the company was doing at the time. They were thinking of hiring some new writers for some new projects, and then editor in chief Meloney Crawford Chadwick hooked us up. Of course I viewed Chris as the enemy at first… remember, I had just left my full time job to write full time so Chris was infringing on my territory. It didn’t take long for us to hit it off though, much to my chagrin.

5 ) Do you write differently when you’re collaborating with Chris than if you write on your own?

When working with a collaborator I think both writers are striving for a more singular voice, a cross between both. In Chris’ and my case, we have similar characteristics in our work, so it made the whole process a little bit easier.

6 ) How did you break into the comic book industry?

I’d met comic book artist Stephen Bissette, who was then working on DC’s Swamp Thing with Allan Moore and John Totleben, at my local comic book shop and we really hit it off, having many of the same interests in movies and comics. We stayed in touch over the years, and when he was putting a comic book horror anthology together called TABOO, he asked if I wanted to adapt one of my short stories to comic book form…and the rest is history.

7 ) Have you learned anything from writing comic books that has helped you go on to write other stories?

I think it’s helped me quite a bit in regard to my description. Remember, when scripting a comic book story you have to describe to the artist what you see inside your head, so I think it’s helped me to refine that skill a bit. Thought I haven’t dabbled all that much, it’s also helped in the film scripting department as well.

8 ) We have to ask…who’s your favorite comic book character?

It’s a toss up between Batman, and Hellboy. If you saw my office you’d probably guess Hellboy… there’s Hellboy crap everywhere.

9 ) Your latest work is entitled LEGACY. Can you tell us about it?

I’m pretty excited about this one, and don’t want to give too much away. Basically, the main concept of the book is… what if the deadbeat dad, that abandoned you before you were born, came back into your life and is asking you to take over the family tradition because he’s dying… and, oh yeah, he’s a superhero and pretty much this particular world’s equivalent to Batman. What the hell do you do? That’s all I want to say.

10 ) For fans that have read all of your work, what do you think they’ll enjoy the most about LEGACY?

I think my fans will find all the stuff that they’ve come to expect from my work… quirky characters, odd attempts at humor, bigger than life heroes and villains… and an unlimited special effects budget. There are some pretty wild action scenes in this one.

11 ) How do you keep all of your projects straight in your head?

Scotch. Seriously, I just have stuff broken into categories inside my head. Everything has its own file inside my brain.

12 ) You’ve recently started to become more active on social media. What’s with the monkey avatar?

Anybody who knows me knows that I have this bizarre fascination with monkeys. Don’t really know where it comes from, though I did work with monkeys for about a year as a pre-freshmen at Northeastern University, and for at least a year more after starting college. Those dudes were nasty!

13 ) How can fans keep up with your recent releases?

I’m sort of a high tech retard, but people can visit my website at www.sniegoski.com or they could follow my Tweets through my Twitter account. (@tomsniegoski) Just look me up!

14 ) If you could work on any property, in any format, what would it be and why?

Oh, that’s just not fair. I would LOVE to be able to keep doing my original stuff… Remy Chandler is the best… but I’d also love to do more media tie-in stuff like Hellboy and Lobster Johnson. And I’d die to get my hands on some of the old time pulp characters like Doc Savage, The Shadow, and The Spider. That would be completely awesome.

FlamesRising.com would like to thank Tom Sniegoski for taking time out of his busy schedule for this interview. Be sure to watch for an upcoming preview and a few more reviews of Tom’s works. If you’re interested, you can read a review of MEAN STREETS, which features a novella set in the world of Remy Chandler, or the book review of CHAOS BLEEDS set in the world of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. We wish him the best on all of his creative endeavors!

Interview with author Anton Strout

Flames — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:15:16 +0000

In this interview, Flames Rising is pleased to feature urban fantasy author, Anton Strout. Anton is the author of a series of books called the “Simon Canderous series.” Set in modern-day Manhattan, Simon, the main character, has a power called psychometry.

We’d like to share with you Anton’s thoughts on urban fantasy, what inspires him as an author, and his perspective on his Simon Canderous series of books. If you’re a fan of Anton’s work, you can also touch base with him throughout the year at several conventions including New York Comic Con, GenCon and more!

Can you define what “urban fantasy” means to you?

I think urban fantasy (UF) is a big changing bucket of definitions depending on who you talk to on any given day. I’ve picked up a loose definition during my experiences over a decade on the publisher side of things: I think it’s any story with paranormal elements that is set in the modern world. Doesn’t have to be an urban environment, even. Category-wise, there’s a fine line between UF and paranormal romance. As a general rule, I think the amount of sex in the story influences which direction its leaning. UF does tend to be more plot and mystery oriented with relationships being slightly secondary whereas PR is a bit heavier on the romantic relations.

How did you come up with the idea for the Simon Canderous series?

The idea of a fairly mortal hero has always appealed to me. For instance, I like Batman more than Superman because he’s a fairly regular guy. The stakes seem higher for him. Simon possesses the power of psychometry. He touches an object, he can read its history. Thing is, he can’t control it, and that was the initial spark of the idea for the series, which was inspired by a short story within John Irving’s The World According to Garp. There’s a man who wears magic gloves, but he can’t feel anything while wearing them. There was a bittersweet sadness to it all that set my mind wandering, thinking about gloves and magic. I imagined for myself a character who had to wear gloves to keep his power in control, and that this lack of control had also ruined every relationship he had ever been in. Simon’s struggle to learn to control that power was what appealed to me.

What made you decide to go with a more humorous tone to your novels?

I miss Ghostbusters. I like the idea of regular guys, in my case secretive corporate office “Joes,” fighting evil on a budget in Manhattan. Also, I’m a big fan of Joss Whedon and miss Buffy and Angel being on air. No one was really writing the types of books I wanted to read, so I set out to tell my own tales.

How much are innocent bystanders affected by the paranormal in Simon’s world?

In my version of Manhattan, most people are unaware of the supernatural world around them. It’s New York City, baby! Strange shit happens. As a New Yorker myself, I turn a blind eye to things that aren’t “normal” on the street. It’s part of the defense mechanism that most New Yorkers have. The New Yorkers in my books generally turn a blind eye to what they think they see “shambling by” out of the corner of their eye. That said, New York’s Office of Plausible Deniability handles covering up much of the larger, more visible incidents. Its head, David Davidson, is a master of all things politic and could sell snake oil to a snake.

Of all the powers you had to choose from for Simon’s character background – why psychometry?

I’m thrilled for how well urban fantasy has been doing the past decade or so, but I’m also a bit tired of the kick ass heroines that are all Buffy clones. When main characters are uber-powerful, I get bored quickly. What’s the peril for them? I mean, really? I find the more mortal my heroes, the more important living through a story becomes. Real death is on the line! Although (thankfully) in UF death doesn’t necessarily stop a character from going on…

What made you decide to incorporate Simon’s day job at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs (DEA) so prevalently in your series?

I’ve spent some time working in the corporate sector. I thought the day-to-day office politics and that so-called “ordinary” life are a perfect juxtaposition to stepping out of the door to beat down zombies. It’s a rush to take a bat to a bunch of the undead, but then there’s the hours and hours of paperwork that follow that kind of balances the universe. I also think a lot of readers can relate to the fantasy of having a boring day job that also allows you to combat the things that go bump in the night.

DEAD TO ME was your first, published urban fantasy novel. What other stories have you written?

I have a few trunk novels. Stuff I dabbled in over the years before figuring out what I wanted to be doing. There is one, however, that I am in love with and would love to get back to when I have the time. It follows the lead singer of a past-their-prime punk/ska band and his life in NYC as they try to become relevant again. I have more than enough scenes and a large enough word count…. I just don’t know how it all ties together or what the “true thru” line of the tale is, but I love the characters in it and miss them. It’s probably more along my Nick Hornby ambitions as it’s a totally “normal world” novel.

The third book in the series, DEAD MATTER, comes out in February. Can you give us a hint about what the story will entail?

Sure. When we first met Simon’s work partner Connor, way back in Dead To Me, we learned that his brother Aidan had disappeared twenty years earlier. In Deader Still, there are bits of that past that are still plaguing Connor. In Dead Matter, we finally find out what happened concerning all that. Oh, and Taco Night is ruined for Simon thanks to a slathering monstrosity that attacks him at his local SoHo supermarket.

Do you have any favorite authors that have influenced your work?

There are a few. First and foremost, I grew up on Douglas Adams and his Hitchikers’ Guide to the Galaxy series, so I’ve always liked humor in my sci fi/fantasy. The same holds true with early Craig Shaw Gardner and Robert Asprin. In recent years I’ve discovered Jasper Fforde and his Thursday Next novels, the work of Christopher Moore, and most things written by Joss Whedon.

If you had to go back and fix one thing in DEAD TO ME, your debut novel, what would it be and why?

As much as I love Dead To Me, I think it has some issues that plague most first novels. You’re trying to find your style, trying to set a mood. A first novel takes some time to ramp up to speed because you spend a lot of time sort of setting the stage. If I could go back and do a ‘director’s cut’ on the book, I’d probably tighten up the first fifty pages. I think I could be more concise now that I’m four books in and a little clean-up would be a benefit to book one.

Many authors talk about having a muse or some sort of “creature” that inspires your work. What compells you to write?

I can’t help but see writing as a business. I’ve worked in publishing for over a decade now and the business side is ingrained in me. So I see my contractual obligations and deadlines as my muse. Hey, if the classical Greek idea of an inspirational goddess talking to you is your thing, great. As long as you’re getting words down, keen. It’s a little too hippy dippy for my personal liking, so I think I am most compelled to write by the fact that I love sharing stories that haven’t been told yet.

Oh, I also get them from an archdemon named Skippy, but he said he’d kill me if I told you… Oh, wait…

For more about this urban fantasy author, visit the official website of Anton Strout, or read the review of DEAD TO ME here on FlamesRising.com.

Interview with Author and Editor Kerrie Hughes

Flames — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:28:09 +0000

FlamesRising.com is pleased to present you with our interview featuring author and editor, Kerrie Hughes. Kerrie has worked on several short story anthologies including the newly-released ZOMBIE RACCOONS KILLER BUNNIES and GAMER FANTASTIC.

We’d like to share with you Kerrie’s thoughts on editing short stories, what she likes about the format, and her take on the current market.

Can you tell us how you got into editing short story anthologies?

DAW

TOR

What do you love (or hate) about the structure of a short story?

Love the structure because it incorporates a beginning, middle and an end, but it doesn’t need a huge build-up of back story. I can pick up a book and read one story in the morning, then think about the experience all day. A good one can hang in my head for years.

Who comes up with the ideas for the anthologies you work on?

I come up with all my own anthologies. I submit about 4 a year to DAW and compile names for one or two larger ones throughout the year. If I get the right mix of “author” and “title,” I contact Tekno books so they can have their agent take it out for sale.

GAMER FANTASTIC is a fun collection of short stories about gaming. What can gamers expect in this anthology?

A fairly extensive mix of historical and speculation of gamer scenarios, using all gamer authors who are names in the business.

How do you ensure your submissions fit the overall theme of the collection?

I make sure my invitation summarizes the theme, and I make sure the authors know they can contact me at any time with questions. If something is off the mark too much, I send it back with suggestions on how to make it fit. I try to make the process painless by sending out reminders and contacting the authors from time to time, to see if the story is coming along or needs “Muse” assistance.

Can you share with us the story behind ZOMBIE RACCOONS KILLER BUNNIES?

I’ve been cracking a very bad joke for years about noises in the dark or incidents strange as being the work of zombie critters, usually raccoons, squirrels and badgers. It sort of evolved from there and I was stunned when it sold.

Have you ever thought about writing a short story yourself?

I’ve written several short stories for DAW and other anthologies. Also, I’m currently working on a novel with my husband John Helfers and a paranormal one on my own. I also have other ideas in the works for other authors to generate, but that’s all “hush hush.”

How long does it take you to put an anthology together from start to finish?

Anywhere from 6 months to a year.

Throughout the year, you often travel to different conventions. Can you share with us how this has helped you connect with fans of your work?

I don’t really think of it as fans of my work – I think of it as promoting my authors. I’m often surprised when I find out I have fans, but I think it’s a side effect of being a fairly vocal over-educated and experienced woman, who isn’t afraid to have an opinion without being a princess/bitch. You know what I mean.

Can you tell us a little bit more about CHICKS KICK ASS?

In CHICKS KICK ASS, you’ll read stories from 13 paranormal authors. 11 of them are NYT bestsellers and include Rachel Caine and Rachel Vincent, two of my favorite paranormal authors. I’m pretty excited! No romance, just action.

How do you choose the authors that will appear in your anthologies?

I read them and get a feel for what they do; they tell me what they would like to be included on. For every book, I pick two newer authors either based on what I’ve read by them or because people (whose work I respect) have highly recommended them.

For the aspiring short story writers out there, can you share your thoughts about the current short story market?

It evolves just like regular fiction. The tastes of the public tend to wane back and forth according to what events are taking place in the world. No one wants war stories and intrigue when a war has started or is going badly, so they buy romance and mystery. Then the war ends and techno-thrillers become popular again. Or the society evolves and a new market opens up. For example, Horror and Fantasy books have greatly benefited from video games and movies. The combination of the two has grown the new genre of Paranormal Fantasy and Paranormal Romance. Short stories are making a new niche because of the rise of paranormal authors.

We’d like to thank Kerrie for taking time out of her busy schedule to answer our questions, and wish her the best of luck on her editing and writing career. For more about the anthologies that Kerrie has worked on, be sure to watch FlamesRising.com for a sneak preview of ZOMBIE RACCOONS KILLER BUNNIES and upcoming reviews.

Interview with Rich Peterson of Madison Horror Film Fest

Jason Thorson — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:37:58 +0000

This is an APB to horror movie buffs within range of Madison, WI. The Madison Horror Film Fest invades Market Square Cinema at 6604 Odana Rd in Madison WI this weekend and yours truly will be there.

The fest kicks off at noon on Saturday, Oct. 3^rd and goes through Sunday night. You can expect an onslaught of indie horror shorts, features, vendors and guests including Debbie Rochon, and Bill Rebane. Highlights will include a screening of Re-Animator followed by a Q&A with director Stuart Gordon and a “Women in Horror” presentation hosted by Elske McCain and Scarlet Salem. Check back next week for my full recap of Saturday’s events and if you see me at the fest feel free to say hi.

