W.N.G.N. stands for Writer Nerd Game Night.  Once a month I get together with a bunch of other novelists and we have an RPG night. And since I play with a bunch of other writers, obviously they like to write about it.   For people who aren’t familiar with the RPGs (and for my readers, I need to specify that is Role Playing Game and not Rocket Propelled Grenade, because it really could go either way around here) that basically means a board game with no board and more imagination.

This tradition began when I joined Dan Wells’ game night. We were at a book signing, and Dan asked me if I’d ever played role playing games. Yep. (I hadn’t for about 10 years, but I did all through college and high school). Next question. Do you like samurai? Well who doesn’t? (okay, in truth I’m addicted to samurai movies and anything involving Toshiro Mifune, so now you know where Toru the Iron Guard came from in Spellbound) So I got invited to Dan’s monthly Legend of the Five Rings game.

So I jumped in on that and had an absolute blast. It had been over a decade since I’d last played an RPG.  One thing about fantasy writers, many of us are gamers or former gamers, and ironically enough the character Lorenzo from Dead Six is basically a modernized version of a rogue I played in a D&D campaign in college. Take away the sword and replace it with an M-4, and move him from the Forgotten Realms to The Confederated Gulf Emirate of Zubara and I had myself a character.

Dan put a lot of effort into creating a fun world. In fact I had so much fun playing imaginary magical samurai, that a couple of days later while I was stuck in the Chicago airport for a long layover, I wrote a bit of fiction about the character I was playing.

http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/the-burning-throne-part-i-diary-of-a-crab/

That kind of started a tradition and soon everybody else in the group was writing fiction about our game too. It quickly grew to novel size. Dan named it the Burning Throne (which worked for the campaign, but two seconds after I posted the first one to the blog you guys pointed out that it made great potty humor, whoops) 🙂  I started sticking them up on the blog every Friday, mostly because when you are a writer and you are having fun with something, you really want to share it. And besides, since we were playing in somebody else’s world (Legend of the Five Rings belongs to AEG), it wasn’t like any of us were going to publish it. (not that I won’t totally steal that one epic Battle of Pale Oak Castle sequence I wrote to shove it into my own fantasy novel next year).

Then Dan decided to move to Germany for a couple of years (writers can do that sort of thing) so our group broke up. We wrapped up the Burning Throne campaign and I posted all of them here on the blog. There were 46 episodes in total, and I’d encourage you to check them out, because it made for a pretty epic story. Hey, free novel!

Fast forward a bit and I decided to start a new WNGN. This one was going to be held once a month at my place on Yard Moose Mountain. I grabbed a couple of guys from the old group and invited a few other friends who I figured would be into imaginary magical samurai heroics. All but one of them was a professional writer (but he hasn’t let us down on that front, and I’ll get to that).

I volunteered to run this one, so I started putting together a new story which would begin one generation after the Burning Throne ended. I wanted the events of our last campaign to have changed the world. The last one was about the element of fire, this one would be about water.

So we started, and the group turned out great. It is without a doubt the best game group I’ve ever belonged to. When you’ve got a good game group, it isn’t just a GM setting the stage and then some guys rolling dice to see how good they kill stuff, but instead it turns into a sort of cooporative story telling and world building exercise, where everybody is creating something more interesting than what any one of us could come up with by ourselves.

My group is made up of:

Me, Larry Correia, some dude who writes some series of fantasy novels about monsters or magical gangsters, or something.

Steve Diamond, who runs Elitist Book Reviews, who has published several short stories, and who is shopping around his first YA novel. (I’ve read it, and it is awesome). Steve is also my assistant at my Evil Military Industrial Complex day job.

Paul Genesse, author of the Iron Dragon series and editor of the Crimson Pact anthologies, who also happens to have the extremely low stress job of cardiac nurse. “How was work, Paul?” “Eh, I’ve got my hands in some dude’s ribs, I’ll call you back.”

Paul and Steve were in the last WNGN. Paul played Kuni Magatsu and Steve played Ide Todo. I played Hida Makoto.

