Welcome to the third issue of my mailing list newsletter for 2009, intended to provide you with information about my work, my website www.walterhunt.com, and my activities and appearances. I am currently posting this newsletter from Toronto, where we’re having a short visit prior to Montréal Worldcon.

Books Update

The Dark Wing Universe

The Dark Wing series is mostly out of print.

The Dark Wing is available in Russian at Ozon and Books.ru.

The series is available in German from Random House / Heyne, available from amazon.de:

• Die Dunkle Schwinge
• Der Dunkle Pfad
• Der Dunkle Stern
• Der Dunkle Kreuzzug

A Song In Stone

A Song In Stone has been placed out of print by Wizards of the Coast, but it can be ordered from amazon.com. No paperback edition is planned, but it has been exceptionally well received despite a lack of publicity.

As the rights are back in my hands, I am actively pursuing a new edition and trying to place the sequel (which is 40,000 words along).

I am considering the idea of making it into a podcast book. To that end, I am looking for a partnership with someone who possesses the necessary expertise to make it a product that meets or exceeds my audience’s expectations – and not just a recording of me reading my own work. It deserves better than that, and so do you.

I thank the reference librarians both at my public library and my college library for their generous assistance in research. I have placed a copy of an extensive glossary to enhance your reading pleasure.

King & Country

As reported previously I’ve been working on some short(er) material set in the King & Country alternate history timeline. The short(er) work has a good chance of appearing in print soon; more news as I have it. More information on the background on the main site. The novel is now about 40% complete. I was recently told by a historian (of whom I’m a great fan, and who gave me a few minutes of his time when he visited Newport, RI to give a talk): “you know the history well enough: time to write the story.” So I’m doing just that. You will like this book, I hope.

The book has currently advanced to approximately 45,000 words, and I have written three shorter pieces – set in 1815, 1833 and 1843 – that I would like to sell. Alternate history is a tough subject and I hold such work (including my own) to high standards – see my article in the August 2009 Crossed Genres magazine. Tip o’ the hat to Bud Sparhawk, who helped me out at a recent convention with tips on writing short fiction.

Mesmerism Project

Sometimes you can’t write anything you can stand to reread; sometimes you write like your pants are on fire. My trousers have been flammable like you would not believe during the last three or four weeks: I have written nearly 18,000 words on a book set in the middle 19th century that deals with the mesmerism phenomenon. Early readings have received extremely positive feedback. There’s an outline, and I expect to submit it shortly for consideration. I hope to have more news on that soon.

In the meanwhile – I’m doing what I always suggest to young writers: feeding the muse.

Other Projects

I am pleased to announce that after more than twenty years of evolution and development, the New England railroad/business game I developed with a long-time close friend has been sold to Rio Grande Games for publication in 2010. Many, many people have playtested this game over its many years of life, and I hope to include all of their names in the rule book. Rio Grande is an outstanding company that sets a very high standard in production quality, and it will be an honor to have a game with our names and Rio Grande’s name on the box.

I recently wrote an article entitled Here Our Story Begins about writing (and judging) Alternate History work. I hope to do more of this sort of thing, and I hope you enjoy it and support the magazine. It will be available at Worldcon in dead-tree edition.

Upcoming Appearances

2009

We will be in attendance at Montréal Worldcon August 6-10. My schedule is as follows:

Thursday, August 6

1900, D-2806: Card & Board Gaming. Teen programming.

Saturday, August 8

1200, P-510C: First Contact: The Meeting
With: Gay Haldeman (moderator), Chuck Cady, Duncan McGregor, Gay Haldeman, Gregory A. Wilson, Sherwood Smith
“What would happen if aliens came to Earth? What would you say? What do you do? Offer lunch? What would governments do? How would the world react?”

Sunday, August 9

11:00, P-516AB The Singularity: O RLY?
With: Peter Watts (moderator), Gregory A. Wilson, Jody Lynn Nye, Paul Chafe
Vernor Vinge first proposed the idea of the Singularity in 1988: more than two decades on, are we measurably closer to it happening? Have the intervening years provided any evidence for or against its likelihood?

15:30, P-522A Author Reading
I will read from one or another ongoing project. Hope to see you there.

