Blue Moon Aurora

I figured it was time for another update on all things Blue Moon Aurora.

Duet Saga: Knight of Curidan is ambling along. We have about 50,000 words written and the basics of all the mechanics figured out, but I suspect we’ll need another 50,000 words to finish things up.  This means we probably won’t have a first draft done till August.  The art is almost entirely completed and we have some excellent pieces. My instinct is that Knight of Curidan won’t be released till probably early 2012, but I am confident it’s going to be quite the book when it’s done.  I hope it will enable those GMs who don’t have the time or maybe the ideas to be able to run a really compelling duet campaign.

We are learning a lot, which is the whole point of the Duet Saga series.  Foremost we have learned that a novel with 100,000 words is many times easier to write than a RPG book with 100,000 words. We suspected this would be the case, but underestimated the factor by which RPGs were more difficult to write.  Obviously, one would think that for your first RPG you would aim smaller than a 100,000 word opus, but these are the type of RPG books I like so these are the type of RPG books we’ll make.  That said I keep toying with the idea of slicing off a lot of the duet advice material from Knight of Curidan and bundling it up as a free PDF.  That way we wouldn’t need to keep putting that foundational information in every Duet Saga and we’d have a small product as a practice run for Knight of Curidan. 

Within two weeks, West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide will be released as an e-book. We’re not doing any significant advertising for it but will push it here and there.  We honestly have no idea whether it will catch on once it’s released, but we’re committed to the line regardless. We’ve  started writing West Pacific Supers: Victory at any Cost and as a wild guess I would peg maybe September when we’ll have the first draft done.  The turnaround on Victory at any Cost from first draft to e-book is probably going to be a lot quicker than with Rising Tide.  First, we’re more organized in the writing and thus will have less systemic problems to correct. Second, in writing the first book we established a voice and style for West Pacific Supers that is easy for us to continue.  So I would guess that spring 2012 is when Victory at any Cost will be released.  We might write the third book at the same time as the second book, in which case the third book, possibly called President’s Team, will be released in fall 2012.

After those books are out, we’re pretty flexible but it’s really a toss-up between another Duet Saga or West Pacific Supers: The Roleplaying Game.  The West Pacific Supers RPG is one of the big reasons we started Blue Moon Aurora, but we don’t want to tackle that until we’re completely ready to make it the awesome book we’re envisioning.  In either case, we may be hiring writers to help tackle some of the grunt work on these projects.  This could speed up the process or result in wasted money and a lot of rewriting, but it is one of those ideas we’re tossing around.

All in all things are moving along. As a reminder we do have a page on Facebook here and also are on Twitter.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

May was a draining month for some reason and not a very productive one for writing or roleplaying, but June has arrived and Summer always brings me a huge boost in creative energy, which I have been feeling the last few days.  We took a hiatus from roleplaying for May and dived back into Bollywood, one of our guilty pleasures, but are getting back into the swing of things.  

First, Michelle has taken one for the team and begun GMing a D6 Star Wars campaign with the kids and me.  This was a return to a campaign Michelle had started last year and that the kids really loved.   The premise is simple enough, we're a team the Rebel Alliance has assigned to help a local resistance group oppose the Galactic Empire. I'm an Alliance Intelligence officer, Anton is the smuggler with a ship, and Alina is a twi'lek sniper.  The last few adventures have been something with Anton totally botching an infiltration mission and Alina throwing tantrums over spending her money on the mission. The kids are playing with some weird mix of cocky bravado and paralyzation due to fear of making a mistake. The only good news is that the kid's characters are finally starting to accept my PC as the leader of the group though they have yet to embrace the pursuit of the greater good over the greater profit.  Still it's a good experience and they are finally old enough to handle it and maybe pick up some improved social skills.

Second, my play-by-post is going well with four campaigns running at the moment.  There is the iconic West Pacific Supers now in its five season via PBP I believe, which, as always, is surging along wonderfully.  There is both an Eclipse Phase and D6 Star Wars campaign running to good effect.  Finally, there is the Lords Campaign this year's attempt at a PBP politically-orientated campaign, that is going great, mainly with the addition of Crazy Monkey running the crazy monarch of the player's kingdom.  As a player I'm also in a Shadowrun campaign run by zzyxzs titled The Sixth World that has been steadily running on the forums for quite awhile now.  So PBP is also going great.

