In November, when I launched Playing For Keeps, Beatnik Turtle also released the song Playing For Keeps as a theme song. It’s a fantastic song and I was thrilled to have it associated with my book. And now that the book is coming out (AUGUST 25), I thought, “How many other books have a kick ass custom theme song? I should use this for something…”

So I talked to Randy and Jason, my friends with Beatnik Turtle, and I asked them if they would be OK if the fans made a video for their awesome song to promote the book. And they said they were behind me (I love those guys). So we thought it would be cool to coax the fans to make videos, and we could offer them incentives. SWARM books. Beatnik Turtle CDs.

A Flip camera.

But I want people to be able to do this in the time we have, and we don’t have a lot of time! So here’s the deal:

1. You are going to email me saying you want to help with the video. (And you are a talented and wonderful person, thank you!)
2. I am going to email you back and give you 20-30 seconds of the song “Playing For Keeps.”
3. You are going to record. Record a 20-30 second skit or record yourself dancing to the song, or lip syncing. Make it awesome. Make it from your video camera, or your digital camera, or your webcam. I don’t care. Just record it. By August 15.
4. Send it to mightymur AT gmail.com. By August 15.
5. From here I will gather up all the entries and Beatnik Turtle and I will choose the best. We’ll cut together the video and release it as my book promo. (Book promotion. Remember? I need everyone’s help on this!)
6. But wait, there’s more! Every person who gets a clip in the final video will win a prize; prizes include Swarm books and Beatnik Turtle CDs! But the BEST ONE will win a Flip camera!

Then you will all sleep a little better knowing you’ve helped me promote the book, and you’ll be a STAR.

Oh, and about seeing me dance? If I can get 40 entries to this contest, the final video will also feature me, the geek who doesn’t dance, dancing.

If you wanna see it, you gotta show me yours, first. (And 39 of your friends.)

Help me make the book promo to end all book promos. Blog this. Tweet this. Let’s make it happen.

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• Yeah, I went on and on about being part of 7th Son OBSIDIAN (heck, it was cool, what can I say?) and in the early days, back when I knew I was writing a story but no one else did, JC made a call for listeners to record videos during the blackout too, and I had a fun idea about a woman up in my home town area and her many many cats. That video just went live on the Obsidian feed. It’s fun.
• When I went to Viable Paradise, one of my favorite people I bonded with over comics and a long walk into town for alcohol was Evan Goer. He has a pretty active blog, and he interviewed me on it recently.

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Billy Jo didn’t know what to do when she realized her toddler, Randy, was controlling the weather.

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And thank you! (And thanks JC and Tee!)

PFK Wallpaper: 800, 1024, 1152 and 1280

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I was interviewed 7/16 by Hollywood Jesus - it was an IM interview, so if some of my answers seem a little stream-of-consciousness, that’s how I am in chat…

More coming soon!

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My friend Ami’s clan was a laughingstock, but she wore her family’s colors proudly. Where the rest of us wore earth colors, colors taken from our natural fibers, our animal skins and furs, her clan dyed wool to be brightly colored. They did a bad job of hunting after that, bright red tunics cutting through the brush. But the thing is, where our warriors would commit the honorable suicide of seppuku to cleanse themselves of dishonor, theirs would, well..

They committed sporkuku. They would dig the plastic tines of the little used utensil into their abdomens, raise a welt, and then drag it up and across. It mocked our warriors and did little to ingratiate them to the other clans. They declared war on Ami’s tribes.

Ami’s tribe fought with toothpicks. And they won the first battle. It was brutal.

(Thanks Matt Wallace)

<hr /><em>The News From Poughkeepsie is a daily blog post featuring an idea for you to take and do with what you will. <a href=”http://murverse.com/2008/04/22/announcing-the-news-from-poughkeepsie/” target=”_blank”><strong>Read more about it here</strong></a>. This post is licensed under a <strong><a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/” target=”_blank”>Creative Commons Attribution</a> </strong>license. You can take this idea, change it, make something new, and even make money off of it. All I ask is if you create something - anything! - that this post inspired you to make, please link back here.</em>

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When Wal-Mart put in the world’s largest kids’ ball pit, Johnny was thrilled, but it made my breath catch in my throat.

