You should totally buy it.

It’s no secret that Myke and I have been friends a long time. Heck. I remember back in 1991, when he spelled his name M-i-k-e like a normal person.

Yeah, yeah. Like I should talk…

Anyway, Myke and I have a long history of kicking each other’s asses editorially (and with weapons). I met Myke briefly while we were in High School. It was the early 90′s, and we both had crazy heavy metal hair. We didn’t really become friends until college, where we played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons (For those who speak fluent geek, we played Edition 2.0 which evolved into 2.5, Forgotten Realms setting) together.

I’ve spoken before about how Dungeons & Dragons has made me a better storyteller. I used to run friggin’ EPIC games, where I would take the map of Faerun in the Forgotten Realms, pick a spot that hadn’t been explored in any of the novels or boxed sets, and write up a huge, complex story set in that obscure place. I would create plots, sub-plots, characters, backstories, twists, turns, and emotional motivations.

Then my players, Myke included, would just go in and kill everything. And I would have to toss aside my careful plans and dance like a motherfucker to keep up with them, and more importantly, keep them going in the direction I intended. They would deliberately seek out loopholes in my storytelling and try to game the system, or just ignore the boring “talky” parts and get down to dicing and dividing treasure.

Because there are two parts to storytelling: What you want to say, and what your audience is going to hear. Sadly, the two are almost never the same, and the purpose, after all, is to entertain an audience, yourself included.

A year or so later, Myke ran a game, and I gleefully fucked with his the same damn way.

We were also preparing for the pain of rejection letters by ritualistically hitting each other with bamboo swords:

Fast forward to 1998. I have moved to Brooklyn and he to DC. We don’t talk much anymore. Myke tell me he’s been working on a fantasy novel. I say, “Huh. Me too.” I sent him whatever shit project I was working on at the time, and he sends me the first draft of a book called “Latent”.

It would later be renamed, “Control Point.”

In the ensuing 15 years we have relentlessly broken each other’s books, finding tiny weak spots and driving knives into them, forcing each other to improve our craft and pass the other’s gauntlet. We would cover each other’s work in red ink, and call each other saying, “Nice try. Here are the parts that suck, here’s WHY they suck, and here’s my suggestions on how to fix them.”

So there are a lot of Myke’s ideas in my work. The Krasian Watchers, for instance, are laddermen on his suggestion. There are also a lot of my ideas in Myke’s work. For instance, he wanted to call the water sorcerers in Control Point “aquamancers”. I told him tying them forever to the lamest of all superheroes was a bad idea, and suggested he go with “hydromancers”. True story.

Sometimes, we would argue:

So believe me when I say, I couldn’t be more excited about this launch if it was my own book. Because in some small way, it is.

This is not to say that Myke doesn’t deserve all the credit for how awesome Control Point is. The man works obsessively and ruthlessly to make ever second of his books riveting.

Seriously. Stop reading this and go read his reviews. There’s like a million of them already, and they’re all glowing.

Control Point is a military fantasy story set in an alternate version of our modern world where magic ebbs and wanes over the course of every thousand years, much like the waxing and waning of the moon. When it waxes, people with latent magic ability suddenly manifest incredible powers.

They are then drafted, broken down, and trained to fight America’s enemies in the Supernatural Operations Corps. They’re the lucky ones. Those who manifest prohibited powers like necromancy (zombies) are shot in the head.

Lt. Oscar Britton starts as a ‘normal’ human, serving the army in hunting down magical fugitives. That is, until he manifests a prohibited magic himself, and overnight becomes Public Enemy #1.

The fun starts there, and doesn’t stop till the end.

Oh, and I’ve read the sequel, Fortress Frontier. It is even better.

If you want to hear us discuss writing and our history of alpha reading, you can check out our recent podcast interview with The Functional Nerds.

As you can see, this entry to the Fan Art Contest has a perfect New Years theme. A 2012 warded calendar from Margherita! You will remember Margherita from winning the most recent Cosplay Contest. It’s great to see another excellent entry from her! Here is what she had to say:

Hey Peat,

Happy New Year to you and the family! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend.

I hope you get this in good time. I’ve been so rushed, but I didn’t want to give it up. Not sure if anyone has sent in a similar entry, but I figured a good way to start the New Year is with a 2012 calendar. I made a calendar of wards. I tried to allocate some of the wards appropriately. You’ll notice December is a snow ward, July a sand ward, April a water ward (April showers), even October is a mimic ward (imitating someone/something for Halloween). I even included the moon phases for each month. I had planned to do so much more with it, but I lacked the time. Please ignore any mess ups you might come across :s.

Thanks for constantly keeping your fans involved. It’s always fun.

Margherita

Moon Phases Detail

Superb job! I love how all the months have a pertinent ward, and they are all beautifully executed. Thanks to Margherita for entering with such a creative and unique idea!

Here are the rest of the months …

Speaking of Spanish, I also found this great Spanish review of Red Sonja: Blue on Suite 101. It’s definitely worth checking out. You can find a poorly google translated English version here.

Peat’s presence on Facebook has moved. As you may know, currently there is an official group page for his fans right now. However, because Facebook has…well, let’s just call them “issues”, the group pages are going to be shut down sometime in the future. At some point (we don’t know when that will be), nobody new will be able to join the group and everything will be pared down. So, Peat’s made the migration over to the Pages format, and you can join his page here. You just hit Like and you’re all set. The photos have been moved over from the old group, but we’ll be adding more as well, for your viewing pleasure. New contests and posts will also be posted on there like they are on the current group.

Also in the news, AdamReese did some great drawings of Arlen, looking kick-ass.

You can find Adam’s DeviantArt account here.

Morgrad, a member of the forums, posted these great pieces of ward art here. They look beautiful.They each remind of art from a different part of the world. The first one looks Middle Eastern to me.

This one looks more Chinese to me though.

This one I wouldn’t be surprised to see as a tattoo, in place of those tribal designs.

And another (very extensive piece).

It’s a great idea; the jack o lanterns are supposed to help scare off evil things that will come in the night. Remind you of something?

I do wonder how difficult they would be to actually ward. I imagine the strange shape of them might cause some problems for the warder. So probably not a problem for Arlen but very difficult for everyone else.

The way  Phillip and Zach did it, was that Zach drew out the wards on the pumpkins, and then Phillip carved them out. Phillip said “It was hard to get the light to show though in parts of the ward because of how thick the pumpkin was. To solve this, I had to carve the insides  from around 2 inches to about 1/2 an inch. We took wards that were on Peter’s site.”

You can see here, that they not only drew just one ward, but many on each of the pumpkins. Obviously they’re covering all of their bases. You never know when it’ll snow on Halloween just to make things difficult, and then the snow demons appear and eat all the candy. Better to be safe than sorry.

So overall, two very talented guys who warded some very oddly shaped objects.

You can also view a gallery full of pictures of the lanterns here.

Posted by Rebecca the (Occasionally Useful) Assistant