Third, Michelle and I finally got a new duet campaign running with a return to ICON Star Trek, which has always been a favorite for when we are looking for something a little less intense and more roleplaying focused.   We'll see how it goes, but for duets Star Trek works well and the ICON system is super simple and intuitive.  Just perfect as a distraction from the writing and design work we're doing for Knight of Curidan and future products.

So what are you playing right now?

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

When I was in middle school, back in the mid ‘80s, I discovered the BECMI edition of D&D (Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, and Immortals Dungeons & Dragons).  In particular, the Companion Set, the C in BECMI, captured my imagination for it had rules for managing dominions, mass combat, and tournaments – who doesn’t want to rule kingdoms, command armies, and compete in tournaments? This to me has always been fantasy roleplaying, not the slaying of monsters and taking their stuff.

Thus when we decided to publish Duet Sagas, with each book containing all the material a GM would need to run a duet campaign, it was this style of campaign that I wanted to do first.  Michelle took some convincing, but in the end we decided that Duet Saga 1 would be The Barony of Calagard.

This is one of those RPG sourcebooks that defined my early roleplaying years, in fact all of my BECMI books are pretty worn.  Them and my WEG Star Wars books were unquestionably the most used of my RPG collection.

The concept is simple enough: the PC begins by inheriting a small dominion in the Barony of Calagard and is thrown into the world of lordship, politics, and grand adventure.  We are using the Pathfinder system for our rules and the book will include some mechanical crunch, some flavor, but is focused on tools for running this sort of duet campaign.  Every duet campaign is different as every GM and player is different, but one constant I have seen is that a lot of GMs struggle with these sorts of campaigns.  Our focus is not to give you a script to follow, but to give you the means to quickly and easily create scenarios and challenges for the PC to grapple with.  Our biggest assumptions are that anyone can be an effective GM with a little help and that an effective GM is superior to any book, computer game, or other interactive media in challenging and engaging a player.  That is why roleplaying is so damn fun.

A few weeks ago, I bought the Kingmaker Adventure Path published by Paizo.  I was aware of it when we started writing Calagard and the more I wrote, the more I started worrying that it had already done what we were trying to do.  So all six installments arrive from Amazon.com and I begin reading. The first foreword describes how this series would be an open-ended campaign where the PCs can build nations, fight wars, and tame a wild land.  I flipped through the six issues and saw they had governance rules, mass combat, a tournament, and lots of NPCs, monsters, and flavor text on some religions and kingdoms.  For a moment, I was honestly dismayed as it did seem like a lot of overlap with what we were trying to do.  Then I read through it more closely.

Kingmaker is really a remake of the classic Keep on the Borderlands where the PCs claim a keep and then explore the surrounding region facing various challenges hidden at various locations around the area. This part of the adventure path is solid and the villains of the week should entertain a group of PCs as they advance up levels, but when you leave the traditional hack-and-slash realm and move into governance, politics, and the like – Kingmaker fails.  Let me rephrase that, Kingmaker works for a group of PCs tackling these issues at a very shallow level, which covers more gaming groups.  Like most RPGs, Kingmaker approaches governance abstractly, so it loses any semblance of drama or excitement.  Our approach is completely different – we create situations where PCs have to make real decisions with real consequences. Furthermore, we leap off the beaten path and tackle romance, duty, family, faith, and other issues that drive these sorts of decisions.  Any situation where a decision or crisis is simply resolved by a few rolls as opposed to a PC actually making a decision utterly fails in our opinion.

We’ve run these sorts of campaigns for over two decades.  I have run group and duet campaigns involving governance many, many times.  I know all the mistakes and I also know some tricks that really work.  The Barony of Calagard shares all of this valuable information with a GM so that the GM can run a campaign that is simply incredible.  Sure there will be monsters and combat, but that’s not what drives a duet campaign – what drives a duet campaign is the sense of empowerment a PC has that comes from making real decisions that shape the campaign.