I am intending to be at one of the middle state conventions – either Capclave or Philcon – later in the year.

2010

I will be at both Boston conventions in January and February. I have been invited to RavenCon in Virginia in April.

We will not be at Australia Worldcon. I’m expecting that we will attend Raleigh NASFiC in early August.

Worldcon Bids

The 2011 Seattle Worldcon bid has been withdrawn, which is unfortunate. The only standing bid is for Reno, which we have presupported.

There is only one bid announced for 2012, Chicago (as I reported on my blog several months ago.) There is a Texas bid for 2013 that will be having a bid party at Montréal Worldcon.

What I’m Reading

I read the Economist, a weekly news magazine. You should too.

I recently read The Exchange Artist, a book about the first bank failure in United States history – engineered by Andrew Dexter, Jr., a sort of early 19th century Bernie Madoff. It’s a little known chapter in history, and I found it fascinating.

I would also like to put in a another plug for my good friend Lawrence Schoen’s first novel Buffalito Destiny, which I had a chance to read and blurb. His work in short fiction should whet your appetite for this entertaining longer effort. BIG CLOCK! (If you don’t know what that means, count yourself fortunate.)

I also have Erfworld in my RSS list. It’s another webcomic that’s hard to explain: you have to read it, and read it carefully, in order to get what Rob Balder and Jamie Noguchi are doing. I’ve met Rob (but not Jamie); what is it about webcomic authors being great guys? I don’t know. If I could draw I could be one of them

Final Thoughts

Thanks to everyone for their continued encouragement and support. Having a chance to write professionally means I get to do what I truly love, and I hope you will always feel that your confidence in me is well-placed. Keep reading, and keep in touch.

Feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested.

Content © 2009, Walter H. Hunt.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of an event that helped change my life: the landing and first steps on the surface of the moon. We watched it on a black and white television that was pulled into the dining room because it was more important than my mother’s insistence that we come to the table to eat: no one wanted to miss seeing it.

Walter Cronkite, who died this week at 92, was the voice of that event – he and Wally Schirra, a former astronaut, sat at a relatively unadorned desk with scant special effects and plastic models of rockets and conveyed their wonder at this amazing feat. It is the task left by the wayside, the unfinished story, the stepping stone that has not led as far as it should have. Over the weekend Endeavor docked with the International Space Station, so we haven’t completely abandoned the dream. But like Buzz Aldrin, I think we should go to Mars.

Meanwhile, one in fifteen Americans believe that it was faked. These people are pinheads. In 1969, it was easier just to go to the moon than to fake it convincingly. Forty years of special effects and tech improvements have reversed that, of course. But stupidity is readily available these days, even more so than it was in 1969, it seems.

I remember the first moon walk. I haven’t forgotten why we did it, and I want to see us return to the unfinished task.

GEORGE BRETT: Perhaps we should change the subject a little. In his confirmation hearing a few years back, now Chief Justice Roberts analogized the role of the judge to the role of the umpire. Do you agree with that characterization? And specifically, do you think that it would be unconstitutional to waterboard Tim McClelland?

This, along with some other funny stuff, is from a piece on McSweeneys. Imagine, if you will, that the confirmation hearing of noted Wise Latina Judge Sotomayor were held in front of the 1977 Kansas City Royals instead of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I think it would be at least as informative and interesting. Perhaps more so.

Thanks to Steve S. for pointing me at this.

Welcome to the second issue of my mailing list newsletter for 2009, intended to provide you with information about my work, my website www.walterhunt.com, and my activities and appearances. It has been a terribly long time since the last one; I apologize for that, but it has been hectic, confusing, and busy. Things are still hectic, but there is at least some new news to report.

Books Update

The Dark Wing Universe

The Dark Wing series is mostly out of print.

The Dark Wing is available in Russian at Ozon and Books.ru.

The series is available in German from Random House / Heyne, available from amazon.de:

• Die Dunkle Schwinge
• Der Dunkle Pfad
• Der Dunkle Stern
• Der Dunkle Kreuzzug

A Song In Stone

A Song In Stone has been placed out of print by Wizards of the Coast, but it can be ordered from amazon.com. No paperback edition is planned, but it has been exceptionally well received despite a lack of publicity.

