joshroby.com

Free Download: Bundle
Free Download: iPhone

Rooksbridge is a series of short stories released as digital chapbooks. Each chapbook tells its own story, but together, the chapbooks tell a much bigger story set in a place called Rooksbridge. It's not unlike a television series that you can read.

In this fantastic world filled with knights and sorcerers, nobles and commoners, a handful of characters strive against tall odds to win for themselves a life worth living. In these stories, you will meet Sir Sedgwin, a stolid knight trying to find his way when everything he relied on has been upset; Dame Sophia, a sorceress who speaks with the spirits in the service of her mistress; Milton of Roxley, an architect and sapper who destroys as much as he builds; and the Baroness Theresa Bramwood, who never asked for the feudal responsibilities that have been thrust upon her. Each one comes with their own mottled past, and each one will have their opportunity to grasp for their desires, if they muster the will to outstretch their hands.

The first chapbook, Dirty Work, is available for free download in PDF format (or read it on your iPhone or other mobile device). You can get it and read it right now. Go ahead; I'll wait for you here.

Later chapbooks will be released every month for just a couple bucks. The chapbooks will always be available right here.

I have a lot of hope for Rooksbridge, and I'm looking forward to the stories that I'll get to tell in this exciting format. I hope you'll join me.

This week is Speak Out with your Geek Out, and I'm going to speak out about how I geek out with writing.

Except… I'm on a roll writing Rooksbridge #10, so. Maybe later this week?

If you got Requiem for the Wicked's digital edition, the iPhone version apparently dropped the last paragraph. Whoops! This has since been fixed; you can download the updated version from your downloads page.

Two new products up at rooksbridge.com that I'd like to tell you about:

I just published Rooksbridge #7, Requiem for the Wicked, at rooksbridge.com. One of Camwright's old cronies is in town, but this time he's the honored guest of the Baroness. Which is a little awkward, and then, well… things kind of go downhill from there. This chapbook was actually sponsored by Mister Paul Tevis, that apotheosis of humanity and generosity (which is not to mention his superlative taste in fantastic fiction) and author of Penny for My Thoughts. He asked for Norchester, so I gave him some Norchester!

Requiem was a long time coming (and it's a long chapbook: 72 pages), and in retrospect maybe it would have been better as a two-part deal across two chapbooks. As it is, it's sort of a "double issue" with a whole lot of plot, reversals, and character development. I'm very happy with how it turned out, and that's powering me directly into the next chapbook, Haunting, which I hope to have out in the next two weeks. Hope being the operative word, there.

Seth Ben-Ezra says nice things about Rooksbridge over on his blog, A Dark and Quiet Room:

Because of my bad experience with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, I made myself a rule that I never start a series that isn’t already finished. Whenever I’ve violated this rule, I’ve regretted it. For Rooksbridge, though, I think I’m going to break my rule.

With just over a half hour to spare, the November installment of Rooksbridge, Where There Is Smoke, was actually published in November. Well, the digital edition was, at least. I'll be recording the audiobook and getting the physical chapbooks printed in the next couple weeks, and of course trying to get the December episode written, recorded, and printed as well. One of these days, I swear, I will get everything caught back up. Right now, I'm taking satisfaction in just getting the damn thing up on the site in the right month.

I wrote last month that its chapbook, Ravens, Rooks, and Crows, finally got all the pieces together. That meant this month was the first stride forward with all the bits and pieces. And silly me, I didn't really realize what that meant, and how it would subtly change how the whole process works. In this chapbook, I had to make a significant-to-me shift from introducing, introducing, introducing new content and into reincorporating and recontextualizing. Which is all stuff I love; in fact it's what I've been waiting to get to for months, now. I just didn't bargain on what a different headspace I need to be in when writing continuing episodes of what is becoming an established setting.

So one of the things I like to do to amuse myself is present my games in the medium of the day. For Full Light, Full Steam, this meant as excerpts from pamphlets, which were booming in the victorian era. For Sons of Liberty, this meant a newspaper-like format, although I decided not to cram everything down to 8pt like the colonial papers of the time. It's something that I doubt anybody notices, but it keeps me entertained.

One of the unforeseen advantages of my approach, though, was that it left me with a lot of steampunk "pamphlets" full of colorful descriptions of a fictional solar system and short-short stories of the people who call it home. Content I might be able to use in other ways. For instance, I've had a "Spirit of the Full Light Full Steam Century" project on my hard drive for years that I never quite complete. Recently, though, as I've been putting Stories from Rooksbridge onto Kindle, it occurred to me that this stuff might be of interest to folks all on their own: pamphlets of the digital age, as kindle minibooks.

There are three, and I fired them off into the intarwebs at 99 cents a piece:

• For Queen and Country
• A Daring Tourist's Solagraphy
• The Layman's Reports from the Royal Society

And of course, I've got Rooksbridge available on Kindle, too, for the usual two-buck price:

• Dirty Work

The fourth installment of my Rooksbridge serial fiction project is now available at Rooksbridge.com. This chapbook, Ravens, Rooks, and Crows, sees the arrival of George Aldcourt, the Baroness' dissolute brother, trailing behind him a train of unwanted courtiers and suitors. Now the once-quiet town of Guilford is awash with strangers, which makes it that much easier for conspirators to maneuver against the Bramwood court.

