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Posts Tagged ‘kickstarter’

oops I lied

I thought I was done with publications for the year, but one more has slipped in under the wire! My flash story “Ten Minutes” is free to read online at The Cosmic Background. It’s born of my brain’s invincible impulse to narrate everything, including my own attempts at meditation — which led to me writing a story about meditation! And about something else, but you’ll have to read to find out what . . .

I’m particularly honored by this timing because The Cosmic Background is running a Kickstarter right now, and so the editor chose my piece as one to showcase what the magazine is doing. I’ll note that, very unusually for our field, TCB pays its slush readers — most markets rely on volunteers for that — so this is part of what your money will support if you pledge! Rewards include your very own eldritch horror in the mail, so check out the Kickstarter page and consider kicking a few bucks their way!

holy #$&!, we did it

The Rook and Rose pattern deck Kickstarter was a complete success. As in, we unlocked every single stretch goal, and raised nearly $3000 beyond the top one — a wonderful margin of safety against things like shipping costs increasing between now and when we deliver the decks.

Not gonna lie: before we launched this project, I was significantly worried that it would fail. I’ve run a successful Kickstarter before, but the goal for that one was a full order of magnitude smaller than this. $31,500 is a lot of money, and while I had no doubts about the loyalty of our fans, I had the very strong feeling we’d need to reach well beyond that circle to pull this off. All throughout July we were searching for ways to build up our pre-launch followers, and then I surrendered the entire month of August to nothing but Kickstarter and book promotion work: I told myself I would expect no fiction writing or revision out of myself in that time, and indeed, it was only by herculean effort that I managed to muster enough brain to spend one afternoon polishing a moderately time-sensitive thing. The rest of my time and energy was spent on answering backer questions, sending out updates, doing interviews and podcasts and AMAs, flitting between social media accounts on different networks, and mustering the chutzpah to ask friends point-blank to promote the campaign.

Thank you so much to everyone who helped with that. It is genuinely the case that we could not have succeeded, let alone this well, without the support of others. Alyc and I have wanted this deck to be a real thing for the past five years; now it will be. And we will never stop being grateful for that fact.

55 hours left in the Kickstarter + a new bonus!

I’ve got two days left at DragonCon and two and a half days left in the pattern deck Kickstarter. Can I survive them both? 😛

banner for the Rook and Rose pattern deck Kickstarter

We’re down to 55 hours and counting, and Alyc has decided to throw one more temptation into the mix. We already had a stretch goal to make digital art for a Rook & Rose “card” (currently just over $500 away), and we decided a while ago that if we get to 400 backers we’ll print that in the deck (we’re currently at 373), but they announced this morning that if the Rook and the Black Rose get a card, then dammit, Vargo and Peabody should as well. So if you want to see your favorite crime lord and adorable peacock spider on a card, help us get up and over that goal! All backers will receive the digital art, and every backer gets us closer to putting them in the physical deck as jokers, so even backing at the $1 tier helps us toward both goals.

Kickstarter progress! + other events!

I’ve been so busy promoting the pattern deck Kickstarter up one side of the internet and down the other that I’ve completely forgotten to update about its progress here! We’re at the halfway point of the campaign (it ends on September 5th), and as of me posting this, we’ve made it to 89% of our goal. Which is fabulous, but also I won’t breathe easy until we’re past the 100% line with a bit of cushion to spare. My thanks to everybody who’s been spreading the word about this — and don’t forget, all of our add-ons are available at every tier! So even if the deck itself isn’t of interest, you can back at $1 and still get access to signed books or bookplates, tea samples, personalized readings or horoscopes, art commissions, Tuckerizations, or your very own peacock brocade frock coat!

Meanwhile, we have some other promotional events lined up for the Kickstarter and the release of Labyrinth’s Heart. This upcoming Thursday the 24th, from 4-7 p.m. Central time (5-8 Eastern, 2-6 Pacific, 9-midnight UTC), we’ll be playing Rook & Rose D&D online, courtesy of New Orleans bookstore Tubby & Coo’s! Our special guest player for this event is the wonderful author and editor Fran Wilde, and I have no idea what will happen in the game except guaranteed hijinks.

