1) A webcomic appreciation of Doctor Who. via @sinboy
2) The invasive species diet. I don’t care how much good it does for the planet, I’m not eating nutria.
3) The Dalek Relaxation Tape. Video.
4) Worst Album Covers Ever. Some of these are NSFW.
5) It’s Official: Star Wars Kinect Is the Worst Star Wars Thing Ever. I don’t know. To me, a little silliness if just fine.
6) D&D: The Important Questions
7) Awesome animated gifs. No, seriously for real.
The Spirit of the Century Kickstarter hit $25K, so I will definitely be writing KING KHAN after I turn in A BLESSING OF MONSTERS. The Kickstarter isn’t over yet, though! If you pledge ten bucks, you get all the novels as ebooks, and higher tiers give higher benefits. Plus, if they reach $30K, you get KHAN OF MARS from Stephen Blackmoore.
Very cool, you guys. Thank you.
As I write this on 5pm PST on Tuesday, the Kickstarter for the Professor Khan novel (KING KHAN!) I’m planning to write, which needed to reach $25K to be funded, now has fewer than twelve hundred dollars to go.
And it turns out I had the details of the stretch goals wrong in yesterday’s post: Evil Hat has already committed to publishing a stand alone Spirit of the Century novel starring mystic detective Benjamin Hu, written by Brian Clevinger, creator of Atomic Robo comics. I can’t believe I left that out. A $10 pledge would get you an ebook of that novel, too, along with all the others.
Also, BoingBoing did a brief news article on the Mayan-themed anthology I’m in, and now that project has less than fourteen hundred dollars to make its funding goal.
Kickstarter is doing pretty well by me right now.
It’s true. I don’t know if you’ve been following Evil Hat’s Dinopacalypse Kickstarter, but they started with a goal of $5K and blew through that in no time. This is one company that’s really making Kickstarter work for them.
Anyway, the “stretch goals” (projects they’ll fund if they reach funding levels past their original ones) have been pretty cool. At $15K, they committed to a whole trilogy of Dinopacalypse books…
Wait, I haven’t described these books yet, have I? They’re set in the Spirit of the Century game universe, an early 20th century pulp adventure role playing game in which player-characters who protect the world from conqueror apes using technology from lost Atlantis, thwart the schemes of Doctor Scrooge to steal from the poor, destroy death rays, and otherwise take out mad scientists, world conquerors, and evil sorcerers.
The Dinopacalypse books are about Gorilla Khan, conqueror ape, taking over the world with the help of psychic dinosaurs. Beyond that, the stretch goal for $20K is an Amelia Stone novel–she’s a hero who battles monster gangsters in 1930’s Paris–written by C.E. Murphy herself.
And then there’s the $25K goal, which will get you a book written by me. Yep, if the Kickstarter hits that mark, I will write a pulp adventure novel about Professor Khan, a hyper-intelligent gorilla turned Oxford professor and disillusioned “son” of Gorilla Khan. It’ll be set primarily in Hollywood(land) of the time period, along with some fun pulpy stuff thrown in.
And if Evil Hat reaches its stretch goal of $30K, Stephen Blackmoore, the author of the zombie noir City of the Lost, is going to write KHAN OF MARS. I know.
You can read more about the supporter levels and what pledges get you what swag right here in Update #6. A $10 dollar pledge gets you ebooks for all the novels, but for physical books you should read through the various tiers. You can also see artwork, get cool wallpapers of dudes with jet packs shooting pteranodons, etc, etc. Did I mention that the Kickstarter is already above $22K as I write this? Fewer than three thousand dollars in pledges will get this sucker going.
Anyway, I still haven’t settled on a title for intelligent ape in Hollywood novel. KING KHAN? PROFESSOR KHAN TAKES HOLLYWOOD? I dunno. Maybe, after I finish A BLESSING OF MONSTERS and start working on this, I’ll hold a contest.
I know I’m not one to be all rah rah about the projects I’m working on, but this one is definitely exciting.
Creepy, isn’t it?
If you guys don’t know, the book is an anthology set in the universe of the DON’T REST YOUR HEAD role-playing game. It’s a game in which people fall into a gothic nightmare world where they have limited abilities to control things (like lucid dreams) but the awful things they face are just way, way out there.
My story is called “Don’t Chew Your Food,” about a Food Network TV chef searching for a truth he doesn’t want to find. It was challenging as hell to write, but I really enjoyed it.
Anyway: Cover art! The book will be coming out in a few months, and I’ll be sure to announce it when it does.
Cory Doctorow is smart about DRM.
I really do have to prioritize my own web store. I was happy to sell DRM-free copies of my prequel, and I need to get that working again.
I’ve mentioned the Kickstarter for this anthology before, and I’ve linked to other writers’ snippets of their stories, as well as my own.
Well, now Martha Wells has posted her own snippet. Check it out.
As for the anthology, five bucks into the Kickstarter gets you an electronic copy of the entire book, and there are other benefits at higher levels.
Just sayin’
1) A history of the McFarlane/Gaiman Miracleman lawsuit.
2) Trompe l’oeil graffiti vanishes Egyptian military barrier
3) A working scientific calculator, built from Minecraft blocks.
4) Two words: Explosive. Polymerization. (Video)
5) Eight “forgotten” live-action children’s shows from the eighties. I doubt “Small Wonder” has been forgotten, but “My Secret Identity” is the only other one I remember (but I’m a bit old for this time period)
6) Heroic Goofballs: Aardman takes on DC. Video
7) An infographic showing the last words of executed inmates in Texas.
Yesterday, two and a half years after it came out, Child of Fire got a great review from BoingBoing.
And, because my luck is so very perfect, the Kindle store has gone down–apparently because of a database error–so the link from the review takes you to the physical book. No worries, though! I’m sure they’ll have it back up again in no time (grumbles). I’ve heard rumors that there are other places to buy ebooks, but who can tell whether that’s true or not?
The series runs to four books, which you can see over there on the right hand side of my blog. It’s also been cancelled. If you’re curious, I blogged about the reasons why it ended. You can also go to my home page to see the fantastic book trailer made by the guys at Wyrd.
Currently I have a new series in the works I’m about to send to my agent, an epic fantasy about two people caught up in the sudden collapse of an empire. Check out my Upcoming Books page for more info about that.
And welcome.
