How your spending can improve (or do nothing for) your happiness (Twenty Palaces announcement)

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If you’ve been following the recent research on happiness, you might be surprised by some of what has been discovered. Yes, buying material objects can increase your happiness, but only in the very short term. Buying new clothes or a new hat is nice at first, but we quickly become accustomed to it and the happiness fades.

What makes us most happy–and makes for long-lasting happiness–is experiences, especially experiences that will be happening sometime in the not too distant future. The reason is that it’s not so much the experience (the vacation, the concert, the road trip) itself that brings joy, but the anticipation of it. Read this article in The New Republic for a magazine-length discussion:

What you can learn about the new science of smarter spending: Yes, money can make you happy.

One interesting finding was that people enjoyed TV shows more when they included commercial breaks, because that little teasing delay between acts increased their anticipation.

Why do I mention this? Well, books are both material objects and experiences, and sometimes it can be a long wait for a book to come out. That seems like the best of both worlds.

But I’m not bringing this up because of my Kickstarter, which ends this Saturday and which promises a fun experience some months from now when the trilogy (plus the unlocked bonus books) are finished and released. I mean, sure, you might think this topic would be a good way to promote a Kickstarter, but that’s not why I’m here.

I want to officially announce a paper edition of TWENTY PALACES, the self-published prequel to CHILD OF FIRE and the other Twenty Palaces novels.

No, it’s not available yet. I’m still trying to get the cover to work (that’s today’s task, alongside setting up a new Time Capsule) but telling you now so you know it will be out soon increases happiness, right? If, that is, you’re one of those people who wants to read the prequel but doesn’t do ebooks.

Why has it taken two years to get a paper edition? Two reasons that are really one reason: It’s a lot of work, even with help, and it was too depressing. When the cancellation of the series happened, I was really really down about it, and doing all the work needed for a self-published POD Twenty Palaces would have been too painful. Now, with a little distance, it’s more manageable.

With luck, it will be available by Christmas time.

Thanks!

I am interviewed about my Kickstarter

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I did an interview for HELP FUND MY ROBOT ARMY a Kickstarter anthology I’ve agreed to contribute to.

I’d sworn off short fiction for the next several months to focus on my longer work, but when John Joseph Adams asked me to add a story I had an idea immediately, one I absolutely have to write.

Anyway, in the interview I talk about the success my own Kickstarter has had.

Also today I posted a writeup of A KEY, AN EGG, AN UNFORTUNATE REMARK, which is an urban fantasy with a protagonist in her mid-sixties. Everyone who pledges at $12 or more will already get an ebook copy of this new book (that stretch goal has already been unlocked) but the next stretch goal will unlock a game supplement so folks can roleplay inside this setting.

Finally, the Kickstarter has broken through the $35,000 level (twice now, actually, because this is a time when people will cancel or downgrade their pledges). That’s pretty wild. Thank you for all your support.

Kickstarter Stretch Goal Achieved! New Stretch Goals!

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Avert your eyes if you can’t bear to read it!

First of all, we broke through the $34,000 mark and made Stretch Goal: Image. That means I can afford Chris McGrath covers for all three books.

I don’t need to tell you how HUGE that is.

I’ve just posted some new stretch goals if you want to check them out: Desktop wallpaper for the Chris McGrath art, another FATE Core supplement, and my upcoming short fiction collection, which will include a new Twenty Palaces short story. Follow the link to find out more.

Finally: Wow.

Just wow.

Randomness for 10/10

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1) Another drive-through prank, skeleton edition. Video. This one is funny and Halloween is coming up, so… (h/t Nick Kaufmann)

2) Banksy kicks off an art institute on the streets of New York.

3) What your style of beer says about you.

4) Hyperbole and a Half explains power, identity, and changing yourself with costumes.

5) 44 of the Best Scared Bros at Haunted House (2013 pictures). I will confess to enjoying these pictures of absolute terror to an unhealthy degree. Oh, and the body language is instructive for any writer, I guess.

6) Test your color IQ with an online test. My wife, who took the analog version of this test in art school, scored a 26, which is pretty good. Then my son took it and scored a perfect zero. I haven’t tried it myself.

7) The internet is full of “life hacks” but how many of them actually work? 30 Common Life Hacks Debunked. Video.

Things my son said while we watched Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn

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“Nice hair.”

“Oh hey! That’s Sam Axe!”

“wut.”

“Wow, this movie takes forever to get started!” <-- Sarcasm "I have no idea what is happening right now." "This is really cool! Who directed this?" "I like how there's always five doors to kick down." "This is a really great actor." <-- Said while Ash's evil hand dragged him unconscious across the floor "Oooo I can't watch this!" "Ha! A Farewell to Arms!”