In the meantime, check out this short Q&A with Fest director Rich Peterson:

What’s your background, both personal and with regard to horror movies?

I worked for years as a music booking agent both independently and for clubs. I booked Luther’s Blues and the Annex [in Madison] and booked other clubs on an independent level as well. As far as horror goes…I basically got my start watching the late night horror host here in town, Mr. Mephisto from Lenny’s Inferno. From there I just started reading Fangoria and checking out everything coming out both independently and main stream.

How did you get involved with and/or start the Madison Horror Film Fest?

I saw the other cities throwing these horror film festivals, which were mostly featuring independent films and looking at Madison and the diverse art culture, I thought that this town needed something like this to bring the subculture out.

How well does Madison’s horror subculture support the indie horror film scene?

As small as the sub culture is here, people have been very supportive. We have actually gotten support from all the surrounding horror communities: Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois and beyond.

What can the sick bastards attending this year expect to experience?

Great short and feature independent films ranging for horror comedy to extreme terror. We’ve got great guests lined up and will be raffling off DVD’s and other horror collectibles as part of a benefit for the Autism Society of Greater Madison.

Anything you’d like Flames Rising readers to know?

That’s about it besides the fact that people can get advance tickets at Westfield Comics at 7275 Mineral Point road, Pre-played 440 State Street [both in Madison] or online at http://www.madisonhorror.com.

An Interview with the authors of City in the Sand

Matt-M-McElroy — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:49:05 +0000

City in the Sand is a new Mind’s Eye Theatre product from White Wolf using the Storytelling Adventure System. This is the first MET product using the SAS format and I was immediately curious about how the format would work in a live-action environment.

Let’s just say I was impressed with the overall quality of City in the Sand and at the amount of cool stuff that was included in this product. I contacted the folks at White Wolf and had the chance to talk to the authors (Eddy Webb, Kelley Barnes and Jess Hartley) about the design of the product and a bit about Mind’s Eye Theatre in general.

Q: How did City in the Sand come about?

Kelley: In the Summer of 2004, myself and a group of Camarilla members (the Camarilla being White Wolf’s official Fan club) had agreed to write and run a three day LARP session at Gencon SoCal – much as we had historically done for Gencon Indy for some years. Because that summer was the launch of the New World of Darkness, it was a fairly open landscape of story opportunities. I had just read an article about the excavations being done of Cecil B DeMille’s set from the 1923 version of “The Ten Commandments” and it sparked an idea. Instead of a story playing out over three nights in sequence, a story arc told over multiple decades would help explore one of the key elements of the Vampiric condition in the Requiem – the fog of ages – where a vampire who goes to sleep for a time will wake up with memories missing or jumbled about. Vampires in this setting can never be sure that what they think they did or saw decades ago is truth or lies.

The original plan then was to have the first night set at the wrap party for the film in 1923, the second night taking place in the 1950’s on the night of DeMille’s Funeral, and for the last night – a fundraiser in 1988 to aid in the excavation. The central thread going through the three nights dealt with a vampire buried in the set on the night of the party, and the fears of the kindred who took part in that deed that their enemy would be rescued and returned to power. Other sub-plots dealt with political, social and covenant strife, with each group looking to accomplish goals that placed them in opposition with other characters in play.

Eddy: Fast forward to 2007. I was asked on short notice (four weeks) to put together a live-action game for some of our Icelandic co-workers, to get them acquainted with our products. Kelley had all the notes from the original City in the Sand game, but I was only running a game for one night set in the modern day. I had to do a lot of rewriting while still touching on a lot of key aspects of the World of Darkness and Requiem.

Everyone had a good time at the game, and I realized that this is the kind of product that would help people start or get sold on a MET: Requiem game. I wasn’t happy with the hasty revisions I had done, so I decided to rebuild the story from the ground up, using the SAS format. I asked Kelley to help out (since she was heavily involved in the original scenario), and I brought Jess in to give a fresh perspective on the dozens of characters – they were, frankly, a mess, and both Kelley and I were so wrapped up in the original interpretations that we just needed someone new and with good MET experience to come in and whip those characters into shape.

Jess: I was thrilled (and honored) when Eddy asked me to be a part of the transition process – taking the characters that they’d done for the original LARP and helping mold them into something more concise and cohesive. It shows a lot of trust to hand your “baby” over to someone else, and it’s a real challenge to pick up someone else’s ideas and run with them.

Hopefully, I did alright with it – Eddy and Kelley are still talking to me, so I must not have butchered their darlings too badly!

Since this is the first story using the Storytelling Adventure System for Mind’s Eye Theatre I was curious how difficult the transition would be when writing the adventure.

Q: What challenges are there when writing an adventure for live-action play when
compared to a tabletop adventure?

Eddy: It’s very different. The amount of Storyteller characters you can rely on goes way, way down – I developed CitS so that you only need to portray one (and rarely), but it’s easier if you have two Narrators to portray Storyteller characters. Also, the amount of scene-changing events also goes way down, since most of the event takes place in one space in a traditional WoD LARP. So, a lot of the stories move from the Storyteller’s briefing into the character writeups. For example, one guy doesn’t know who his sire is, so another player has to play his sire, and the story comes from how the two play off that dynamic. What’s awesome about this kind of design is that we have no idea how that dynamic will play out – it’s totally up the players – and that’s amazingly exciting. But on the other hand, it’s very difficult to balance all of those subplots and smaller stories, which made writing this a real challenge.

Jess: For me, the biggest challenges was mapping out how all of the 50+ characters inter-related to one another. I remember, at one point, literally having my entire dining room table covered with piles of character sheets, note cards and Post-Its. I used paperclips, color coding and any other way I could think of to show connectivity between the different individuals and groups, so that I could make sure that each one not only had some sort of personal goal, but that they were in a relationship of some sort with others in the game. Rivals, lovers, relations, enemies – something above and beyond the storyline (which is awesome, by the way) that would allow the players to pursue their character’s goals and motivations, even if they didn’t ever interact with the main plotline.

Kelley: To echo a bit of what Eddy said -Live-action play differs from 5-6 players struggling against the world as defined by the ST to a world defined by all the other players in the game. It requires in some measure a more reactive Storyteller – who can adapt and change the flow of the game to reflect the actions of the characters -you need the ability to observe and analyze the preferred play-styles of a number of individuals . The write up can only take you so far, but our goal was to provide a solid framework and suggestions that come from our collective experience to aid the Storyteller in making the game fun and intriguing for everyone involved.

Q: How does the Storytelling Adventure System specifically come into play as part of City in the Sand?

Eddy: The goal of the SAS is to encapsulate scenes into discrete units that can be modified and moved around as needed. One thing I realized in designing my own LARP scenarios is that there are usually similar units, and it seemed natural to try to apply it to the existing Storytelling Adventure System. For example, there’s a scene where the Prince calls the Kindred together to hold court — a very common scene in Requiem — but when and how it happens (and how many times it happens) depends on how the scenario plays out for each group, so it makes sense to put all that information into a portable scene instead of saying “The Prince will say X and Y at 8pm.”

In addition to the SAS scenes and background details on the Kindred of Los Angeles City in the Sand contains a short “introductory packet” for new players. I thought was an excellent addition to the main book.

Q: What can you tell us about the New Player Booklet?

Eddy: It’s an idea that was first developed in the Camarilla, which I expanded on when I was running a number of demo LARPs while promoting MET: Awakening. I didn’t want new players to look at two 400-page books and think they needed to know all that to play, so we broke it down into a smaller, 16-page book that covered the basics very succinctly. However, it still assumed some familiarity with the WoD property, which wasn’t the case for the game I ran at the office, so I had to revise that again to talk about the basics of being a vampire, let alone the core rules. It ended up working out pretty well, so I didn’t have to do much revision when I reworked that for the final release of CitS.

Q: Is the New Player Booklet something that other Mind’s Eye Theatre troupes will find useful beyond City in the Sand?

Eddy: To a limited extent. There are some specifics for City in the Sand in the New Player Booklet, but most of it is a very top-level explanation of Mind’s Eye Theatre: The Requiem as a whole. With a bit of “ignore this bit on these pages,” it’s still very useful beyond this scenario.

Just about all World of Darkness products have both a Theme and a Mood listed with notes for the Storyteller to make use of, City in the Sand was no exception. I was curious as to what the Theme of “Dangerous Secrets” meant to the authors when creating this story.

Q: The Theme of City in the Sand is Dangerous Secrets. What makes that Theme particularly fitting for a Requiem story?

Eddy: I love mysteries, and Requiem is, to me, just one big noir mystery. In a LARP, it’s actually much easier to seed secrets, because all you have to do is write a story and then break it up into pieces and scatter them amongst the characters – one guy is a killer, say, so another one is an investigator and a third is a person who saw the murder. Give them all conflicting goals, and throw them together.

Interestingly, I’ve found that you don’t have to work a lot of red herrings into the mix – usually if you tell a group of players that they need to keep secrets and then give a few of them legitimate secrets, the players will weave a complex web of lies and deception that even Raymond Chandler couldn’t unravel.

Jess: Knowledge is power. When you have the possibility of living for hundreds – even thousands – of years, it’s really the one thing that has value in the long run. So keeping information to yourself – hiding it or using misdirection to foul your rivals’ knowledge stores – that’s at the heart of Requiem, I think.

Kelley: Again, I am drawn to the Fog of Ages. Not only as a vampire do you question who you can trust, but you have to question yourself. That’s where I think the element of personal horror that is such a part of the World of Darkness comes into play with Vampire: The Requiem.

City in the Sand includes over 50 pre-generated characters for Storytellers to hand out to their Players. Almost all of them are either gender-neutral or include dual names (such as Robert/Roberta), a detail I found quite useful since you never know exactly how many Players you’ll get or who they will want to play.

Q: City in the Sand is designed as stand-alone story that includes a ton of pre-generated characters. Were convention games the initial goal of this product?

Eddy: The game evolved from a convention game, and that’s certainly one application, but really I was trying to emulate “How To Host A Murder Mystery” more than, say, GenCon. I realized that MET was very intimidating to a lot of new players and Storytellers, and I’ve certainly found writing LARP scenarios to be the most challenging Storytelling I’ve done, so I wanted to find a way that people would run a LARP with a minimum amount of time and set-up. Of course, conventions are an easy way to get 50 people together in one space, but with Internet meet-ups, flash raves and other ways of getting spontaneous groups together, it’s certainly not the only way, or even the main one.

Kelley: There is a side benefit to this product that should appeal to Storytellers – that “ton of pre-generated characters” you mentioned. Between the character backgrounds and the coteries built to work together, acquiring City in the Sand gives you the option of having groups ready drop into your table-top game, or repurpose as NPC’s to be played by Narrators in your LARP chronicle. While not a primary goal of this product, speaking as a storyteller myself, I think that is a nice bonus.

Q: What can you tell us about the list of pre-generated characters? Any particular favorites among them?

Eddy: Although we gave Jess a stack of broken characters and asked her to fix them, I think they’re really more her babies now than mine or Kelley’s. I personally think Prince Danton is fun – she strikes a nice balance in my head between a “traditional” WoD vampire Prince and some new ideas that haven’t been explored much – but then again in my playtest the Prince was played by my wife, Michelle Webb, and I’m always a sucker for how she plays insane characters…

Jess: That’s so hard to say, because I tried to really make them all into someone that either I’d love to play, or that I could picture one of my friends loving to play. Fenton, the snarky gossip columnist would be a blast to try for an evening, or Jordan, the gruff ol’ wolfish Gangrel. But I would say there’s probably 40 characters (out of the more than 50 we included) that I’d like to have a chance to try out for myself!

Q: What if none of those characters work for someone wanting to join the game? How easy is it to bring other characters into the story?

Eddy: We tried really hard to cover a lot of the various kinds of play that people bring to Requiem, but it’s certainly possible to bring other characters in. There are a few Kindred that are specifically visitors to the Los Angeles area (where City in the Sand is set), so it’s very simple to bring even more visiting Kindred into the game. There are also ways to expand on the existing coteries.

I’m a big fan of live-action games, even if I don’t get to run them as often as I used to. So far White has three Mind’s Eye Theatre books currently available. The core Mind’s Eye Theatre book along with core books for both Requiem and Awakening.

Q: This is the first non core book for Mind’s Eye Theatre. Are we going to see more support material for live-action games?

Eddy: We’ll have to see. I’m still passionate about live-action roleplay, and I feel very strongly that MET needs more than just rulebooks if it’s going to grow and prosper as a line, but right now everything’s an experiment – first MET: Awakening, and now City in the Sand. Each time we look at how the MET product does and plan accordingly. So, for now, it’s “wait and see.”

Q: Speaking of MET: Awakening, what will Storytellers running an Awakening game or even a mortals game using the Mind’s Eye Theatre core book find useful in City in the Sand?

Eddy: Probably not — the game is really based around Requiem ideas and concepts. That being said, I’ve heard of people taking our regular Vampire tabletop SAS products and converting them to, of all things, Exalted, so anything is possible!

Early we talked a bit about convention games and City in the Sand seems like an excellent introduction to Mind’s Eye Theatre: Requiem (and possibly even the Camarilla).

Q: Is White Wolf planning on running City in the Sand or other Mind’s Theatre games at GenCon this year?

Eddy: We are running three interconnected Requiem LARPs at GenCon, all based in Mexico City. Two are traditional Requiem LARPs, and one is actually based around Belial’s Brood. The traditional ones are Thursday and Friday evening, and the Belial’s Brood game is Friday afternoon. The games are all being run by David Bounds, a very experienced and creative LARP Storyteller with years of experience. Kelley and I will be playing a little as well when we have a chance, so come check it out and game along with us!

I wanted to thank Eddy, Kelley and Jess for taking the time to tell us a bit more about this new product. I hope you get the chance to explore some of those Dangerous Secrets in your own Mind’s Eye Theatre games.

City in the Sand is currently available at the Flames Rising RPGNow Shop.

Eddy Webb is the Alternative Publishing Developer at White Wolf. Kelley Barnes is the Marketing Director at White Wolf. Jess Hartley is a prolific freelance writer, and you can find her website at www.jesshartley.com.

