Don’t Walk in Winter Wood

I’m happy to announce that I will contributing to Clint and Cassie Krause‘s upcoming colonial America folklore RPG Don’t Walk in Winter Wood.

The official description:

Are you ready for a walk in the woods?

Don’t Walk in Winter Wood is a storytelling game of folkloric fear. Players take on the roles of hapless villagers who must enter a legend-haunted forest and uncover its sinister secrets. The game uses simple rules and a unique narrative style to help you create spooky stories with your friends. It includes:

Legends of Winter Wood: The dark folklore surrounding Winter Wood and its neighboring village.

Game Rules: Easy-to-learn rules designed to be playable around a campfire. Recommended for 2-6 players in search of the willies. Playing time averages about 2 hours.

Advice: Tips on running games of folkloric horror, building your own scenarios, and creating a memorable, spooky atmosphere.

Scenarios: Three ready-to-run scenarios set in Winter Wood. Desperate villagers strive to save a girl hexed by a long-dead witch in The Curse. A mischievous children’s dare leads to an encounter with The Strangers. Rumors of a skinchanging beast haunt the village in The Witchery Way.

This is the revised and expanded second edition of the game featuring all new layout and artwork by George Cotronis, new legends, new rules clarifications, and new adventures. It is the definitive edition to add to your game library.

Originally released in 2004, the second edition of the game expands on the old ruleset and includes folk tales/story hooks from Jason Morningstar (Fiasco), Daniel Bayn (Wushu), Jeremy Keller (Technoir), Rafael Chandler (Dread), Daniel Moler (Red Mass), and me!

A Kickstarter for the project is still running for six more days. You can get in on the new edition early and secure yourself a shirt, a poster, and your name in the book. Check out the video below to see if this is something you might be interested in.

I hope you consider throwing some support behind the game. From what I’ve read, this is going to be a great game. I look forward to seeing the final product.

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Out Now: Haunted – 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror

My friends at Flames Rising have launched the first anthology from their FR Press publishing imprint and I’m proud to say I have a story in it. The anthology is all about ghosts and ghost hunting. To quote anthology editor Monica Valentinelli:

Who willingly walks into a haunted house?

Ghost hunters explore dark places, investigate clues and uncover secrets of the dead. Evidence of an afterlife may prove elusive and few hunters recognize some things are best left buried and forgotten.

Haunted: 11 Tales of Ghostly Horror is available now in a variety of digital formats and will be in print soon. My own story, “It Happened in the Woods at Night,” joins fiction from such great authors as Alex Bledsoe, Chuck Wendig, Jess Hartley, Georgia Beaverson, Preston P. DuBose, and more!

I hope you get a chance to check it out. It’s a great kick off to the Halloween season and good for some scares all year ’round.

Buy it for your Nook at Barnes & Noble online.

Buy it in PDF, ePub (most eReaders including Nook), and Mobi (Kindle) at DriveThruHorror.

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What I’ve Been Doing

I’ve been pretty silent on here. Initially, I was busy putting the final touches on Among the Missing for Little Fears Nightmare Edition and then jumping right into the tenth anniversary edition of the original Little Fears (which will be out soon). On top of all that, I had an absolutely fantastic opportunity come my way that has me really excited and reunites me with a great team on an amazing project (and I’m not just spouting hyperbole).

I’m very happy to announce I’ve rejoined Human Head Studios as the Writing Production Coordinator for the upcoming open-world first-person shooter PREY 2. I’m in charge of wrangling the narrative and working with the team to deliver a consistent, engaging experience. I worked at Human Head previously, and I was there for the last eighteen months of their developing the first PREY. Already knowing the studio and fiction, as well as being part of the revision team on the first title’s script, made sliding into this role very smooth.

The job is an absolute blast. I can’t wait for you all to see what this game has in store.

You can check out the PREY 2 portion of the Human Head Studios website here. I posted some official images and the launch trailer below (language and violence warning on the video).

(Linked from GiantBomb.com.)

