All posts by Bob Greenberger

Latchkeys, New Releases

What goes into a Good Cover?

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Latchkeys: Roscoes in the Night will be available next week after a slight delay. But right now, author James Reasoner writes about a good cover.

Writing historical fiction is always a challenge. And a story like “Roscoes in the Night”, despite incorporating the fantasy elements of the Latchkeys series, is definitely historical fiction, set in a time and place that actually existed.

Because of that, there are all sorts of details that have to be gotten right, or at least close enough to right that they’re not jarringly out of place. If you’re writing a story set in the Old West, you can’t have a character pull out a smart phone and look something up on Google. (Well, you could . . . but then it would be a whole different kind of story.)

Not only do you have to worry about historical accuracy, you have to be concerned with capturing the feel of the time period as well. The reader has to think, if only for the time it takes to read the story, “That must have been what it was like in the Roaring Twenties.”

A good cover artist can be of immense help in creating this impression, and that’s where Vance Kelly comes in.  His covers for the Latchkeys series include all different sorts of scenes, but what they have in common is that you look at them and immediately get a sense of what the story is about, not only its plot but also its tone and background. The creators of Latchkeys couldn’t have asked for a finer artist to bring their vision to life.

So enjoy that beautiful cover and then check out the words as well. I think they’re pretty good.

New Releases, News

ReDeus Brings Back the Gods and Goddesses of Yore

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Imagine, if you will, the 2012 Olympics in London. The world’s best athletes have assembled to compete in the name of brotherhood. The Olympic torch is about to complete its journey to signal the beginning of the games.

Instead, the gods of myth have returned, crowding the skies as they gaze down at mankind. Zeus, leader of the Greek pantheon and the one most closely connected to the games, explains the gods have been away for a while but have come back. Every man, woman, and child will be encouraged to return to their ancestral lands from which they may worship the gods anew.

The world as we knew it ended that day as a new age began.

ReDeus: Divine Tales is an  anthology that explores what happened next. With eleven of original stories by Allyn Gibson, Dave Galanter, Phil Giunta, Robert Greenberger, Paul Kupperberg, William Leisner, Scott Pearson, Aaron Rosenberg, Lawrence Schoen, Dayton Ward, and Steven H. Wilson, spanning twenty years, you will meet the next generation of humanity. Who has renewed their ancient beliefs? Who has come to question their existing faith? What happens when a god decrees technology be banned?

You will meet believers, disbelievers, the uncertain, the confused. And the angry. Additionally, you will see the gods themselves bicker and fight for worshippers to enhance their power as the games between pantheons begins all over again.

The book features a new cover by Russian artist Anton Kokarev with nine stunning interior illustrations by Spanish artist Carmen Carnero. It will be available at Shore Leave, August 3-5, then made available for POD sale via this website. Ebook editions for Kindle and Nook will follow in mid-month.

New Releases, News

Introducing ReDeus, a Brand New World, a Bold New Anthology

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You know how there’s this legend that the world was built in seven days? How about a story of creation that took nearly four years? Or the one about how something was built out of nothing in under a month?

In November 2008, Aaron Rosenberg and Paul Kupperberg had been kicking around some ideas for creating a shared universe. They came up with one so momentous that they needed a third hand to help bring this to life. They asked me to come play.  The ideas flew back and forth with intensity—and then, it seems, life got in the way.

At one point, Paul said he was too busy so bowed out, wishing us luck with the gestating universe. We still needed a third (sort of like a minion but without the membership requirements) so we talked to Steven Savile, who was busily hatching other ideas with Aaron, one of which became For This is Hell.

Some more work was done, including a three-month effort to raise some funding via Kickstarter. We were among the unlucky ones not to get the monies we needed, but that’s another tale. In any case, we turned to other projects for a while, conceiving, among other things, Latchkeys. But ReDeus continued to gnaw at us, an idea too cool to let go.

Finally, this spring, Aaron and I wrote our stories to get things rolling and Steve was excited. But he was also busy, so he bowed out. And lo, there came the resurrection of Paul to the mix. There began a new round of excited ideas, one of which was to take our three stories and combine them into a printed book to sell at Shore Leave, which represents Crazy 8 Press’ first anniversary.

It soon became obvious, however, that the economics were against a book with roughly 30,000 words. At which point, one of us said we should invite the pals attending the con to come play in this brave new universe. So in late June we put out a call and invited a host of demigods to join us. The catch was, in order to have hard copies ready for sale they would have to meet a rigorous early July deadline.

Rising to the challenge were Allyn Gibson, Dave Galanter, Phil Giunta, William Leisner, Scott Pearson, Lawrence R. Schoen, and Steven H. Wilson. Dayton Ward knew he couldn’t make the con, but thought the idea too cool to pass up so joined in the fun.