To find out more information on the Storytelling Adventure System visit the SAS Website:www.white-wolf.com/sas. For more information on the Camarilla Fan Club visit the Camarilla website: camarilla.white-wolf.com.

Interview with Ken Hite

Flames — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:30:58 +0000

Recently, we had the chance to sit down with industry veteran Kenneth Hite, who is a horror game designer, author and columnist. You may have read some of Ken Hite’s columns through Weird Tales or Out of the Box at Indie Press Revolution. In this interview, we talk a little bit about the Origins-award winning title Tour de Lovecraft and the recent release of The Day After Ragnarok, horror as a genre versus mood, the Windy City, his upcoming projects and much, much more!

How did the idea for Tour de Lovecraft come about?

When Simon Rogers of Pelgrane Press hired me to write Trail of Cthulhu, I decided to re-read all of Lovecraft, to soak myself in the mood and the material, and to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I was using the new Penguin Classics versions — with S.T. Joshi’s careful, scholarly edits and annotations — and inspired by that, decided to blog each story on my Livejournal as I read it. It was really nothing more than that at first, but as I kept reading, I kept finding more ways to approach the material — some conventional “gamer ways” like imagining a secret history behind Houdini and Lovecraft’s partnership, and some straightforward lit-crit stuff like identifying the Burkean sublime in “The Call of Cthulhu.” So the project “jest growed,” and eventually, readers started asking for a book collecting the posts. Since one of those readers was Hal Mangold, who was looking for a first book for his Atomic Overmind Press, the result was Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales, which just won an Origins Award, he bragged.

Can you tell us a little bit about your column in Weird Tales?

Well, another of the readers of my “Tour de Lovecraft” blog posts was Stephen Segal, one of the editors of Weird Tales. (Let me just say that again. Weird Tales. Home of Lovecraft, Howard, Smith … and me.) He wanted something like that for Weird Tales, and riffing on the notion of the “tour,” we worked out the idea of approaching Lovecraft via the settings of Lovecraft’s stories. He named the column “Lost in Lovecraft,” which besides triggering atavistic Air Supply terrors in readers of a certain age is a pretty good description of what the column is. Like a Lovecraft protagonist, we find ourselves in some strange country — Antarctica, or Arkham, or the Woods — and kind of explore our way around it using Lovecraft as our guide. It’s still literary criticism, not travelogue, but given Lovecraft’s absolute insistence on setting, it’s odd that I haven’t seen it done more often.

The question whether or not horror is a “mood” or a “genre” often comes up in entertainment. What’s your take and how does that apply to your work?

I like to say that horror is both intent and content: if you intend to horrify, you’re committing horror, whether you’re Shakespeare on the blasted heath or Tolkien in Mirkwood. That said, we all sense that vampires, and serial killers, and crumbling cemeteries, “belong to” horror in a way that kings and elves don’t. We call that sense “genre,” and it’s a term of art used by marketers and academics. There is a horror “genre” in both senses, and I try to pay attention to both marketing and academia, but as a reader or a writer you have to be first concerned with mood. “Is it scary?” is a far more important question than “Where will it be shelved in Borders?” All that said, when I’m writing a book like GURPS Horror, I have to think about genre questions (what monsters should I stat out? what character templates need to be available?) while providing plenty of advice and guidance on mood.

What’s the story behind the children’s book Where the Deep Ones Are?

That’s one of those “someone should do this” projects that a bunch of us, including myself and John Nephew of Atlas Games, have been kicking around for years over drinks at various conventions. Finally, it got to the point that I just did it, and John agreed to publish it and the next book in the series, The Antarctic Express (which is The Polar Express out of “Mountains of Madness”). The most surprising element of the whole project, in both cases, was how easy the fit was. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” really is about a young man who visits a dangerous place and discovers he belongs there; “Mountains of Madness” really is about a magical voyage to the Pole, and getting a gift you can’t share or prove. Once you start looking at the tales that way, there’s almost no limit to how many of these I could write. If they sell, of course. Fortunately, Atlas Games got really great artists on both books, which was absolutely essential, but I had nothing to do with that part.

How does writing Lovecraft for a game differ from writing fiction?

Well, I haven’t written very much fiction, except for the short story “Ring Around the Sun,” which was the intro fiction for a game book, Secrets of the Ruined Temple for the Mage: the Awakening. So, I’m not sure that I’m the best person to ask about this … but the big difference between writing anything for a game and writing any kind of narrative art (prose, comics, drama, film, whatever) is that game writing is not fundamentally about character or plot, but setting. There can be “supporting cast” characters, and plot hooks or story opportunities aplenty — wars, evil cults, cute anthropologists, what have you — but the game writer isn’t in charge of the characters or the plot. That’s the players and the GM’s job, for the most part. Some games do more to constrain those choices, and direct the plot toward a given feel or mood: Trail of Cthulhu, for example, assumes that the characters are investigators of occult mysteries, and that the stories will horrify. But at the end of the day, if your idea of a game is to try and make strangers act out the novel in your head, you’re doing everyone (and the novel in your head) a disservice.

Did you find working on the post-apocalyptic game, The Day After Ragnarok, easier or harder compared with your other, mythos-inspired work?

Every game — and I assume every writing project — has that stretch about three-quarters of the way in where it just becomes agonizing labor. Some get there sooner, and stay there longer, but they all get there. The best projects are the ones that keep dangling that carrot at the end, or keep providing little pieces of magic amid the sweat and toil. Trail of Cthulhu and The Day After Ragnarok were those kinds of projects; they both kept throwing up little nuggets of joy even when by all rights they should have been utter misery. H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard are very different (and occasionally difficult) writers to try to inhabit, even though I’m comfortable in both outfits — but after spending a year or so mentally dressed as HPL, putting on the Two-Gun Bob hat was more like a vacation than it might otherwise have been. Plus, I have to admit that there’s a certain toddler joy in smashing things up; everyone who predicts or plots an apocalypse, from the prophet Jeremiah to Al Gore to me, is probably half-rooting for it in their inmost heart. It’s the reason we go see disaster movies.

In your published works, the city of Chicago appears to be one of your favorite locales. What inspires you to write about the windy city?

I like to say that I’m a lifelong Chicagoan, and have been one ever since I moved here in 1988. If you’re an architecture buff, it’s like living in the Louvre; Chicago’s history is a perfect microcosm of secrecy and madness; its literary tradition is perhaps second only to New York’s in the hemisphere. There’s just no bottom to the well, whether you wander around Chicago in person or in books. While “write what you know” is a distinctly overrated maxim that has resulted in far too many novels about failed novelists, I do think that to know about Chicago is to want to write about it.

Of all your works, which one was the most fun to work on and why?

Probably the most fun project I’ve ever done, soup to nuts, was the original-series Star Trek RPG for Last Unicorn. I was in charge, I had an all-star cast of writers, we had a top-notch graphic design all ready to go, and my job was to make everything more like Captain Kirk would want it. It was the kind of project where I could ask Robin Laws for old-school TREK vignettes, and get them back in three days, and be the first person to read such wonderful things. The misery stretch of that project really only lasted a week — it was the last week, and I got no sleep, and every crisis in the book detonated all at once — but then it was done, and it looked fabulous. I don’t know that it’s my absolute best book — that’s probably GURPS Cabal or Trail of Cthulhu — but it was the most fun day in, day out.

More recently, Will Hindmarch asked me to write the introduction to Requiem for Rome, saying “just be Ken Hite on Roman vampires for 2,000 words.” I had so much fun with that that I turned in 5,000 words. On a slightly more disciplined level, my “Lost in Lovecraft” and “Suppressed Transmission” columns are that kind of fun, too — something about that 2K-5K length is just all sweet spot.

What’s next for you?

Well, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to U.S. History, Graphic Illustrated comes out this week, so that’s technically “next.” I wrote the script for it — the amazing Shepherd Hendrix (of Stagger Lee fame) did the art. The Antarctic Express, Rough Magicks (for Trail of Cthulhu), and Cthulhu 101 (an “intro to the Big Green Guy” for newbies) will all be out at GenCon. I have Book-Hounds of London (another Trail of Cthulhu sourcebook) to write, and a “vampire spy thriller” GUMSHOE game that needs a good title. I’m developing two products for Adamant Entertainment’s Call of Cthulhu line: one in Elizabethan England, and one in gangland Chicago. I’m revising GURPS HORROR for Fourth Edition, and writing three or four PDF supplements for that. We have more Day After Ragnarok stuff planned and in the pipe — a Russia sourcebook, probably with a Plot Point campaign in it, for starters, along with some shorter things. I’ve got plans for a narrativist “indie game,” and some microgames. And more stuff along those sorts of lines.

If you could work on any project, what would it be and why?

Well, ruling out things like “write and direct a big-budget Bollywood version of Carmilla,” or “be lead developer on an MMORPG based on H. Beam Piper’s Paratime series,” and restricting ourselves to the more likely universe, I still have hopes of doing a Hell-Fire Club book for Call of Cthulhu, doing for Georgian England what Delta Green did for fin-de-siecle America. I probably need to take one more swing at a time-travel game of some sort before I’m completely satisfied, too. It would be fun to write a novel if I turned out to be any good at it. Same thing with comics. And of course, there’s a list of people I’ve worked with — Christian Moore, Steve Kenson, Robin Laws, Jim Cambias, to name a few — whose involvement in a project would automatically make it a project I want to work on.

Visit Ken’s LiveJournal for updates on current projects, conventions appearances and more. Check out his Out of the Box column at IPR for game reviews and industry news.

Interview with Ari Marmell, author of Agents of Artifice

Matt-M-McElroy — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:37:52 +0000

Agents of Artifice is your first Magic: the Gathering novel. How did you get introduced to the Magic setting?

Well, I knew a tiny bit from the couple of times I’d played the game, and from picking stuff up here and there. But when I was first approached to write the book, I essentially undertook a crash course. The folks at Wizards sent me a lot of background material to read, and they also flew me up to Seattle where I spent an entire day in a meeting with the editorial and Magic staff. Between those two sources, and additional materials they sent me early in the writing process, I worked up a pretty solid foundation of basic knowledge.

What do you like the most about Magic: the Gathering?

I like the variety inherent to the basic conceits of the game’s setting–or settings, really. The fact that it’s based around the notion of planeswalking, traveling to and summoning from an endless variety of worlds, means that the game, and stories set within the game’s multiverse, can draw on just about any sort of setting, and thus any sort of fantasy.

What were the biggest challenges while writing Agents of Artifice?

Simple creative differences. Wizards put a lot of effort into this novel, and the new Planeswalkers line, and that meant that a lot of people had a stake in how the book turned out. A few creative differences with my editor and/or with the Magic staff, combined with the fact that I was still learning some details of the setting as I went along, meant that I had to do a lot more rewriting than I’m normally accustomed to.

I want to make it clear, though, that I’m not saying anyone did anything inappropriate. Creative differences are all but inevitable in a case like this, and a lot of the changes my editor asked for wound up making for a better book.

Did any particular cards inspire you while working on the book?

Well, in terms of some of the details, yes. Some locations (such as the Rubblefield) and many of the specific spells and creatures, were inspired by extant Magic cards. But in terms of the overall story, not so much.

Can you tell us a little more about Jace Beleren?

Hmm… I’m not sure I can tell you much more than what’s revealed in the novel itself. He’s a Planeswalker, and a man naturally skilled with magics of the mind and with illusion. At the start of his story, he’s not really a very good person–selfish, interested only in advancing his own position.

Without offering spoilers, I’ll say that I like to think that he’s grown somewhat over the course of the book, and he certainly thinks about more than just himself. But as far as giving anything more in the way of details about the character? I think I’ll leave that for future books, whether written by me or someone else.

You also have a Ravenloft novel called Black Crusade currently available on the Wizards of the Coast website, what can you tell us about it?

Black Crusade was originally written to be the first in the Ravenloft: Dominion fiction line. The idea was to do a new Ravenloft series that drew characters from various points of Earth history, rather than drawing from different D&D worlds. Unfortunately, the book was delayed for various marketing reasons, and then the line itself was canceled. I was afraid Black Crusade would never see the light of day, until it appeared as a web-based weekly serial. (available now at Wizards.com)

In short, Black Crusade focuses on Diederic de Wyndt, a knight of the First Crusade. From the bloody sack of Jerusalem, we see Diederic get involved in the schemes of a priest by the name of Lambrecht Raes. Lambrecht’s dabbling with the occult leads to a series of horrific events–first in Jerusalem, and then in the nascent Ravenloft domain of Malosia, as Diederic attempts to pursue the heretic even through his peculiar, supernatural escape. Over the course of the novel, we follow Diederic as he tries to adapt to his new situation and continue his hunt for Lambrecht–despite the dangers to not only body, but soul, as he allows his lust for vengeance to threaten his sense of morality.

Ravenloft is a very different setting than Magic: the Gathering, do you have a preference between the two? Why or why not?

Well, at the moment I’m more fond of the gothic horror-fantasy, and the in-depth history of Ravenloft than I am of the more overt, high-magic and high-fantasy feel of Magic. But as I said above, Magic’s strength lies in its variety, so given the right world in the Magic multiverse and the right characters to work with, that preference could certainly change.

What can you tell us about The Plane Below and your other upcoming Dungeons & Dragons work?

Obviously, I can’t go into any specific details on upcoming D&D books. I can say that “The Plane Below” is my first stint as the lead designer on a WotC book. That means that, while of course there was guidance and oversight from above, the overall outline of the book, and the decisions of what sort of materials to include and focus on, were mine. I’m quite happy with how the book came out, and I think DMs will find it a great inspiration, but I can hardly claim to be an unbiased source.

How is working on novels different from working on game material and which do you find more challenging?

While there’s substantial overlap in terms of the required skills, they’re actually two very different beasts. The prose in a game book should (in a perfect world, anyway) be just as evocative and flavorful as that of a novel, but with a very different purpose. The novel is meant to tell a story, to immerse the reader in the surroundings and actions of the characters; the game book has to be equally immersive, but instead inspire others to tell their own stories. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of including too much of one’s own story in game writing; but by the same token, an insufficient amount of flavor means that the book isn’t going to inspire the imagination. And of course, there are the mechanical aspects to consider, something that never even enters the equation when writing a novel.

