Lonesome Robot Press :: Jack Graham

Eclipse Phase: Panopticon. Is that a monkey & an octopus in a pit fight? You bet your sweet ass it is, paatno-san.

The new Eclipse Phase hardcover, Panopticon: A Focused Eye on Transhumanity, Vol. I, went live for PDF sales on DriveThruRPG.net today. It’s available as both a standalone PDF and a Creative Commons-licensed hack pack so that players & GMs can mash up the art for their own use.

Physical copies of Panopticon will be available in  gaming stores (at least in the U.S.) on August 31. Support your FLGS! But if you just can’t wait that long, or don’t have a game store that stocks Eclipse Phase, it’s also available through Indie Press Revolution.

Panopticon features new material on uplifted animals, ubiquitous surveillance, and space habitats (the chapter I co-authored with Justin Kugler). Along with beautiful art and detailed setting information, it’s packed with new morphs, new gear, and new mechanics of use to both players and GMs. This is a great book to own if you’re into the high tech dungeon crawl or political aspects of the game, and the chapter on sentient animals is essential reading if your campaign involves uplifts. And the opening story, El Destino Verde, also written by me, ain’t too shabby, either… in my entirely humble opinion.

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Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring Twenties

Meanwhile, on the fiction front, my story Der Graue Engel appears in Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring ’20s. It’s got a little bit of Fritz Lang, a little bit of Cabaret, and a little bit of LeGuin’s Hainish Cycle, all turned loose in a Weimar Germany that’s about to hit the skids big time. I can’t wait to get my hands on the book myself, because it’s also got stories by three of my Clarion West 2010 classmates — Frank Ard, John Remy, and Andrew Romine — as well as by Paizo’s fiction editor, the estimable James Sutter. Keen-as-hell art by Galen Dara ices the cake. Our editors, Jaym Gates and Erika Holt, themed their last anthology, Rigor Amortis, around zombie erotica, so I highly doubt they pulled any punches on this one.

All right, enough marketing. I’ve got another chapter of Eclipse Phase: Rimward to polish off tonight…

Wikipedia doesn’t ask for donations very often, so when they do, I take notice. Consider supporting the Wikimedia Foundation. I use it every day, and I’m sure a lot of you do, too.

After months of Posthuman Studios wrangling with Amazon about a Catalyst-related ISBN mix-up, Eclipse Phase: Sunward is available on Amazon… But check your FLGS first!

I’m not sure who created this, but whoever they are, I’d like to shake their hand.

Thanks to the ’80s D&D logo, I can’t look at an ampersand without seeing a tiny dragon breathing fire.

I’m headed for Gen Con in a few hours. You can find me at the Sandstorm Productions booth. Sandstorm is Posthuman’s new publisher for Eclipse Phase. We’ll have the second printing of the EP core book, the GM’s Screen & Starter Adventure (for which I wrote the scenario), and our first major supplment, Sunward: the Inner System (for which I wrote the chapter on Mars). If you can’t make it to Gen Con, all three titles are available at Drivethru RPG, and your local game store should have them in August/September. Ask your FLGS to carry it!

This should be an exciting con. Eclipse Phase is up for four ENnie awards, we’re debuting new products, and we have a full slate of really excellent events on the con program. (I’m biased; I wrote one of them, Doctrine). The EP events are sold out currently, but don’t hesitate to stop by with a generic ticket. Old hands at Gen Con know that a table is sometimes light a player or two for the slot.

And please stop by the booth. We really enjoy talking to people who are interested in the game (heh… as long as you keep stories about your character’s exploits to a minimum).

After six weeks at the Clarion West writer’s workshop, it’s finally time for the eighteen of us to wrap things up and head home. While I’m ready to get back to that which we call “real life,” it’s sad, too. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time with a really wonderful group of people this summer. There’s no life like the life of the mind, and being fully engaged in writing for six weeks has really cracked my head open. I’m leaving here with a new perspective on what I write and how I write it, and I’ve met great people along the way.

I’ve also got a batch of stories I’m proud of, along with some intelligent advice on how to make them better. I’d be revising them for submission right now if I weren’t so damned exhausted.

Here’s some of what I learned:

• During Michael Bishop’s week, I got back on the path of beautiful writing. The workshop format for this week was to submit a bunch of short assignments, which would then be read allowed by Mike and given blind critiques. This stirred a bit of competitive spirit in me (which is a confession; they tell you not to do this). It got me ready to run hard and fast, and it gave the people who weren’t used to being critiqued a gentle entry into something that can be pretty rough for some to handle — having one’s work ripped apart.
• During Maureen McHugh’s week, I had a blinding flash of insight about how to structure novel projects, how to think about designing them. It wasn’t anything she taught directly, but Maureen is one of those people who’s so damned smart that stuff she says offhandedly can accidentally rewire your thinking. On my own initiative, I chose this week as a time to get serious about one of my main goals for Clarion — getting better with plot, dramatic tension, and narrative structure. Looking back on the stuff I’ve produced, I think I achieved this goal. No longer will the Spacecrafts workshop have to complain about my plotless narrative experiments! Ha!
• During Nnedi Okoraor’s week, I attained the realization that I am never going back to academia. Yay!
• During Graham Joyce’s week, I worked even more on matters pertaining to plot. Graham is seriously awesome at teaching this stuff. He has a series of great little 30 minute lectures he does on narrative structure that would benefit just about any writer.
• During Ellen Datlow’s week, I learned how to channel Ellen Datlow. So did some of my classmates (and it showed in the following week’s critiquing!). By “channeling Ellen,” I mean developing the ability to question and poke at my own writing during the revision process as if I were an editor trying to make it comprehensible to a reader.
• During Ian McDonald’s week, I stepped back, recovered, and tried to make sense of all I’d learned — and I found that it was good! We were also treated to some of Ian’s thoughts on screen writing and how the rigorous formats of screen- and teleplays can inform narrative structure in fiction.

