Awards, Books, Games, Oh My
CATCHING UP
WOW, it’s been a while. For some reason I had it in my head that my last newsletter went out when I turned in editorial revisions to THE PATRIOS NETWORK, but… turns out I did no such thing 😂
So, yes, PATRIOS was revised and edited and turned out 4,500 words shorter than the first draft. Which is certainly a first for me, and the book will be better for it. When, exactly, you can judge for yourselves I don’t know. I think we’re now looking at July publication, but I’ll let you know for sure when I do (and I really will, this time).
What else am I up to? Well:
Resident Evil Village has won a bunch of awards. First we won Ultimate Game of the Year and PlayStation Game of the Year at the Golden Joysticks:
We were are also a Game of the Year finalist at The Game Awards:
Maggie Robertson won again for Best Acting at the New York Game Awards:
https://nygamecritics.com/2022/02/02/awards-all-the-winners-from-the-11th-new-york-game-awards/
And, finally, Maggie and I won Outstanding Achievement in Character at the DICE awards:
So it’s been kind of amazing. I think everyone involved is blown away by how VILLAGE has been received, and of course the phenomenal response to Lady Dimitrescu herself.
What else? I’m hard at work on a new graphic novel, codename PROJECT LAWMAN. I can’t say any more, and in fact I don’t think I’ll be able to tell you anything about it until at least 2023, despite my script deadline being the end of this month! But it’s pretty cool, and will be worth the wait.
Since the end of last year I’ve also been working with an LA-based studio on some very cool stuff that’s nominally games, but will hopefully sort of broaden out to be more than that too. I’m operating on pacific time most days as a result, which has completely flipped my normal working schedule on its head 🙃 But it’s worth it. I don’t know when there’ll be any news to share – GDC is coming up, of course, but I don’t think any of these projects will be announced there. We’ll see.
Speaking of GDC, I’m delivering a talk at this year’s Game Narrative Summit – sadly remote, rather than in-person, but it’ll still be fun – called How to Run (and Survive) a Writers’ Room. If you’re attending the conference you’ll be able to watch it live, or a recording in the GDC Vault. If you’re not an attendee, there’s a chance GDC might decide to make the recording one of their rare publicly available talks (they did that for my first appearance back in 2010, for example) and if so of course I’ll let you all know.
My “breaking into comics” piece for the WRITERS & ARTISTS YEARBOOK – which first appeared in the 2020 edition, and was reprinted in the 2021 and 2022 editions – is now set to appear in the 2023 edition as well. Nobody at Bloomsbury is quite sure if four years in a row is unprecedented, but it’s certainly not normal…!
Last year I took a position as a Shore Scripts judge and read for the sci-fi category, which was won by Lisa Lueddecke with EPHEMERAL (which I ranked first, and clearly so did many of my fellow judges – it really was a great script). For 2022 I’ve been asked to mentor the overall winner of the feature script competition, giving them notes on their screenplay and a one-on-one video chat. For all that we complain about ‘Zoom fatigue’, I’m very glad to see the rest of the world catching up with us nerds and getting comfortable with video calls. They’re a huge boon to international collaboration like this.
Finally, you can apparently take the boy out of design, but you can’t take the designer out of the boy. I’ve been hard at work recently on several rebranding exercises for the Crime Writers’ Association, where you’ll recall I was elected vice chair last year. Ironically, these redesigns have nothing to do with that position, but it seems I just love making work for myself 🤪 Before Christmas I redesigned our Dagger awards branding, recently I’ve been working on new imagery and styling for the National Crime Reading Month initiative, and coming up is another project to revamp the reader-focused newsletters we send out. Around and around it goes…
OBLIGATORY WEIRD MUSIC LINK
Because what would one of my newsletters be without one.
Like the good mad scientist musician he is, Greg Shapley has re-encoded two numbers station broadcasts as music. Atonal, unusual, certainly unique: yep, it’s right up my alley. Called The Impossibility of Performance, you can listen and buy the album at Bandcamp:
And if you don’t know what a numbers station is, hoo boy. Prepare for some fun, weird reading 🕵
IS THIS WORLD MINE:
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