Very soon, indeed this very week, I am releasing two novellas - indeed, two versions of the same novella. One as a fantasy adventure, and one as a fantasy adventure that is also a romance. We're gonna start digital; if it was good enough for MIke's living god Hugh "Wool" Howey, it's good enough for me. They'll be available right from our store.
I asked John Scalzi how to write books, because he certainly would know. In a bizarre symmetry, I only know him because he reached out in the primordial era of the Internet and asked if he could advertise on the site. He was one of our first dedicated advertisers, and might literally have been the first. But he told me something that was a comfort to me on the writing front: namely, that I have been writing on here since nineteen ninety-eight. And if you take it all together, all of it, and it is a lot, it's probably a couple books just there.
That wasn't the comforting part. This is: I was like, yeah, but those are all short things. They aren't long things, Jonathan. I'm asking about long things! I could tangibly feel the shrug in his response. He said "you write short, to write long."
Oh, that's all? That's when I knew I could do it. He gave that to me. I didn't really believe I could up to that point. And now, technically, I've done it twice.
I have read lots of books but the ones that hit me at very specific moments and had an outsized influence were from the inheritors of the old science fiction pulps. The medium itself hemmed them in, the way a three panel comic might: an unrelenting, de facto editor. Short, aggressive, and Ellisonian, they get in and get out. I wanted them to be short because I wanted to write a snack. I wanted to write the equivalent of a pringle, something you could pop in your mind and remain hungry. The first of the snacks I will offer you is Acquisitions Incorporated: Initiation, with a cover collab between Mike Krahulik and Francisco "Kiko" Villasenor.
This story is about a lot of things, it does occasionally endeavor to get fancy, but at root it is the story of how Ominifis Dran and James Winifred Darkmagic The Third first meet as boys. For those who are familiar with Acquisitions Incorporated: The "C" Team, there might be a little treat or two for those of you in what was once called The Shadow Council. The circumstances of their meeting - and hints toward the future we know from the longest running campaign in "Actual Play" - do not require any knowledge of the future or the past. I just want to give you another world for a very, very brief period of time. This is my first book and I hope you enjoy it.
But there is another book, whose cover was fathered by Gavin Greco. Can you perceive the hidden subtext?!?
This book is also about the two of them meeting, although I would say that it features substantially more yearning between the Dran and the Magic. It's a romance. Though the two books share text, none of that text means the same things really. Even the parts that are the same aren't really the same. This book is about Dranmagic. And in writing this book, I completely got it. I got the ship. It seems really fucking obvious actually, and it's a reading that there is plenty of support for even if it's not the intention. And writing this book made the other book better. Dabe laid out both books, and they each have a different energy just from that, but this take on the novella has the traditional Acquisitions Incorporated warning at the beginning - it's more freewheeling, more fun, takes liberties. In other words: it features Adults, using Adult language.
It absolutely warrants reading both, and I hope that it's as fun to see those differences as it was for me to arrange all of it for your enjoyment. They go up for sale very, very, very soon. It would be really cool if you grabbed one or both; I sort of think this is what I'd like to be, now. Like, a "book man." Whatever you call a person who writes books.
(CW)TB out.
