Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Double Dragon Book Release Party at Balticon 2013

A quick thank you to Micheal A. Ventrella  and Double Dragon Publishing for hosting a book release party at last weekend's Balticon. As an aspiring writer it was inspiring to meet published authors and hear first-hand about publishing and writing in general.

As I mentioned earlier, Double Dragon recently published a collection called A Bard in Hand, edited by Michael, that includes a story written by Bernie Mojzes and yours truly. Here's a picture (courtesy of Kelli Williams) of us signing copies of the book. Yeah - I know - writers writing in books. What can I say? We love to write.

Bernie and I and some of the other authors included in A Bard in Hand spoke about our stories in front of a rapt audience. It may have been the doughnuts and hard boiled eggs that had them enthralled, but take my word for it, they were rapt!

I will talk to you again soon. Right now I am due in the audience chamber of Meddo Malik, King of the Akalarian Tribes, Emperor of Yallum, and Lord of Guatame. He's pretty long winded sometimes, and I am trying to getting him to be more concise in this draft. It ain't easy.


Saturday, May 11, 2013

Embarrassing Relations

At the risk of putting myself out of the running for the Laziest Blogger Ever Award, I’m interrupting another long silence to let you know that a story I have co-written with Bernie Mojzes is now available in a collection called A Bard in Hand, edited by Michael A. Ventrella.

Our story, ‘Embarrassing Relations’, along with all the others in A Bard in Hand, takes place in Fortannis, the setting of Michael Ventrella’s novels. For the first Fortannis collection, A Bard’s Eye View, Bernie wrote a great story called ‘Bad Debts’ featuring Maris Goselin, a woman of considerable talent and charms. When Bernie decided to continue Maris’ adventures in the second collection, he thought it would be fun to team her up with Brian, a slightly mad and completely devoted cleric. I created Brian as a role playing game character, many moons ago, when Bernie and I were part of a weekly pizza and polyhedral dice fest (Ah, to hear DM Kim say “When we last left our fearful adventurers . . .”). Bernie remembered Brian, contacted me through the modern magic of social media, and before they could protest, Maris and Brian were thrown together in a partnership made in interdimensional space. 

The Official Blurb for Embarrassing Relations: After defending Ashbury from an unspeakable horror from beyond time and space, Maris Goselin finds herself with a new assignment: help the Duke avoid spending quality time with a gibbering out-of-town relative. It seems easy, but Maris soon realizes that although the relative may be insane, insanity is relative, and sometimes making a living has life-threatening consequences.

A Bard in Hand also includes stories by noted authors Davey Beauchamp, Jon Cory, Roy C. Booth and Brian Woods, Tera Fulbright, Jesse Grabowski, Henry Hart, Laurel Anne Hill, Mark Mensch, and Mike Strauss. You can read more about these stories on Michael’s blog here.

A Bard in Hand is available at these links as a Paperback or an E-Book.