The Sword Unbound Is Out! And other things.
The Sword Unbound is out! Reviews have been (mostly) positive, sales are (largely) out of my hands. I did a signing in my local Waterstones, and got interviewed by the Irish Examiner.
If you have read the book, reviewers and ratings on the hateful e-commerce site of your choice are always helpful. Amazon has started showing approximate sales (250+ sold in the last week looks great, but then you randomly click on some book you’ve never heard of and they’ve sold 10,000 copies in the same time), which is a wonderful way to waste a portion of the span of one’s precious life.
(The UK kindle, at least, of Sword Defiant seems to be on sale as I type, if you haven’t read that one.)
Also out - the Spanish translation of The Broken God. (I understand there are shiny things on offer if you order from the wonderful Gigamesh.) It’s wonderful how enthusiastic the Spanish readers are, and I hope they enjoy El Dies Caído.
Please insert my standard ‘it’s not a trilogy, I never said it was a trilogy, I’m writing more’ disclaimer here. Admittedly, the writing is going slowly - even though I’ve been working Book 4 on and off since 2020, the structure of it is proving amazingly tricky. I’ve started tracking progress over on my bluesky account.
Ongoing work - three different Tolkien things, two bits of computer games, and 13th Age material to support the 13th Age 2nd Edition Kickstarter
Recent reading included a very early copy of Mike Carey’s ONCE WAS WILLEM, which was fantastic. Oddly, it tickled my rpg conversion brain as I was reading it, because it’s a fantastic case study on how to use carefully phrased questions in character generation. Without trespassing onto the unholy ground of spoilers. every player character in a hypothetical game based on it would have to answer the following four questions:
WHAT STRANGE FATE DESTROYED YOUR OLD LIFE?
WHAT SUPERNATURAL POWER DID YOU RECEIVE?
WHY DO THE VILLAGERS FEAR, HATE OR MISTRUST YOU?
WHY DO YOU FEEL COMPELLED TO HELP PROTECT THE VILLAGE?
A setup like this accomplishes so much with only a few questions. Each player gets to create a uniquely twisted and traumatised character, they get to pick their kewl powers (which is always fun), it gets them to flesh out the village and its culture and inhabitants, it binds all the player characters together because of their shared concern, and gives the GM an instant way to start the campaign by threatening the village.
Strongly recommended novel. Fantastic use of language.
I’m just back from a weekend-long board gaming convention, where I played a dozen or so games, most of which I hadn’t played or in some cases even heard of. Some were short (like Vaalbara), others very very long (the boardgame adaptation of Slay The Spire is an absurdly, even overly, accurate translation of the computer game). The standout for me was Air, Land and Sea, a terribly clever little card game, with just 18 cards (in the vein of Love Letter). The Pelgrane booth’s only a few aisles over from the publisher, so I must make a pilgrimage at GenCon and grab my own copy.
It’s UK Games Expo this weekend, and I’m not there. Nor am I at Cymera, also this weekend. But the weather’s glorious where I am, and there’s a BBQ this evening, so it’s all fine.
Thanks for reading.
Currently reading: Rereading Annihilation
Currently watching: Nothing.