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.