As to which is more challenging? I’m not sure there’s a real answer to that. I think that game writing probably involves more of a fine balancing act between the two extremes mentioned above. On the other hand, because the mechanics do so much of the heavy lifting in a game book, there’s more of a safety net; if the narrative isn’t as strong as it could be, the book’s not automatically a failure. Maintaining a strong narrative and tone throughout a novel is far more important.

I’d say that adequate game writing is probably easier in the long run than adequate novel writing, because there’s usually multiple writers on a given book, which means that Author A can pick up Author B’s slack in one area, while B picks up A’s in another; and because someone who’s good at mechanics but not prose, or certain types of prose but not others, can still meaningfully contribute. But good writing is probably equally difficult for both.

About Ari Marmell
Ari Marmell was born in New York, moved to Houston when he was a year old, moved to Austin when he was 27, but has spent most of his life living in other worlds through a combination of writing and roleplaying games. He is the author of multiple roleplaying game supplements including work on Dungeons & Dragons and Vampire: the Requiem. Ari lives in Austin with his wife, George, and two cats. Visit his website Mouseferatu.com for more information.

Special Note:
If you’re a fan of Magic: the Gathering, you might be interested in our current contest. When you Send a Friend to GenCon for 2009, your friend will also receive a prize pack with goodies from Magic: the Gathering, too!

Neil Gaiman on Coraline the Movie

Monica Valentinelli — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:02:55 +0000

We have a special treat for all you Neil Gaiman fans out there! From comic books to best-selling novels, Gaiman has wowed fans with his mythical tales and endless imagination. Now for the first time on the big screen, the animated film Coraline is set to debut in just a few weeks. Fans of The Nightmare Before Christmas will want to go see this film; Coraline has the same talented director, Henry Selick.

What is Coraline about? The film is based on a novella first published in 2002 entitled Coraline, about a young girl who avoids a warning and goes through that fateful door. Once inside, Coraline faces a world similar to her own with marked differences: her mother is no longer recognizable, the cat can talk, and the doddering old ladies Miss Spink and Miss Forcible are more than they appear. Winding through other twists and turns, you’ll watch as Coraline attempts to emerge victorious, rescuing more than just herself.

We had the chance to read the Coraline novella here at Flames Rising, and noticed that this is a story unlike other young adult tales. Masterfully-written, you’ll watch Coraline grow into her role as the heroine, but also retain her sense of self and childlike innocence while she’s doing it.

We are pleased to offer you an inside look into the mind of Neil Gaiman. Mr. Gaiman was kind enough to answer a few questions about this long-awaited, animated debut.

Neil Gaiman on Coraline

FLAMES RISING: What was the most challenging part of your novella to translate into film?

GAIMAN: Finding the right filmmaker was the challenge. I sent the finished manuscript to Henry Selick and he bought it. Then I waited 9 years.

FLAMES RISING: What is your favorite scene in the movie?

GAIMAN: Favourite scene is the end, with the Other Mother in her final form, and anything with Spink and Forcible in it.

FLAMES RISING: What inspired you to create the character of Coraline?

GAIMAN: The inspiration for Coraline was that it was a story for my daughters, with a girl who got to be brave but was normal. She’s a bit Holly, a bit me, but mostly herself.

Join us in welcoming Coraline on the big screen and watch Mr. Gaiman’s favorite trailer included below for your viewing pleasure.

For more about Neil Gaiman, don’t be afraid to visit either Neil Gaiman’s website or the official Coraline movie site today.

Interview with Artist Jeff Preston

Matt-M-McElroy — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:55:14 +0000

Jeff Preston has been working in the RPG industry as a freelance illustrator and concept artist for several years. His art has been featured in products released by Chaosium, Atlas Games, Catalyst Game Labs and many others.

Recently Jeff was one of the featured artists in the Halloween Horror series here at Flames Rising. Jeff has also been busy working on some of the Shroud products with the folks at One Bad Egg.

I recently had the chance to ask Jeff a few questions about his work…

How did you get started working with the folks at One Bad Egg?

As a part of my freelancing I have a long list of companies I contact regularly for work. Publishers of every stripe. If I’m not working on a project, I’m doing that. So one of these was Evil Hat Productions (Spirit of the Century). Corresponded with Fred Hicks there a couple times and they had some work coming up under the One Bad Egg, LLC imprint. A little bit of follow up and I got the call. My first work for them was the Death Mother critter.

What kind of art direction do you get from the Eggheads? Can you tell us a little about the process?

Fred Hicks is a very experienced Art Director. A real rock star! He gives all the details he’s looking for, with references. I got the art specs, and started cranking out thumbnail sketches till we got one that was in-line with what they were looking for. The most important things for an Art Director to be (in my opinion) is to be readily available. Especially since we’re all on a deadline. If I can get sketches to him, and he can give me quick feedback/ approval, I can move forward and get the project done…fast and closer to what he wants.

Your most recent OBE product is the Shroudborn, what was it like working on that one?

That was a lot of fun. I kind of got to piece together a number of elements I’ve always loved: spellcasters, dragons and undead. I also got to learn a lot about lighting and underground caves. I did a lot of looking around for reference images for that.

Of course, my representation is greatly flawed in many areas, but it’s all a learning process and I think I’ve improved a bit on this one.

The Death-Mother is an “interesting” piece of work, how challenging was that one to put together?

Well…my initial direction was just a concept piece to get the critter “right”. Then I did some tweaking to make it somewhat interesting to look at.

I remember telling Fred “It’s gruesome. We’re going to get complaints from Little Jimmy’s mom on this one”. Fred laughed and was cool with it, so we let it ride. I think we achieved “scary, and gruesome” without going “too far”.

Speaking of monsters, you did some work for Hungry Little Monsters by Sean K Reynolds, what was your contribution to the book?

I got to do the “Bound” critter. Kind of a skeleton with the aura of the spirit still wrapped on it. My initial sketches weren’t quite “right” so I reworked it to what SKR wanted. That’s one I’m really not happy with. I’m likely to do a rework of it later on. It’s pretty amateurish as it sits.

Some of the other monsters you’ve helped create recently were part of the Flames Rising Halloween Horror collection. Which is your favorite? Why?

Honestly?

Succubus. It was hardest, so I did it first (I usually do). I knew how to draw the woman easy enough, but making the background look right…I wasn’t sure.

I think I like this one the most because I learned the most on it. This is another one I’ll be redoing (now that I’ve figured some stuff out).

Have you ever had any of the products you’ve done the art for come up in a game you were playing?

No, not yet, though running in to one of the Creatures of The Shroud, the One Bad Egg stuff…man, they look kinda scary. I don’t think I’d care to face one of them. I have a DM currently who is digging the Half Dead. He’s a WoW player and the undead are really up his alley. I don’t think that’s going to fare well for us.

What is your favorite genre of art to work on?

Fantasy. Hands down. Elves and Dragons and stuff like that. Swords and armor. I’ve made a lot of armor back in my SCA and reenactment days, so I know how armor works: assembly, wear, usage, repair, etc. I’m also a big D&D nerd. Ever since 1983.

Sci-Fi is fun…but has a lot of challenges of its own. Sci-fi often has more precision. Straight/ perfect lines. Smooth curves. That sort of thing. I work almost entirely freehand, so those parts are harder. It just means I have to use more tools to make it look right. I ronically I’ve had some really great reviews of my sci-fi work, even though my fave is Fantasy.

Horror…well…I can do scary fantasy and scary sci-fi pretty well. I haven’t done a lot of straight “Horror” stuff. At least not yet. I hope to broaden my scope a bit this year.

You recently opened a new online store, what can we find there?

Coffee mugs (I love coffee cups/ mugs) cards, hats, magnets, stickers, the usual Cafe Press fare. Of course if anyone digs a certain pic I can put it on anything Cafe Press has in stock. Pretty much anything I’ve done I can use because I’m not making a profit off it on Cafe Press. It’s purely self-promotion, getting the art out there, visible, attainable for anyone who is interested.

Pretty much anything in my gallery can be put on a mug, mouse pad, clock, sticker or magnet, etc.

What’s next on the to-do list?

Doing a bunch of Dragons for Hero Games. They wanted the elemental dragons to be done by the same guy and that guy is me! I totally lucked out on that. Any chance to draw dragons is a treat!

After that I have a bunch of pics to do for SR4 for Catalyst Game Labs.

I also am Art Director for Mythmere Games‘ Knockspell Magazine. Issue #1 is coming out any day now. I’m responsible for Art Direction on Issue #2 It’ll be available via Lulu in paperback as well as PDF. They’re using one of my images as cover art but otherwise I’m avoiding doing art for Issue #2.

I’ve always felt that Art Directors shouldn’t fill their projects with their own work. It’s kind of a conflict of interests.

Interview by Matt M McElroy

Visit Team-Preston.com for a look at Jeff’s gallery and information on upcoming projects. Be sure to check out his new Cafepress Store for posters, t-shirts and other items.

David Wellington Interview

Matt-M-McElroy — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:41:19 +0000

David Wellington is the author of several successful horror novels, short stories and web serials. The Monster Island zombie series and 13 Bullets vampire fiction are very popular with horror fans, who can’t wait to see what happens next.

Vampire Zero, the third book featuring Laura Caxton and Jameson Arkeley was recently released. I had the chance to talk to David a bit about the story and some of his other projects.

So, zombies vs. vampires…who wins? Why?

Jeez, that’s an interesting question. The vampires definitely have all the edges–strength, intelligence… coordination. And since they’re immortal they’re in no rush. They could probably just sit out a zombie outbreak in their coffins. But the scariest thing about zombies has always been that they’ve got the numbers. If we’re talking about a worldwide zombie apocalypse, the vampires are toast, if only because there wouldn’t be enough human blood left to keep them going.

What are the different challenges when it comes to writing zombie and vampire fiction?

Zombie stories are a lot like disaster stories–the scenery, the setting is huge and sometimes poses the biggest threat to the characters. There’s a lot of world-building to do in a zombie story. How are the characters able to travel, how do they find food, what kind of weapons can they get access to? What happens when the power goes out, or when civil authority completely breaks down?

Vampire stories, on the other hand, are very personal. The world as we know it is all still there–of course this is a generalization, there are a lot of great apocalyptic vampire stories, but the ones that leap to mind immediately are about a hidden threat, about a predator that stealthily invades your life so that you often don’t know he’s there until it’s too late. I think zombie stories are more like science
fiction, honestly, whereas vampire stories are pure horror.

Which is more fun to write? Zombies or vampires?

Zombies are fun because the entire world is your canvas–you get to describe everything, and how it would collapse when the dead rose. With vampires you need to stick pretty close to the world as it is, but you can also develop really cool vampire hunter characters. I don’t know–I have fun with everything I write.

Vampire Zero picks up where 99 Coffins ended, what can you tell us about it?

Spoiler alert!

At the end of 99 Coffins it was clear to Laura Caxton that her old mentor Jameson Arkeley, who had become a vampire for all the best reasons, wasn’t going to just turn himself in. That she would have to hunt him down. That’s the story of Vampire Zero. Arkeley taught her everything she knows about hunting vampires, but maybe not everything he knew. 99 Coffins was a big sweeping battle story with a cast of hundreds. This one boils down to just Caxton vs. Arkeley and neither of them is playing nice. It’s about what Arkeley decides to do with his new immortality, and about just how far Caxton is willing to go to stop him–a lot farther than she’s gone before. I don’t want to give anything away, but she does something this time that really crosses the line, and she ends up paying for it.

What sort of research went into the Laura Caxton character?

I had to do a lot of research on the Pennsylvania State Police and the US Marshals Service, about police procedure in general. For her character though it was a really simple process. She’s based on several people I know in real life, including my sister Melissa–I dedicated the first book, 13 Bullets, to her. Really, Caxton started out as just an ordinary, average person, a woman working highway patrol.
Everything that she has become has been a result of her experiences fighting vampires, and what she’s learned from Arkeley, her mentor.

Let’s say that someone is making a movie based on this trilogy. Who would you cast in the roles of your main characters? Who would you want to direct the movie?

Well, when I was creating the characters I imagined Laura Linney (especially in her role in the Mothman Prophecies) as Caxton, and Robert Mitchum as Arkeley. I think Tommy Lee Jones would do an amazing job with that character as well–did you see him in No Country for Old Men? The guy reinvents the classic tough guy every time they turn the camera on.

Rumor has it that you’ve got a small collection of short stories set in the world of the Monster zombie trilogy. Are we ever going to see them in print or on the web?

Some have already been released–most of them, in fact, though they’re all over the place, online, in various anthologies, or I gave them away free as promotions when I was actively selling those books. There’s nothing my core group of fans hasn’t seen before. I’d love to gather them all together in one volume, but I think that’s a long way off. I’d like to do a fourth novel in that universe but that’s going to have to wait a while, too. Sorry! But I’ve got tons of great projects coming up.

You have stories in two of the Undead anthologies from Permuted Press, care to tell us about them?

One of them is called “Chuy and the Fish” and it’s about a zombified giant squid. It’s set in the same universe as Monster Island, at a point of time between the events of Monster Island and the beginning of Monster Planet. The other story is in a universe of its own. It’s called “Cyclopean” and it’s a cross between the Cthulhu Mythos and zombies. And evil mushrooms. I’m pretty proud of that one!

What other projects have you got lined up?

There will be a fourth Laura Caxton book. And two books about werewolves–one of them, Frostbite, is available on my website but the print version will be greatly expanded and revised. And then I’m working on some very cool stuff that I need to keep under wraps for now.

Zombies, vampires and werewolves…what other monsters would you be interested in writing about someday?

I’d love to do Frankenstein’s Monster. Of all of them, he’s the monster I most personally identify with. Of course, there are all kinds of copyright issues there, but there are ways around them…

Do you have any plans for Halloween?

I’m doing a reading at McNally Jackson bookstore in New York City–one of the last independent bookstores around. Then a friend of mine is having a party. I’m also going to try to check out some haunted houses, one of my favorite things to do!

Interview by Matt M McElroy

Visit David’s website, www.davidwellington.net, for more information. You can also read reviews of 13 Bullets and Monster Island here at Flames Rising.