Alyc and I will also be at DragonCon, though I don’t quite have a finalized schedule yet. If you’re attending and would like anything signed, feel free to catch me after a panel or ping us to arrange a meetup; I know that getting into the dealers’ building can be an incredibly time-consuming process, and we don’t mind signing items in passing to save you hours of waiting in line.

Finally, two pieces of non-Rook & Rose news: first, from now until the 27th, the ebook of A Natural History of Dragons is on sale for only $2.99! And second, looking ahead to October, I’m going to be in conversation with Kate Heartfield to promote our mutual Norse-inspired works, her novel The Valkyrie and my The Waking of Angantyr. That’s organized by Brookline Booksmith, and it’ll be on October 27th at 5 p.m. Pacific (8 Eastern, midnight UTC).

I know there are other things I need to scrape together to post about, but brain am mush, so they will have to wait . . .

LABYRINTH’S HEART is in the world!

Nearly six years after Alyc and I said “hey, let’s write the Rook and Rose trilogy together,” the story is complete!

cover art for LABYRINTH'S HEART by M.A. Carrick, showing a brown-skinned, blue-eyed man in an elaborate violet and gold mask

Labyrinth’s Heart is out in the world today, in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. Alyc and I will be celebrating with some carpal tunnel syndrome later on as we conduct an AMA over at r/Fantasy — I’m posting this before I go to bed and Alyc will be setting up the AMA once they wake up, so I don’t have a direct link yet, but you’ll see it there soon enough. My plan is to offer a one-card draw and its interpretation for every person who asks a question, so if you want to see some pattern-reading in action, here’s your chance!

Speaking of pattern, the Kickstarter is 2/3 of the way to goal! And since Alyc and I found a more efficient way of doing the gilding, we’ve decided to offer a third batch of premium decks; it seemed only fair to have a few available on the day the book comes out. So if you were regretting having missed the previous offerings, hie thee to Kickstarter and get one while they last!

(There are a lot of exclamation marks in this post, aren’t there? Six years, yo. It’s a long road to walk from “hey, let’s do this” to the final book being out.)

I should go to bed. But the book! It’s out in the world, for more than just early reviewers! How can I sleep at a time like this?

May we see the Face and not the Mask . . .

The Rook & Rose pattern deck Kickstarter is live!

A triptych of tarot-style cards: The Mask of Mirrors (a reflective face with no mouth), The Liar's Knot (an unraveling red noose-like knot above a watery background), and Labyrinth's Heart (a quiet, looping path amid low greenery)

Kickstarter doesn’t let you schedule a campaign to launch at a set time — you have to set it off manually — so last night I did that right before I went to bed, and then deliberately left both my phone and my laptop downstairs in the den, as far away from the bedroom as they could get, so I wouldn’t be tempted to just take a peek when I woke up in the middle of the night. This turned out to be a very good decision . . . and it meant that I woke up to the news that we were already about thirty percent funded! It’s slowed down since then, of course, and I’ve had to impose a rule on myself that I have to do something useful (like writing this blog post, or tidying something around the house) before I’m allowed to refresh the page and see if we’ve acquired another backer, but we’re now up to nearly forty percent, which is an excellent start.

In addition to the deck itself, we’re offering a variety of other rewards, like signed books from the trilogy (or bookplates if you already own them/don’t want to pay for shipping a book overseas), samples of our series-themed tea blends, your very own numinatrian horoscope, custom art, Tuckerization in one of my stories, and a frock coat sewn to your measurements in your choice of two gorgeous peacock brocades. For the truly splurgy (or groups of friends pooling their money), we’ll run you a one-shot RPG in the Rook & Rose setting for up to five players! The add-ons can be selected even if you only back at the $1 level, so if the deck isn’t of interest to you but other things are, you can always back minimally and then add on what you like.

And whether you back or not, signal-boosting is HUGELY appreciated! Right after social media cracks up like a frozen river in spring is uhhhh not a great time to be trying to make a project like this happen, so every bit of word of mouth is enormously helpful. We’ve got posts on Mastodon and The Service Formerly Known as Twitter, if you want to boost those, or just mention the deck anywhere you know of people who might find it appealing!

