October 17

Next update November 2

Just survived GDC Austin, now I’m packing my bags for my trip up North to Canada for for STARFest!

Well, technically I wasn’t at GDC Austin… but I did go out several nights to meet friends and former BioWare folk who now work at companies like Blizzard and Riot. Seeing how many Bio-folk have become “players” in the industry is a real testament to how good our team was.

But GDC is over, and I’m looking forward to this weekend. I’ll be speaking at the St. Albert Public Library on a topic I have some familiarity with: Exploring Evil and the Dark Side of Star Wars. You can get tickets here if you want to hear my thoughts on creating villians in books and games. They’re only $5, and the money goes to help support the library… as an author I think that’s a very worthy cause.

Hosting my talk will be Brent Knowles, a former colleague at BioWare and an accomplished sci-fi author in his own write. (Yes, that’s a terrible pun.)Obviously, Star Wars will be a focus, but I’ll be talking quite a bit about Mass Effect as well. And then I’ll be taking questions from the audience and probably signing some books. Here’s a story in the St. Albert Gazette – my hometown paper – about the event. Lots of award winning authors at the event… yet somehow I got invited anyway. Hope to see you there!

And if you can’t make it out to see my talk, at least you can check out this years Mass Effect Marathon over at g33kwatch. Once again, they’re raising money for Child’s Play – a very worthy charity.

Shortly after that – November 13 to be exact – my next novel is coming out: Star Wars: Annihilation. It’s a bit of a departure from the Sith/Jedi focused works I’ve done in the past (though both Sith and Jedi are involved). This one has a more of a secret agent/James Bond/Mass Effect feel to it. (Hmm… am I allowed to say one of my Star Wars books has a “Mass Effect” feel?)

Annihilation has some tie-ins with the Star Wars: The Old Republic video game, but you don’t need to play the game to enjoy the novel. But  if you did play the game, you will recognize some of the characters: Jace Malcom, Satele Shan and Master Gnost-Dural all make appearances. But the main hero of the story is Theron Shan, the protagonist from the Lost Suns comics written by Alex Freed. Alex also has a short story “prequel” to the novel coming out soon. The Last Battle of Colonel Jace Malcom appears in Star Wars Insider magazine issue #137 on October 23.

For those of you who follow my updates by not my Twitter feed, here are some links to a bunch of recent interviews with me that have gone up on the web:
Bombad Radio had me answer questions submitted by fans. This was done by e-mail, so I actually come across reasonably well.
Fangirl Next Door caught up with me and some of the other authors at Star Wars Reads Day – my stuff comes in around the 30:40 mark of the podcast. This was done live into a recorder (almost said “tape” recorder – damn, I’m old!), so I sound like I’m either drunk or simple. Hey, I’m a writer not a talker! (But totally go see my talk at StarFest.)
EUcantina posted a video interview I did back at Celebration promoting Star Wars reads day. Fortunately, this format allowed me to do retakes on things where I sounded stupid, so you’ll hear a lot less “uhs” and “ums”.

Okay, that’s about it for this update. Next update I’ll be talking a lot more about Annihilation; total coincidence that it will be coming out a couple weeks later.