Never mind the fact that as a doctor, she feared what germs and diseases lurked in such places. It was the other things that lived there. As a child, she had spent time in such a ball pit while her mother bought a used car, and the things that had happened to her, and the creatures she met, had molded her forever.

“We can go,” she said to Johnny, who was bouncing up and down impatiently. “But I’m going in with you. I have a score to settle.”

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When I was at Red Storm, I had an altercation with some coworkers who were very negative about my job performance (they were not in my department). They complained about me, complained to me, and were generally hell to work around. I got fed up at one point, and someone warned me not to burn bridges. That shocked me. My coworkers didn’t seem to be hesitating on burning the bridge to me. As far as I was concerned, that bridge was gone.

It’s happened again. I was trying to set up a book event at a local store, as my book is coming out in August. Now, you folks know I can handle rejection. I can understand a “no”. What I can’t understand is ineptitude and rudeness. The person who my publicist contacted intended to forward the email to someone who handles events, adding to the email her opinion of my event. Her opinion was not flattering. At all. Instead, she REPLIED to the email, sending her lovely comments back to my publicist and me. When it was pointed out to her, she apologized for sending it to the wrong person - not the words she used.

Once I got over the sting of the whole thing, I just had to laugh. Then I thought about blogging about it, but I don’t want to burn bridges… and that’s when it hit me: that people in power do not burn bridges. They can afford to treat me poorly because as an author, I’m always going to need them (book store events, publicity, whatever). Them treating me poorly wasn’t burning a bridge, but me calling them out online is.

So I’m telling the story - but not the book store name. If you’re local and you ask me, I’ll tell you offline. And I’m not going back to that store again. I have a college buddy who managed to get an event there this fall. I was going to go, but now I just think I’ll buy his book on Amazon.

(or the other indie book store in the area- I do like supporting the local economy, after all)

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Dump trucks have fascinated me - they’re huge, powerful, spraying rocks dirt on the road, destroying windshields and blocking vision. They’re usually too dirty to identify where they’re working, and most don’t even have license plates.

Is it just me, or is a dump truck the best spy/convict vehicle?

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Having trouble with wordpress - too late for me to deal with this. here’s the direct link.

Anyone know a problem with podpress with the new wordpress “upgrade”?

All fixed!

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The dark underbelly of the Girl Scouts of America have been hinted at, and people don’t seem to be too concerned. But what people don’t know is that the secret society that runs the cookie operation, chooses the new badges, and chooses the troop leaders is the Alpha 10, a scout who wins in an endurance and puzzle competition.

The latest Alpha 10 has been unprecedented - a Brownie by the name of Susie Barrow, 6 years old, beat out the previous Alpha 10 in both the martial arts and the sodoku challenges. A new era of scouting was on the horizon, and no one knew what to expect.

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In preparation for the print release of Playing For Keeps, I have removed the PDF versions from the website. Now calm down- wait a second, don’t get upset. I have a present for you. I would not leave you out to dry. I am removing the PDFs to make way for the Ultra Mega Mega (dare I say… Super?) PDF to drop on August 22, the Friday before the book release on August 25. This one document will contain all of the awesome art created by my first wave volunteers, as well as the full novel and… maybe something special that you can’t find anywhere else.

Not to discount the awesome work my volunteers have done, I’ve created a gallery of all of the comic book covers (and the old cover of the book) right here.

Be patient, and you will be rewarded.

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Direct link to episode and show notes.

Incidentally, I am very open to interviews as I try to increase interest in my upcoming book launch, so if you have a podcast or blog and want to interview me, please don’t hesitate to email me!

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Alexandra is a strange girl. When she was born, so was her personal god - Mister Johnson. This was no guardian angel, but an actual god came into being. The God of Alexandra. She would hold no gods before him, and she would pray to, worship, and sacrifice to him. He had the body of a heron and the face of her mother’s third grade teacher, which upset her mother considerably when she found his visage burned into Alexandra’s morning toast. She is a good girl, trying to follow his seventeen commandments (including Thou Shalt Not Eat Fat Free As Long As Thou Keeps Thy Weight at a Reasonable Level) and find small rodents to sacrifice to him. She was a kind girl and always tried to go for the sickly ones. She quickly realized that her cat, Midnight, also knew of her god, and would bring her sacrificial mice to help keep her god happy.

