“She was the one who had the egg,” I said. It was a lie, of course. Fiera had probably never set a finger on the egg, but Yabair didn’t know that.
“I suspected as much,” he said. “Can we now consider this matter well and finally closed?”
“I damn well hope so,” I said.
We rode in silence for a while after that, the griffin circling lower and lower above Dragon City. It wasn’t until we reached the level of Wizards Way that Yabair spoke. “Where would you like me to drop you?” he said.
I thought about this. My place had been destroyed. Moira and Danto were in the hospital. Cindra and Kells had their kids at home. Belle had kicked me out. Much as I liked Kai at the moment, there was no way I was heading into Goblintown to find him and see if he had some space for me to stay.
On most nights like this, I’d have turned to the Gütmanns, but they were all dead. I could only hope they’d rest a little bit easier now.
“Take me to the Quill,” I said in the end. “I could use a drink.”
“Done,” said Yabair. “And after the week I’ve had I may join you.”
On just about any other day, I’d have been suspicious of Yabair and his motives. At the moment, I was too damn weary to care. “All right,” I said, “but you’re buying.”
THE END
The story continues in Bad Times in Dragon City.
Special Thanks
This book — this entire series — would not have been possible without the support of the many people who backed the Kickstarter drive for the trilogy of Shotguns & Sorcery novels. Each and every one of you has my gratitude for your faith in this project.
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The Origin of
Shotguns & Sorcery
As with Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World, Shotguns & Sorcery started out as a roleplaying game, but it was one that was never made. I first came up with the idea for it back in the 1990s, but because I was helping run a tabletop gaming company called Pinnacle Entertainment Group at the time, I never got around to working on it, spending my time working on things like Deadlands and Brave New World instead. I left Pinnacle Entertainment Group at the start of 2000, though, and brought Brave New World over with me to AEG, which purchased it from me and signed me up to write books for it for a year.
As that year wrapped up, AEG decided to mothball the Brave New World game, and I was ready to find something new to do. This was at the height of the d20 craze, so I decided to dust off Shotguns & Sorcery and shop it around as a tabletop roleplaying game setting. In the end, I wound up signing a contract with Mongoose Publishing to license the game to them and have them hire me to write it. By the end of 2001, we were ready to go, hoping to launch the game under the name ShadowKnight at Gen Con 2002.
Then my wife Ann became pregnant with quadruplets.
Plans Change
That, as you might imagine, shot most of my other plans to hell. Instead of working on the game, I spent much of 2002 taking care of my extremely pregnant wife and our three-year-old son Marty, and once the babies were born, I pitched in with taking care of our tiny Pat, Nick, Ken, and Helen too.
After the quads were born, Ann and I decided that she should stay home to take care of them, at least for the first year or two. Since we’d been getting our health insurance benefits through her job as a school social worker, that meant we needed another way to make sure our exploding family’s health care needs were covered. Finding an insurer willing to sign me up with four extremely premature babies on my hands proved a challenge, so I went looking for a job that came with benefits instead.
I wound up working as the director of the adventure games division of Human Head Studios up in Madison, Wisconsin, about an hour’s drive north of my home. They kindly agreed to allow me to telecommute two days a week so I didn’t have to waste any more time commuting than necessary.
Human Head is a computer game developer famous for the games Rune and Prey, but the guy running the company at the time — Tim Gerritsen — envisioned setting up a tabletop games division in which we could try out ideas for settings or games before committing to them as video games. Since video games cost at least an order of magnitude more to publish, it made some sense.
I worked for Human Head for nearly two years, and we put out a couple excellent games: The Redhurst Academy of Magic (an award-winning d20 sourcebook) and Dracula’s Revenge (a tactical board game of vampire hunting). Neither of them became computer games, although I wrote a two-issue comic book mini-series about Dracula’s Revenge for IDW back then.
Back to It
That period was the only time I’ve worked full-time for someone else since a short stint on a student work visa I did with Games Workshop when I was fresh out of college. (That’s a great story, but too long to get down here.) Even so, I kept freelancing, mostly developing games for other people. In what spare time I had, I also started writing novels for Wizards of the Coast and Games Workshop, the first of which — Secret of the Spiritkeeper and Blood Bowl — hit shelves in 2004.
It was a crazy, busy couple years, and I didn’t sleep much.
The moment Ann started itching to get back to work in the fall of 2004, I put in my resignation, and we signed up for COBRA insurance to keep us covered until she returned to school social work the next year as the homeless student liaison for the Janesville School District. Much as I liked the folks at Human Head and appreciated the job, I had to get back to doing my own thing.
I haven’t looked back since.
