swan_tower | About yesterday's news . . .

I would not have predicted that my first Nebula nomination would be for game writing.

Mind you, it's like 25% my nomination, if that. The work in question, the Ninefox Gambit RPG, is designed and written by Yoon Ha Lee, based on his Machineries of Empire series. But I wrote three mini-adventures for it, and Yoon credited me as a co-author for the award, so here we are! I'm a Nebula nominee!

. . . in a category that includes Alan Wake II and Baldur's Gate 3, lololol, we are so not going to win. But that's fine. It's still super cool for this game to get that kind of recognition. And I don't have to mention that 25% thing when I put this in my bio; I just get to say I've been nominated for a Nebula Award!

I should also say I really enjoyed writing those adventures. I worked on them shortly after doing Imperfect Land for L5R, and it was interesting to take what I'd learned doing that and scale it down to the size Yoon was looking for. Plus, the Machineries of Empire series being what it is, all the plots needed to involve significant moral tradeoffs and costs -- no "here is the route to a clean victory." I had the notion of dividing them up among the six hexarchate factions, two per plot, to give each one its own distinct flavor, and that worked out very well; I was also able to focus on parts of the setting that don't always get a lot of prominence in the novels, like non-faction members and outside polities. If one of the plots wound up being incredibly difficult to stuff into the requisite-sized sack, well, I have only myself to blame for that. <lol>

So yeah! Nebula nominee! My thanks to everybody in SFWA who nominated it, and to Yoon for giving me a chance to contribute to the project.

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/ZnAV1k)