Interview with Forgotten Realms author Jaleigh Johnson

Flames — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:39:01 +0000

Jaleigh Johnson’s second Forgotten Realms novel, Mistshore, opens with a letter from a grandfather to his infant granddaughter. “Someday,” the letter concludes, “you will go forth into the world and find your own adventure waiting. I want this for you, above all things, granddaughter. The world is spread out before you, and life is meant to be lived. Be well, and be happy…”

Mistshore tells the story of the granddaughter, Icelin, as she flees into Mistshore, a district of Waterdeep built upon the wreckage of sunken ships, warped planks, and violent crime. Mistshore is, as Ed Greenwood, the creator of the Forgotten Realms, says in his introduction to the book, “a corner of Waterdeep much whispered about by the fearful, who believe all manner of sinister half-sea-monsters, half-humans lurk in its sagging riggings and rotten cabins. Creatures with webbed fingers, gills hidden under high-collared robes, and sly, stealthy tentacles waiting to throttle or snatch.”

The second release in a series of standalone novels called “Ed Greenwood Presents Waterdeep,” Mistshore is no mere travelogue through under-explored territory. As the prologue promises, Mistshore is a book of adventure populated by well-developed characters. Johnson gives us Cerest the scarred elf, Sull the well-meaning guardian butcher, Ruen the legendary thief, and Icelin, a young woman with a sharp tongue and more backbone than any of the men she meets.

The Howling Delve, Johnson’s debut, merely hinted at the power Johnson would unleash in the Realms with Mistshore. Delve is good. Mistshore is stunning.

Johnson and I spoke last week, a few days after the release of Mistshore.

Jones: The prologue of Mistshore is unexpectedly moving.

Johnson: The prologue probably carries the most weight in the novel, because of what was going on in the Realms and with me personally when I wrote it.

There are two layers–the first, obviously, is plot. The protagonist [Icelin] is introduced through another character’s [her grandfather’s] eyes. The reader is going on the journey with Icelin, and you can just tell by the tone of the letter that she’s going to be something special, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

The second layer was me knowing that I was writing this novel a hundred years in Faerun’s future. At the time I wrote the prologue, no details about 4th Edition or the time jump in the Realms had been announced. The Realms I’d loved for so many years were changing, and most of the characters I’d grown close to would be dead or gone in the new edition. I was sad for that and unsure where to go with this changed world.

I tried to remember what it was like the first time I picked up a Forgotten Realms novel. The book was Spellfire by Ed Greenwood–I’d swiped it from my brother while he was still reading it. I think I latched onto it because there was a young woman on the cover fearlessly facing down a Dracolich. I hadn’t seen too many covers like that in my limited experience.

I fell in love with the world of the Forgotten Realms because of the characters in that book and because I felt like the world was alive in a way I’d never seen before. At the same time I was reading about Shandril’s adventuring party being attacked in the wilderness, I could picture powerful wizards scheming in far off cities, their stories untold. These characters might never meet each other, but to me they were all connected in this vast world.

A hundred years may have passed, but the Realms are still a vast, living world inhabited by characters with untold stories that can capture the imagination.

So the prologue of Mistshore is a letter from grandfather to granddaughter, but it’s also a letter from me to a reader discovering the Realms for the first time. I want them to see the magic of the Realms the way I saw it, and to be swept up the way I was with all the possibilities for stories

Coming to the Realms as someone who’s been a fan for years, my first impulse as a writer is to try to get other readers as hooked on the world as I was when I started out. After I finished Spellfire, I wanted to know everything, every secret about every corner of the world. I want to give that feeling to other people, so I try to make my books as accessible to new readers as possible while being true to the history and lore of the setting.

Jones: How did Icelin grow to be the young woman we meet in the first pages of Mistshore?

Johnson: Icelin is–despite what the novel later reveals–very much an ordinary young woman. I wanted her that way. She doesn’t have the unhappy orphan background. Her great-uncle raised her in a safe, stable environment. She’s not the girl who has grand aspirations to leave home and see the world. She’s just content working in her great-uncle’s shop and remaining unnoticed and sheltered in Waterdeep.

In another story, she would be the faceless shopkeeper’s daughter who waits on the hero when he’s buying a torch and rations. Her gifts force her into the spotlight, a place she doesn’t want to be, but because of that we discover there’s a lot more to her than appearances suggest.

Icelin turned out to have a lot more spunk than I gave her credit for. Translation–I hated ever writing her as a shrinking violet. I remember rewriting the scene between her and Ruen on Ruen’s raft several times. I was never happy with how scared Icelin was. There was no way Ruen was going to respect someone who wouldn’t stand up to him. So I rewrote the scene again, putting in the line about Icelin losing her virginity to a stable boy who was much handsomer than Ruen. When I was finished, I knew I had Icelin’s voice.

Jones: What is at the heart of a heroic character? Of a villain?

Johnson: I try not to separate the two. To get at the heart of my characters, I take ordinary people and throw them into the hairiest circumstances imaginable and see how they come out on the other side. What is Cerest willing to do to get what he wants? How many people is he willing to hurt? Does he care if he dies in the attempt? What about Sull, a man who barely knows Icelin at the beginning of the novel–why does he care what happens to the faceless shopkeeper’s daughter? All the characters have choices to make, and they have to deal with the consequences of those choices. Their actions reveal who they are. I leave it up to the readers to decide whether that makes them heroes or villains or something in between.

Icelin is essentially a “good” person in that she obeys the law, loves her uncle and treats others with respect. But she also makes choices that are cowardly and impulsive, and puts those close to her in danger because of it.

Cerest is, well, even he is convinced that he’s doing the right thing and sees nothing “bad” in his actions.

In the end, it comes back to choice when I’m developing the “good” guys and the “bad” guys. The bad guys are going to make the selfish choices, almost every time. The good guys can too, and do, in the novel, but they can also recognize where they went wrong and at least try to make things right.

Cerest doesn’t have that ability.

Jones: How would you describe the tone of the Forgotten Realms?

Johnson: I think high fantasy whenever I think of the Realms. The tone has shifted into darker territory over the years, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and there’s still an incredible diversity of story when it comes to individual authors. Look at The Dungeons series for an example. Erik Scott de Bie’s Depths of Madness will take you into the dark and then some, while Rosemary Jones’s Crypt of the Moaning Diamond will make you smile.

Jones: The dialogue in Mistshore sounds genuine, unique to the character speaking, and has a way of pulling the reader forward to see what will be said next.

Johnson: My strategy for writing dialogue is to try to stay in the moment when writing a scene, take it from beginning to end in one session, but also to remember that every line of dialogue has to mean something. It either moves the plot forward or it develops the characters, and it can never ever be boring. If I get bored writing an exchange between characters, it’s time to end scene, backtrack, figure out where I went off the rails. Most of the time, I’ll find that the characters have started discussing something that has no bearing on the plot or on them as people. Out it goes.

Jones: How do you develop a plot from the first idea to the end of the book?

Johnson: For Forgotten Realms, it depends a lot on what the series calls for. The Dungeons, obviously, had to conform to an underground environment, and the Waterdeep series is all about the city. With Mistshore, I started out playing with the setting and the common people who’d lived in the city all their lives. What would it be like to take an ordinary woman from South Ward and throw her into the worst neighborhood in Waterdeep? Better yet, what if she went there by choice?

When I’m plotting a book from scratch, and it doesn’t have to conform to a shared world, I start with character. For the book I’m working on now I knew I wanted to use an older hero, someone at the end of his life (or so he thinks). Once I have a general idea of setting and characters, I move on to conflicts. What does the protagonist want? What does the villain want? What’s standing in the way? Are they going to get what they want, and what’s the cost if they do? Once I answer those questions, I can outline from beginning to end.

Howling Delve taught me that I need to stick to my outline. I wish I was the type of writer who could work without a net–I’ve seen other writers do it, and I envy the heck out of them–but if I veer off the outline too far, inevitably it means more revisions and broken plotlines, more work for the writer who already has a fulltime job. Mistshore followed the outline with little variation, resulting in a cleaner first draft, and overall a more pleasant experience in the writing. The biggest thing Mistshore taught me was to follow my instincts.

Writing in a shared world environment, you’re conscious not only of continuity in the setting, but the expectations of your editor, long-time fans, new fans, and it’s easy to forget that you, the author, have as big a stake in the book. You can never put all that other stuff completely aside, but at some point, you have to let go and tell the story you want to tell, and take time to enjoy the experience. I did that with Mistshore.

I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have about writing in a shared world is that it’s easier somehow, because the setting is already established. Both my proposals for Howling Delve and Mistshore required heavy research before I ever started writing. Then my editor looked at the proposals and asked for more revisions so I didn’t cross wires with other authors working on projects at the same time. It’s a juggling act and I don’t know how the editors and designers do it, but hats off to them.

When I’m writing in my own world, it’s pure research. I get to the actual writing a lot faster, and I don’t need anyone’s permission to blow up anything.

Jones: What are the differences between writing short fiction and novels?

Johnson: With a novel, I feel like I can build the characters from the ground up. Anything is fair game: childhood tragedy, sociopathic tendencies, daddy issues, mommy issues, forbidden love, forced love, etc. You’re spending three hundred plus pages with a character, so a lot of dirty laundry is going to get aired.

A short story is a snapshot of who a character is and how he or she got to this point. So much is left up to reader interpretation and imagination, I find myself focusing on plot first, and then character, which is usually the opposite of how I work. Once I have the basic plot, I start building the characters, developing them the same way I would for a novel, but I let the trials they go through, the plot give the readers hints about who they are. That’s the hardest balancing act for me, trying to decide how much background to reveal about the character in a short story and what the reader will figure out on his own.

I’ve been cited both for giving too much information and not enough, so it’s an imperfect, ongoing process. That’s something else I love about writing: you never figure everything out. You always have something new to learn, and you can always be surprised.

Jones: What the best part about writing?

Johnson: Days like today, actually. I had the day off from work, it was raining outside, so I put on some music and edited a scene from the novel I’m working on. In it, a seventy-two year old man discovers magic for the first time, and I found myself wondering what it must be like for this character to have lived all the years of his life, to be certain, absolutely certain, that nothing else can surprise him, then along comes this burst of wonder that turns his world upside down. And I knew exactly how I needed to write the scene. I wish the writing always came so easy, or maybe I just need more of those quiet, rainy afternoons.

Jones: Can you tell me more about the novel in progress?

Johnson: I’ve had [this project] in the works on and off for almost a year now. It’s not under contract, so I’m taking my time with it. It’s probably bigger in scope than anything I’ve written before, but roughly, it’s a modern-day fantasy set in an alternate version of Venice, Italy.

On the surface, everything looks the same, but there are wizards living in ancient palazzi, and dragons swimming in the Grand Canal, fun stuff like that. There are darker things, too, evil things hiding in buried layers of the city, and my protagonist, an old man who wants nothing to do with any of that nonsense, is plunged headfirst into this world, along with the reader. The story itself has been a blast to write, but the research into Venice and its history is probably the most rewarding part of all.

I’ve wanted to write about Venice for a long time, and Andre, my protagonist, had been banging around in my head, but I didn’t have the right story for him. I put the two together and the basic plot followed pretty quickly. The hardest part was building Venice into the city I needed it to be.

I read an interesting book, The World of Venice, by Jan Morris, which was written in 1960, before the flood that brought Venice’s peril to the eyes of the world, before organizations like Save Venice came on the scene to help preserve the city. I started thinking, this was the Venice I wanted in my book, not the beautiful, fragile tourist destination it is today.

To get to that, I thought, what if Venice had never come to the attention of the world the way it did? What if instead of being rescued by preservationists and public awareness, wizards came on the scene and offered their services to protect and restore the city? What price might they exact in return?

Using those questions, I created a Venice that is as beautiful as it ever was, but now it’s a wizard haven, its tourism carefully controlled, a city slowly being taken over by magic and forgotten by the rest of the world. For me, everything about character creation, world building, plot, etc. starts with the “What if” questions.

Jones: After writing two novels in the Realms, do you see more possibilities or fewer?

Johnson: I always see more possibilities for stories. Given the chance, I’d love to write a sequel to Mistshore, but ultimately that decision lies with Wizards of the Coast. But as long as they keep letting me, I’ll keep writing in the Realms. It’s a great place to be.

Ed Greenwood taught me that if writing–whether in the Realms or in my own world–is what I truly want to do, I should never give up, never stop trying to make myself a better storyteller. The greatest gift he ever gave me was his world. The Realms were the doorway to my first published novel. I’ll never forget that.

Interview by Jeremy Jones

Visit Jaleigh Johnson’s Blog for more information on her writing and other projects.

Interview with Freelance Writer Monica Valentinelli

Flames — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 13:15:48 +0000

Freelance writer Monica Valentinelli likes to play around with ideas, forms, rules, words… and just about anything else that can be thrown into a creative stew pot. She blends a love of history and philosophy with a love of dark fantasy and horror to create startling and exciting fiction and games.

“Monica possesses a genuine passion for creating and a sharply self-critical eye, both of which are essential for someone to grow as a writer,” said James Lowder, author and editor, whose most recent anthology, Worlds of Their Own was released last month. “She has lots of good ideas and the discipline to develop them in interesting, genre-expanding ways.”

Valentinelli has worked on games for Abstract Nova, Eden Studios, Rogue Games, and Twilight Games in addition to several other companies for games that are not yet in print. Most recently she contributed to Exquisite Replicas, Aletheia, and Noumenon, all from Abstract Nova. The setting chapter of Exquisite Replicas, “Initiation,” shows Valentinelli at her darkest, weirdest, and most experimental… which is to say, at her best.

“When I write, I feel like I’m right smack dab in the middle of the rivers of creation,” said Valentinelli. “Whether it’s a story, a business proposal or a game, I feel that each type of writing requires a different skill set to make the finished product sparkle.

“I thoroughly enjoy that the medium is constantly changing, and that I can continually learn and grow with every project. As any writer knows, if you’re not evolving with the times–you might as well trade in your laptop and build a time machine, instead.”

In the spirit of online test marketing, Valentinelli has been serializing her novel, Argentum, the first novel in the The Violet War series, and taking feedback from her many readers.

Valentinelli and I spoke around the time of GenCon 2008, while she was preparing for the debut of Exquisite Replicas.