But when Alexandra was 17, she displeased her god, and she felt his wrath.

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Stories about the RIAA bullying music fans are so ubiquitous it’s nearly becoming white noise. The association has been trying to kill ants with a hammer; when the blow strikes true, it’s devastating, but even as you squash a couple here or there, there’s an entire Internet’s worth of ant colony hanging out underground.

Read more…

Remember, my column doesn’t have NSFW photos, but the rest of SG does.

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Imagine an alternate Playing For Keeps (released August 25! ) universe where there are no heroes, just people with really lame superpowers. As the most powerful people in town, they form factions/gangs. The city falls into a somewhat lame, yet terrifying, gang-driven world.

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Check out his UStream event, it’s awesome.

Buy two. They’re small.

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The meeting of the Young Ladies’ Baking and World Domination Club came to order as usual, but because Miss Peabody was out sick, this time the meeting had to be chaperoned by Coach Wilkins.

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Adventures in Scifi Publishing is teaming up with I Should be Writing to bring you the “Keys to Publishing” contest. Running all summer long, the contest will feature authors Tobias S. Buckell, Kay Kenyon, Jay Lake, David Louise Edelman, Brenda Cooper, Sean Williams, and perhaps a surprise author or two.

These professional writers will bring you some the essential keys necessary in succeeding as a professional author. Tor and Pyr SF are cosponsoring the contest with book giveaways featuring some of the summer’s hottest new titles.

To enter the contest, simply listen for the six keys on Adventures in Scifi Publishing and I Should be Writing. Write down the title of each key, and when the last key is given, email all six keys to adventuresinscifipublishing@gmail.com with “Keys” in the subject line. That’s all you have to do. There will be at least two winners!

We hope you have fun with the contest and that it helps some of you fulfill your dreams of becoming professionally published authors.

**Sorry, but US residents only.

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People think that there’s one Sandman who puts people to sleep and gives them dreams. Nope. Dreams are fabricated by humans; but once they’re dreamed, if they’re not harvested by the dream keepers, terrible things can happen. They make songs about how your dreams can come true, but do your really want that?

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I went out to visit the prayer grove yesterday. It used to be a prayer tree, a holy yew where we hung our wishes to the gods. But ever since the local youth were conscripted to go to battle, the tree has expanded to the grove that surrounds it. I saw the shaman there, yesterday, on her knees, weeping. I stood to the side respectfully as she wrote her prayer on the parchment and kissed it, whispering a prayer. She’s unmarried and childless, so I don’t know who she was worried about, but as she’s usually the calm one, blessing our prayers as we hang them.

She left the grove without seeing me, and I went in to hang my own prayer, next to hers. Curiosity got the better of me, and I read what she wrote.

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And good luck Jeff!

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• I was interviewed on SF Signal, discussing the best superhero movies and TV shows.
• Last year at DragonCon, Paul S. Jenkins from The Rev Up Review interviewed me on the last night after a large sushi dinner, and that podcast is live.
• Did I mention my interview on Adventures in SciFi Publishing? I can’t remember… But here it is!
• There’s a PFK review on Static Multimedia here along with a fantastic feature about me and my podcasts.

I think that’s all for now! I’ll post more as I hear about them!

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The world of My Pretty Pony is one beset by war and strife. Their society started innocently enough, with the branding of the young ones with cute icons, but later those brands became akin to gang signs, and the ponies would group together based on nothing more than signs. Astronomical signs vs water signs was a particularly bloody war, and the heart signs vs rainbow signs was tense, but stable, until recently. It breaks my heart to look at them and know the bloody past. The gang members keep branding new foals to keep the cycle of violence up, and it will take a talented mediator to end the decades-long hatred.

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Promo: Adventures in SF Publishing and ISBW Keys To Publishing contest! More later on the ISBW blog!

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Character Sketch Mondays

Percy is a man who wears turtlenecks with his business suits and always has his hair a little shaggy. He prefers people to stand to his right side, and he claims he’s hard of hearing on his left. He’s a Features Editor at the local city paper, 250,000 circulation, and he’s good at his job. He’s always careful to look good, although his hair always seems a little shaggy in a 70’s kind of way.