I am considering the idea of making it into a podcast book. To that end, I am looking for a partnership with someone who possesses the necessary expertise to make it a product that meets or exceeds my audience’s expectations – and not just a recording of me reading my own work. It deserves better than that, and so do you.

I am doing all I can to promote the book by personal appearances. I have received a number of invitations from Masonic organizations to give a talk on Rosslyn and on A Song In Stone; when I appear, I have copies of the book with me to sell. I have already redirected some portion of receipts to Masonic charities such as the Knights Templar Eye Foundation, in part due to the efforts of my friend and brother Bob Winterhalter. To my Masonic friends: if you know a Masonic body such as a Lodge of Instruction that would like to have a speaker, and would permit me to sell books, please contact me and let me know. The same goes for educational institutions such as colleges; I’m more than willing to put miles on the car.

What it means to my other readers: if I could send a copy to the many people who have taken an interest in my writing over the last several years, I would – but it’s neither practical nor profitable. If you can’t afford to buy a hardcover, or prefer not to purchase books in that format, I understand. But your local public or college library might. In the acknowledgements to A Song In Stone, I thank the reference librarians both at my public library and my college library for their generous assistance in research. I have placed a copy of an extensive glossary to enhance your reading pleasure.

King & Country

As reported previously I’ve been working on some short(er) material set in the King & Country alternate history timeline. The short(er) work has a good chance of appearing in print soon; more news as I have it. More information on the background on the main site. The novel is now about 40% complete. I was recently told by a historian (of whom I’m a great fan, and who gave me a few minutes of his time when he visited Newport, RI to give a talk): “you know the history well enough: time to write the story.” So I’m doing just that. You will like this book, I hope.

Other Writing

I have been developing a proposal for a book set in the nineteenth century that deals with the mesmeric movement. It’s got an outline but isn’t quite a proposal yet.

Other Projects

I am pleased to announce that after more than twenty years of evolution and development, the New England railroad/business game I developed with a long-time close friend has been sold to Rio Grande Games for publication in 2010. Many, many people have playtested this game over its many years of life, and I hope to include all of their names in the rule book. Rio Grande is an outstanding company that sets a very high standard in production quality, and it will be an honor to have a game with our names and Rio Grande’s name on the box.

Upcoming Appearances

2009

I will be at Readercon in Burlington, Massachusetts, July 10-12 as a participant. This literary convention is one of the best events on the speculative fiction calendar, and the Saturday night entertainment is not to be missed.

I will be at Confluence in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 24-26. I was recently asked to be a judge in the PARSEC short story contest, and I was asked to be present when we give the awards for the best stories.

We will be in attendance at Montréal Worldcon August 6-10.

I am intending to be at one of the middle state conventions – either Capclave or Philcon – later in the year.

2010

I will be at both Boston conventions in January and February. I have been invited to RavenCon in Virginia in April.

We will not be at Australia Worldcon. I’m expecting that we will attend Raleigh NASFiC in early August.

Worldcon Bids

The 2011 Seattle Worldcon bid has been withdrawn, which is unfortunate. The only standing bid is for Reno, which we have presupported.

There is only one bid announced for 2012, Chicago (as I reported on my blog several months ago.) There is a Texas bid for 2013 that will be having a bid party at Montréal Worldcon.

What I’m Reading

I read the Economist, a weekly news magazine. You should too.

During our visit to Amsterdam I bought Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies, one of the group that helped conceal eight Dutch Jews for two years during the Nazi occupation – until they were sold out for thirty pieces of silver. This book was not a literary masterpiece but was compelling and moving; I cannot speak too highly of it, or in praise of the woman who wrote it. She’s still alive as of this writing, having turned 100 this year. It is a personal account of a terrible time and a monument to indomitable spirit that fascism and hatred could not crush.

I have just finished reading The Lunar Men, an account of the “Lunar Society” – a group of five polymaths and natural philosophers (Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley, James Watt, and others) whose interaction sparked a generation of inventors and thinkers. It’s a great read.

I would also like to put in a plug for my good friend Lawrence Schoen’s first novel Buffalito Destiny, which I had a chance to read and blurb. His work in short fiction should whet your appetite for this entertaining longer effort. BIG CLOCK! (If you don’t know what that means, count yourself fortunate.)