Kickstarter Artist Preview #3: H. Emiko Ogasawara

With the Kickstarter launching tomorrow, I bring you the last of our artists!

H. Emiko Ogasawara works in a dizzying variety of media: woodblock prints, pop-up books, ceramics, and more. I’ve known her for a few years — I think we met at the San Jose Worldcon in 2018 — and not only is she a great artist, but she has the kind of mind that digs deep into the context of the art; on the Discord server for our readers, she at one point asked about what type of paper-making is practiced in Vraszan, given that we talk about them having printing presses. Y’all know me; you know I love thinking through my worldbuilding in depth. Emiko managed to catch me flat-footed: I had not given so much as a moment’s thought to that question. But it absolutely delighted me that she asked!

We say in the story that pattern decks can either be hand-painted (for the fancy ones) or woodblock-printed (for those without so much money). Obviously we’re going more of a hand-painted style for the fronts of the cards, but for the backs, I really loved Emiko’s eye for design and attention to technology. In fact, she’s cut actual printing blocks for her backing! We’re not going to actually use them to print all the decks, of course — that would be wildly unfeasible — but she’s gone to work with carving tools and several stages of lino blocks to give the image that authentic look, which is above and beyond the call of duty.

As for her work in general, you can check out her website to see her range! For visual art, I was particularly charmed by this fellow:

Hanafuda Hannya Joker by H. Emiko Ogasawara, showing a grinning, horned wooden demon mask in the Japanese style

And with that, you have met all of our artists! Tomorrow, we kick this Kickstarter into gear!

Kickstarter Artist Preview: A.C. Esguerra

Time for a peek at the second of our artists! As Avery Liell-Kok will be doing the Face and Mask cards in the upcoming pattern deck, the wonderful A.C. Esguerra will be doing the bulk of the deck itself: all the “unaspected” cards in each thread, plus the seven clan cards.

A.C. has a gorgeous style that meshes beautifully with Avery’s watercolors. When they sent in their portfolio, my eye was immediately caught by this image:

The vivid colors, the dreamlike feel without sacrificing crisp detail — it felt absolutely perfect for our deck. You can check out more of A.C.’s work on their website and see the range of styles they practice, but this is absolutely the angle we fell in love with for the project.

One more artist to come!

Kickstarter Artist Preview: Avery Liell-Kok

In the lead-up to the launch our pattern deck Kickstarter, I want to give you all a glimpse of the art style to expect — starting with Avery Liell-Kok’s work!

I’m cheating a bit here because it lets me show off the painting Avery did as a gift for me. She asked for one of my favorite photos out of my own work, with no context; when I got to a certain point and then stalled out on trying to choose, she selected this one:

A waterbird (egret or heron) taking off from leaf-strewn seawater with a stone cliff behind

Her style lately is based on blind contours, drawing multiple times from a reference without looking at the page, and then watercolors over the line drawing. From my photo, she produced this:

A dreamlike painting of a waterbird (egret or heron) taking off from leaf-strewn seawater, with a stone cliff behind

My poor scan does not do justice to the details, believe me. And for a deck based in a setting with dream-related magic, the overlapping shapes and vibrant colors are perfect. Avery will be doing the Face and Mask cards for the deck, the ones representing Vraszenian deities — starting with The Mask of Mirrors, which you will see very soon!

It’s coming: the pattern deck Kickstarter!

Ever since Alyc and I started working on the Rook and Rose books, we’ve had an ambition: to make the pattern deck which features heavily in the story into a real, illustrated set of cards.

At long last, it is coming.

Or rather — as you’ll see if you click that link — the Kickstarter is coming. Paying for art from real! live! human! beings! costs money, so coming next month, we will be crowdfunding the deck. Right now you can sign up to be notified on launch, which is a very helpful thing to do; not only does it ensure you won’t forget, but having more pre-launch followers increases our visibility on Kickstarter, which in turn increases our chances of reaching our funding goal. So if you like the idea of the deck existing (as something other than the blank deck I marked up with Sharpie for writing purposes), sign up to be notified, and tell your friends!

