You were the best. Underground, cyberpunk street samurai, burglars and breakers, agents of a mysterious spymaster with half a name, zero history, and a plan. He made the missions and you carried them out. You were the go-to crew for high-stakes break-ins, dangerous ops, and impossible escapes. You fought the megacorps, the tyrants, the killers—all for the sake of making a better future, of beating the Technocrats at their own game of shaping tomorrow. You always won, never quit, lived in the now. 

Until, eleven years ago, he disappeared…

Now he’s back—back in trouble—and it’s up to you to save him and maybe, along the way, change the world.

—

Instead of telling you more about the 55,000 words over 100+ pages that make up Always/Never/Now, my new cyberpunk-action RPG adventure based in part on Lady Blackbird, I shall point you to always-never-now.tumblr.com, where you can read more about it. Or I’ll point you at DriveThruRPG, where you can download the project for the remarkable price of free.

I do these so that you won’t so much read about A/N/N as you will instead read the actual A/N/N.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have fun with it.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about depression and what it’s like. It won’t be the last. Publishing that piece — or, more accurately, realizing as I type this that I published it for real — gave me the frets. It’s not even that drastic a work. It hardly says anything about what it’s like. But it was something that I wanted to get out there, in part because it gestures toward my self-awareness on Twitter (more aware than maybe some think) and in part because I thought it was the sort of thing that people outside of our little circle here might find helpful.

It’s nothing new. Lots of people have said it before. I wanted it said again.

Onward.

In case you’re curious, over the past three months, ReWired Tales stories have sold dozens of copies across all available titles, across all available venues. It’s somewhere around 100 or so sales right now, with royalties for those sales varying by venue.

The best-selling story so far is “Craftworld,” with 30-40 sales. “War Stars” is moving much slower than the launch titles did.

Signal boosts, like retweets, have been rare but meaningful. They mean a lot to me. Twitter and G+ seem to be where people share news about the stories. The actual Rewired Tales blog at Tumblr has little discernable effect on sales or promotion.

I have heard from almost no readers and have received virtually no reviews. Given the copies sold, this is unsurprising. This impacts the work only to the extent that I change my style and approach to future stories based on the feedback of my occasional alpha readers and my own whims, rather than telemetry from additional readers. Honestly, I don’t know what percentage of buyers have gotten around to reading the stories in the short time they’ve been available.

This is a slow-burn thing. I’m committed to writing six ReWired Tales, at least, to see how things go and grind out the experience points I wanted from the project. If I’m still enjoying this come July, I may write eight or ten or twelve stories in total and then collect them.

I have done, to be fair, very little promotion relative to what I could or should be doing. My expenses for the stories thus far are minimal. I have chosen not to purchase images for covers, for example, and instead just make little tonal pieces for each one. If I collect the stories into a book at the end of the project, that’s where I’ll pay for a cover and such.

At this point, I don’t count ReWired Tales as a success or a failure. It’s too soon to measure that sort of thing. So, onward.

You can continue to find these stories at DriveThruFiction and at Amazon.

War Stars

Perhaps you’ve seen me mentioning the ReWired Tales project on Twitter, G+, or Tumblr already — I hope you have! — and you’ve thought you’d get around to them. Here’s another reason to get around to them: the March tale, called “War Stars,” is now available!

Here’s what the story is about… sort of:

Not long from now, in a war-torn city, a journalist embedded with a military force confronts a contrast between the wars we idolize and the wars we fight. Stranded in a blasted metropolis, the journalist travels with her wounded unit on a dangerous mission to use next-generation weaponry and support robots to locate and eliminate a hidden rebel base. But in the fog of war, the story we want isn’t always the story we get.

Here’s what the story is about, in another way:

I sat down with the March issue of Wired magazine to seek out inspiration for the next ReWired tale and discovered the issue had a lot to say about Star Wars, in one section, and things to say about the art of war, in another section. Those combined to inspire “War Stars,” a story that’s about our future as much as it’s about inspiration and awareness. But, of course, I know more about Star Wars than I do about actual warfare, and maybe that’ll be obvious as you wade into this tale. I’ve intentionally (and maybe, in some places, accidentally) hidden quite a few little references and allusions into this story — some are obvious, some are meaningful, and some are different combinations of obvious and meaningful. This is a playful tale.

(The cover is drab, I know. I’ll talk about why that is in another post.)

Once you’ve read the new story, I’d love to hear what you think of it — and which allusions you found in the text. Sound off in the comments?

You can find the new story, “War Stars,” up at DriveThruFiction and at Amazon for about one dollar at each venue. That dollar gets you the story for the Kindle at Amazon and it gets you a ZIP file containing the story in a few ebook formats at DriveThru.

Want a quick peek at the story itself?

Read more »

When I write, I put on music. When I play RPGs, I put on music. I don’t know anything about music, really, but here’s something I’m listening to.

David Holmes, composer and DJ, made the music for such Soderbergh films as Out of Sight and Haywire, plus every film in Soderbergh’s Ocean trilogy. All of those films have great sounds — Out of Sight’s soundtrack is so sharply put together that the last time I saw the movie, parts of the film fell away into memories of the soundtrack album — but one of these discs has driven me through work in a way the others have not: Ocean’s Twelve.

We can talk about the movie itself someplace else. This is about the sound.

As a writer, I find something about the energy and juxtaposition on this disc propulsive. The way the graceful charm of Ornella Vanoni’s “L’Appuntamento” transitions into the bassy, distorted verve of Holmes’s own “$165 Million + Interest (Into) The Round Up” takes me from contemplation into action. (The back half of that “Round Up” sometimes grates on me, though.)

For writing or play, you’ve got a slew of playful and melodramatic tracks here that build in terrific ways. “What R We Stealing” and “The Real Story” have terrific energies. “Yen On A Carousel” is a fantastic, uplifting sound for a swanky victory pulled from an ugly defeat.

Want to just get a taste of this? Two additional tracks came out as a single from this album: “Amsterdam” and “I Love Art… Really!” Both are repetitive motifs that loop well to create a bit of playful fun for any con.

My favorite piece out of all of these, though, is the dramatic, grandiose, complex sound of “7/29/04 The Day Of.” I play that track for dramatic arrivals, travel montages, moments of ecstatic panic, and all sorts of spirited scenes. The moment around 1:49, when the track gets anxious, is a great dramatic shift if you can nail it. If you miss it in the moment, the through-line sound of the track is still great for action-packed heists.

The mid-century-style swagger and cool on this album reminds me of Lalo Schifrin’s original Mission: Impossible sounds with all the military vibes stripped out. It’s a great sound for surreptitious antics and heisty shenanigans.

I bought Ocean’s Twelve on CD… I can’t remember where. It’s available, disc and download, from Amazon, iTunes, and elsewhere.