And the new guys,

Pat Tracy, who has published several short stories, and who is an award winning poet. And when I say poet, I mean, this guy writes poetry that is freaking astounding, and I don’t even normally like poetry. Pat also happens to be one of those World’s Strongest Man kind of guys, who bends big nails with his bare hands and rips phone books in half for fun, and is the only person I know who could actually use my Christmas tetsubo effectively and not injure himself.

Brad Torgersen, probably one of the single most talented sci-fi authors around, Brad’s short stories have been published in everything. In 2012 he was a finalist for the Hugo, the Campbell, and the Nebula award AT THE SAME TIME.  He was Analog’s writer of the year. Basically, the dude can freaking write. Brad’s a Chief Warrant Officer in the US Army.

Zach Hill wrote his first few books while serving two tours in Iraq. His first pro publication will be out soon with Uprising Italia, (zombies in Italy!), but regular readers will know him best as the guy behind my favorite history webpage, Minimum Wage Historian. He’s the guy who actually knows how real samurai culture worked, which is why it must pain him when I chuck that right out the window.

 Tony Battalingo is the only guy in our group who isn’t a published author, but you can’t tell because he jumped right in on the fiction too, and I’m happy to say he’s gotten pretty darn good at it. Tony is an active duty EOD Tech. (and he’ll hate me for bringing up this totally unrealistic movie, but like the Hurt Locker. In my defense, Tony, most folks don’t know what EOD means, and it is pretty badass).

One Friday a month, these guys show up at my house around six and we end up playing until 2 AM. And we’re all grown ups with jobs!

And the fiction… Holy moly… It has been great. There have been a few which comletely blew me away, seriously as good as anything I’ve ever seen published. I will be posting it every Friday here on the blog again, and this time I will be posting more of the game details along with it, so the readers can have a clue about the things which transpired that don’t show up in any one character’s narration.  I’ll also be cross posting to the official L5R forum with all of the nerdy stats and nitty gritty game details which most of the folks reading here won’t care about at all. You guys are probably in it for the story.

So starting tomorrow, and every Friday after that until the campaign is over, I will be posting a bit from the new Writer Nerd Game Night serial, The Drowning Empire.

So we slammed our brakes on right before going over the cliff, and instead we simply picked up a rock and brained ourselves a few times, so that way we can simply fall over the cliff next year.  Taxes were raised, but no spending cuts were made to anything, because every single government program is vital and super important, and simply can’t be cut. At all. Ever. But don’t worry, I’m sure all that new tax revenue (there won’t actually be any as the economy shrinks, but go with it) it will totally take care of our spending problems.

Here is a nifty graph I found on the Blaze which shows what a difference this will make.  http://www.theblaze.com/stories/stunning-graphic-shows-possible-reason-the-house-gop-is-balking-at-senates-fiscal-cliff-bill/

Wow. That milestone snuck up on me, but I guess that’s what happens when you have 350,000 new readers in a week. Now if only I could get all of them to buy stuff through the Amazon links off to the side, I could pay my house off…  🙂

Blogging is weird. It took me like two years to get to half a million. Then it started climbing. When I broke the first million somebody asked how it felt, so I wrote the following crazy nonsense, and then I reposted it when we hit the 2 million mark too, so I guess since this is now tradtion, I have to repost this bit of sillyness. 🙂

So how awesome is getting 3 million hits on your blog? How does this make me feel?  Well, if I could paint you a picture, it would look something like this:

How about Conan punching a tyranosaurs in the face while Linnea Quigley (like she looked in the 80s) fights a hot zombie chick with a chainsaw, and Linnea is in a tank top that is all ripped and about to fall off, and they’re on top of a speeding monster truck painted in tiger stripes playing a sound track by Dokken, and the monster truck is jumping over a tank that is exploding and there are ninjas flying everywhere on bullet bikes while pterodactyls shooting laser beams out of their eyes cause a big explosion with a massive fireball and then there’s like tigers with wings shooting out of the ground and theres like this skeleton, but the skeleton is wearing a chainmail bikini so you know that it was like totally a hot chick once too, but then like there’s this dude who looks like a samurai, but he’s fighting a cowboy, and blocking the cowboy’s bullets with his katana, because it is a LASER KATANA!  But then the samurai is totally Chow Yun Fat and the cowboy is Chuck Norris, and Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks the bullets in mid air to make them go faster, and there should be lightning bolts coming out of the sky, and then have like a big laughing skull behind it all, and the skull should totally be Hitler! because then you know he’s the badguy, and he should have that little mustache, and Conan and Chuck Norris are all going to totally kick his ass. And make the pterodactyls red, and put like a hammer and sickle on them, so you know they’re totally evil communist dinosaur clones, and make the monster truck be shooting blue flames out the back from all the nitro and the big tires should have spikes, and like nazi zombies are totally trapped in the spikes! And then have more hot chicks on the side, only make one like a devil with a tail and a pitchfork, and then the other side the hot chick should be an angel, but make her look a little naughty, if you know what I mean. Then make it in 3D! So that everything jumps out at you, and add more explosions, so you’re all like WOOSH KaBLAAAM PoW! POW! POW!

And yes, that does still work. 🙂

http://www.graspingforthewind.com/2012/12/27/sffwrtcht-a-chat-with-bestselling-author-larry-correia/

One bit from the bio was incorrect though, the first bestseller list I got on was Entertainment Weekly’s. I didn’t hit the NYT until Monster Hunter Vendetta.

So the Correia family had an awesome Christmas. Here is a quick blog post catch up, because then I’ve got to get back to work.

My self imposed exile from the internet for a couple days was 99% effective, and I only got on to approve comments (which I only skimmed long enough to make sure they weren’t spambots) and to post a painted mini pic on Twitter. That’s pretty darn good for me, especially since my last blog post went viral.

For everyone asking if they can share that gun control opinion, please do. If I had realized that 300,000 people would read it this week I would’ve actually given it an editing pass. When I get a chance I will try to read through the 1,700 comments and try to respond to some of the FAQs. It seems that the mega post was shared a lot, helped educate, and even made some people rethink their beliefs. Awesome.

I met a lot of new, interesting people this week because of this blog post. I got retweeted by Adam Baldwin (very conservative) and ended up having a conversation with Sean Astin (very reasonable democrat trying to look at both sides of the issues, and really nice guy, so I gained a lot of respect for him),  so as a geek, that made for an interesting day.  Now I’m going to go wear Jayne hat and watch Lord of the Rings.

The rest of this week I will be working on Warbound, which is out in August 2013. It is coming along pretty well, and I think it is a great story.

I just wrote a bunch of stuff for the MHI RPG, including some really fun little bits of fiction, including Holly saving Christmas, Owen and Milo do an inventory, Ultimate Fighting Lawyer v. Undead Lawyer in LAWYER FIGHT (in an elevator), and a behind the scenes of how orcs find their talents in Reckoning Day.

I’ve been checking on the art work for the RPG, and let me tell you guys, it is absolutely awesome. We’ve got some amazing artists on this and the stuff they are turning in has blown me away. For those of you who missed the MHI Employee Handbook Kickstarter, don’t worry, because it will still be on sale in 2013.

Baen books are now available in the Kindle store as of last week, which has been nifty. I checked my Amazon affiliates stats for the month (whenever you buy anything through Amazon through any of my links off to the right, I get a % for the refferal) and I can see that a bunch of people have bought eBooks this week through there. Thank you. Anytime you buy through Amazon that gives me more money to blow on ammo and miniatures. 🙂

Speaking of miniatures, FRP had their super end of the world blowout sale, so I’ve got enough lead being shipped to my house that I’ll have stuff to paint until I die… And at my current Sunday afternoon painting rate, that should be sometime in 2185.

Everyone here had a great Christmas. The kids are getting older, but young enough that the “Santa” magic is still there for some of them, and the youngest was super happy to play with the wrappers.

My family has been truly blessed this year. Thank you, Monster Hunter Nation, for being the best readers and friends any writer could ever have. Merry (belated) Christmas. 🙂