No doubt about it, we have ambitious plans for these Duet Sagas. Our goal is quite simply to lift the bar on what a campaign sourcebook should be.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

It has been a few weeks without an update, though it was a good Spring Break so it all balances out in the end.  Things though have been moving forward and most exciting is we have our cover for our pending eBook - West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide.  The cover art was done by Eric J. Carter and he did an incredible job of creating West Pacific on the verge of crisis.  The title design was done by Andy Kerr who was also the mind behind the Blue Moon Aurora logo.  We'll have the second chapter of Rising Tide up in the preview section next week, but as we are ahead of schedule we are moving up the release to June instead of July. We still have a number of things to do, but are well ahead of our various target deadlines.  So unless some fiasco or crisis catches us, Rising Tide will be available as an eBook in June. 

Rising Tide is a fun book.  It's also a little odd, I guess.  Sure the fact it's about superheroes who are treated as celebrity super stars is a little different, but I think the real oddness to Rising Tide after rereading a few chapters is how it has a little bit of everything.  There's melodrama, there's comedy, there's action, and rotating around the story is a number of interesting characters.  We hope people like it, we certainly think it's a good story, but you never know till people read it.  That's why at the end of the day, we just wrote a book we would like.  

Duet Saga 1: The Barony of Calagard is progressing, though slower than I would like in regards to the writing.  The Barony of Calagard is basically a complete duet campaign for a knightly PC.  The ideas are easy as this is a sort of campaign I have been running for decades, but converting the ideas is proving challenging, well more slow than challenging.  The art is coming in great with a fantastic cover done by Lorraine Schleter who is also doing some interior art as well.  Actually, the artists Michelle has been working with have been great in all ways.  Christine Y. Chong (Mayshing) we've used for a number of pieces, like this one she has up on her DeviantArt page.  We're also using Kim Feigenbaum, Zak Hennessey, Christina Hess, and MuYoung Kim.  I have to say every artist we have worked with has been great, very responsive, and professional.

All in all, things are moving forward, we've even partially outlined West Pacific Supers: Victory at Any Cost our next eBook as well as Duet Saga 2: Ghosts of Arbastil, but first we need to get some books published and not get too ahead of ourselves. So back to writing for me!

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

The current budget crisis in D.C. demonstrates the fundamental problem with our government: the American people – including me writing this blog and you reading it. It’s human nature during a crisis or even a period of malaise or discontent to point fingers. It’s easy and frees us from any responsibility, basically, the American dream. My son is a perfect example of this.  He fails a spelling test and he can give a litany of reasons for this failure: the teacher didn’t give him enough time, I didn’t force him to copy his spelling words this week, he was tired because his sister woke him up early, and so forth and so on. Lots of reasons, but none of them involve him taking personal responsibility for the failure. In a lot of ways, it’s like reading Facebook most mornings.  The Nation is a mess because of the President, the Tea Party, corporations, religious fanatics, aliens from outer space, and so forth and so on. It’s human nature to point fingers, but it takes a little bit of the divine to honestly look in the mirror.

In the interests of full disclosure, my wife works for the Federal Government, in fact the Senate.  She belongs to a non-partisan office and is likely to be deemed “essential” personnel, which means in the advent of a shutdown she has to keep working while not getting paid, one of the perks of government work.  However, she is one of the lucky ones, because “essential” workers are most likely to get retroactive pay after a shutdown ends (though it’s not guaranteed). Besides my wife, I have many friends and family who work in the government from the military to homeland security to teachers.  I am biased, because I consider all of them patriots.  Try an experiment: ask a soldier you know if they would rather remain in the military or become a public school teacher with a class of two dozen special needs students. I doubt you’d be surprised at the results of the experiment. People don’t work for the government because of the money – they work for the government because of the benefits, primarily the benefit of being able to serve this country. My wife, like most government employees, could make more money in the private sector, but then you’re just working for money. Now we’re not in a financial crisis if the shutdown occurs, as long as it doesn’t last more than a month, but what about the carpenters, cafeteria workers, young staffers, and the like who work for the Federal Government and are living from paycheck to paycheck?  Who is the irresponsible employer who puts their livelihoods in jeopardy, well, we’re a democracy so that means we’re responsible.