“What?”

“Nope nope nope nope.”

“Ha ha! Oh my god! AAAAHH!” <-- eyeball bit "Did he bring the axe? I can't tell. He'd better have brought the axe." "Great. She's dead." <-- when character runs outside. "Oh my god." "What? What?”

“Is this really awesome makeup or cgi?”

“Aw, yeah! Chainsaw hand!”

“What. The. Heck. Whattheheck!”

“Chainsaw! Use the chainsaw!” (singing) “Chainsaw chainsaw to the neck! Chainsaw chainsaw to the neck!”

“AAAAH! Ha ha! Oh my god!”

and finally:

“Dad, did it every occur to you that maybe I don’t like horror movies?”

Hey, it’s on Netflix and it’s just as rough as I remember but even funnier.

Sunday Night Gaming has a family squabble

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Last session knocked off with the rescue of Walt’s daughter Ever, a girl who had her life shortened via genetic engineering. This session opened with a cut scene, in which the players saw a group of Xenari soldiers (those are the aliens who tried to commit genocide against the human race) found the body of the Xenari scientist our team interrogated and then… ahem… executed in cold blood.

In our defense, he was a big jerk.

Sadly, the alien soldiers didn’t seem all that pleased to find his corpse and the scanning devices they used promised to be quite advanced.

Action came up for the PCs with the party split. Evan (our resident mad scientist/anti-alien war hero or terrorist depending on your POV/Xenari executioner) was out of the party due to player illness. Finlay had returned and was sorting through her newly-acquired alien tech, trying to figure out what she could get for them. Walt retired to his home (which, seriously? Rich guys take out a contract on your life and you take your kid to your house?) with his daughter. Travis, for his part, had requested a meeting with his industrialist father and now found himself on a shuttle heading for an orbiting space station.

Ever began to get sick, running a high fever and experiencing quite a lot of pain. Walt shortly began to show similar symptoms, but with added nosebleeds. He called Finlay and she rushed over to help. As the two of them began to show increasingly severe symptoms, an X-Agg hit squad showed up and began shooting at them through the walls. Continue reading

Yesterday was book day for me?

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Honestly, I thought KING KHAN was going to be published two weeks from now, but it’s available on Amazon.com right now with a pub date of yesterday.

At Barnes & Noble, the ebook is available now but the paper book isn’t.

It’s confusing!

In any event, the book is already out. If you want both print and ebook, the best bet is probably to buy directly from the publisher where can get multiple formats for one price. Regardless, all the ebooks are DRM-free. I’m going to work up a post for the book sometime this morning, but hey, new book!

THE GREAT WAY mentioned on io9.com

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It seems my Kickstarter campaign made the list of io9.com’s crowdfund recs, which is a whole barrel full of awesome.

Welcome, io9.com readers. If you like the sample chapters, I should also mention that a pledge at the $12 level will get you the first book in THE GREAT WAY trilogy, called THE WAY INTO CHAOS (those are the sample chapters you’ve been reading) along with an ebook of my TWENTY PALACES prequel (cleverly titled: TWENTY PALACES) along with some other fiction mentioned in Kickstarter Update 5.

If you’ve already backed mine, check out some of the other project featured in that io9 article; some of them look pretty hot.

Agents of SHIELD, you disappoint me

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The first episode of AGENTS OF SHIELD was passable but the followup was downright boring. For one thing, the rebels coming out of the jungle with their machine guns? Dull. If you want me to give a shit about the rebels, they need to be capturing one of the team, hopefully someone that matters. Even better, one of the bad guy soldiers so there’s actual conflict regarding the Mysterious Device. Making it about a coup in a country we don’t know anything about is boring.

But I’m sure the jungle set was limited and the plane set was already there, so they moved the action into the bottle.

Anyway, Coulson continues to be fun and interesting (Note: when punched in the face he bled red blood, so I’m losing hope that he’ll become the Vision).

Here’s a list of things I’m already over:

    Ward insisting he’s a solo operative who blah blah blah.
    May’s secret past and her unwillingness to kung fu a bunch of people even though she totally does.
    Science geeks enthusing about science.
    Anything regarding team dynamics.
    Skye and her secret group.
    The make-believe that Coulson is fooled by Skye’s willingness to work with him. Is there anyone who doesn’t recognize that he’s using her to expose and ruin Rising Tide?
    Destroying powerful resources that would be useful in the next alien invasion, like, say, launching a death ray into the sun.

Things I want more of:

    Conflicts that direct outward. When the stakes of a show are high I don’t want to see squabbling. Fire the squabblers and bring in new people.
    People with superpowers. Pilot ep, yay. Weird device in the second ep, boo.
    A sense of actual changes to the world in the wake of an alien invasion. Politics. Culture. Show me what’s changed.
    Characters from the Marvel Comics setting.