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Roleplayers Chronicle: Designer’s Diary

Aaron T. Huss, from Mystical Throne Entertainment, contacted me recently about doing a Designer’s Diary for his Roleplayers Chronicle website and I quickly agreed. The piece went live over the weekend and touches briefly on the work that went into my Little Fears Nightmare Edition project as well as some of the history behind the game.

You can check it out here.

Big thanks to Aaron for the opportunity!

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Among the Missing – Out today!

The second book in the Little Fears Nightmare Edition line came out today in PDF. This book was a long time coming but I had a lot of fun writing it and I think I came up with some pretty terrifying stuff. Here’s the cover and blurb:

You were a normal kid once with a normal life and a normal family. Then things changed. There was a moment when your life took a sudden turn and you stopped being a normal kid. You became a headline, a statistic, a picture on the grocery store window. A warning for other children.

Maybe you were taken, stolen by a monster, or maybe you simply disappeared.

Whatever happened, at that moment, you became one of the missing.

Book 2: Among the Missing is an expansion to the Little Fears Nightmare Edition game. In it, we talk about what missing children mean in the world of Little Fears, how kids become missing, what happens to them next, how they can help in the fight against monsters, and how they can be saved. Includes expanded GMC rules, new monsters, information about the World In-Between, and a full-length episode titled “The Long Way Home.”

If that sounds like it’s up your darkened alley, check out the official Little Fears website for details on getting your own hardcopy when it comes out or you can grab the PDF right now for just $10 from the good folks at DriveThruRPG and RPGNow.

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Free Comic Script Day: The Long Count

As you may know, Free Comic Book Today is tomorrow. If you have a favorite local joint (mine happens to be the excellent Westfield Comics), head over to grab some exclusive issues and previews of upcoming titles from a variety of publishers.

But today, at least over here, it’s Free Comic Script Day.

Back in 2007, I had signed a deal with Archaia Studios Press, publishers of Artesia, Mouse Guard, and many other great titles, to write a twelve-issue series called The Long Count. The story centered on famed sports star Carmen Sandoval, her history with the serpent-god Quetzacoatl, and how her personal destiny meshed with the fate of the world and the coming change foretold in the titular calendar. The comic took place in an alternate America known as Colombiana, one where the “Southern Tribes” of the Mayans and Aztecs conquered their northern brethren prior to Europe’s western expansion. So, when the Europeans showed up on the shores of the “New World”, war broke out with the Spanish, Dutch, and English on one side and the Mayan/Aztec alliance on the other. The Tribes pushed back, slaughtering the Dutch and the English, eventually making peace with the Spanish, allowing them access to their land in exchange for weapons, medicine, and other technology. History, primarily told through flashbacks intertwined with Carmen’s story, went on from there.

The story took place primarily in Colombiana’s capitol city, Nueva Cempoala, and incorporated a heavy dose of Mayan and Aztec mythology, history, and culture.

I was proud of the story Leanne, the illustrator, and I cooked up, and the folks at Archaia were pretty jazzed as well. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond the publisher’s or my control, the project fell apart, and only one issue ever saw publication. Which is a shame, because I think I did some good writing on the project and I was excited to see it continue. Joe Illidge, my editor on the project, gave great feedback and guidance while the comic fans I let read the scripts really enjoyed the characters, the world, and seeing the plot unfold.

Of the twelve scripts, I finished four of them (and did a fair bit on the fifth) before the project went south. I’ve sat on them for years but, in fit of nostalgia, dug them up recently and have decided to put them online for anyone who’s interested.

Here are links to the PDF versions of the scripts (language warning):

The Long Count #1: The Silence Inside Her Heart, Part One

The Long Count #2: The Silence Insider Her Heart, Part Two

The Long Count #3: The Old Blood

The Long Count #4: The Permanence of Stains, Part One

If you get a chance to read them, I’d love to hear what you think. And if you know anyone hiring a comic writer, feel free to pass them (or this link) along. I enjoy writing comics a lot, and I would love some more work in the field. Perhaps the future holds some.