You can read the preview or order the digital edition.

So far I've been releasing these on the first of the month, and as you can see, I fell a little behind this month. Summer travel really sucks time out of a schedule! I'm putting up the Digital Edition now, and recording the Audiofile this week: if all goes well, posting it by Friday. The physical chapbooks are going to take a little longer than that. I don't expect to see them before November. Chalk this one up as a lesson learned, and extra motivation to get the next chapbook, Where There Is Smoke, in the can and into the pipes as soon as humanly possible!

Aside from scheduling, this chapbook had its difficulties in writing. You'll see when you read, but I had to be pretty awful to my characters, and that's sometimes difficult to do. I went through a number of versions, each one flinching away from what Had To Be Done, and each one spawning off problems in theme wrinkles and plot holes, until I finally told myself to just go ahead and Do It. Miraculously, all the problems cleared up as soon as I made certain characters sorry they ever got involved in Rooksbridge. It's amazing what a red-hot coal can do when properly applied.

If you're enjoying Rooksbridge serial fiction (and there's a new one up today!), here's some other places to get other serial fiction:

Scott Lynch is doing Buroughs-esque Barsoom serial fiction at Queen of the Iron Sands.

Derek Haas and other screenwriters are posting short pulpy fiction at Popcorn Fiction.

Hey, quick note for those of you not attending GenCon and wandering the internet wondering what to do with your time since the gaming end of the internet is a ghost town — if you pop in the coupon code "NOTATGENCON" at rooksbridge.com, you can get three bucks off of whatever. That covers all of a digital edition or an audiofile, or takes a chunk out of a print chapbook. So take a break from mooning away, wishing you were at GenCon, and spend an hour with some Fantastic Serial Fiction. Offer only lasts this weekend!

Rooksbridge: Fantastic Serial Fiction is live at rooksbridge.com. This is the culmination of about six months of preparation, and at the same time, it's the beginning of a whole new chapter for Kallisti Press. I am trying my hand at writing fiction, and Rooksbridge is my first foray, serialized into monthly chapbooks.

To get an idea of what I'm on about, you can download the first chapbook, Dirty Work, for free.

To be more specific, Rooksbridge is a series of short stories released as digital chapbooks every month. Each chapbook tells its own story, but together, the chapbooks tell a much bigger story set in a place called Rooksbridge. It's not unlike a television series that you can read.

In this fantastic world filled with knights and sorcerers, nobles and commoners, a handful of characters strive against tall odds to win for themselves a life worth living. In these stories, you will meet Sir Sedgwin, a stolid knight trying to find his way when everything he relied on has been upset; Dame Sophia, a sorceress who speaks with the spirits in the service of her mistress; Milton of Roxley, an architect and sapper who destroys as much as he builds; and the Baroness Theresa Bramwood, who never asked for the feudal responsibilities that have been thrust upon her. Each one comes with their own mottled past, and each one will have their opportunity to grasp for their desires, if they muster the will to outstretch their hands.

The first chapbook, Dirty Work, is available for free download in PDF format. You can get it and read it right now. Go ahead; I'll wait for you here.

On our doorstep today Prudence and I found the first of three packages from my printer, 360 Digital Books. Said box contained the first Rooksbridge chapbook, Dirty Work.

In order to give a sense of scale I could have posed it with a U.S. quarter or something, but that's not very globally conscious, is it? As we discovered the package in the midst of my shift with the baby, I used Prudence, instead. As you can see, it is a cute little book that matches, if you have one on hand, a cute little baby. If you do not have a cute little baby on hand, well, it's ideal for slipping into pockets, notebooks, or what have you. It's just a touch larger than my open-palm hand.

I am very happy with how these guys turned out. The books are compact and "efficient" if that makes any sense. They are what they are and nothing else: a delivery system for a short story. No frills and nothing to detract from their purpose, either — in other words, perfect for chapbooks, and will nicely mirror the digital and audio formats in which the stories will also be available. The chapbooks also look surprisingly sturdy, and look like they will hold up longer and better than I expected. Ideal for passing from reader to reader (hint hint)!

I spent the morning with the superlative Wes Otis, who gave me some tips on doing the audio portions of the Rooksbridge project. He listened to what I had done so far and one of his first comments was, "You're recording hunched over with bad posture." This from listening to the recording, mind you, not watching me record. Suffice to say, I got a lot of great tips on how to do audio well. Then Wes whipped out his heretofore unknown bass clarinet skills and put together a nice little stinger to play between sections of each chapbook.

I'm feeling really good about the audio now, and (because this is a clever segue here) you, yes you, should go check out Wes's teeshirts on his revamped website, Tattered Star Apparel. There you can find such nifty shirts as these:

Files sent to printer. It's always a big and heart-stopping step when you send stuff out of your house and into the world. It becomes real (and starts incurring expenses), and there's always the little voice in the back of your head screaming not to do it, keep your head down, don't try or else you might fail. And I end up walking around all shaky and distracted for the rest of the day: was that a big mistake?