Jones: What’s the difference between writing for games and writing fiction?

Valentinelli: There is a huge difference between writing games and fiction. Huge. When you write fiction, you’re telling an entertaining story replete with a plot, characters, setting, etc. Fiction has a very one-to-one relationship with your audience; it’s just you (the author) and the reader. The reader can’t change the plot (unless, of course, you’re reading a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure”), which makes the medium more static than a game.

With game writing you’re not writing plot — you’re writing the potential for a plot wrapped in a set of mathematical rules that need to make sense. Game writing is a lot like technical writing, and requires a different set of skills than fiction does.

When you write games, though, I should note that you have an agreement with the publisher so you don’t go willy-nilly and include cute, little sprites in your game about flesh-eating necromancers. There are a lot more restrictions that you have to deal with in game writing and you’re not always going to agree with the publisher who, ultimately, is “the boss.”

Jones: In which do you feel more at home, fiction or game writing?

Valentinelli: Well, I’m attracted to both types of writing for different reasons. Fiction I enjoy because I feel I have more flexibility with the format and the content than game writing.

Game writing I enjoy because of the team aspect and the challenge of fitting text around an outline and a system. It’s a lot like putting the pieces of a puzzle together and–in the best of scenarios–you’ll have contributed to a highly-playable and marketable game.

From playtesting to working on the outline and editing chapters of text, if you do not have a good synergy with the people you’re working with on a game, it will show. The role that I find myself in depends upon the publisher I’m working for, how well-versed a company is in the production process, and what the company’s expectations are.

Jones: What can you tell me about your novella, “Twin Designs” from Tales of the Seven Dogs Society?

Valentinelli: When the collection was being planned, Lee and Matt had a choice to make, and that was whether or not to have the same, iconic set of characters for each of the stories or let us create our own. They opted for the latter, so my story focuses on one take on the Seven Dogs Society, whereas Matt’s and Jim’s are two different ones. I felt that I knew the setting pretty well, having contributed to the game, and I double-checked with the other writers to see if they were going to include the metaplot or not before I went any further.

Before I even got into writing “Twin Designs”, I knew that there was something I had to show off from the game, to hint about what Aletheia is really about without spoiling it for people. In order to do it, though, I had to break a lot of conventions.

In Aletheia, you play a psychically-gifted investigator that belongs to a group called the Seven Dogs Society, headquartered in a sprawling Victorian mansion in Alaska. The novella is split into two points-of-view from two of those members, Ralph and Edgar, his twin brother. The basis for the story is a little-known power called “Presque Vu”, which gives you the ability to see whether or not an action or event is part of the Grand Design, to receive insight about it which is crucial to the player’s investigations.

“Twin Designs” was written and designed the way that it was for multiple reasons: to provide a stand-alone story, to show that not everyone is going to interpret Presque Vu the same way for their character, and to show off a little bit about the mystery behind the Usher Codex.

In all honesty, I’m expecting mixed reviews because I feel that I really stretched the boundaries of a typical, adventure-style fiction story. This isn’t a scene-by-scene type of a story where the group investigates a mystery while chased by bad guys that a lot of people enjoy reading; while there are bad guys, there’s a lot of focus on character development which was intentional and “crucial” to the mystery of the Usher Codex and the characters.

In some stories, the characters are on an adventure; in “Twin Designs”, the twins are the adventure.

Jones: How do you develop a character, both before and during the writing?

Valentinelli: Character development for me is actually pretty straightforward at the onset, because I never create characters that live in silos. In some way, the character has to have some connection or “hook” to the world that he/she’s in. I don’t do a lot of development up front, because much of the character’s personality for me doesn’t come through until I’m writing them down. For example, in “Twin Designs” I named Ralph and Edgar after Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allen Poe because I wanted their characters to be philosophically “light” and “dark.”

Well, Ralph and Edgar didn’t exactly wind up that way; as the story was being written there was one point where I thought that Ralph ended up a tea-drinking, whiny, snot-faced elitist. Edgar seemed to be this character that would listen to your sob story, look you straight in the eye and say, “Shit happens.”

For me, a well-developed character needs to be three-dimensional, human. They’re the good guys that will steal your lunch money when they’re down on their luck, or the bad guy that protects fluffy bunnies because he has one as a pet. Well-developed characters, like people, also change and evolve with the world around them. They apply what they’ve learned, however subconsciously, and go on living.

Jones: You’ve mentioned elsewhere that Exquisite Replicas is the darkest game you’ve ever contributed to.

Valentinelli: In my experience with horror games, your character either can see the horror or he/she can’t. “Exquisite Replicas” is a little bit of both; your character isn’t sure that what they’re seeing is real. Even if they think it is, there are very few people who will believe them. That hit me pretty hard when I was focusing on how to describe the setting, because I kept putting myself in the character’s cheap, black suit, wondering what it would be like to have the ability to see the Replicas–knowing that they’re unnatural and wrong–but feel powerless to do anything about it.

I’m typically drawn to horror because I feel that kind of adversity causes true heroes to shine more brightly in the dark. However, this is a game where the heroes don’t “shine,” they don’t have parades, and they can’t really pat themselves on the back. Characters have to sacrifice the illusion that they’re safe to rush out and rescue–who? Whose decision is it to save your character’s husband or your family’s cats instead of your teammate’s sister, your leader’s son? Who has the power, time and resources to donate food or help your team hide from the mortals who think you’re criminals?

Jones: What did you learn about the game writing process between Aletheia and Exquisite Replicas?

Valentinelli: No matter what type of a game you’re working on, you can’t ever take the same style of writing and stick it into an outline. It’s essential to understand the pace of a game–whether it’s proactive or reactive–to write the text accordingly. Aletheia is what I would call a proactive game, where “Exquisite Replicas” is a reactive type of a game.

In a proactive game, when an event happens your characters have more time to make decisions that affect the story. For example, your character doesn’t “have” to investigate a supernatural event in Aletheia, but it is part of the job. Your character can choose where she wants to go and how your team investigates it by using a set of guidelines. Here, the text is more straightforward and, at times, scientific to play up the crucial “observer” aspects of an investigator’s role.

In Exquisite Replicas, it’s more reactive because your characters have a limited amount of time to figure out what you’re going to do next. The feel is much more frenzied because it’s a do-or-die situation where your character either acts NOW or you suffer the consequences of your actions. The text is winding, spinning and diluted because, as an Initiate, you learn about the world from DM-107864923Q-AAP who has suffered those consequences. Her character serves as an example of what can happen if you choose–poorly.

Jones: What are the pros and cons of working in a Shared Universe?

Valentinelli: Pros? The biggest pro is that you are working with other writers on a creative project, so you’re not isolated in your craft. Always a danger, if you’re not in a writing workshop or a writer’s group it’s all too easy to put the blinders on and “forget” to think objectively about what words you’re putting on the page. A “shared universe” encourages and fosters teamwork even if you’re not working with the other writers directly, because you’re collaborating on work that’s either already been designed, or a universe that you’re helping to create.

Certainly the most technical experience [I’ve had working in a licensed setting] was trying to make sure I had all the setting details right for “Twin Designs”; I literally had the Aletheia .pdf open and was doing massive amounts of searches to make sure I described the floors, rooms, and other minutia correctly.

The biggest “Con” to working in this type of a format is the headaches of legalese. Legally, shared worlds and licensed settings are defined as two, separate things. Typically, with “licensed” settings (which is really what most gaming fiction is) you don’t own the rights to what you do. With shared worlds the rights may vary depending upon the contract. For example, if you’re lucky enough to work with George R.R. Martin and his ingenious “share”-based ownership of “Wild Cards”, you’ve hit a gold mine.

Jones: Can you tell me a little about the process of building the setting for the serialized novels that make up The Violet War?

Valentinelli: The first decision I made was to figure out how magic worked. In the setting, I wanted everything–from the crabbiest werewolf to the fantastical gryphon and the betrayed Illuyankas–to be real. In this universe, magic is based on the characters’ biological makeup which is kept in check by Nature.

The second decision I had to make was to figure out how I wanted to break down the series from this larger-than-life idea I had about the war between magic-born and mortals. At the heart of the Violet War are the Alchemists, humans with no innate magical ability that tinker with genetics just as much as they do with metals.

The first book, “Argentum”, focuses on one of the Condemned, an exiled magic-born named Sophie Miller who is on a quest to return to her world any way that she can. Her character’s memory loss has allowed me to introduce the setting piecemeal, but it’s not without its own challenges, especially in the online format.

Jones: In The Violet War, how are your zombies and vampires different than run of the mill monsters?

Valentinelli: Any monstrous figures in the Violet War are a byproduct of a failed Alchemical reaction. Zombies, vampires, werewolves, etc. do not work independently, they are born slaves to the Alchemist, but may also be commanded by the being whose genetic make-up created them. For example, say that the Alchemists were working their magic on a feather from Quetzalcoatl and the reaction failed miserably. If *poof* there’s a feathered bird-zombie in their midst, both the Alchemist and Quetzalcoatl could control it–but only those two. Alchemists are often strongly discouraged from taking huge risks in their experiments, or if they do they’re asked to kill their “creations” outright. ‘Course, that doesn’t always happen.

The weakness for these creatures is always the common elements used to create them. Vampires, greedy for blood, are sensitive to gold. Zombies don’t eat in this setting and have a shortened lifespan; many Alchemists intentionally create them, though, using them as a type of homunculi –especially if they’re doing something they’re not supposed to be doing.

Jones: What part of the world-building process do you enjoy most?

Valentinelli: Remember the phrase, “Phenomenal cosmic power! Itty bitty living space?” World-building is a lot like that. You’re creating plot planets and star characters and magical gravity, but you have to smush it all down into a keychain-sized, readable story. I like the smushing–a lot–because I feel like I’m turning big ideas into something small and digestible.

Jones: “Smushing”?

Valentinelli: Smushing is a word I use to describe taking really big “world-building” concepts and distilling them into a one-or-two sentence summary. The process allows me to have free reign when I’m brainstorming, but then brings big ideas back into reality.

Jones: How has the Violet War story changed since your original conception?

Valentinelli: Oh, it was originally a lot darker than I had intended it to be. Initially, the main character was going to tell the story from flashback mode in a torture room, but I stopped that cold. Sophie’s character may be a lot of things, but she wouldn’t have been able to realistically survive a magical torture chamber after what she had done.

Jones: What part of you shows up in The Violet War?

Valentinelli: I’ve always had an interest in philosophy, folklore, archeology and mythology; if you read a lot of cultural myth, you might notice that a similarly themed god (or goddess) shows up multiple times in different areas of the world. In Violet War, many of the gods, goddesses and other beings can be referred to by multiple names, but are pulled from places all over the world.

Jones: What is it about Kurt Vonnegut that resonates with you? What has Vonnegut taught you about writing?

Valentinelli: First time I read Vonnegut, I was knee-deep in a pile of books like The Fountainhead, Cat’s Cradle, Fahrenheit 451 and Flowers for Algernon. The thing that struck me the most about Vonnegut is that it seemed like he had no boundaries, no limits to his made-up vocabulary or the message behind his books. He wasn’t confined to “what everyone else was writing.” He made up the rules as he went along. He lived through terrible human atrocities we can only see in pictures today. But he never stopped — he kept on going.

Vonnegut has taught me that it’s okay to experiment and play with formats. It’s all right to try new things, to breathe freshness into tired mediums using as few words as you possibly can. While I don’t always follow his mantra, my writing is never static as a result of his early influence on my work.

Jones: Are rules your friends or foes? Good or bad?

Valentinelli: Well, there are really two types of rules; conventions and mechanics. Writing conventions are a necessary evil, because without them you wouldn’t be able to write-for-hire. When you write “for” someone else–no matter if it’s a brochure, a want ad, or a character description–you have to meet their expectations as the “publisher.” Depending upon the market, you may also have to silently satisfy the reader as well. If someone were to hire me, for example, to write a story based on “Hellboy”–I would be obligated to look at previous work and figure out what the conventions of “Hellboy” are to write the story. In that case, I have to satisfy not only the publisher, but the reader and fans as well.

Mechanics, on the other hand, are a whole ‘nother ball of wax, because you’re confined to write based on those “game rules.” No matter what your game mechanics are–systemless, multiple systems, or “new”–solid rules enable writers to write great games.

Interview by Jeremy Jones

Visit www.mlvwrites.com and www.violetwar.com for more information on Monica’s fiction, game design and other projects.

Something New with the Dragon: A Conversation with Elaine Cunningham

Flames — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:33:08 +0000

Elaine Cunningham writes character-driven fantasy stories that are rich with humor, complexity, and action. She could very well be speaking of her own fiction when she describes “a satisfying story” as “both surprising and logical.”

Since 1991, Cunningham has written extensively in the Forgotten Realms, co-authored a novel with Ed Greenwood, ventured into the Star Wars Expanded Universe, and produced a steady flow of short fiction.

“When I read Elaine’s first Realms novel, Elfshadow, I was struck by two things,” said Ed Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting and co-author with Cunningham of The City of Splendors: a Waterdeep Novel. “First, how much more I wanted to read, for the rest of my life, about her two main characters, Arilyn and Danilo. Not only did she bring them vividly to life, she made me care about them and want to know everything else they did and that happened between them, from that moment on, until they died or I did.”

?”Second,” Greenwood added, “[I was struck by] how Elaine had somehow managed to read my mind, or sidle into my dreams, to see Waterdeep, and Elaith, and the Harpers, and various folk of Waterdeep both humble and prominent, and bring them to life exactly as I had pictured them in my mind, for so many years. I still don’t know how she managed that, but she captured and portrayed them all perfectly.”

Cunnigham’s output in recent years has remained both prolific and varied. 2007 saw the paperback releases of The Best of the Realms III: The Collected Stories of Elaine Cunningham and Shadows in the Twilight, the second Changling novel. In the spring of 2008, Paizo Publishing announced that Cunningham would be writing fiction set in the Pathfinder universe. Last month, her story “Beyond Dreams” appeared in Beyond Magic, a three-author anthology from Tor, and “Lorelei” was included in James Lowder’s Worlds of Their Own from Paizo.

One thing remains consistent throughout all of Cunningham’s work: good story and great characters.