This brings us to the current budget crisis and back to the problem with the American people.  Now a little constitutional fact: Congress really only has to do one thing every year and that is to pass a budget.  Congress could pass the budget and then go home, but obviously the world has become a lot more complicated since Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence on his iPad between sending Twitters to Benjamin Franklin and John Adams for feedback.  The world is a complicated place and we need a complicated government to deal with it.  Stop and think for a moment.  Imagine that you have 435 friends on Facebook and you have been charged with passing the budget for the United States.  Now these are your friends, you’re all connected by some common bond, maybe just Farmville, but there is something keeping you all together.  So do you think you could easily produce a budget?  Could you get half of your friends to agree? Or let’s make it really challenging: you have 100 friends and you need 60 of them to agree with your budget. This should seem pretty daunting, because it is.

So how does Congress pass anything? Well they do it with help.  Ideally, it should be with help from the American people, but have we really been helping? I think we can all agree we haven’t been doing our share.  So a vacuum has been filled by special interests from corporations to unions.  Americans throw their arms up in frustration over the influence of lobbyists and the corruption of Congress, but what do we do about it besides complain? I’ll tell you what we do.  We send emails, post on Facebook, or write blogs to share with our friends so we can all be indignant together.  Even better we send misinformation when we do this, because checking Snopes.com before sending an email or posting on Facebook would just take too much effort.  Another popular gimmick we love is to find some champion who we support so they can solve all the nation’s problems, whether it’s President Obama, the Tea Party, or Ron Paul, we would rather support someone who reflects our beliefs than do what is needed for a democracy to function: communicate.    

Americans don’t want to communicate, because that involves listening and probably changing opinions, which goes against our fundamental mental laziness.  Life is so easy when you can just categorize everything; like declaring all Congressmen are corrupt, even though you know that is patently false, the vast majority of them are patriots trying to do what they think is best for the country.  But we live in an age where if you can’t sum up a position in 25 words or less it isn’t worth sharing.  Blanket statements are our modern security blankets, it’s comforting to just declare all liberals are communists or all republicans are fascists, because it doesn’t require thinking.  I’m just as guilty about this as anyone, but I’ve come to realize this is what is causing all our problems in this incredible Nation of ours.

Our government, our media, our society is reflective of its people.  We are a democracy, but democracy only works when people are engaged. Sure our guy may have lost an election but that just means that the other guy is now our guy till the next election.  That’s how democracy works.  I’m just as guilty as anyone on being a lazy American.  I haven’t written an actual letter to a Senator or Congressman in probably a decade.  I’ve sent emails to members of Congress, but come on, we all know emails don’t matter, just like posting on Facebook.  Also I have never gone to the office of any member of Congress to talk with some hapless staffer about an issue.  I’ve also been lazy when it comes to elections.  Yes, I vote in primaries and the main election and occasionally give money to various campaigns, but I don’t get that involved in the messiness of it all.  It’s just easier to ignore it all, make a comment here and there, or occasionally write a blog and pat myself on the back for my cleverness.  That’s all meaningless; it’s all feel-good politics without any substance.

Our democracy is not struggling due to those in Congress; it’s struggling because we aren’t doing our part to help them.

So here is my challenge to myself and anyone reading this blog:

First, find out who actually represents you in the Federal, State, and local government. My advice is to start in your phone book, but the Internet is about as good.   

Second, send a letter to someone on that list on some issue that matters to you.  Inform yourself about that matter and keep an open mind about the issues, that last part is the hard part.  An open mind requires you to look in the mirror, which is a little scary.  Remember the letter is to persuade not to win any debates.   Regardless of party affiliation, your representative represents you and for that to work respect needs to go both ways.

Third, don’t expect one letter to change the world, but you can start to change the world with one letter if you keep going after that.

Fourth, post the results of your efforts in a comment here, in your blog, or even on Facebook and encourage others to do the same.  The issue doesn’t matter; it’s the engagement.  If you are engaging in a civil and open discourse then I’m happy, even if you want to move the capital to Madison, Wisconsin and require all members of Congress to spend a few weeks every year making cheese.  Okay, that’s kind of odd, but democracy is about communication and exploring new ideas and growing as a Nation, but for that to happen we have to grow as individuals.