Percy doesn’t cut loose much, but he does once a year on an anniversary he won’t tell anyone the meaning of. But one night, over too many martinis, he leans over to a coworker and says, “If you ever want to get a job, don’t get a tattoo on your HEAD.” The coworker sees now the ink that peeks from Percy’s turtleneck, going up into his hairline, and then Percy begins to tell the coworker the very strange tale of the particular anniversary of this evening.

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Course, he says it in a more eloquent way. Cause I still suck in some ways. But that’s OK. I’m working through it.

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Some of my favorite ideas have come from my inability to type. There’s the whole “superherpes” thing that came up time and again during the writing of Playing For Keeps, as “p” and “o” are right next to each other. I was chatting with someone about queries the other day and accidentally typed “quarries”.

Then suddenly I was all aflame with the idea of book quarries, where miners chip the books from the rock face…

(first day back after a week. Whaddya want, Shakespeare?)

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This is the Mighty Mur and the Pink Tornado. They fight crime. Thank you, Cheyenne!

Happy 4th to US residents!

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The good news is that I have a special treat planned for episode 6, which will run around July 15, so stay tuned!

Said travel stress and computer hiccups have also delayed the News from Poughkeepsie, but it will be back soon.

Thanks for your patience.

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Thursday had us getting the lay of the land, checking out the exhibit hall, etc. The floor was smaller this year, with smaller booths. Some companies, like KenzerCo (publishers of Knights of the Dinner Table where i have a monthly column) went all out with their usual booth decorations, whilel others, like White Wolf, scaled down considerably. Still, plenty of places to spend way too much money. Webcomic (you must read ERFWORLD now) and funny musician Rob Balder from the FuMP was there, and we hung out and chatted quite a bit. The funny anecdote of the day came from Dave Kenzer of KenzerCo when he saw my badge and asked if that was my real name. I said, well, not technically as Mur is a nickname, which is where he interrupted me and asked, no, was I the person who wrote for them. That amused me greatly.

Friday is when the podcasting group made it to town, consisting of John Cmar, Laura Burns, Chris Miller, Kris Johnson, Shannon Farrell and Dave and Mario from The Gamemaster’s Show. I splurged on a pair of goggles as I’m turning 35 on July 25 and wanted something pretty, dammit. Friday night we ended up at the Big Bar on 2 (the name of the Hyatt bar) witnessing some truly epic karaoke. I texted Rob Balder to come down and play with us, and he did an awesome rendition of “She’s Always A Goth Chick To Me”. I got drunk enough to where I wanted to sing, but luckily fate headed me off at every pass. I was convinced Rob and I would do a fantastic duet of “Common People” by William Shatner, but he didn’t know the Joe Jackson part and the karaoke guys didn’t have it anyway. It’s for the best… Another high point of the evening was getting angry texts from Matt F’n Wallace who hated me for having alcohol and Rob Balder at my con, when he was having trouble locating either at his.

Local people- Rob will likely come to town for Trinoc Con. Just sayin’.

Saturday was made of win, as it was the costume contest. Both the Pink Tornado and I got thrills: she dressed as a villain this year, going as Miss Time’s Up (pictures going on Flickr soon, but protected under filter, so if you don’t know us, you can’t see… sorry) and she won for the second year in a row. Our kid is awesome. My thrill came when I met Feedback, winner of Who Wants To Be A Superhero season 1, and he brightened up when he heard my name, as he remembered me from helping me out on the PFK podcast and from when I loaned my voice to his audio drama. Jim got some pics with his awesome new camera and I took some video of Feedback endorsing PFK. It was awesome, he was a very gracious and funny guy with his fans. Laura, Shannon and Chris Miller each gave me early birthday presents of accessories for my goggles, so I now have a gatling gun, a site, and a LIGHTNING BOLT to go on the lens. I am a tricked out Mur. That night we tentatively introduced our podcasting friends to our RPG friends at a cookout later and it seemed to go quite well.

I met several listeners at the con, spent too much money, and bought myself something shiny. All in all, an excellent con. Even though my Mac broke on Sunday morning. More on that later.