“Elaine understands and convincingly portrays characters better than most writers in any genre I’ve encountered writing today,” said Greenwood. “Elaine Cunningham deserves to be a mainstay of American popular literature, regular appearances on the New York Times bestseller lists and all. That she isn’t there already is a tragic mistake on someone’s part, and when I find that someone . . .?”

When we corresponded via e-mail a while back, conversation quickly went to the topic of characterization.

Jones: What do you enjoy most about writing?

Cunningham: Quite a few things, but some of my favorite moments involving finding le mot juste–words that express exactly what I wanted to get across. I also enjoy getting to know the characters through the revision process. I’ll start with a basic idea of who the characters are and I’ll do a plot outline, but by the time the rough draft is finished, the characters and I have gotten past the get-acquainted stage and I start to figure out what they’re really about. The initial writing phase is hard, slow work for me; revision, on the other hand, is fun.

Jones: Where does a novel (or story) start for you? With an image? A character? A plot idea?

Cunningham: It’s all intertwined. A character is defined by his history, his environment, his abilities and aspirations, and his decisions. Right there you’ve got back story, setting, characterization, and plot. But since you have to start somewhere, I usually define the rest of the story elements in terms of the character. Even if I start with a plot idea, I can’t go far without considering how the characters will respond to it. After all, Jack Bauer (from the television show “24”) is going to respond to a problem quite differently than, say, Nancy Drew or Harry Potter. You can’t have Nancy breaking a guy’s neck by getting a grip, running up a wall and doing a little cheerleader flip, and Jack would lose serious street cred if he started pointing sticks at bad guys and yelling, “Patronis!”

Jones: Could you walk me through the character building process a little? I mean, how do you go from a blank page to Gwen Gellman of the Changling series or Liriel Baenre of the Forgotten Realms: Starlight and Shadows series?

Cunningham: I start by building a back story for the main characters. It’s important to know what their lives were like before the story started. You don’t have to tell the reader everything you “know” about a character, but prep work finds its way onto the page in ways that are hard to define.

I ask a lot of questions about characters under development. There are many surface questions, such as, what do they look like, what do their speaking voices sound like, how do they dress, what do they do for fun, how do they spend their days? I like to know how they think, and what assumptions they hold about their worlds. What are their opinions on politics, religion, and social issues? And what does that say about them? What things do they find amusing? What sort of music and art appeal to them? What are their character strengths and weaknesses? Are they sociable or solitary? What type of people are they drawn to, and why?

You can learn a lot about characters by considering how they think, but it’s just as important, if not more so, to consider what they do. What are her skills? What sort of thing is she likely to struggle with, or avoid altogether? How is she likely to respond in a given situation?

But I think the most important question of all is, “What does this person want?” This question deals with “motivation,” in terms of plot issues and story events, but it goes beyond it. What things really matter to the character?

Knowing where a character is at the start of the story is . . . the start of the story. I need to have a pretty good idea where the character is going to end up, how he’s going to grow or change. For me, the “character arc” is one of the most important elements of storytelling.

Jones: Is there a test or way you evaluate whether or not a character’s motivation will be able to sustain a whole novel?

Cunningham: Not really. A single, highly focused motivation–let’s say “revenge,” for example–can carry any number of novels; conversely, it can result in a clichéd story that employs eighty-three out of the 100 items on that list of “Things I Wouldn’t Do If I Were An Evil Overlord” one finds floating around the Internet. It’s why that desire for revenge developed, and how that vengeance is enacted, that makes a story worth telling.

I don’t mean to imply that every character must have a single, overwhelming goal; in fact, one of the most common types of high fantasy stories is the “coming of age” tale, in which the hero finds his or her true purpose in life. One of the most central questions of human existence is a search for meaning and purpose. I assume that in this regard, fictitious people are no different from the living, breathing sort. Real people have complex and often contradictory motivations, and a character’s goals are frequently changed or redefined during the course of a story.

That said, pondering the question, “What does this person want?” is one of the best ways I know of getting below the surface of the character development process.

Jones: Do the characters ever just take over?

Cunnigham: I’ve heard writers complain that their characters “just won’t behave.” This is frequently accompanied by a self-congratulatory tone and a smug little smile. The subtext is, “My characters are so vivid and fully dimensional that they have developed lives of their own! They’re ALIVE! Mwa ha ha!” I have two words for this: decision tree. Every decision you make opens up new possibilities and suggests new directions. Chasing off down some of these paths can lead to wildly unforeseen directions as well as the occasional dead end, but it’s the author’s decisions that are going far afield, not the character. Taking the time to do a solid plot outline will forestall a lot of “misbehaving character” problems. I do a lot of pre-writing work, so I have a pretty good idea of who the characters are before I start to write.

That said, I don’t believe in keeping slavishly to an outline. New directions might be a good thing. I frequently come up with small plot twists during the writing process. Sometimes you come to see events in a slightly different light as you get to know the characters better.

Jones: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone speak of revision in terms of getting to know the character, but it makes wonderful sense. Sort of like going over the events of someone’s life with them. In revision, do you find that you cut a lot of excess material, a lot of the exploratory material that helped you get to know the character or is it more that you need to add material?

Cunnigham: Many of the “getting to know you” elements that happen during the writing process have to do with voice–a distinctive way of speaking. Sometimes a character’s dialogue starts out sounding fairly generic during the rough draft phase. As I get to understand his or her personality, I get a better sense of the rhythm, syntax, and sensibilities that inform their way of speaking. To that end, I spend a LOT of time revising dialogue. Dolly Parton once observed, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Similarly, it takes a lot of time and work to make dialogue sound natural and effortless.

There are phases and layers involved in getting to know a person. There’s the first impression, the acquaintance stage, the process of coming to a deeper understanding. All of this has parallels in the writing process.

I’ve heard it said that there are no good writers: there are only good revisers. I’d have to agree that most of the good stuff happens during the revision phase. I do try to trim as I revise, but a lot of the exploratory material doesn’t make it into the manuscript, and was never intended to.

Jones: Can you share some practical advice on refining dialogue?

Cunningham: People have distinctive ways of speaking. Many factors go into shaping a person’s “voice,” such as education, occupation, interests, age, outlook, and personality. A reserved, taciturn person will give short answers, a skilled diplomat will be able to dance around unpleasant truths. If a person is either very insecure or very egotistical, he will probably be the topic of most of his conversations. If he’s religious, his speech will reflect this. His rank, and how he regards rank, will influence how he speaks, and to whom. This is most obvious in settings where class and rank are clearly defined–historical novels and fantasies set in hierarchal societies–but it holds true for any era or setting.

For example, people who don’t understand and respect children tend to talk down to them. People who regard members of the opposite sex in terms of potential romantic/sexual partners will relate quite differently than someone whose first instinct is to regard people as individuals, with gender being one characteristic of many. In short, you have to know your characters very well before dialogue starts to ring true.

I think that’s the central question to ask yourself when you’re writing and revising dialogue: Is this something the character would say, and is this how he would say it?

Next to that, I’d say the most important element to good dialogue is brevity. Dialogue is a bit like poetry, in that a few vivid, well chosen words are more powerful than unfocused meandering.

It’s also like poetry in that it’s meant to be “heard” in the mind’s ear. The sound of dialogue matters. Does it have the rhythms of speech? Can the reader hear someone speaking a sentence without coming up for air, or does the speaker go on and on? Timing and cadence are important. Does the length of the sentence, choice of words, and method of delivery reflect the speaker’s personality and state of mind? One recommendation you’ll often hear is reading the dialogue aloud to get a better sense of flow and rhythm. This can be helpful.

A few other observations: Ruthlessly prune social chit-chat, as well as narrative that’s thinly disguised as dialogue. Make sure the characters are talking to each other and not the reader, for example: “Well, as you know, Sir Harvey, Viking raiders have been besieging the coastal settlements all summer. We’ve fought four battles this month with heavy losses, including your own son.”

Too many direct answers to questions can make dialogue plod, and a lot of Q&A can quickly sound like interrogation, not dialogue. Unless that’s the effect you’re aiming for, sometimes it helps to imply the answer and move along.

Jones: What role does setting play in the early stages of writing? Do you go through similar stages of development as with characters?

Cunningham: Absolutely. First, a bit of background. My undergrad degree was in music education, and the degree requirements included classes in developmental psychology. “Nature vs. nurture” was a much-discussed issue. Heredity is given great importance in many fantasy stories: hidden royal lineage, great magical abilities that come of a certain bloodline, the inheritance of a powerful weapon or artifact, the sense that an evil parent might presage some dark destiny. But people are also products of their environment, so I consider setting to be of great importance, and yes, I do a lot of prep work.

Jones: Does the process of setting development vary significantly in working with shared world fiction and fiction set in a world of your creation?

Cunningham: In some stories, the setting is as important a “character” as any other. This is particularly true in fantasy and science fiction. But whether you’re working in a shared-world setting, writing historical fiction, or creating a new world, I think the most important thing is internal consistency. Once you’ve established a set of “rules,” most readers are willing to accept them, but break those rules and you’ve also broken the unspoken contract with your readers. When someone picks up a novel, they prepare to suspend disbelief, to set aside as irrelevant the knowledge that this is a created work about imaginary people moving through artificially contrived events. They’re willing to temporarily accept that magic can be worked through various gemstones, that vampires can drink bottled blood, that strangers can fall in love in a single afternoon–whatever. In exchange, the author offers the chance to explore another reality, to ponder new issues and consider dilemmas they themselves haven’t faced, and to spend time with interesting people. If you shatter that sense of “reality” by breaking the rules, or if the people in the story don’t act in accordance with the expectations you’ve set up, the reader quite naturally feels betrayed. This is true whether you’re writing experimental literary fiction or a Star Trek novel.

Setting–environment–is not a static thing, a stage or movie set against which actors play out some drama. It actively shapes the characters, who often end up returning the favor. Also, anyone who has siblings knows that no two characters are going to experience any environment in precisely the same way. Again, it’s all about decisions. Some people embrace the culture in which they find themselves, others question, reject, or transform it. Characterization, plot, and setting can be so deeply intertwined that it’s difficult to talk about just one of these elements.

Jones: In writing character and setting in a fantasy novel, are the conventions of the genre a blessing or a curse?

Cunningham: As you pointed out, every genre has conventions. Mysteries are neatly resolved, traditional romance novels end with the promise of a happily ever after. Within these genre conventions are more specific elements, such as the hard-boiled detective, the locked room mystery, the gorgeous romance heroine. Other than the inclusion of magic, the biggest convention in fantasy is Good Wins. Forget about dwarves and elves and unicorns for a moment. Good Wins–that assumption lies at the heart of fantasy.

There are exceptions, of course. Fantasy, like everything else, is prone to fads and fashions. Right now we’re in one of the gray-character, anti-heroes phases that roll around from time to time. “Gritty” is a much-used key word these days, and you’ll find a lot of “grittier than thou” posturing going on in the genre. When the tide turns, the best of these gray characters will survive, the rest will be sniffed at as yet another tiresome cliché. And I think that holds true for most applications of the convention/cliché rule: If something is done very well, most people will overlook the sense of familiarity.

One of the problems of writing fantasy (or anything else for that matter) is that one man’s convention is another’s cliché. For some people, the triumph of good over evil is a cliché. Some writers and readers loudly proclaim that anything with elves in it is, by definition, a Tolkien rip-off. The survival of the good guys is a cliché to some, so George R.R. Martin’s willingness to whack some of his central characters was lauded with glee. But what is new and fresh can quickly become tired in some readers’ eyes.

R.A. Salvatore’s most popular character is a noble dark elf, an exception to the evil race known as drow. Suddenly every third gamer wanted to play a dark elf ranger. Books and game products about the drow filled the shelves. If fantasy message boards are any indication, some readers regard Drizzt as a cliché, forgetting that he was the prototype of the “good drow.” I remember when dour, grim dwarves were considered cliché. Now “comic relief” dwarves are familiar enough to have bred contempt.

It’s always a challenge to do something new and interesting with a familiar convention, whether it’s a revenge plot, a love story, a sword battle, or a dragon.

Interview by Jeremy Jones

Visit www.elainecunningham.com for the latest news, updates and more information on Elaine’s fiction projects.

Discussing Eberron and Blood Bowl fiction with Matt Forbeck

Flames — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:30:36 +0000

Matt Forbeck writes about superheroes. And mutants. And parodic, homicidal American football players in his Blood Bowl novels. He does some Weird West, too.

In fact, there’s more than a little cowboy thrown into every thing he does. Check out the Lost Mark Trilogy for an idea of how seamlessly the Wild West and heroic fantasy can meld into something much bigger than the sum of both genres.

For the last twenty years, most of Forbeck’s work—game design, fiction, non-fiction—has in some way or another been connected to a shared world or licensed setting. He has worked with many settings from just about every possible angle—writer, editor, and developer.

A while back, Forbeck and I talked about writing in general and shared world writing in particular.

JONES: What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing in a shared world?

FORBECK: The best part about writing in a shared world is that someone else has done much of the heavy lifting for you. Many of the details about the setting and how it works are already set in stone, and you don’t have to worry about constructing these things.

The biggest disadvantage, of course, is the other edge of that same sword. Since many things about the world have already been decided, there are constraints you have to live within. You can’t just do whatever you want.

[You have to] learn as much as you can about the setting before you begin. This saves lots of time and frustration down the road. There’s little worse than coming up with a great story and then realizing you built it upon premises that are flat-out wrong.

JONES: If a lot of the setting is done for you, does it force you to focus more on the characters and the story? It seems to me that you couldn’t really hide behind world-building and would have to focus on what YOU bring to the world and not on the world itself.

FORBECK: A good writer should always pay attention to the characters and the story, so working in a shared-world setting doesn’t force you to do so, as much as it frees you. It gives you back the time you’d otherwise spend on world building.

JONES: If writing in a shared world frees you to focus on character and story, why then does shared-world writing get such a bad rap by so many people? It seems to me that character and story are not only the most important part of a good story, but also the hardest part of writing. Yet, shared world, game-based, media tie-in fiction all gets treated as second-class citizens of the literary world. Seems to me, maybe, a lot of people are missing the boat…

FORBECK: These are all great points. The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW.org) started up 2005 with the ambition to help change minds about books like these. There are a slew of articles posted there that can help answer your question.

