Jennifer Brozek | All posts tagged 'rpgs'

Awesomeness Happening

July has been kind of a crazy month. Between Westercon and catching up on all sorts of things that I was behind on, I have barely time to breath but such cool things are happening.

I have turned in my Gruntz fiction.

Alliteration Ink has posted the TOC for Dangers Untold.

Lily’s kickstarter for the Guidebook to Village by the Sea has funded and as of today has 7 days to go. I am cheering my little heart out for her.

Stoneskin Press has funded its anthology kickstarter and is in the process of funding stretch goals. This one is close to me because I have a story in The New Hero II anthology set in my weird west Mowry universe. The story called “Iron Achilles Heel” is about the first known weakness in my spirit hero, Joseph Lamb. I wrote this story because I think perfect or invulnerable heroes are boring. Joseph needed to be knocked down a peg so that his host, Eric Hamblin, could step up and show that he is a hero, too.

The Lady of Seeking in the City of Waiting received a really nice review from Curled Up reviewer Douglas R. Cobb.

My non-fiction book, Industry Talk: An Insider's Look at Writing RPGs and Editing Anthologies, has been sitting in the top 100 on Amazon’s Authorship list for a week now. I’d love to see it continue on like that. It is available in Kindle and paperback form.

I also had an article on Booklife Now go live. On Mentoring is my take on why being a mentor is such a good thing for both the mentor and the mentee.

Finally, I wanted to mention that a friend of mine emailed me a couple of days ago to rave about my non-fiction finance book called The Little Finance Book that Could. This is my story and daily rules that helped me get out of debt and to stay out of debt. They told me that I helped them pay of their credit cards—more than $7000—in two years. This is a great book for grads and those people going back to school. Debt sucks. Especially in this economy. It makes me pretty darned happy when someone says I helped them.

Now that I’ve shared all my good news, what’s yours? I’d love to hear about it.


Gruntz

I’ve been doing this social networking thing on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Livejournal for a while. I consider all of it to be an investment in my career. There is nothing more annoying about looking up an author or editor and finding nothing about them. Right or wrong, it makes me think that they either aren’t very good at the business or marketing aspects of being in the publishing industry.

That said, I always try to temper my business side with remaining a real person. I chat with people. Talk about stuff that isn’t work. Or talk about where I am in what I’m doing—the easy parts, the hard parts. I do like to be social.  Some of the social stuff is play and I do like to play. I think I’m pretty successful at balancing the two.

About a week ago, after talking about work I’m doing on the Battletech web series, a stranger on twitter pinged and asked if I was open for a gig. I get this question a lot and my answer is always: “It depends on my schedule, the subject matter, and the pay rate.”  Then we shifted to email for the rest of the conversation.

Short story still short, Robin Fitton has hired me to work on the fiction part of Gruntz. “Gruntz is a dedicated 15mm fast play wargame designed for skirmish level play with between 10 to 40 figures per side using combined arms (squads, support vehicles, tanks, VTOL's and artillery).”

I’m excited about this because I get to make up a lot of canon information about the Gruntz universe. Every faction will have signature leaders, houses/groups/etc.  With 11-12 stories to come up with, I’m still deciding on how this will happen. But believe me, there will be a variety. I’ve got permission to go wild and nothing is off limits.

I love jobs like this.

I also love getting jobs like this because I’m just being me on Twitter.

As an aside, there is an Indiegogo fundraiser for an Gruntz Army Builder App that is already funded and is into stretch goals.

Productive

When I'm writing, I'm pretty much head's down. Right now, I'm all about the Battletech webseries. I'm about to kill off the first NPC and then the first main character. Mostly you will hear, "I wrote 1000 words today."

I am also working a lot on Apocalypse Ink Productions. We have our regular "get on the same page" meeting on Wednesdays. And things are moving in multiple projects. I'm pleased and not yet overwhelmed.

I have enough to do that I am working to a specific schedule these days. It's wonderful and busy but not yet to the juggling chainsaws stage. Though, I can see it in the distance.

I have contracts for four anthologies (Beast Within 3, Beast Within 4, Coins of Chaos, Dangers Untold) with a couple more floating in the "in progress" ether. I can already tell you that the month of September is going to be crazy. But I'm looking forward to it.