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Operation: Awesome – The 1000-Word Plan

One thousand words. It’s not a lot. But neither is a single grain of sand.

Earlier this year, I hit a hard realization: Writing wasn’t working for me anymore. I was writing in spurts. Some days I’d hit 3000 words but most days I wasn’t writing anything. Operation: Awesome was stalling, and I needed to jumpstart the engine if it was going to survive.

Part of Operation: Awesome was collecting the tools I should’ve gathered a decade ago: the study, the concept of form and genre (Step One), the dedication to a path (Step Two), and reading regularly (Step Three). I was doing well at those. I obsessed over structure and story, knew the type of career I want to have, and have been reading stacks of books in my audience and genre. Operation: Awesome had fixed a lot of my flaws as a writer, or helped me work on fixing them anyway, but I was struggling with one very important thing. I lacked the discipline to write (Step Four) and with every day I became less motivated to work on that discipline.

I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to writing. Most of my time is spent raising my kids (and my dogs and cat and, well, the chinchilla pretty much takes care of himself). My wife and I don’t have the cash to put my son into daycare so, even though my daughter is at school, my attention is elsewhere throughout the day. When my wife gets home, I want to spend time with her and the kids. By the time bedtime rolls around, I’m out of juice. Sometimes she doesn’t get home until after 8 o’clock at night which leaves me even more exhausted (and is she too). After 13+ hours of always-on fathering, I just don’t have the word count in me. I sit and read or catch up on television or play games. Or, maybe, on rare occasion, hang out with friends.

In recent months, that routine had worn me to a nub. I was stressed to my limit, and I started to resent writing. I felt too much pressure to cram all my week’s writing into two days. Any other time I wasn’t writing, when I was spending time with family or catching up on books/games/shows, I felt like I was wasting time I should be writing. I was stymied.

My work and my life were too muddled and I wasn’t dedicating the time and attention I should to either. I had hit a wall, and I had to make a choice: Write or find something else to do.

In order to make sense of this, I did what my pretentious teenaged self should have done, I turned to the professionals for advice. I read somewhere that Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing and Little Brother fame) has (or maybe had) a writing goal of 250 words a day. Stephen King, one of the most popular American novelists of all time, writes 2000 words a day.

That blew my mind. These guys weren’t nose-first in their work from dawn to dusk as I imagined. A lot of aspiring authors I know huddle in front of their screens day-in and day-out and, hey, if I could, I would probably do the exact same thing. But I can’t. I have other, bigger responsibilities, but I knew I could find a sweet spot between Doctorow and King, something that worked for me.

I looked at my schedule and contracts and realized to hit my deliverables, I only needed to write 1000 words a day. That’s it. About an hour’s worth of work. While I can’t park my son in front of the television for six hours every day, I can set him in front of Sesame Street or a couple episodes of Dora (or, his favorite, Dino Dan) and crank out 1000 words.

I decided that was my plan. I would write 1000 words a day, every day. But, I added some rules to make that more meaningful:

A Thousand Words of Fiction or Other Paid Work. Not blog posts, Twitter, emails, LittleFears.com updates, or even the work I do for AdventureGamers.com. The thousand words had to be on projects I was selling (or hoping to sell) or paid gigs. All that other stuff had to be done outside the goal, at night or during the extra work hours my wife’s days off allowed me.

No Making Up Missed Days. I couldn’t push one day’s work onto another. Meaning: I couldn’t skip Tuesday but promise myself I’d write 2000 Wednesday. If I didn’t hit my goal on a day, I had to accept that as failure even if I did write 2000 words the next day. (I take this from something attributed to Jerry Seinfeld: When you hit your day’s writing goal, mark it on a calendar. As the chain of marked days grows, you become more motivated not to break the chain.)

I Couldn’t Write Ahead. Same idea as above. I couldn’t buy a half-day Tuesday by writing 1500 words on Monday. Each day’s goal was separate.

