Coming soon, from all the regular places you get your podcasts.

Writer Dojo is a new podcast by writers, for writers. We’re going to talk about writing, business, and the nuts and bolts of creating. It’s for aspiring authors, people who already write but want to pick up tips and tricks, and anybody who just want to listen to a couple of nerds talk about books for thirty minutes every week.

It’s hosted by me and Steve Diamond, produced and edited by Jack Wylder (and a special shout out to Craig Nybo for letting us use his recording studio).

If you’re on this page you probably know who I am, but if you’re new, I’m the New York Times bestselling, Dragon/Audie award winning author of 25 novels, 3 collections worth of short fiction, and a bunch of other stuff. I’ve been doing this for 12 years, the last 8 full time.

Steve Diamond has written a few novels and a pile of short stories, but he also sold books for a living, ran a big book review site for many years, and has read more scifi/fantasy/horror/thrillers than 99.999% of the human population. Not joking. I helped him move. The sheer number of books nearly killed us all.

But most importantly, Steve and I have worked together for a long time so we can riff off each other really well. Plus, between us we’ve been on a few hundred panels at various cons talking about writing topics. Usually on the fly, because Steve is the guy the cons always drafts at the last second when the moderator doesn’t show up.

The two of us have been talking for the last couple of years about the need for some good writing podcasts that are A. actually useful, B. fun, C. not insufferably woke. That’s right, we’re here to talk books and writing, not intersectional blah blah blah which always boils down to how artists should walk around on egg shells terrified of offending the perpetually offended. Nope. Screw that.

However we didn’t get around to it until now because neither one of us had the bandwidth to go learn all the technical stuff about how to edit/podcast. Which was when the indomitable Jack Wylder stepped in to save our bacon. He knows all this stuff, but mostly I think he just wants the chance to use his Radio Guy announcer voice.

Craig Nybo (check out his books on Amazon!) was kind enough to let us use his actual recording studio, so this doesn’t sound like it was recorded at my kitchen table (with Faust barking in the background).

We’ve recorded our first few episodes, and we’re just going to get a few more in the bag before we go live. We had a lot of fun with these. The hardest part was not swearing or trash talking authors who annoy me.

Writer Dojo will be available on all the regular places you normally get podcasts. Dates to be announced.

No Game for Knights is the follow up to Noir Fatale. Once again Kacey and I have put together an anthology of noir sci-fi and fantasy stories from a team of fantastic authors. Our last anthology stuck to the theme of The Femme Fatale, and this time the stories are about The Detective.

Now that all the contracts are in we can officially announce the line up of stories.

Kacey Ezell and Griffin Barber

Larry Correia

Laurell K. Hamilton

Sharon Shinn

Robert Buettner

Christopher Ruocchio

Craig Martelle

Chris Kennedy

S. A. Bailey

Rob Howell

Michael Haspil

D. J. Butler

Christopher Smith and Michael Ferguson

Most of these are done already and it has been an absolute pleasure to edit them. They’ve been excellent across the board.

No Game For Knights will be published by Baen, I do not know the release date yet. I can’t comment for sure on audio yet, but Noir Fatale did great in audio so I expect we’ll see that too.

Book plug away!

https://amzn.to/3paQlrt

Scott Huggins is such a good writer that he’s the only person to ever win both the Baen Fantasy Award AND the Jim Baen Memorial Science Fiction Award.

If you aren’t familiar with those contests, they are blind judged, short story submission contests. Meaning that the judges don’t know who wrote what. The judges just get a giant stack of stories with the author information missing, so they’re judged entirely on how good and enjoyable they are.

I first read Scott when I was a judge one year, and his story was awesome (he was the runner up that year). In the years since he’s just kept practicing, until last year when he had the winning story in sci-fi AND a different winning story in fantasy. To put that in perspective there are hundreds of entries in each, and many of them are REALLY GOOD.

Scott released a new novel at FantaSci. Check it out.