About that last thing: I realize that Whedon has said he’s not going to turn the show into an Easter Egg hunt for fans of the comics. And he’s right not to do that. You don’t build a successful TV show by driving fan discussion into obscure trivia. If your Twitter hashtags are full of people talking about how some minor character in the second act is Jonathon Hart who would later become Jack of Hearts, you’re not getting a second season.

However, that doesn’t mean the show should use generic death rays and villains cribbed from the Marvel U movies. The comics are full of wacky, interesting ideas from five decades. Many of them aren’t appropriate for this setting and many can’t be done in a TV budget, but for god’s sake rummage around in that treasure chest and pull out something good because death rays and South American coups are not making full use of the property and it’s not going to cut it.

Oh what the hell: Here’s part of chapter 6, too

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Here’s part of chapter 6 of THE WAY INTO CHAOS, on sale now.

Just in case you missed them: Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Cazia

Cazia couldn’t help it; the idea of learning to fly a cart thrilled her.

Then she saw Lar scrabble across the gray tiles and she flushed with shame. He slipped and fell to one knee but quickly regained his footing, heading toward the chimneys at the front of the building. His red coat looked almost comical, and she wished he’d chosen something that would not stand out like a rose in the grass. Col followed close behind; Timush must have been still climbing on the rope.

She couldn’t look away from them. Yes, she’d just been promised a lesson in flying–flying–but the one person she loved most in the world, her own brother, had just rushed onto a battlefield—and he’d brought his two best friends. A strange feeling she couldn’t identify filled her like wind blowing into a tent. She felt hollow and fragile, as though the next misfortune would make her pop like a bit of froth, destroying her completely.

This is the feeling that comes just before grief. You are about to see your brother murdered in front of you because he is trying to be a hero which is your fault because this was your idea. This is how you feel just before grief overwhelms you and makes you wish you could die with him.

The screams from below became more intense, distracting her. The creatures tore through the crowd, knocking people about like brooms. Each victim received a terrible bite wound, some instantly fatal but not all, as the monsters battered their way through the mob. Men, women, and children fell before them. One of the city guard pushed against the surging mob in an effort to shut the Little Gate, but there was no hope of that.

Lar scrambled toward the chimneys at the front of the house. As he moved, he started to strip off that long, gaudy coat, but it tangled on the strap of his quiver.

“Here!” Col yelled. He slid out of his gray-and-red jacket, then tossed it to the prince. Lar held it by the collar and let the hem hang over the far edge of the roof where Cazia could not see. A moment later, the two of them heaved it back up but, only now it had a girl clinging to it.

It was the Indregai princess: pale, tiny, and severe in her white house robe. Cazia knew she was a few years older than Jagia, but she looked shockingly young. The princess scrambled handily onto the peak of the roof, then began chattering at the prince, pointing back the way she’d come.

Lar did not seem not interested in taking orders. He scrambled to his feet, pulling Colchua upright with him. Timush shouted at them, waving them back toward the dangling tether, and Cazia hissed at the noise he was making. Lar practically shoved the princess toward the cart, and a renewed chorus of screams from below made her do as she was told.

An iron dart cracked the tile roof near the chimney. The sound startled Cazia, but she drew a spike from her jacket pocket without thinking about it and began to cast.

One of the creatures had dragged itself over the edge of the roof. The clerk had cast at it, missing, but Doctor Warpoole had begun a spell of her own.

“Great Way,” Treygar prayed, his voice tight, “protect the prince. Keep him on your path.”

Doctor Warpoole’s dart flew with surprising speed, but it struck the creature low on the back, practically on its hip. Cazia did her best to lead with her own spell, just the way she had to lead the hoops during Doctor Twofin’s lessons. She struck the beast on its high back below the neck. It sprawled on the tiles and tumbled down the steep roof slope.

Cazia started another spell right away. A second creature appeared at the top of the southernmost chimney. The clerk fired another dart, striking the brick just below the creature’s furred hind hand. At least she was getting closer.

Cazia wasn’t going to finish her spell in time, and Doctor Warpoole hadn’t even started a new one yet. Lar had a quiver of his own, of course, but his back was turned. Cazia kept her hands moving, her mind falling into the necessary state, despite the fact that she knew it was futile. The only way she could avoid this awful grief would be if the creature hesitated.

It didn’t. It leaped from the chimney at the prince. Cazia could feel tragedy flying at her like a volley of arrows.

Oh, no! not a cliffhanger!

Yep. That’s the last of this particular story I’ll be releasing free on the blog. If you want to know what’s going to happen next, be sure to order a copy.

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