Author: Joshua A.C. Newman

Eyes in the Night, Delivered To Your Doorstep

Beowulf. An epic game by Joshua A.C. Newman

Beowulf is off to press on the morrow! I’m doing a very limited run, Ashcan-style, so if you want to read the poem, consider the exegesis, play the game, and give me feedback, this is your chance!

I’m selling it for $14+$5 S&H, or just regular $14 at Gen Con. Since the run is limited, I’ll be selling the remainder at Gen Con that I haven’t sold via my own site, so if you want to make sure you have a copy, preorder and I’ll shoot it off to you as soon as they get to my doorstep. If you want to wait until Gen Con, you can, but I’ve had a few people interested in preorders already, so you take your chances with the Wyrd.

Even better than picking up a copy at the Playcollective or Ashcan Front booths, order one from me, play with your friends, play with me at Gen Con, and give me feedback that will both be fun to generate and help produce a great final book.

It’s 244 pages long, 5″ x 8″, and I’ve made uglier things in my life.

Order Beowulf (sold out. Please give feedback!)

So Many Words, So Many Meanings

Joshua A.C. Newman at work on Beowulf

Frickin’ Beowulf is frickin’ 162 pages already. By the end, it’s gonna be fucking huge. Like, seriously, 250 pages.

It’s got the full text of the poem (Grummere translation — 1.0 may be a different translation if I can convince myself to typeset it again), an explanation by Dr. Michael Drout of the “Situation” (in Big Model terms) of Beowulf (Guess what! It’s about sex, families, and power!), a summary of the events of the poem, and a 27-page appendix explaining the various ways of dating the poem that come down to the reason I’m including the essay:

Let me give an example closer to home: in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” we read of Giovanni’s feelings about Beatrice: “Least of all, while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni to have remained so near this extraordinary being that the proximity and possibility even of intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing.” The date of the production of the text is very significant for our interpretation of the meaning of “intercourse” in this sentence, and we might interpret that passage very differently if we thought that a 20th-century reviser/editor/copyist would have felt free to change Hawthorne’s text for one purpose or another.

That is, the inclinations of the reader — traditionally, a single, horny dude with a political mandate in a scriptorium — matter at least as much as the putative intentions of the poet himself. In this case, it’s the intentions of the player, not our ideas about history; our own moral stance, not the “what would a 6th century dude think,” that makes a difference.

Because when you draw from the Runes, and they tell you, “A young woman, rune-rich, vying for glory despite her sex.” you’re going to read it with your Postmodern eyes, through a Feminist filter, through a filter that forces us to wonder what “glory” is to us, through eyes that see the word “hero” used speciously to describe anyone who was killed for the acts of their government.

Far as I can tell, Beowulf is only about ten degrees deeper than Conan, but because of the incredible history of the text, it makes an excellent canvas upon which we can cast our tale of blood, glory, and remarkable circumstance. And all the questions we ask when we experience such a tale.

Making It Be What You Want It To Be

My final college project was a Medieval-style mystical tome containing an allegory using modern artificial life and intelligence as its alchemical ingredients. I bound the book using traditional European bookbinding techniques.

You’ll notice, if you order one of my publications, they’re gp0002 or gp0005 or some such number. Homunculand was the first glyphpress publication in a print run of two, so it’s gp0001. It’s not for sale, but if you come over to my place, you can read it. I hope to someday rewrite it for broader publication. Maybe that edition will be gp00015 or something.

As ashcan season comes upon us, I’d just like to remind everyone that there are a lot of ways to make a book. Many of the indie games of years past have been bound at home, using a variety of loving techniques. Paul Czege’s Acts of Evil is hand-splatterpainted. I believe the first edition of Dust Devils was bound in Matt Snyder’s basement. Paul Tevis’ A Penny For My Thoughts is bound like a patient dossier. Books are not a magical thing that someone else makes. They don’t need to be a particular size or shape. What they need is to look and feel the way your game looks and feels so that it attracts and holds the people you want to attract and hold. Find your way to make that happen.

Money money money

Scrooge McDuck Enjoys Shock:

One of the great things about publishing independently is that you get to make all sorts of decisions about your work on the fly. Some of the most important decisions are financial, and they’re tough. One of the biggest financial decisions you can make is how much to charge. Kenneth Hite once said that Vincent hadn’t printed a price on Dogs in the Vineyard because “money is evil”. Really, it’s so V could change the price whenever he wanted to, since he didn’t know what was going to be a sustainable price. It’s hard to figure out.

Shock: has been $23 up until recently. This is partly because I wanted to make back my investment in a certain amount of time, and to do that I needed a certain number of sales at a certain dollar point. I also don’t like to make prices that end on a $5 mark* — $20 or $25 for instance — because then the price is compared to another product on a dollar-by-dollar basis, as some sort of information commodity, which it isn’t. The Dollar:Fun ratio is hard to pin down. Is Shock: expected to be 1/3 as fun as D&D because it costs 1/3 as much? Or is it unexpectedly three times as much fun, and I should be charging $60 a book? That just doesn’t make sense. The only measure that is worth anything is What The Market Will Bear.

I like bears. Sometimes, they’re not funny. But this one is. Because determining what the market will bear is hard to do in and of itself. Not only will different people pay different amounts for things depending on how much they want it, but your ability as a publisher to determine price point is determined by a number of factors outside of your control: the cut taken from various middlemen, changes in the price of paper, changes in the prices of shipping, and so forth. Then, of course, publicity changes how much people want the product in the first place.

So I’m doing an experiment: I just got a great deal on the next print run of Shock: and I’ve reduced the price to $19. The retail price is going down by more than the price break warrants by itself, but the price break softens the blow some because I wanted to try a lower retail price point anyway, and this means that I can take the same per-unit blow I was going to before, while charging an even lower price. I am hopeful that sales will increase by at least the same percentage as the price break, netting me a greater satisfied audience. If sales increase by more than the price break, then super-awesome: I’m making more money and more people are enjoying the game.

Shock: is available now for $19 from both the Shock: page and Indie Press Revolution.

*Thanks to Ben Lehman for this idea. Who accidentally made a price point at $23 when he started selling Polaris.

I’ve Always Wondered How Buck Rogers’ Pistol Worked

He'll save every one of us! From inferior plastics!

… wait, no I haven’t. But I really love Winchell Chung’s site Atomic Rockets. It’s all sorts of explanations of how science fiction and space opera stuff might or can’t work. Stuff like laser guns, aliens, and, of course, atomic rockets.

It’s full of old SF paperback covers, rational discussion, and a clear deep enjoyment of the subject matter. Check it!