KJToo

Matthew Wayne Selznick’s Brave Men Run: A Novel of the Sovereign Era is the latest podiobook to make the jump to the print market. The book will be released by Swarm Press this Sunday, 13 July 2008, and Matt has planned a day-long “Book Release Web-a-thon” to help promote sales on Amazon.com. There are plenty of details at the the book’s official site but the gist is this: beginning at 10am EST on Sunday and continuing every hour throughout the day, Matt will be streaming live video and reading new short stories set in the universe of his novels. Contributors include Mur Lafferty (Playing For Keeps), J.C. Hutchins (the 7th Son trilogy), Nathan Lowell (South Coast, Quarter Share) and other well-known podcasters and podiobook authors.

Brave Men Run is the story of Nate Charters, a teenaged boy who is about as far from normal as teenagers get: he looks different and he has abilities that he has kept hidden from his peers for his entire life. But when the existence of the so-called “Sovereigns” is announced on live television, Nate learns that he is not alone, and his life changes forever. Brave Men Run is a superhero coming-of-age story that doesn’t feel like it was lifted from the pages of a comic book, but rather like it was born in the halls of your own high school and on the streets of your home town.

Brave Men Run: A Novel of the Sovereign Era is still available as a free, serialized audiobook at Podiobooks.com, read by the author. The audio version was nominated for a Parsec Award in 2006.

In the dead of night, while all the world slumbered and creatures of unspeakable horror stirred beneath billions of beds, the latest episode of Pseudopod, The Sound of Horror, emerged from its glistening cocoon. Go, now, and listen to Among the Moabites by Michael Hartford, a tale of unexpected visitors and a little voyeurism. (Caution: Pseudopod is intended for mature audiences.)

Somewhere just before the two-year mark, parents typically stop reporting their child’s age in months. I had planned to report my young apprentice’s age in weeks until he legally became an adult, but that plan dropped by the wayside when I forgot to actually keep track of how many weeks old he is. I could have easily written a widget to manage that little bit of data for me, but it’s a little late in the game to go back to tracking the weeks; the last thing I want to be is gimmicky.

Kyle will not technically be thirty months old until the thirteenth of July but I suspect that, developmentally, not a whole lot will change in the next six days. On the other hand, he picks things up very quickly these days, so I suppose it’s possible that he might potty-train, count to twelve, learn to read and develop a cheap, clean and completely renewable energy source by next week. That’s just how far the Pendulum of Parental Expectations™ swings these days.

Yesterday, as I sat on the couch with a box of tissues trying to cope with an allergy attack, Kyle climbed on to my lap, looked up my nose and declared, “You got a boogie, Daddy.” He then climbed off my lap and headed for the stairs. “I get it!” he exclaimed as he ascended. He disappeared into the master bedroom and emerged a moment later, descending the stairs with a cotton swab clutched in his hand.

Laura and I occasionally use cotton swabs to clean Kyle’s nose when he has a particularly crusty cold, but those swabs are in a small box, tucked away in his room where he (ostensibly) can’t get at them. However, after watching daddy’s post-shower rituals on occasion, Kyle knows that there are cotton swabs in a jar we keep on a shelf over the toilet in the master bathroom; a toilet that he sometimes climbs when he wants to wash his hands with daddy.

So, Kyle descended with the cotton swab he got out of our bathroom1 and climbed back onto my lap. “Oh,” I said, reaching for the swab, “thank you!”

“I get it!” he repeated, and before I could stop him he jammed the tip of the cotton swab up my left nostril.

I don’t know if he got the boogie, but I managed to stop him short of drawing blood. Not, however, short of causing a firestorm of agony in my nose.

A very helpful and considerate firestorm of agony. And that made it worth the pain.

1. Time, I think, to move the cotton swabs. [back]

Here’s how it went down: Chris Miller and I hit the road in the MVoD at approximately 6:00 Friday morning, armed with a cooler full of bottled water, some geeky t-shirts and our Zoom H2 digital voice recorder.

Friday

• Arriving at around 9:00, we met Mur Lafferty, Jim Van Verth, the Pink Tornado, Cmaaarrr and SciFi Laura for breakfast at Max & Erma’s, buffet style.
• Registration. Piece of cake! Pro tip: pre-register; it saves time and money. I decided not to buy any event passes because I wanted to play it by ear. I didn’t even pick up a handy program guide; I was totally footloose and fancy free.
• The Board Room: Rio Grande Games was giving away two free games with the purchase of a $16 pass to the Board Room. I snagged Crocodile Pool Party and Dragonriders. I wound up selling Dragonriders for $10 to a random guy in the hall about four hours later.
• While in the Board Room, we played Pandemic with Mur, Jim, Cmar and Laura. I want this game, but it is apparently very scarce at the moment.
• Lunch at The North Market. I played it safe and went with a known quantity: General Tso’s Chicken. During lunch the phrase “Give in to your sapphic desires!” was uttered, entirely within the context of the conversation.
• Back to the Board Room for some Arkham Horror with all the expansions. We were joined by Shannon Farrell and Carlos (whose last name I can never remember). Three and a half hours later, we had to wrap up the game due to time constraints. By the end of the game, Cmar had tapped Granny no less than fifteen times; she was exhausted, but he was not.
• Eventually we found ourselves gathered for dinner at Buca di Beppo with all of the above plus David Moore, Mario Dongu, Rachel Ross, John and JD. No vicious Internet rumors were started after I finished my linguine. None.
• Karaoke at The Big Bar on Two in the Hyatt. Paul Tevis nailed Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and Rob Balder performed “Always a Goth Chick”, his parody of Billy Joel’s “Always a Woman.” Everyone else sucked. One whiskey sour, one Long Island Iced Tea and two gin and tonics later, it was…
• Bedtime!