While they wrote with the red-hot fire of new life, we sought out others to craft the cover and even some interior illustrations which got everyone excited, making them write faster.

ReDeus: Divine Tales will be available at Shore Leave, August 3-5, then made available for POD sale via this website. Ebook editions for Kindle and Nook will follow in mid-month.

And exactly what is this new universe that has everyone so excited?  We’ll tell you that next time.

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Latchkeys #5 Takes Things Up A Notch

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Roscoes in the night . . . Has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? Well, it does if you grew up reading hardboiled crime fiction, like I did, and watching TV shows like The Untouchables. It conjures up images of snap-brim fedoras, blazing tommy-guns, and low-slung roadsters with running boards. Don’t know what running boards were? You can look ’em up. They were pretty cool.

The fact that the Wardens from Tanglewood can open a door in the House and find themselves in the Roaring Twenties is one of the wonderful things about the Latchkeys series. These characters can go anywhere in time and space, any place that ever existed . . . and some that didn’t. So in a series that encompasses fantasy, science fiction, and horror, there’s no reason Mercy, Marguerite, Jeremy, and Matt can’t find themselves smack-dab in the middle of a war between bootleggers in the New York City of 1922.

When Kris Katzen and I first came up with the idea for this two-parter, we envisioned a fast-paced yarn full of local color, humor, and plenty of action. With the able assistance of Paul Kupperberg, I think that’s what we have in The Bootleg War and Roscoes in the Night. Paul and Kris left me with a great cliffhanger at the end of Part One that had all of our heroes in serious danger of losing their lives. In order to get them out of that fix and allow them to defeat the bad guys, I knew that Part Two would need to feature action, action, and more action.

And sure enough, in Roscoes in the Night, thousands of machine gun rounds are fired, a bomb blows up, and there are wild chases both above and below the streets of Manhattan. Don’t pause to take a breath too often, or the excitement will blow right past you. I had a blast writing this story, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Look for this installment at month’s end!

Latchkeys, New Releases

The Bootleg War is now Available

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Latchkeys #4, “The Bootleg War”, is now available for Kindle and Nook. Author Paul Kupperberg talks about the writing experience.

By Paul Kupperberg

For writers, ideas are like stacked up airplanes circling the fogged in airport. We want desperately to have all of them land safely, but some are going to have to stay up in the air a little longer than others until the weather clears or a runway opens up. As a result, we’ve all got lots of ideas circling our brains but no opportunity to bring them in for a landing on paper as quickly as we would like.

A few years back, Steven Savile, on a writers email list to which we both belong, suggested that a bunch of us join forces to take some of those high-flying ideas, throw them into a hat, and pick a few on which a dozen or so of us could work together. The idea was to hasten the development and writing of these various concepts by sharing the workloads. The result of Steve’s suggestion was a collective we came to call the HivemMnd.

While Steve has already related the secret origin of the HiveMind in an earlier post here on the Crazy 8 Press blog, the work of actually writing Latchkeys takes place not as a community activity, but in the individual workrooms, offices, and minds of our fourteen writers. The current episode, “Chapter 4: Speakeasy, Part One: The Bootleg War” began with a story by Kris Katzen, which landed on my desk for fleshing out and was a particularly fun story for me to work on. It incorporates elements that play to several of my strengths as a writer: It takes place in New York, the city in which I was born and about which I have an insatiable curiosity (I have shelves containing nothing but histories and biographies related to this, the greatest city on earth), and is set against a historic backdrop, in this case the Prohibition era of the 1920s (coincidentally, I recently read Daniel Okrent’s fascinating history, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition).

I love to pepper period stories like “Bootleg War” with interesting little historic tidbits, whether about its locale or some incidental information (did you know Converse All-Stars sneakers were introduced during the First World War?)…just enough to give it the right flavor and a dash of verisimilitude. Of course, stories have to come from out of the characters first, but those characters need to be rooted in a world that’s as real as they are. The use of the wrong slang or an anachronistic prop and the reader is yanked out of the moment and all the mood and drama the author was hoping to set up is ruined.

And speaking of characters: Latchkeys stars a roster of good ones. I was already familiar with two of them, twin sisters Mercy and Marguerite, from writing one of the later Latchkeys episodes (#13, “Emmett”), but “Bootleg War” gave me the opportunity to get to know a couple of the other fascinating teens who populate this world. I hope you’ll find their intelligence and resourcefulness as interesting as I did while writing them.

So, to torture my opening airplane analogy just a little further, bringing Latchkeys in for a landing has been, in some ways, a long and sometimes bumpy ride, but now that we’re safely home, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss a moment of the trip. For readers, on the other hand, there’s nothing but clear skies and some good reading ahead.