Regardless, I’m going to make an effort on this to make myself a better citizen and I hope some of those reading this blog might do the same, but that’s just more feel-good politics – though sometimes feel-good politics can help us do real things.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

As those who frequent this website have noticed it has a new look, a new logo, and is slightly reorganized to better serve Blue Moon Aurora, LLC. But the even cooler news is that the first chapter of West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide is up as a PDF on the Previews page. We will follow this up with the second and third chapters in May and June to build up to our release of the e-book in July.  We are planning on releasing the book through Amazon and Barnes & Nobles and you will not need a Kindle or Nook to read it,which is a common misconception about e-books, Amazon, for example, has a free reader for its e-books you can use on your PC.

Now the first three chapters are pretty indicative of the book.  So if you like the first chapters you’ll like the rest of the book, but if you don’t like the first three chapters…spend your money elsewhere, but do check in from time to time, because we have other books planned including a Pathfinder-compatible roleplaying game campaign we’ll release near the end of the year.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

One of the most exciting parts of our new business operation has been commissioning art for our books. We've always been lovers of high quality illustrations in roleplaying books (and in books in general - I've been collecting beautifully illustrated children's books since long before we had children), and when we started Blue Moon Aurora, we assured ourselves that we would get the best art we could afford for our books. Worst case scenario, we don't sell many books but we end up with a collection of beautiful art to go with our writing!

Finding artists was the first challenge, not because there are so few artists,but because there are so many. Several people referred us to deviantart, but the scope of the site makes it almost unusable for our purposes. There are artists of every imaginable style and quality and no easily discernible way to find out which ones are based in the United States and interested in commissions.

After a bit of online searching, I discovered ArtOrder,which describes itself as "a community of Fantasy and Science Fiction illustrators committed to mentoring, artistic improvement, and career enhancement". Most importantly for our purposes, the site has a members database with locations clearly listed. It was a laborious process to go through 54 pages of names (1,143 members last I checked), pulling out every one in the United States, and then narrowing further to those who had websites displaying their art. Each online art gallery had to be checked to see if it was a style of art that we liked (either traditional high fantasy or realistic-looking superhero art; anything too horror, too erotica, or too manga was out). I made a master list of artist names, website links, and contact information, along with notes about which of our books a particular person might be best suited to illustrate.

The final list consisted of 62 artists whose work I considered to have real possibilities. Of those, I selected 20 who most fit the projects we would be commissioning illustrations for first and sent query emails to check rates and availability; I received 15 responses. Almost everyone I've dealt with has been friendly, helpful, and enthusiastic.

Blue Moon Aurora, LLC, has currently entered into independent contractor agreements with six artists to provide freelance illustrations and one to produce the Blue Moon Aurora logo. Two of the artists are working on cover art pieces and four others are doing interior illustrations, all in accordance with written art specifications. We've received the preliminary sketches from several artists and the finished work from one; it's incredibly exciting to see our written descriptions come to life on the page.

As with everything else with Blue Moon Aurora, the art side of things is a learning process. I'm fortunate to have a childhood friend who does book layout professionally and who has been advising us on matters involving dpi, fileformats, trim sizes, and other mysteries. As art is delivered and contracts are fulfilled, we will be asking each artist to answer some "outtake"questions about how we can do things better. We're eager to learn and improve,although I can already see that the biggest problem that we're going to have with art is sticking to our art budget.

Thanks for reading,

Michelle

Blue Moon Aurora, LLC is three weeks old, things are moving forward, and we’re learning lessons as we go along. Honestly, a lot of what we have done has been tedious but rather easy like setting the company up as an LLC and registering for an EIN.  Reworking the website, setting up email addresses for the company, organizing our computers, and setting up a box for files are all disgustingly easy but time consuming. Unquestionably, the biggest challenge we have faced thus far is developing the contract we are using for our various art needs.

I attended law school and like all future lawyers muddled through classes on contracts and legal drafting, but that was six years ago, and the lawyerliest thing I have done since then was a summons for jury duty, which resulted in nothing more than sitting in a lobby reading a book as I was never called for jury selection.  However, when faced with the prospect of writing a contract, I did what all lawyers do when drafting documents – they begin by copying the work someone else has done.  So a search of the Internet turned up lots of appropriate contracts and I muddled through a number to work up a rough draft, which I turned over to Michelle who is in all things a writing goddess. We finished our draft and sent it off to our lawyer to review.

