Imagine, if you will, the 2012 Olympics in London. The world’s best athletes have assembled to compete in the name of brotherhood. The Olympic torch is about to complete its journey to signal the beginning of the games.

Instead, the gods of myth have returned, crowding the skies as they gaze down at mankind. Zeus, leader of the Greek pantheon and the one most closely connected to the games, explains the gods have been away for a while but have come back. Every man, woman, and child will be encouraged to return to their ancestral lands from which they may worship the gods anew.

The world as we knew it ended that day as a new age began.

ReDeus: Divine Tales is an  anthology that explores what happened next. With eleven of original stories by Allyn Gibson, Dave Galanter, Phil Giunta, Robert Greenberger, Paul Kupperberg, William Leisner, Scott Pearson, Aaron Rosenberg, Lawrence Schoen, Dayton Ward, and Steven H. Wilson, spanning twenty years, you will meet the next generation of humanity. Who has renewed their ancient beliefs? Who has come to question their existing faith? What happens when a god decrees technology be banned? Continue reading

You know how there’s this legend that the world was built in seven days? How about a story of creation that took nearly four years? Or the one about how something was built out of nothing in under a month?

In November 2008, Aaron Rosenberg and Paul Kupperberg had been kicking around some ideas for creating a shared universe. They came up with one so momentous that they needed a third hand to help bring this to life. They asked me to come play.  The ideas flew back and forth with intensity—and then, it seems, life got in the way.

At one point, Paul said he was too busy so bowed out, wishing us luck with the gestating universe. We still needed a third (sort of like a minion but without the membership requirements) so we talked to Steven Savile, who was busily hatching other ideas with Aaron, one of which became For This is Hell.

Some more work was done, including a three-month effort to raise some funding via Kickstarter. We were among the unlucky ones not to get the monies we needed, but that’s another tale. In any case, we turned to other projects for a while, conceiving, among other things, Latchkeys. But ReDeus continued to gnaw at us, an idea too cool to let go. Continue reading

Fans don’t always realize how much of what they get to read on the marketplace gets out there despite publisher preconceptions.  History is filled with any number of books, ranging from A Wrinkle in Time to Confederacy of Dunces to Harry Potter, that hit the market and left in their wake a host of rejections from various editors because the stories didn’t fit in with what they were looking for.

Pulling up Stakes first made its presence known at various conventions when I first started working on it.  I’d read sample chapters and enthused audiences begged to know when it was going to be done so that they could find out what happened next.

Yet when the book was circulated to editors, the reason for their passing on it were impressive, to say the least.

Stakes tells the skewed tale of Vincent Hammond, a twenty-something vampire stalker, who lives with his domineering mother in a small community of hunters tracing their lineage back to the French Revolution.  Vince, however, has a rather singular problem:  he’s a vampire.  And if his mother finds out, she’ll kill him.  Literally.  So he doesn’t dare come out of the coffin, so to speak and keeping his secret becomes further complicated when… Continue reading