On a much lighter note, my daughter read The Lightning Thief in sixth grade, and it was a great romp. (She chides me that I never read fiction anymore.) There are other books in the series, and an author website with a study guide and everything. Despite all of that it’s an enjoyable read.

I recently received the newest book in the Schlock Mercenary dead-tree editions, The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. The cover features a worried toaster on a counter in front of a group of heavily armed individuals. I met the author of this brilliant webcomic, Howard Tayler, at Denver Worldcon last year, and we talked writing and plot late into the night. He’s a terrific guy and has even given me props in his blog. I have it on RSS feed.

I also have Erfworld in my RSS list. It’s another webcomic that’s hard to explain: you have to read it, and read it carefully, in order to get what Rob Balder and Jamie Noguchi are doing. I’ve met Rob (but not Jamie); what is it about webcomic authors being great guys? I don’t know. If I could draw I could be one of them

Final Thoughts

Thanks to everyone for their continued encouragement and support. Having a chance to write professionally means I get to do what I truly love, and I hope you will always feel that your confidence in me is well-placed. Keep reading, and keep in touch.

Feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested.

Content © 2009, Walter H. Hunt.

Time travel? (Not that I’ve investigated the theme any . . . ) Don’t worry, this has you covered. Funny stuff, and it’s a t-shirt as well. There’s apparently one to help you avoid being executed for heresy, still in the works.

Why yes, officer. I am a geek. So are many of my friends and many of my readers as well. What’s it to ya?

A newsletter is on its way shortly, but in the meanwhile ponder the following: an internet-wide effort called GIMPS has been working since 1996 to find more Mersenne Primes, numbers of the form 2^n-1 where p is prime. Last Friday the 47th such number, 2^242,643,801 – 1, was independently verified. It’s a big number.

And yes, I was a math geek in junior high and high school, I was in the Math League and everything.

My daughter wants the t-shirt. It’d be printed real small, or be a really, really big shirt.

I am a judge for the PARSEC short story contest, and have been invited to be present for the awards ceremony.

The Gathering is a gaming get-together held in a hotel. It runs non-stop for ten days and is invitation-only, and is the source of envy and even lampooning by others; but it’s a great event, a chance to play with people I only get to see once a year, and to see what’s new from Essen and Nürnberg. Speaking German isn’t so much help these days thanks to Rio Grande, but it still helps, as sometimes I’ll see something that doesn’t hit the English-language game sources for several months, or even a prototype that hasn’t made it yet. (In past years, I got to see Dominion before it became a phenomenon, and tried out Uwe Eickert’s excellent WWII combat game Conflict of Heroes when it was in prototype. I also played Pandemic as a prototype a couple of years ago, but I actually haven’t played the finished version yet. So it goes.)

I usually bring a list of what’s new, and try to get in a play of as many such games as I can to see what might be worth buying. Our game collection is already quite big, but you know, nothing succeeds like excess. Usually there’s one game that is a big hit, a surprise small press sleeper, and some solid-but-I-don’t-have-to-buy this ones. This year was no exception, other than the big hit. I played several other games that aren’t listed below, and a few neat prototypes I can’t talk about, but these are the highlights. Hope you enjoy.

Some folks were excited by Eggert’s Castle for All Seasons, which I test-drove last year, but I continue to be unimpressed. There’s nothing I can say to heap further praise on Race for the Galaxy beyond the fact that L. and I have gotten it to the table at least 300 times since we first got it almost a year and a half ago, but I can’t say much about the upcoming expansions – not just #2, due this summer, but the prototype-only #3. I don’t think that it’s jumped the shark yet. (But there’s still time.)

I guess the most well-received new release would have to be Days of Wonder’s Small World, a fantasy retheming and reworking of Phillippe Keyaerts’ Vinci, a civilization building game that lasts an hour instead of eight. We sent our copy packing – it just didn’t get played enough; but Small World was getting enough compliments that I thought I’d try it.