Cover art by Alan Pollack

This is the novel I’ve been telling you guys about that’s a sort of WW1 in a world with dark fairy tale magic “trench fantasy”, think 1917 meets the Witcher. The main character is on what’s basically a tank crew, only instead of a tank, it’s an armored suit made out of dead golems. I’m currently working on this now (it is bad ass), and I believe the release date is early 2022.

This last weekend I was the Guest of Honor at FantaSci in Raleigh-Durham. I was supposed to have gone in 2020, but like everything else fun the government could cancel, it got cancelled. On that note, it was really nice to be able to get together with a big crowd of friends and fans again.

Despite this only being the second ever FantaSci and them being forced to have a year long gap between them, the con did a good job. The volunteers were awesome. They obviously put in work beforehand, and when problems happened (problems always happen at cons!) they jumped on them and took care of the guests and fans. Major props to the FantaSci team.

This was one of those “relax cons” where it’s a not a massive mob of thousands of people rushing around. It was a few hundred people in a hotel, going to panels and events, and then hanging out with friends and peers. And after a year of bullshit, that was really nice. Just good folks having a good time. Lots of wrongfans having wrongfun.

Our flight got in super late on Thursday (actually, Friday morning I suppose). Then Friday and Saturday were panels and events for both of us. I ran a game of Gritty Cop Show one night for charity (they auctioned off seats at the table) and that was fun. Sunday was the “MHI Anniversary Brunch” slash “Larry and Bridget Show” because when this was originally scheduled for 2020 the con fell on our anniversary.

The Larry and Bridget show consists of us rambling about all sorts of topics while people ask us all sorts of questions. Luckily, Bridget is charming and interesting. 😀

It was nice to see a bunch of writer friends. There’s too many to try and list them all, but this was the first time I’ve got to see Jason Cordova in person since we decided to write Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever together, and it was good to go over some of that stuff in person. David and Sharon Weber were there, and they’re some of our favorite people on Earth. I always love seeing Toni, though I only got to talk to her for like twenty minutes because we both had to get to events.

On that note, Toni did a Baen Roadshow (where she has the authors talk about our upcoming or just released books while she goes through a slide show of the covers) and I got to see the cover for my upcoming collaboration with Steve Diamond for the first time. That’s tomorrow’s blog post!

Also during that I asked Toni if I could talk about something else really cool, she gave me permission and I mentioned a new TV deal (contracts are in the mail!). Except I just realized before I blab about that on the internet, I should probably wait for her official announcement before posting more. But stay tuned, it’s really awesome news.

Saturday night Bridget and I were the guests at the Chris Kennedy Publishing dinner for the Four Horsemen Universe. Going in, I just thought it was just a dinner. I didn’t realize it was an elaborate in-universe mess hall ceremony, complete with Grog Bowl of punishment (but thankfully in addition to the horrific swill mixture of ten different kinds of booze, there was another container of non-alcoholic and sugar free swill for the non-drinkers and to not accidentally kill any of the diabetics! That was fun. They’re a good bunch.

Bridget was on a Care and Feeding of Authors panel (meaning author spouses tell stories about the whole wacky author lifestyle thing, and these panels have become a staple at a lot of cons because they tend to be really funny as the wives and husbands unload all the dirty secrets about how goofy their writer spouses are). Some authors are banned from being in the room during this (cough, David Weber, cough) but I usually just hide in the back quietly… Until Bridget dropped some truth bombs that made me snort laugh while everybody in the room watched me blush with embarrassment. 😀  (Mike Massa was in there too while his wife talked about him but he was like a ninja so nobody noticed him).

However, the goofiest thing that happened all weekend was to poor Dave Butler, but that is his story to tell. 😀 There are some really weird fans out there. Luckily, not at the con. Those people were great. This weirdo was one of the participants in a thing that Dave live-streamed on Zoom. Let’s just say that some people must really be into six foot eight mustached folk singers playing the guitar.

We flew home yesterday, and even though I’ve got a ton of work to do, as soon as we got home I took a four hour nap.

I really had a good time at FantaSci and will go back.