Well, Rifts® Tales of the Chi-Town ‘Burbs is finished and sent to the printer. It will be ready to ship some time the first week of August (August 6 or so).
I had hoped we’d be done Tuesday or Wednesday, but I’ll settle for Friday.
The book's wonderful and I believe Rifts® fans will love it. I hope so, because we’d all love to write more short stories and novels for Rifts and other RPG settings.
For me, I think to two big surprises were Taylor White and Carl Gleba.
In the past, Taylor has written a number of small things for Palladium Books, and co-authored Madhaven with Brandon Aten, but most of our contact was usually through Brandon, not Taylor directly. Furthermore, as with most collaborations, it was difficult to tell who wrote what.
Any way, I’ve gotten to know Taylor better over the last year and knew he was a talented storyteller with aspirations in film as a writer and director, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by his story, Me and Mr. Choke, but I was. It was fantastic. It starts out slow and quiet, a tale of desperation. Then it builds and builds and builds to a wonderful crescendo. Nice. The scene in Chi-Town: epic! And there was a point where I had to leave and didn't want to go. I had to know what happened next!! As a writer myself, personally, I think I would have ended this page turner differently, but it was not my story to tell.
Wow, nice work Taylor. I sure hope you plan to write a heck of a lot more for Palladium in the future.
As for Carl Gleba, his ideas are brilliant, his execution – his actual writing – sometimes has problems, and by his own admission, writing prose is one of his weaknesses. Or at least that’s what Carl had told me. Consequently, I was prepared for a lot of rewriting for his story.
What a surprise! Boy oh boy, I have to disagree with Carl, the dialogue was wonderful, each character had his own voice, the characters were interesting, the story was compelling, and I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. Sure the story had a few problems and rough spots, especially the first 4-5 pages (which I fixed), but no worse than anybody else. Once Carl got cranking, it was awesome. I found it riveting and action packed! Exciting and human at the same time, and it screamed Rifts in all its glory. I loved A Juicer’s Tale and think I would rank it as one of my three favorite stories in the book. Nice work, Carl. Actually, everyone pulled out all the stops and did nice work for this collection of short stories.
Other work
Other work this week involved Gen Con convention preparations (planing our booth layout, ordering tables and carpeting, renting a truck, designing and getting business cards made with Palladium's new address and telephone number, talking to freelancers and pals who are going to be there, etc.). I also spoke to various freelancers, assigned the rest of the Robotech® artwork, exchanged ideas with Jason Marker about the Robotech® sourcebooks, signed 500 signature cards for the Robotech® "Gold Edition", then packed it up and sent it out to the Manning brothers, paid some bills and helped ship out The Rifter #43. Oh yeah, I also prepared and mailed out something like 30 contracts, and did some prep work for the 2009 Palladium Open House.
The Rifter® #43 is everything I could have hoped for. Great art, great stats for 22+ villains. The one with the Nick Bradshaw art offers four characters and an exotic and dangerous dimensional location for players of Rifts/Phase World/Three Galaxies/Minion War and other Palladium world settings to visit. It’s a sort of way-station between dimensions, ideal for dimension hopping, deal making and political deal making, to pure entertainment. Written by your’s truly.
The Rifter® #43 is also the perfect farewell to Erick Wujcik, but I’ve talked about that before. I hope everyone enjoys this issue of the Rifter as much as we did making it.
What’s next?
I finished my portion of the Macross sourcebook and finished prep for Gen Con. Then it's on to the Master's Saga (Southern Cross) sourcebook, Dead Reign, Dyval, Dimensional Outbreak, and Mysteries of Magic, among others, we hope to get out before Christmas.
Um, so I better shut up and get back to work!
Sincerely,
Kevin Siembieda
Publisher, Writer, Artist and Storyteller
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