Here’s the concept. Instead of creating civilizations, picking attributes, spreading out and then choosing to go “into decline” when there’s nothing left to do, you pick a fantasy race consisting of two attributes, one the race/nation type (Amazons, Dwarves, Sorcerers) and the other a modifier (Flying, Hunted, Annoying – well, maybe not Annoying.) This part is clever: they exist as thick tiles that fit together and are chosen in pairs. There’s a selection mechanism similar to Vinci that lets you pick a combo that’s not immediately on offer. Off you go to conquer the map (there are different ones for each number of players); so many races, so little time. VPs are secret and the game lasts only 10 turns. The graphics for Vinci were ugly; Small World‘s are garish, though the production value is great. It was fun and I’d play it again, but don’t think I’d buy it.

Small World: So Many Races, So Little Time

If I were to pick a favorite new game from the Gathering, it would have to be the latest in the cooperative-game genre, Asmodée’s Ghost Stories. This isn’t quite new, but it was my first crack at it. It plays best, perhaps only, with four players, each representing a Taoist monk with color-specific powers, fighting against the forces of a nasty demonic villain who sends legions of nasties toward a village before coming on stage himself at the end of the game. A gaming vet friend at the Gathering was down on it, describing it as “Lather, Rinse, Repeat” – but I got to play with three people who made it enormously fun. We played with the upcoming expansion and won by the skin of our teeth at the very end. There was a 3-D model on display but I didn’t get to try it. This might be a buy, if not for us than for the club. It’s hard, and it’s fun, and it looks like it has enormous replayability.

Ghost Stories: Cooperate or Die. Or Worse.

There was a time when Alea could be counted on to provide a cool new “gamer’s game” every year. Some of them, like Puerto Rico are perennial favorites (and PR would still be #1 on BGG but for those darned kids and their card games). But they’ve turned in some clunkers too. This year’s offering was light almost to the point of irrelevance: Alea Iacta Est, a dice rolling and allocation game. There’s certainly some strategy to it, but like the tile-laying game Maori, I don’t think there was anywhere enough game there to make me want to try again. I suppose that it comes down to being jaded, or refusing to be a part of the Cult of the New, but I don’t expect to bother with either of these. In the case of Alea, which has passed the relevance test a number of times, I confess to being disappointed.

Alea Iacta Est, Maori: Nothing New Here. Move Along.

The same is true of Ystari’s latest offering, Bombay, a resource manipulation and reallocation game. I have quipped about Ystari games in the past that they can all be described as “manipulating colored components into pleasing patterns” – at various levels of complexity; I’ve come to appreciate William Attia’s Caylus and we even own it, though I still think the fun is largely sucked out of it by people who are really good at it (i.e., not me). Our favorite Ystari game has to be Yspahan, which I’m also no good at, but L. likes a lot. The new one, though, left me unimpressed. The little plastic elephants are cute, with baskets to carry resource cubes on their backs, but that’s not enough to compensate for never being able to get back the time I spent playing it. On the other hand, as I told someone at the Gathering, at least it wasn’t very much time.

Bombay: Little Pink Pachyderms, For You and Me.

I played two licensed product games, one Cthulhu-themed (Die Hexer von Salem) and the other based on one of my favorite novels – The Name of the Rose. Neither made me want to go out and buy it. Hexer is a cooperative venture to get all of the nasties out of R’lyeh and close all of the warp gates before everyone goes mad or demons eat everyone’s face; it was difficult and frustrating, which might be true to the theme, but didn’t make it much of a game for me. Rose is a deduction game with two interesting mechanisms: first, you have cards that let you move any of the pieces on the board to increase “suspicion”, but no one knows which piece really represents you; and second, everything takes time, and it’s a Bad Thing to end the round, so you balance cost against effectiveness. But it comes down to a deduction game at the end – who’s the Red monk? Who’s the Blue? It’s like a long, fiddly, drawn out game of Mastermind. So I’ll pass on both.

And then, of course, there’s the big hit cooperative/competitive game – Battlestar Galactica. It’s a very faithful and incredibly nicely produced game about the TV series, in which some (but not all) players are good humans just trying to find a new home after the nasty Cylons blew up their old one. Halfway through the game, more people can turn into toasters; there’s lots of accusation and lots of analysis. Some game groups will do well with this: some will find it less compelling. I assumed it was basically Frackin’ Werewolf; unlike other games of its type, it’s not a cooperative game with a traitor mechanism, it’s a psychological exercise with an admittedly beautifully-executed and thematic game wrapped around it. I played it at 1 AM and wound up accidentally doing the wrong thing, which meant I spent a lot of the game in the brig. But I was, after all, a Toaster. So say we all. I’d probably like to play it again, and might buy it if it turns up on heavy discount at a bookstore as it did last Christmas. It was fun, but I liked Ghost Stories much better.