It’ll be more than just the deck, too. We’ll be providing rules for games to play with the cards, and there will be rewards and add-ons ranging from signed books to tea blend samples to bespoke clothing to me and Alyc running an online one-shot RPG for you and your friends. (Yes, really: that will be on offer.) So even if the deck itself is a relatively small draw, we may have other things you want . . .

One Kickstarter ends; another begins!

As I post this, there are just twenty-three hours to go on the Kickstarter for Shapers of Worlds II, including a short story from yours truly. It’s reached its funding goal, but there are still plenty of prizes left, including signed copies of The Mask of Mirrors (all the ARCs of The Liar’s Knot have been claimed) and some ready-to-hang acrylic prints of my black-and-white photos:

black and white photos for the Shapers of Worlds II Kickstarter

And though I’m not personally involved with it, I’d like to bring The Deadlands to your attention: a Kickstarter for a new magazine, helmed by E. Catherine Tobler, the former editor of the much-missed Shimmer. (I also happen to be friends with the poetry editor, Sonya Taaffe, and the art director, Cory Skerry.) I find it hilarious that one of the backer rewards you can choose is a fake obituary detailing the peculiar manner in which you died . . . anyway, this one is running for a while, but some of the limited rewards have already sold out, so back now rather than later!

Two Kickstarters

I’ve mentioned both of these on Twitter, but since that medium is so ephemeral, it’s easy to miss things:

Both Apex Magazine and Uncanny Magazine are running Kickstarters right now. Both of them are award-winning publications, with lots of stories winding up on shortlists or nabbing the honors. Apex was on hiatus for a little over a year, but is now starting up again, which is really great news for the short fiction field. Their Kickstarter has been running longer and they’ve hit their main goal already; they’re almost to the stretch goal that will mean the entire next year of issues is fully funded. (After that there are a few more stretch goals for things like an indigenous and native creators special issue and an international creators special issue.) Uncanny’s Kickstarter just launched and is aimed at funding the whole year in one go; their stretch goals are for original cover art, paying a small stipend to staff, and increasing the pay rate for nonfiction essays. If you’re able to back one or both, that would be really amazing — I know there are so many things that need money right now, and for many people that’s in short supply, but these magazines are both vital parts of this corner of publishing. And both Apex and Uncanny have a lot of fiction online for you to check out, if you want a taste of what they do!

Kaiju, Tuckerization, and tornadoes

Strange Horizons is running a prize drawing as a fundraiser for the magazine. Enter for a chance to be Tuckerized in the book I’m writing right now, the sequel to the Memoirs of Lady Trent! Given the nature of this book, the most likely prospect is that you’ll wind up being some kind of expert on the Draconean language or other such nerdy topic, but there are a few other possibilities as well.

The Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II anthology is nearly halfway to goal. If you missed it before, this anthology will feature a short story from me based on the micro-setting I wrote for the Mecha vs. Monsters expansion for the Tiny Frontiers RPG, which took that concept and smashed it full-speed into the idea of high school science competitions. The story is one of the most gonzo things I’ve ever written, and you can help it become a published reality!

This is a very long article, but very worth reading if you want to get a sense of how terrifying tornadoes can be. I’m lucky that I never experienced one, despite living in Dallas for eighteen years; I did experience huddling in the back hall of our house, waiting to find out if we’d lose that particular game of meteorological Russian roulette.

(Juxtaposing that with the previous item: gonzo as my story is, it doesn’t come close to approximating the sheer destructive force of a tornado. But it’s also meant to be a moderately funny story, and there’s nothing funny about annihilation on that scale.)

Finally, not so much an item as a teaser for something upcoming: stay tuned to this space for some exciting news on February 6th!

This short story GOES UP TO ELEVEN

I recently finished my first short story of the year, which doesn’t yet have a title I am satisfied with, but which is destined for publication in Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters II, once the Kickstarter behind that link successfully funds. (It’s a quarter of the way there after one day, so odds are good.)

