I’m happy to say that Amazon and iTunes are both featuring it as Editor’s Picks for the month of April!  Or you can go indie!

Cory Doctorow has written a nice account of it at Boing Boing.

I was happy with my story in the anthology, and now that I’ve read it I can say that the whole thing came out incredibly well!  It’s a great theme for anthology and the contributors seriously stepped up.

I’ll read from the story, we’ll talk about mad science, and generally make things awesome.

Full event information here:

http://www.mystgalaxy.com/event/mad-scientists-adams-grossman-sd-022213

DISHONORED came out in October. It’s a game from Arkane Studios, which I did some writing for, although it was very much a communal effort. Thus, I can say that it came out pretty great. It’s on PC, PS3, XBox 360. It’s an immersive, sandbox-y, narrative game, probably most comparable to the Bioshock games. It’s dark, beautifully made, and hands you unsettling choices. It’s also – I should say – rated M for Mature, and it should be – strong language, violence, sexual situations. You are an assassin who talks to the devil in an 18th-century steampunk city under martial law afflicted by a deadly plague, so shit gets pretty real.

YOU: a novel. Done and in copyedit. I was at New York Comic Con in October to talk about it and rant about video games, which I look forward to doing a lot more of.

Other Stuff: I have a story in the anthology Under the Moons of Mars, edited by John Joseph Adams, which came out earlier this year. It’s called “River Gods of Mars.” It’s set in an alternate universe where I write in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s prose style.

Everyone always tells you to make notecards, and even though I hate taking any kind of writing advice ever, I have to admit this is kind of cool.  It’s nice to be able to look at the whole thing at once.

“You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.”

The first book is called YOU, and it’s about games, gaming, and game development. I love novels about games – Dream Park, Alice in Wonderland, Player of Games, and of course Ender’s Game. I love paging through D&D Modules and RPG Manuals and letting my imagination run.
I have spent an inexcusable amount of my life creating and playing and thinking about game. I love paging through D&D Modules and RPG Manuals. So I’m writing a novel about it – about both making and playing games. I want to do for games what SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE did for comic books – to write what it’s like to be inside them, in a newly rich and interesting way, a re-imagining of the medium wrapped in a compelling story.
The title is inspired by old Infocom games –”YOU” is the you of “You are likely to be eaten by a grue” or “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.” It’s the “you” at the center of every game ever made, but who exactly is that?

“My Name is Richard Milhous Nixon. I was educated at Whittier College in Whittier, California, and I have seen the devil walk.

The second book is called CROOKED, and it’s about Richard Nixon and the secret history of the American presidency. What if Nixon was a man who had stumbled on a terrible supernatural secret, and who did what he had to do to protect humanity, at the cost of public disgrace? What if our third-worst president was really a pivotal figure in the secret history of the twentieth century, a man caught in a desperate struggle between his family life, his political career and horrors from another reality?
It’s a character study, a Cold War espionage novel, and a Lovecraftian horror tale in one.
Expect the answers to such vital historical questions as…

• What unspeakable events transpired during the notorious 18 1/2 minute gap?
• Famously, in 1970 Nixon made Elvis Presley a Federal Agent-at-Large? What was his true mission?
• What terrible secret did Neil Armstrong bury on the moon?
• No serious student of history believes the Bavarian-born Henry Kissinger to be entirely human, but for the love of God, what is he?

Finally a word on the SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE followup. It exists, it’s just been delayed. Honestly, it’s just gotten stuck. I was putting a lot of effort into the INVINCIBLE film and I think I was psyching myself out a little. I have a good chunk of it done, but I really needed to take a break and try something different – Mulholland Books has been kind enough to give me a chance.

Austin

ps. I know the contact form is broken, I’m trying to fix it. If you have any advice you can get in touch by…oh never mind.