One of the reasons I think tie-ins get a bad rap is that the community of dedicated fans in most genres prefers to read things new and different. It’s only natural, as these people spend a lot of time reading and know all the tropes of their chosen genres, front and back. So they focus on what’s novel in novels rather than just reading good stories well told.

Check the sales figures, though, and you’ll see that most tie-ins outsell most original work. There are lots of reasons for this, not the least of which is the trust that people have in the brands those shared worlds have built. The readers, who vote with their dollars, seem to know what they like.

JONES: Capturing the right tone seems to be crucial when working in a shared world. How would describe the tone of Eberron, and since you did work so early in the series, what did you do to be sure that you had captured it.

FORBECK: My editor Mark Sehestedt pounded this one into me. Eberron is pulp fantasy, D&D mixed with Indiana Jones. To get that across: it’s cliffhanger, cliffhanger, cliffhanger. In my Eberron books, there are all sorts of twists and turns, and the chapters are all short and punchy, each ending with some kind of cliffhanger.

JONES: Well, when you put it that way (a pulpy mix of D & D and Indiana Jones) it seems like there’s no way the Eberron novels could be anything but great. Yet, reviews were mixed for all the Book One’s and very strong for the Book Two’s… Was this expected? A surprise? Growing pains? Is it a case of readers becoming more comfortable with a new world or with the world finding settling in or what?

FORBECK: Probably a combination of all those things. In the case of both Keith Baker and me, our first Eberron novels were our first novels of that length. (I’d written a Knights of the Silver Dragon novel, but it was less than half as long as Marked for Death.) I’d like to think both of us improved as writers with our later books. I’m certain I did, although I haven’t had a chance to read Keith’s second novel yet.

Also, when Keith and I started writing our novels, the Eberron Campaign Setting hadn’t been published. The first I saw of it was as a 12-page brief. Although I’m sure Keith knew a bit more about the world than I did when he started writing, there were still huge gaps in the setting at the time, things we had to try to avoid stepping into without really knowing where they were. This made the process that much more challenging. With the later books, we stood on firmer ground.

JONES: So then did the first two novels contribute to the expansion of the campaign setting? I’ve heard of shared worlds having a “bible” that the authors draw on to maintain consistency. What goes into building a world’s bible?

FORBECK: These days, the Eberron Campaign Setting (ECS) serves as the line’s primary bible. When Keith and I started writing, we didn’t have that to refer to, so it often felt like dancing in the dark, trying hard not to step on anyone’s toes.

The first novels and the setting were developed in parallel, but the RPG book always took precedent. I suspect as time rolls on that the RPG authors will incorporate some of the elements from the books, although they’re not obligated to do so.

Wizards of the Coast has since developed a writers’ guide for Eberron that features details not included in the ECS. It’s packed with things like proper punctuation, information about the moons, and other helpful bits of information.

When developing a bible, you need to make clear the basics of the setting, the scope, the tone, and so on. If there’s no central arbiter of what’s right or not, you need to have some means of resolving conflicting ideas, too.

As you build the bible, you discover what questions need to be answered. A lot of it depends on the writers’ intent for their stories. With some writers, the kind of currency doesn’t matter, whereas with others it’s a vital detail. You could do worse than to pick up an RPG setting book and modeling your bible on that, although that may bring you more detail than you care to deal with. It’s easy to get carried away in the creating of the world and forget about getting down to writing the actual stories.

JONES: Which of your shared worlds books would you say is the best introduction to your work?

FORBECK: The obvious choice would be Marked for Death, but I’m the first to admit that it doesn’t stand well on its own. Also, the second book in that trilogy, The Road to Death, is a better read. If you don’t mind jumping into the middle of a story, I’d try that one.

Blood Bowl is a fine standalone book, but it’s hyper-violent and humorous, which makes for a strange mix. Still, it’s a lot of fun and turns some of the standard fantasy tropes on their ear.

JONES: Can you recommend some other particularly successful examples of shared world writing?

FORBECK: The Thieves’ World anthologies are great. They were one of the first such settings to get lots of use by a wide cast of top-notch authors usually known for their original work.

You can find similar anthologies for Star Wars, Vampire: The Masquerade, Dragonlance, and the Forgotten Realms. There’s one for Eberron, Tales of the Last War.

JONES: Are you working on any shared world fiction projects right now and, if so, can you tell me a little about it?

FORBECK: I am, and I can’t. Well, that’s dull, so let me say that, at the moment, I’m negotiating to write a novel based on a popular MMO, and I’m sure there will be more such books in my future.

Interview by Jeremy Jones

Visit www.forbeck.com for the latest updates on Matt’s upcoming fiction, games and other projects.

Interview with zombie novelist Z. A. Recht

Flames — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 13:41:47 +0000

Novelist Z. A. Recht, the author of Morningstar Strain: Plague of the Dead and Morningstar Strain: Thunder and Ashes, likes playing god in a world of shamblers (slow moving zombies), sprinters (fast-moving ones), and rotting, stinking corpses (unmoving).

“No, really,” said Recht of playing god. “If the Morningstar Strain universe actually existed, I would be the Great Spirit of it, and that’s the beauty of writing. It allows you to create and destroy entire worlds on a whim.”

“This is not just idle banter, either,” he added. “I actually mean create and destroy whole worlds.”

It doesn’t take much to get hooked by one of Recht’s novels, just a few short paragraphs or pages. His zombies, the viral by-product of the dread Morningstar Strain, are hungry for flesh and his humans are survivors with enough character and enough ammunition to live another day. Except, of course, when they get killed, eaten, or infected.

Recht and I spoke in mid-July, while he was hard at work on Survivor, his third Morningstar Strain novel due out from Permuted Press sometime in 2009.

Jones: Why zombies? What is it that makes you want to write about them?

Recht: Of all the creatures that never existed, zombies seem, to me, to be the most tangible and, well, “realistic,” for lack of a better word. The other creatures that often pop up alongside zombies in human mythology–your werewolves and vampires and evil witches–all seem too incredible to be true. Zombies, on the other hand, aren’t magical or immortal. They don’t have special powers. They’re just hunks of rotting meat that have a taste for living flesh.

Still–despite this–they manage to rank among the most terrifying creatures our collective imagination has yet to come up with. It must be the missing limbs or rip-sprung autopsy victims. Yes, that must be it–their revolting appearance.

Or maybe it’s more primal than that. Maybe, deep down, we all still retain the mortal fear of being eaten as prey that our ancestors once felt on a daily basis.

On top of all that, zombies give humans a fighting chance. It takes either a lucky shot or incredible martial prowess to face down a werewolf or a vampire and win; with zombies, it takes smarts and discipline.

It makes for a more compelling story when the protagonists aren’t super-human monster hunters. They’re just regular people who manage to stay alive when others don’t. It’s easier to identify with them, to see yourself in the same situation. It’s what drew me into “Dawn of the Dead” when I first saw it at a very young age. My brain started playing the question of “What would YOU do if this happened?” over and over again, and that was all she wrote. It was a little like love.

Once you go down that train of thought, things are never quite the same. You size up what stores have stocked and either mark the place down as a good foraging spot after the zombies rise or discount it as useless, rather than just buying what you need and leaving. You note the location of distribution centers, car lots, and you pay attention to road repairs or closed routes of escape. You look at houses and measure them up by how well they’d resist several dozen zombies trying to get inside, rather than by good looks or square feet. And most importantly, you start to look at everyone around you as a potential zombie. You don’t really get that too often with other mythological creatures. We enjoy them, but we don’t identify with them all that often. Zombies are us. They just happen to be dead.

Jones: What are some of the dos and don’t of writing zombies? Is there a Z. A. Recht theory of zombie creation?

Recht: I’m a big proponent of making the origins of zombies semi-credible. Of course, at some point you’ll have to make the leap of faith that requires suspension of disbelief. It is, after all, physiologically impossible for a dead body to move around. Still, if a person is reading a zombie book, it’s pretty clear they’re ready to make that leap. That just leaves making the origins semi-credible. This can be anything–from a Venus probe with a strange radiation signature, a la “Night of the Living Dead,” to Trioxin from “Return”, to the Morningstar Strain.

I don’t mind it when people don’t delve into the origins of zombies at all, but it irks me when the zombies rise because of some mystical, magical event or powerful, immortal demonic being.

Oh, and the other big rule for me is to make the zombies act like zombies. If they’re dead, they’ve lost their humanity. The soul (or perhaps “consciousness” would be a more accurate word) is gone. It shatters the 4th Wall for me when zombies start talking or planting booby traps. It’s fine to have them act on instinct and to make that instinct appear intelligent just to throw off your characters’ expectations, but to have one pop up and say, “By Jove, I am so dreadfully hungry that I’m going to take a bite out of your schnozz!” destroys the whole image of the walking corpse for me. At that point they cease to be zombies and become some other paranormal cousin to zombies.

Usually when a writer has talking zombies there’s a paranormal explanation behind them, which is, as the above paragraph beat to death, something I’m not a big fan of. Leave the paranormal to ghost stories. These are zombie stories. The next best thing a zombie fanatic likes to talk about besides the zombies themselves are firearms, and we’ll get down into the nitty-gritty about those, too. Maximum effective ranges, overall accuracy, weight, ammunition supply, and so on…we’re down-to-earth people.

Zombie fans do not want, but require, that the zombies and the setting be at least mostly, if not entirely, realistic.

Jones: Can you tell me a little about how you built the Morningstar Strain “universe”?

Recht: I started with that basic mantra I repeated over and over in an earlier question –”Make the origins semi-credible. Make the origins semi-credible. Make the…” — and worked from there. Hence, the virus was the first thing I fleshed out. It follows all the rules of actual viruses, and even has a few drawbacks (it’s not airborne, for example, and dies relatively quickly when out of the body). Spraying infected blood with Lysol will kill the virus. It’s not supernatural in any way–rather, perfectly natural, which I hope adds to their menace.

The virus itself is based on two real sicknesses: Ebola and Rabies. Every bit of the virus’s effect on humans before they turn feral is, symptom for symptom, Ebola. (The incubation period, the headache, the nausea, the fever, the vomiting, the red eyes, all are indicative of Ebola.)

Once the fever causes them to snap, they’re like a rabies victim on meth. There’s not merely a chance that they’ll attack you. They will attack you.

And though I’ve never come across a chance to really explore it, they obey the virus to the extent that they will avoid killing a potential host if possible. After all, the zombies in the Morningstar Strain are really just the last stages of the disease, the virus’s final hope of spreading to a new victim. The virus would prefer, if it truly had a preference, to be reproducing in a living host rather than a walking corpse.

Once I had my virus and all of its specifics, the rest was rather a cop-out. I just started with a pre-built Earth set in 2006 and tossed in a pinch of Morningstar over the Congo River basin, then sat back and watched the results. (I also poured vinegar into Mount St. Helens but it didn’t explode again, which was a minor disappointment until I remembered that I had forgotten the baking soda. I’ll get it to work next time.)

Look, I enjoy playing god.

Think about Middle Earth. Really. Think about it for 30 seconds, hard, and then resume reading. I’ll wait. There. You see? You just called up a plethora of memories and situations and settings, didn’t you? How could you do these things if Middle Earth doesn’t exist somewhere, or never existed? You couldn’t. (Ian McKellen’s answer is that Middle Earth has “always existed somewhere in our hearts.”)

So J.R.R Tolkein isn’t just an author. He’s the creator of a world with its own unique history and culture. He is a kind of God. Certainly not on the same stature that we consider our Gods to be, but a different kind of God. It’s like that whole macro/micro scale thing wherein our universe might just be an atom in an infinitely larger universe, and that one might be an atom in an even larger one, and so on.

Jones: Do you use an outline or just let fly?

Recht: Little from column A, little from column B. I make general outlines. For example, I might jot myself a note that says, “So-and-so should die in this chapter,” but I won’t outline anything more than that. The circumstances and even the setting might be complete surprise to me when I get to it, but that poor character will, in the end, die.

I’m working on Survivors right now and my outline, which is around three sentences per chapter, only gives me the barest facts. All of the specifics are a mystery to me. That adds to the fun of this job. While I’m writing it, I’m also the first person alive who gets to read it.

Jones: Is there any similarity between writing fiction and playing, say, a mmorpg?

Recht: There are a couple similarities. MMORPG’s are good for practice, if you don’t mind geeking out and actually roleplaying while in-game. They help you polish your typing skills and hone your sense of storylines. They also improve your memory, as you might have a dozen such storylines in progress at any given time and you must remember the details of all of them in order to be a useful contributor.

Jones: What lessons did you learn about writing between Plague and Thunder and Ashes?

Recht: Learn? A couple of things, sure. I really learned not to leave things up to people’s imaginations. Suez was a scene of contention in Plague. Half the readers loved the Battle of Suez. The other half hated it with a passion. The big reason (besides a typo that got turned into a chapter-wide mess), you ask?

No carpet bombing.

Apparently it wasn’t very realistic that the soldiers lost the battle. To me this came as a shock–it didn’t strike me as being at all unrealistic when I kept the planes out of it. Use any reason you like to justify it–maybe the higher-ups thought the Canal would be enough of a deterrent and never dispatched any. Or maybe bombing missions were too high-profile and they didn’t want American or British Air Force/Naval planes on some civilian’s videocamera bombing thousands of what appear to be unarmed civilians. The problem was the part where I let them “use any reason they wanted.” Some of them couldn’t find a reason that fit for them. I do much less of that now.

If I were to re-write Plague, I would probably, in a fit of childishness, add one single line to the Suez battle scene wherein a radio operator reports that all planes everywhere have flat landing gear. How’s THAT for an explanation as to why there was no carpet bombing? Hey, it works, doesn’t it? And it’s perfectly explicable: the gremlins did it.

I also learned that having a wide cast of characters means that you’ll occasionally and accidentally cross one over with another. This is just plain old human error on my part. Then again, I feel I’m in good company, as most known authors have done things like this. It’s all part of the experience.

Writers – more so than in any other creative endeavor — have complete control in creating detailed worlds out of nothing more than the swirling mists of their own imaginations. Let there be light.

Interview by Jeremy Jones

Visit www.themorningstarsaga.com for more information on Z. A. Recht’s novels and other creative projects.