The Stories
After all that, I mostly forgot about Shotguns & Sorcery until 2010, when my pal Robin Laws asked if I’d be interested in contributing a short story to an anthology he’d concocted called The New Hero. The theme of the book was based around Robin’s literary theory of the iconic hero. In many stories, the hero is supposed to go through some kind of change, a character arc, as it’s often called. We know, though, that many heroes — especially in series fiction — don’t change much if at all. Instead, as Robin theorized, they change the world about them by being true to themselves.
Think of heroes like Sherlock Holmes, Batman, James Bond, and so on. They aren’t affected by their environments nearly as much as they affect them. Those are iconic heroes.
Robin charged me and the other authors to come up with heroes like this for our own stories and, hopefully, to use them in later stories too. For mine, I unearthed Shotguns & Sorcery and created a hero to fit the setting, a hardboiled ex-adventurer by the name of Max Gibson.That original story hasn’t seen the light of day yet, but it should be published later this year through the brand-new Stone Skin Press, a fiction imprint Robin now runs for our mutual friends at the tabletop games company Pelgrane Press. That first Shotguns & Sorcery story, “Friends Like These,” is slated to appear in The New Hero 2.
Still, I enjoyed writing about Max’s adventure so much I wrote another one for the Carnage & Consequences anthology edited by Marc Tassin, which came out in the summer of 2011. Once I started planning for my 12 for ’12 challenge, I couldn’t resist adding it to the lineup. I hope you enjoyed this book enough that you can see why.
The Origin of 12 for ’12
Back in October of 2011, I announced the 12 for ’12 project, in which I planned to attempt to write a short novel every month in 2012.
So far, it’s been a huge success. Last November and December, I ran a Kickstarter drive to fund the first trilogy of books, and we raised over $13,000 in pledges, well over four times the original goal. That unlocked all three books, and I set off to write them, starting January 1. In February and March, I ran the second Kickstarter to raise money for my Shotguns & Sorcery fantasy noir trilogy, and that did well too, bringing in over $12,000 and more than 330 backers.
I finished all three novels on time, completing the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World trilogy. The first book — Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revolution — came out in May. The second and third — Revelation and Resolution — came out in July.
You’re holding the fourth book — Hard Times in Dragon City, the first book of the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy — in your hands.
Can I Do It?
As I mentioned, these novels are a little short. For purposes of 12 for ’12, I defined “novel” as a work of fiction that’s at least 50,000 words. The Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards each define a novel as anything over 40,000 words, but I wanted to be a bit more ambitious.
Fifty thousand words ma
y seem like a lot, but most of my previous novels ranged from 80–100,000 words, so that makes these substantially shorter, more in line with the size of novels that used to get published before the publishing industry made the push for doorstop-sized tomes we see on shelves now that take years to write and months to read.
That’s also, not coincidentally, the number of words writers shoot for during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which happens in November every year. Last year, over 200,000 people gave it a shot, and 37,500 actually crossed the finish line on time. Of course, I’m not taking on a month-long sprint but a year-long marathon.
I’m a full-time writer — this is my day job — and disasters aside, I write fast, often between 3,000 to 5,000 words per day. That makes 50,000 words per month doable. Toss in the other freelance gigs I don’t plan to give up, though, like writing the Magic: The Gathering comic for IDW, and that makes completing 12 for ’12 a bit more of a press. Still, so far, so good.
What’s Next?
In June, 2012, I wrapped up the third 12 for ’12 Kickstarter. This one was for a trilogy called Dangerous Games, a collection of modern-day thrillers set at a large gaming convention, something I know a great deal about, having made a living as a game designer too for over two decades. It was a huge success, bringing in over $18,000 from nearly 400 backers, the best of the drives so far.
In September, 2012, I brought it all to a resounding crescendo with a fourth and final Kickstarter drive for a bunch of books called Monster Academy. It’s a trilogy of young adult novels set in a fantasy world in which the good guys win, but then have to figure out what to do with all the innocent young monsters they still have around. So they set up a school to try to teach them right from wrong — with mixed success.
Kickstarter, by the way, is a crowdfunding platform, a website (Kickstarter.com) on which creators can post projects and ask backers to chip in to help make them happen. No one gets charged anything, though, unless the funding drive meets its goal and the project is greenlit. Those who join in on the Kickstarters get the books before anyone else, within just a few months of when I complete them, and have the chance to claim all sorts of other cool rewards too.
Now I just have to finish writing the books. As of December, 2012, I announced that I was going to shoot for 13 books in 13 months instead. Back in the spring of 2012, I took a short break from 12 for ’12 and wrote a novel called The Con Job based on the TV show Leverage created by Chris Downey and my friend John Rogers. That put me about a month behind on my aims for 12 for ’12, so I’m going to take up that slack in January of 2013.