I’ll probably write more about my Clarion experiences down the road, but the quick summary is:

1. I’m really glad I went.
2. If you’re someone who’s thinking about going, maybe you should. But you need to do it with an open mind. You need to go full of questions. You need to go with confidence in your own work but with a willingness to experiment and change.

I’m glad that I went at the time that I did, when I was mature enough (finally, ha!) to take some of the knocks and roll with  the unexpected, but not yet so set in my ways that I couldn’t use the experience to change and grow. I found the experience really encouraging and absolutely worth taking the time out of my life for.

Now: off to Gen Con!

Working on RPGs is not something you do for fame, and it definitely isn’t something you do for money, but… every so often, some recognition is nice.

So it was really cool to learn this morning that, hot on the heels of bringing home the 2010 Origins Award for Best RPG, Eclipse Phase earned four ENnie nods, including nominations for Best Writing and Product of the Year.

How cool. Ten year old me (who wanted nothing in the world more than to be a game designer at TSR — or an astronaut) would be pretty darn psyched. Heck, thirty-six year old me is happy about it, too.

Congratulations to my teammates. It’s sweet indeed when hard work gets a little recognition.

Left to right: Nancy Kress, Ursula LeGuin, Gary Wolfe, Walter John Williams, Connie Willis

I’ve been avoiding blogging during Clarion West, following the advice of our esteemed organizers to keep my eye on the ball. But here are some notes on a panel I went to at the Locus Awards today, which some might find interesting…

I’m at the Locus Awards, watching a panel with Nancy Kress, Ursula LeGuin, Walter John Williams, and Nancy Kress. The topic is researching for fiction.

Some interesting points that were brought up:

• Ursula: A lot of people think if they just do a ton of research, they’ve got a story. But that isn’t so.
• Walter: Travels a lot as research, but bemoans that it doesn’t impress anyone anymore because of the Net.
• Connie: One really important type of research is the way in which overheard conversations spawn story ideas.

The moderator, Gary Wolfe, asked: how do you keep your research transparent?

• Nancy: It’s okay to do an info dump (i.e., big expository section), if you earn it. Make the reader care, and then they’ll sit still for it.
• Ursula: Utopianist readers have greater patience for exposition, because they want to know how the utopia works. (Personally, I’d guess this could be extended to dystopianists, too).
• Connie: When you’re writing exposition, beware of writing beautifully. You might be indulging yourself.
• Ursula disagreed: You shouldn’t always kill your darlings. If a piece of exposition is beautiful, keep it.

On obsessive detail:

• Connie relates an irate letter she got from a fan who was upset that she’d mentioned the Molasses Swamp card in a Candyland game – a card that doesn’t exist in the game. This made her into an obsessive researcher. (There but for the grace of God go I? Oh, wait… I’m already this obsessive. Crap.)
• Walter: Nothing prompts nitpicking letters like getting a firearm wrong.

Inventive research:

• Ursula: Sometimes we invent things we can’t research. She mentions a marriage system she invented that was so complex it created continuity problems. Essentially, she had to research within her own writing. She takes Phillip Pullman to task for this – changing the metaphysical rules in the middle of his trilogy.
• This prompted a divertimento on magical/metaphysical systems and how they must have internally consistent rules.

On getting people right in a different time period or world:

• Connie: getting the mindset of people during the Blitz right was hard.

Maureen [McHugh, from audience]: do you ever put in the inexplicable?

• Ursula: Yes. In the last book of the Earthsea trilogy, she dealt with the fact that the wizards really had no idea what they were doing and hadn’t for some time.
• Kress: Got a lot of flak for Steel Across the Sky for combining genetic engineering with a metaphysical afterlife.
• Walter: Sci-fi readers have less tolerance for the inexplicable than fantasy readers. But it might also be that if someone thinks they’re reading a sci-fi novel, they’ll be annoyed if things go unexplained. Urban fantasy works when it plays on the tension between these two things.

Cool panel. And it’s pretty neat seeing sci fi’s grande dame still sharp as a tack!

This weekend I’m a redshirt at PAX East in Boston, and I’ll be running Eclipse Phase. If you’re coming to the show, I’m doing a two hour demo Saturday at 10 am & a full 4 hour game Sunday at 10 am. Check @EclipsePhase on Twitter for location info (as I’m not sure yet where the table will be).

More info here.