Now there is a divide among lawyers over legal drafting and that is the divide between plain language and legalese. We are fanatical believers that legal writing should be plain language, as understandable as possible. This is also the standard they teach you in law school.  However, in practice most lawyers embrace legalese. The plain language versus legalese is the conflict between ideal and reality.

In law school, there are a few things you learn quickly enough.  First, that whenever you answer a question from a professor you must begin with: “It all depends, (insert your argument).” Second, the law of the land is mostly forged from judges grappling with those cases involving the most outrageous, moronic, or nuanced fact patterns you could imagine.  Yes, we are a litigious society, but easily 90% of all civil suits are settled long before they go to trial as the parties find some equitable resolution.  The remaining cases are the wacko ones, people trying to change the law, people out for ‘justice’ (i.e. make the bastards pay), or perhaps both parties are just too stubborn for their own good.  Thus it is these cases that end up making the law of the land, yes, this is one reason why judges try to decide cases on as narrow of grounds as possible, but generally bad cases make bad law.

So imagine a case where two parties are arguing about the meaning of a contract, let’s say a section detailing which jurisdiction covers the contract, and that section is drafted about as well as writing on the wall of a bathroom stall.  However, the court finds that section actually does what it’s supposed to and upholds the contract.

Now stop for a second.  You’re a lawyer.  Your job is to protect your client from all manner of legal problems and to draft contracts that will hold up in court.  So our previous case is the law of the land in your jurisdiction. You could write a clear, simple section on jurisdiction, or you could use the crappy version the courts have upheld as valid.  It’s not an easy choice.  Do you go with the sure win that is horrifically written or the elegant version that you think is clear, but what if you’re wrong?  Your answer should begin with, “it all depends.”

This right here is the conflict between ideal and reality.  If a contract, no matter how poorly written, is held up to do what it was intended to do then if you use that contract language you’re good to go in the eyes of the courts. Let’s go the other way.  Imagine a case with a crisp, short contract that “assigns all rights” for a work of art to the person commissioning the work of art.  Reading that you might take “all” to mean “all”, well, what if there is a case out there were “all” wasn’t held to mean “all” but instead was held to mean “really just a couple”. Ridiculous? Maybe, but what words mean in a contract depends upon the contract and the industry covered by the contract.

Now we sent off a 2 ½ page contract to our lawyer and got a lot of comments and concerns, which we incorporated into the current 5 page contract we are using.  It’s now legally sufficient but not nearly as plain language as we would like and we’ll have to deal with that at some point.  The point of a contract is not to screw the other guy.  The point of a contract is to set up rules for what is hoped to be a mutually beneficial arrangement.  If things go poorly in the arrangement then the contract is there to help protect you.  But you have to know what you want more: a clear contract to promote a positive working relationship or a contract that ensures you can safely get through troubled times.  Ideally, you try to do both, but this is a fundamental business philosophy you have to decide.

Captain Malcolm Reynolds summed up the basics of contracts: “I do the job…and then I get paid.” At the end of the day, that’s all there is to it.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

We finished our last revisions of West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide this past Sunday and registered the copyright on it Monday.  It was unquestionably the smallest revision we have done as it was targeted to fix a few issues. Besides some minor aesthetic changes the main focus was on sidestepping any trademark issues.

Trademarks are a tricky issue and when you use something like a can of Dr Pepper in a work of fiction you need to be careful.  It’s generally okay if you use something as a backdrop, like having people eat at a McDonald’s, but if you are derogatory to a trademark, or a trademark becomes important to the story, then you are treading in dangerous waters.  And by dangerous waters, I mean getting angry letters from lawyers who have just enough grounds to cause you headaches even though you are probably well in the clear of the law. However, that sort of is the standard for trademarks.  Take a look at this article.  It’s interesting when you think about how something like selling a trademarked weapon (i.e. TASER) in Second Life might be an infringement on that trademark.  It kind of makes sense and kind of doesn’t.  Imagine you have a real world restaurant chain in a MMORPG and every time you ate there your avatar became overweight.  It’s funny, but it does negatively impact the trademark.  On the other hand it’s a make belief world and some companies need to get a grip.  Anyway, what we did was just create a few fictional trademarks to replace the real world ones we were using significantly and the real world ones we kept are in the background or portrayed in as positive of light as possible. Actually, it worked a little better with the changes, a little more humorous.  Still at this point after four significant revisions and half dozen minor revisions Rising Tide is locked down.