Battlestar Galactica: Yep, It’s Frackin’ Werewolf.

Last year I played and enjoyed Martin Wallace’s Brass, a moderately-complex game about rail and canal and industry in Lancashire. This year Wallace offered a simpler, gentler historical game about Cornwall mining – Tinners’ Trail. I’ve recently been reading a fantastic book called The Lunar Men, about eighteenth-century polymaths and scholar-inventors, one of which was James Watt, whose steam engines helped revolutionize Cornwall mining, so I was up on the subject. I don’t know if it helped me play the game, but at least I knew what an adit was. It’s vintage Wallace: there are limited resources, things have costs, there are dice to create randomness, turn order is important, and there are nice historical touches. I won, but only by a few points. One of the most interesting things is that things cost money – at auction or as a means of development – but at the end of each of the game’s four turns, you can use your existing funds to buy victory points, which is the only thing that matters to win the game. Nicely balanced. Don’t know if I’d buy it, but it was fun to play.

Tinners’ Trail: Martin Wallace Goes To Cornwall

For the second year, we had a chance to get eight people together to play an epic battle of Commands & Colors: Ancients. As with last year, it took place during the Friday night “Game Show”, an event I participated in once (and enjoyed not at all, not because it wasn’t well done but because it’s simply not fun for me.) This year featured the same overall commanders – Eric Brosius and Tyler Putnam – and the battle was Cannae, a big honkin’ army of Romans against a big honkin’ army of Carthaginians. Some of last year’s commanders came back to play again, and the Roman center was commanded by none other than the game’s designer Richard Borg, who provided a prototype of the new Epic deck for us to use. I sat to his right, and got to face Doug Hoover’s Carthaginian medium and heavy cavalry. Fortunately, Tyler didn’t have anywhere near enough action cards for his left wing, so a lot of the action was in other parts of the battlefield; by the time the horsemen came down on my position I’d gotten some of my better troops in line and they faced some stiff opposition. Borg, however, turned out to be unable to roll any hits on Jim McCarthy’s Carthaginians (who didn’t have any of those troublemaking elephants this year), and we dropped a tough decision by 12 to 11 banners.

I think this may be the most fun way to play C&C – big battles, three generals and one commander for each side. This is by far my favorite setting for Borg’s clever system; my girls like Memoir ’44, but that might be just for the tanks. Give me a good old cavalry charge any day.

2505 1731

Commands and Colors: Ancients – 8 Players, Lots of Blocks

Romans, left side of your screen: me, Richard Borg, Joe Rushanan, commander-in-chief Eric Brosius; Carthaginians, Doug Hoover, Jim McCarthy, Peter Card, commander-in-chief Tyler Putnam.

The Saturday night festivities – prize table, awards, announcements – were long and involved; Alan is an impresario, and this is his stage (and his show), and is entitled to some reflection and reflection on what this event has become. There were some very nice videos made by attendees, and while my favorite didn’t win, I did appreciate and enjoy watching them all. This is an interesting community: gamer geeks mostly, very picky about what they like, but patient with newbies and usually willing to sit and play a game for the game’s sake rather than the desire for fierce competition (there’s WBC for that, after all.)

This year’s Gathering produced two very exciting results for me. One is still under discussion, while the other is a done deal. I don’t feel at liberty to discuss either right now, but I’ll have more details soon. (And there’ll be a newsletter soon too. Promise. Really. It’s coming, I can feel it.) I hope to be able to say that the several trips I’ve made to a gaming event are justified by these projects getting completed; my best pal L. has put up with the inconvenience and I can’t thank her enough. We’ll see soon enough.

I have already signed up for next year, and am looking forward to it. Thanks, Alan.

This is worth 20 minutes of your time. Watch it. You’ll never look at Richard III the same way again.