My games are now available at DriveThruRPG!

So one of the things I like to do to amuse myself is present my games in the medium of the day. For Full Light, Full Steam, this meant as excerpts from pamphlets, which were booming in the victorian era. For Sons of Liberty, this meant a newspaper-like format, although I decided not to cram everything down to 8pt like the colonial papers of the time. It’s something that I doubt anybody notices, but it keeps me entertained.

One of the unforeseen advantages of my approach, though, was that it left me with a lot of steampunk “pamphlets” full of colorful descriptions of a fictional solar system and short-short stories of the people who call it home. Content I might be able to use in other ways. For instance, I’ve had a “Spirit of the Full Light Full Steam Century” project on my hard drive for years that I never quite complete. Recently, though, as I’ve been putting Stories from Rooksbridge onto Kindle, it occurred to me that this stuff might be of interest to folks all on their own: pamphlets of the digital age, as kindle minibooks.

There are three, and I fired them off into the intarwebs at 99 cents a piece:

• For Queen and Country
• A Daring Tourist’s Solagraphy
• The Layman’s Reports from the Royal Society

And of course, I’ve got Rooksbridge available on Kindle, too, for the usual two-buck price:

• Dirty Work
• Getting By
• The Divide
• Ravens, Rooks, and Crows

Publishing to Kindle, it turns out, is dead-easy… as long as you have your content in an easily-accessible format, like XML or HTML. The above titles were approved for the Kindle store a couple days ago; when I went to check if they were live, they already had a couple sales on them. This with absolutely zero promotion, which is pretty neat. For maybe an hour’s effort on my part, it’s a nice little revenue stream that I don’t really have to do much to manage. The percentage of revenues that gets back to me is less than awesome (35%), but in the grand scheme of things, that’s 35% of revenue that I doubt I’d be tapping any other way.

So those of you who are Kindle-enabled: here’s another way to get some tasty, tasty content from my corner of the world. Hope you enjoy!

The fourth installment of my Rooksbridge serial fiction project is now available at Rooksbridge.com. This chapbook, Ravens, Rooks, and Crows, sees the arrival of George Aldcourt, the Baroness’ dissolute brother, trailing behind him a train of unwanted courtiers and suitors. Now the once-quiet town of Guilford is awash with strangers, which makes it that much easier for conspirators to maneuver against the Bramwood court.

You can read the preview or order the digital edition.

So far I’ve been releasing these on the first of the month, and as you can see, I fell a little behind this month. Summer travel really sucks time out of a schedule! I’m putting up the Digital Edition now, and recording the Audiofile this week: if all goes well, posting it by Friday. The physical chapbooks are going to take a little longer than that. I don’t expect to see them before November. Chalk this one up as a lesson learned, and extra motivation to get the next chapbook, Where There Is Smoke, in the can and into the pipes as soon as humanly possible!

Aside from scheduling, this chapbook had its difficulties in writing. You’ll see when you read, but I had to be pretty awful to my characters, and that’s sometimes difficult to do. I went through a number of versions, each one flinching away from what Had To Be Done, and each one spawning off problems in theme wrinkles and plot holes, until I finally told myself to just go ahead and Do It. Miraculously, all the problems cleared up as soon as I made certain characters sorry they ever got involved in Rooksbridge. It’s amazing what a red-hot coal can do when properly applied.

With this chapbook, I feel like the cast of characters is assembled, the setting is established, and the premise of the series is pretty solid. In a lot of ways, this was the chapbook that I’ve been looking forward to writing since I started. We finally see the baroness in action and most of the cast working together (which is to say, working at cross purposes) to create the kinds of stories I’m really after. This is the kind of fiction I always want to read — and I hope it’s the kind of fiction that you enjoy.

Happy reading (and cringing)!
— Josh

Rooksbridge Serial Fiction Project – Rooksbridge #4: Ravens, Rooks, and Crows – Digital Edition

All my games and books are now available at the Kallisti Press Un-Store!

I somehow neglected to post about it here, but:

The latest Rooksbridge chapbook, The Divide, is now available! You can grab it in digital, audio, or print formats (or a bundle of all three).

This month, it’s a murder mystery complete with creepy eldritch evil and amusing if disturbing children. And you know, with a recipe like that, what can go wrong?

I’m also running a little promotion by which you can pick up a free digital or audio version of The Divide by just posting a hello (and your digital-or-audio preference) in the rooksbridge.com forums. So if you’re vaguely interested but not yet sold on the idea, swing by and see what’s cookin.

Mister Chris Perrin interviewed me a little while ago, and the result is now posted up in his new weekly article on RPG.net, “Small Press, Big Game.” The interview is actually about all my games, which was a bit of a departure from other interviews I’ve done before. It was interesting talking about how my games relate to one another — and interesting forming those thoughts as they spilled out of my mouth. In any case, I am Mr. Perrin’s second designer (somehow I’m supposed to follow Luke Crane and Mouseguard — no pressure there!), and I’m looking forward to seeing what other designers Chris lines up in the future.

Files sent to printer. It’s always a big and heart-stopping step when you send stuff out of your house and into the world. It becomes real (and starts incurring expenses), and there’s always the little voice in the back of your head screaming not to do it, keep your head down, don’t try or else you might fail. And I end up walking around all shaky and distracted for the rest of the day: was that a big mistake?

Seth recently asked if the blog would explode when the tower hit full. The answer is yes: explode in awesomeness. I will also, I think, get to take a nap. I’ve been pounding away on this project like mad to get it to completion. Most recently, XML has saved my ass and made a lot of things lots easier. There’s nothing quite like laying out sixty pages by hitting an update button.

I’m presently looking at a launch date of August 1st. Fingers crossed…

Progress…

As the mighty Fred Hicks might say: “I wonder what this means…”