Saturday

• Breakfast with David, Shannon, Cmaaarrr and SciFi Laura at Max & Erma’s.
• Chris had to return home unexpectedly due to an emergency (don’t worry, everyone’s fine).
• I took a quick trip to Best Buy, where I bought a Fujifilm Finepix J10 digital camera.
• I met up with Gunnar “Miscellaneous G™” Hultgren and Jon “Man Mountain” Pollom for lunch at The North Market. How many days in a row can I eat General Tso’s Chicken for lunch? The world may never know.
• Armed with my new camera, I roamed the halls of the convention center looking for photo-ops. I managed to get a picture of Wonder Woman, but that was about it. I also visited the dealer’s room and carefully avoided the Chessex Bin o’ Hepatitis (more commonly referred to as the big dice bin; I was tempted to pick up some cheap dice, but the idea of rooting around in there just wasn’t very appealing).
• Later in the afternoon, I attended the Heroes and Villains costume contest, sponsored by the Ohio Gamers Association. There weren’t hundreds (or even hundred, singular) of contestants, but there were some very good costumes. Matthew “Feedback” Atherton, winner of season one of Who Wants to Be a Superhero? was the master of ceremonies and he did a very good job and hung around to chat with people afterward. He even did a promo for the upcoming release of Mur’s superhero novel, Playing For Keeps (available on Amazon.com, August 25th). The guy is just too damn likable.
• Mur “dragged” us to a barbecue where we played Mad Scientist University. The card game was ridiculously fun, owing to some excellent players with truly wild imaginations. I knew we were in for a treat early on when Ralph Melton equipped dwarfs with decoder rings, shrunk them down Inner Space-style and injected them into a human being to decode RNA. We created a bizarre continuity involving vampires, penguins, the Moore sphere, and a fifty-page index written by mosquitos. Much of the game was recorded by David Moore and may eventually be released to the public, but only after heavy censoring by the Department of Homeland Security.
• David had to run off to play the role of an NPC in an ARG and it was Mur’s evening with The Pink Tornado, so Jim, Cmar, Laura and I went to the Board Room and broke out Tannhäuser, which is essentially a first-person shooter board game. I had played once before but opted not to participate, instead providing occasional helpful (I hope) tips with the rules based on my prior experience. I started zonking out around midnight, so it was soon…
• Bedtime!

Sunday

• At 10:00, we met for breakfast with the gang and Max & Erma’s. How many days in a row can I eat the same buffet for breakfast? Three.
• After breakfast, David, Mario and I returned to Room 929 to record The Secret Lair Origins Report. Assuming I didn’t completely fail my Use Zoom H2 Digital Recorder roll, we should have that posted in the next couple of days.
• At noon, I dashed to the dealer’s room to buy AmuseAmaze, a word game that I thought Laura might enjoy. By some stroke of luck, I found the rest of our merry gang playing some sort of card game and managed to say my goodbyes before dashing back to the Crown Plaza to…
• Pile my luggage and loot onto a cart, load up the MVoD and hit the highway.

And that pretty much wrapped it up for Origins 2008. With Mr. Miller soon moving to the Los Angeles area, I don’t know whether I’ll be inclined to attend Origins 2009, but I do know that my next convention is Con on the Cob in early October.

A few days ago, while still at Origins in Columbus, I suggested that photographic evidence of my presence there (not to mention some of the bizarre and shocking things I had witnessed) would be forthcoming.

I am not a liar.

All of the photographs you will see were taken with my new Fujifilm Finepix J10, a camera I purchased at Best Buy on Saturday morning and then forgot I had in my pocket for much of the remainder of the day. My absentmindedness is the reason you do not see even more photographs to shock and amaze, for the opportunities to capture the following events were missed entirely:

• A raging mob of Pokémon, led by a twelve-foot-tall Pikachu, turned the tables on a group of young children, chasing the terrified youngsters (all aged between four and nine years, by my approximation) through the convention center, muffled shouts of “Gotta catch ‘em all!” echoing through the hall as bystanders watched in stunned silence.
• During a corset fitting, a buxom young woman’s cleavage collapsed in on itself, creating a localized singularity that consumed every scrap of leather and link of chainmail in a five-meter radius before evaporating. Thirty-two seconds after the incident, the Troll & Toad booth quietly expanded to fill the empty space.
• A group of investigators actually won a game of Arkham Horror. After the initial celebration, all six participants spent the remainder of the convention attempting to replay every move made throughout the game to ensure that they had not somehow broken one or more rules in the course of play. A representative from Fantasy Flight Games was quoted as saying, “No way. No [bleep]ing way.” He then indicated that an upcoming expansion, entitled The One That Makes Winning Impossible, would correct the rules loophole that allowed the victory. Pre-order sales for the expansion have already broken records.
• During a game of Settlers of Catan, a player expressed a genuine desire to receive wood in exchange for sheep. He was understandably surprised when all four other players began to pelt him with wooden tokens and other small objects.

I am far from the only photographer to provide a visual record of the convention, and the curious may find additional evidence of strange goings-on elsewhere on the Intertubes, provided they know where to look.