On other fronts, we have contracted the cover art for both West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide and Duet Saga I: Barony of Calagard.  We’ll talk more on that later, but art is exciting as it is really the process of giving visual life to an imagined world.  Besides that, lots of little paperwork and other nonsense with the company have kept me busy but I have dived into the writing for Barony of Calagard.  When I start making more progress I’ll talk more about that, but the writing is going well.  Furthermore, Bluemoonaurora is now on Twitter and Facebook, but I don’t expect to really use those lines of communication in earnest for a month or two.  The focus right now is setting things up and writing, because otherwise we’ll have nothing to publish.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk

In March 2011, Blue Moon Aurora, LLC, was formed in the State of Maryland to publish fiction and roleplaying games.  The basic BMA business plan is to try to break even producing high-quality books.  That’s about it; really, that should be the business plan for all small press publishers. Blue Moon Aurora's focus is on roleplaying games, which is pretty much a niche market where if you sell 1000 copies of your book you’re doing pretty well.  So this is a modest little enterprise, but we have committed to put a minimum of three years into this to learn how it all works (we’ll admit it, we’re pretty ignorant at this point).  We aren’t in this to become rich (there are easier ways to make money), but we love to write and we love nice books.

Fiction

Our first fiction book will be released this July.  West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide is the story of a superhero team in a world much like our own where securing endorsements, climbing the rankings, and handling the media is about as important as saving the city from destruction.  We are in the process of preparing it for publication as an e-book and via print-on-demand.  To give you an idea what this book is all about, we will be sharing the first three chapters online in April, May, and June.  If you like the first three chapters; you’ll love the book, if you don’t like them, well, buy someone else’s book.

So our first three books will be:

West Pacific Supers: Rising Tide (July, 2011)

West Pacific Supers: Victory at Any Cost (TBD, 2012)

West Pacific Supers: Apotheosis (TBD, 2013)

After West Pacific Supers we will be writing other books,almost definitely in the fantasy and science fiction genres. We certainly aren’t one-trick ponies; we’re at least three-trick ponies.  Once we finish writing West Pacific Supers: Apotheosis we’ll bicker for a few weeks about what to do next and one of us will finally yield.  At that point, probably some time next year, we’ll announce in this blog what we’re writing next.  

Roleplaying Games

Our first RPG will be Duet Saga: Barony of Calagard which is an entire duet campaign to allow a narrator to run a single PC as the ruler of a dominion, managing an unruly noble family, foiling evil machinations, courting one’s true love, and trying to be a just, or at least effective, ruler.  Released simultaneously will be the Duet Saga Handbook, which will be a free PDF giving you all the information you need to run effective duet campaigns. These first books will be Pathfinder compatible, but will have lots of great materials for any fantasy RPG.

So our first roleplayinig books will be:

Duet Saga: Barony of Calagard (TBD, 2011)

Duet Saga Handbook (TBD, 2011)

We are also in the process of developing West Pacific Supers: Roleplaying Game but between our big ambitions for this RPG and our limited resources means this won’t be released any earlier than August, 2013.There are also a number of other ideas percolating, including a number of additional Duet Saga sequels, but thus far nothing is set in stone. 

Children’s Books

Michelle has a manuscript done for a collection of Buddhist children’s stories that we will be publishing, but we can only do so much at a time so we don’t expect this to be released till probably 2013. 

Other Stuff

I will continue to rework the website and forums and make a better effort to keep putting new stuff on the site.  There might be a few other things to announce down the road, but this is the place where I'll make all our major announcements first. Check back as there’ll be more use of the members function for this website with emails and even a section with stuff just for members.  So join up to not miss anything! Otherwise this is more than enough for today's blog.

Thanks for reading,

Kirk