I Could Go Over. If I felt inspired, I could do 1500 or 2000 or more. But I didn’t have to. 1000 was the goal.

That was a couple months ago. Overall, I’ve done well. I’ve missed days but not enough to beat myself up. On the positive side, I’ve noticed some big changes beyond the increase in productivity:

I’m Happier. Writing is working for me again. I get my 1000 done and the writing stress is gone. I’m not up late berating myself for watching Supernatural or playing games instead of writing.

I Have Gained Control of My Schedule. Since I know my output, I can better gauge my workload. This means I know at a glance if I can take on other work or if I have to turn something down. This is new to me (and is a big reason I was not good at freelancing for so long). But now I know my schedule and I don’t overload it.

I Jump Into Writing More Easily. Another great piece of writing advice, attributed to multiple sources, is to stop writing in mid-idea so you know where to pick up the next day. Writing only 1000 words puts me mid-idea almost every time so I come back to a project knowing where to start. The words flow from there.

I Have More Writing Energy. Because I’m not squeezing 5000 words out of my day’s imagination reservoir, I come into the daily goal refreshed, with a full day’s creative rest between rather small bursts of output.

So, after a long time struggling with my goals as a writer, I have found a system that is working for me. I’ve already handed in a bunch of contract work and am almost done with a new book for Little Fears Nightmare Edition.

A side effect of the new plan saw my last bit of contract work line up with May 31st, meaning I was free to start new projects on June 1st. After some noodling, I put down designs for the Big Summer Project, which I’ve codenamed Operation: Last Chance. This is something that terrifies and excites me in almost equal measure. See, there’s more to this new phase than I have said, more at stake than simply hitting a daily goal, but I can’t talk about it just now. I’ll leave the details of that for another time.

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Conduit 2: Out Today!

As you may remember, I spent a good portion of my summer last year working with the fine folks at High Voltage Software on their upcoming Wii-exclusive shooter Conduit 2. After seeing a few delays (very common in the video game biz), I am happy to tell you that Conduit 2 hits store shelves today. If you have a GameStop local to you, you can pick up the Limited Edition of the game (which includes a 44-page art booklet as well as an exclusive suit of multiplayer armor and a fancy version of the game’s All-Seeing Eye) for the same price as the regular edition other stores have.

I can’t wait to tear open a copy and get playing. I really enjoyed the game while it was in pre-alpha development and can only imagine how good it must be now.

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Interview with Geekcentricity

A couple weeks ago, author and gamer Jonathan Reynolds interviewed me for Geekcentricity. Topics ranged from my geek cred (I have little) to the inspiration behind Little Fears, to my video game work, to what items I consider indispensable when it comes to exploring dungeons.

You can read the interview right here. Thanks to Jonathan and the folks at Geekcentricity for the chat!

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I’m Writing for AdventureGamers.com

I’ve been a fan of point-and-click adventure games since I was a teen. Like a lot of my hobbies, I came to it through my brother who introduced me to games like Prisoner of Ice, Bad Mojo, and Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father. Once I had my own PC, my first game purchase was Sanitarium and I soon moved on to Grim Fandango and Blade Runner, two classics of the genre. I took a break from gaming in the early 2000s but I came back big time in 2005. Quickly upon my return, I rediscovered my love of point-and-click adventure titles. I fell hard for Syberia I & II, Still Life, Puzzle Agent, Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk, and many others. Right now, my computer’s desktop is littered with shortcuts to adventure titles from the new games on retail shelves and Steam to the not-so-new from my personal archive or Good Old Games.

My love of the genre is well-documented, as many online and face-to-face conversations attest. And that love is about to be even more documented as I have recently joined the world’s most popular site dedicated to my favorite genre, AdventureGamers.com, as a Staff Writer. My first article, a preview of the hotly-anticipated A New Beginning is up already, and I’ll be contributing as much as the site’s editor-in-chief Jack Allin and my schedule will allow.

If you dig adventure games, you should already be checking out AdventureGamers.com. My presence there, on the main page and in the forums, is just a bonus, right?

Right?

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