Drafting the story was interesting, because it’s been a while since I wrote something where my constant reminder to myself was GO BIGGER. In some ways “The Şiret Mask” last year, I suppose, but that was more caper-style ridiculousness. When it comes to sheer world-wrecking destruction, I think I have to go all the way back to In Ashes Lie, with its Great Fire and the battle between Prigurd and the Dragon in St. Paul’s Cathedral. But when the theme of your antho is kaiju, well, sheer world-wrecking destruction is very nearly an entry requirement.

(“Very nearly” because you could probably write a really interesting story about kaiju not trashing cities — something much quieter and more personal — and in fact I hope somebody in the lineup for this anthology does so. But that story is not my story.)

As for my story: it’s riffing off the microsetting I wrote for Tiny Frontiers: Mecha and Monsters, which was called “The Grand Prize,” and is basically what happens when somebody hands me the prompt “kaiju and mecha” and my brain immediately pairs that with high school science fairs. The short story takes place at the Twentieth Annual Metzger-Patel Genius Prize tournament, and that’s all I’ll say right now — except to remind you that if you want to read a story about teenaged robotics and bioengineering competitions gone massively overboard, you should back the Kickstarter today!

Three things for the Halloween season

Pseudopod (Escape Artists’ horror-themed short fiction podcast) is running a Kickstarter to raise the funds to pay their narrators. I am not wholly a disinterested party in this, as I’ve narrated for them several times (without pay); but I will say that I wholeheartedly support the notion that the people who read you the stories in a podcast deserve to be paid for their work. They already compensate their authors well, so this is the next step, and I applaud them for taking it.

Also, don’t forget that you only have until the end of this month to purchase prints from my Autumn and Halloween galleries:

Paired photos of a single autumn leaf and an angel on a cross

You can get them in practically any medium (paper, acrylic, metal, canvas, glass, wood) and any size, or a digital license for use as book covers etc.

Finally, I’m over at Unbound Worlds talking about the most influential book I’ve ever read. You have to know the book in question or the things it’s based on to understand why it’s Halloween-themed, but trust me, it is.

May I call to your attention . . . .

First of all, my friend Mike Underwood’s Genrenauts Kickstarter campaign is already nearly funded, because I’ve been crazy busy in the last week and a half (house-buying drama; turned out okay, thank god), but you’ve still got eighteen days left to back it. This is the “Season One” collection of Genrenauts, comprising six novellas (two already published, four to come), plus a bunch of extras. If you’re not familiar with the series, it involves a group of highly-trained agents parachuting into alternate realities governed by the laws of different genres, seeking to right imbalances that threaten the stability of our own world. Basically, catnip for anybody who likes thinking about and playing around with the tropes of narrative — which of course is why Mike started writing them, and why you all should read them!

Second, I’ve put up two items for auction via Con or Bust, a nonprofit that helps fans of color attend conventions they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford. The first is a signed hardcover of In the Labyrinth of Drakes, and the second is a 9-CD edition of the audiobook for A Natural History of Dragons, narrated by the amazing Kate Reading. It’s for a good cause, so please, bid high!

Explore a Tiny Frontier!

This one is for all the RPG fans out there. Gallant Knight Games are Kickstarting Tiny Frontiers — an authorized SFnal port of the Tiny Dungeons system.

Why do I bring this up? Because I’ll be contributing a micro-setting to Tiny Frontiers — a place and a situation, with a few hooks for plots you could run in it. I’m still in the process of writing that up, but as a teaser, I’ll give you two words: alien. god.

The Kickstarter has five days to go, with several stretch goals of various types: funding goals, social media goals, and so forth. My setting will be included in the core book, regardless of whether those goals are reached, but there are plenty of other goodies to be had! So if this kind of thing sounds fun, do head on over and take a look. It may be tiny, but it’s a giant pile of fun. 🙂

CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 5 Kickstarter is nearly there . . . .

We’re down to the last couple of days, and CP5 is within striking distance of its goal. This is the anthology series that previously brought you “A Mask of Flesh,” “Once a Goddess,” “The Gospel of Nachash,” and “What Still Abides” — along with, of course, a host of stories from other writers, ranging from newcomers to Tanith Lee.

There’s an AMA underway on Reddit, where you can (as the name indicates) ask editor Mike Allen anything. Check that out, check out the Kickstarter, and let’s get this over the line!