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August 25. We’re getting closer.

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“Peter, put down that penguin, you don’t know where it’s been!” his mother yelled.

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Jenna never liked the songs about fools being in love. A fool being in love was a delicate matter. Your cleverness falls when you’re in love. Your bias toward the object of your desire may force you to be kinder to them when a stinging barb is needed. And your general mentality to pretend like you’re stupider than everyone else doesn’t make for good wooing.

Jenna hated being in love. But she did love Karen.

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If you haven’t listened to 7th Son so far, you won’t be lost. The common thread in OBSIDIAN is: the power grid blows across the US. You don’t need to know how or why. But I highly, highly recommend you download this SF thriller trilogy, it’s fantastic.

Direct Link

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The shattered businessman sat at his desk, his head hung low. His fool stood in the doorway, not called upon, but entering unbidden as always.

The fool goes where other’s cannot. But at the end of the day, they are still fools.

“I recommend saying that you’re taking time to spend with your family,” Orson the fool said.

The man chuckled bitterly. “I have no family. They know that.”

The fool grinned. “That’s why it’s funny. But you know what would be even funnier? The truth. You committed fraud. You got caught. After today’s press conference, you’re going to jail. But what they don’t expect is the truth. Tell them the truth. And after you get out of jail, they’ll remember that.

“And then you run for governor.”

His boss raised his head. “Will you be my campaign advisor?” He sounded very young and hesitant.

The fool pulled down his collar to show the brand on his clavicle. “I am always yours, that’s my servitude.”

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Macguffin Wednesdays

Kathy, the janitor of Trump Tower who moonlighted as the fool, although no one knew it. She had taken her dice bag to work with her, and left it behind on one of the floors. Kathy’s dice bag was reknowned among the game-playing janitorial staff for being nearly charmed to roll high - she’d once asked Gary Gygax to bless them, after all - and the janitors begin a late-night race through the tower to find the missing dice bag.

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When I was in kindergarten, we had posterboards that anthropomorphized letters. The consonants were male, the vowels and Y were female (that always pissed me off.) Each letter had a personality and a story.

I don’t remember any of the stories, but I do remember that ever since then, I’ve grown up with certain prejudices about letters.*

• Some letters are inherently funny: F, K, Z
• Some letters are just cool, and if you have them in your name, you get cool points: X, Q, V
• P is a wuss of a letter, and even to this day my first thought when thinking of alphabetical order is to look for P after R, because it doesn’t deserve to be before R. I mean, yeah, when I’m singing the song, I know where to put P, but if I’m just thinking of where the P books are in the library, I may look after R until I remember….
• R is a solid, proud letter, a perfect precursor to the might is that is S.
• T is somewhat bumbling, but still strong. Like a basketball center who’s not lithe enough to be a guard. It is the perfect follower to S.
• LMNOP is the perfect name for a sorority, and if my school had had one, I would have joined.

That’s it for now. If I think of any more, I’ll be sure to tell you more of my strange prejudices regarding letters.

*I just realize Wheel of Fortune could have contributed to this, as well.

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Girdy Twinkleflow is the elected head of the NYC Fool’s Guild. Patty Finhowl is the head of the blue collar fools, while Larry NoLastName is head of the white collar fools. The NYC Fool’s Guild has been putting fools in businesses from Public Works to McDonald’s to Trump Tower for the past 5 years, and at this point people don’t know how they did without them. Local high school and colleges are starting to put in fool curriculum, and it’s quickly becoming one of the better paying jobs. The fools took over the local Masonic lodge for their hall, and have become as secretive as the Masons.

Convincing the corporations to take on fools was not easy, and no one is quite sure how they did it. Most people aren’t even sure who “they” are.

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It’s time to have another special week. I just read Fool’s Errand by Sarah Zettel (which grew into Fool’s War, which I’m interested in reading) and I got so entranced with the idea of the fool in settings other than feudal, I wanted to do another week.

Rachel’s mother was a fool and her father was a prince - in other words, she had the pedigree of most fools. Raised in the fool’s guild, she was well on her way to following in her mother’s footsteps. There was only one problem: Rachel was too gorgeous to be a fool. People mistook her for a merchant’s daughter amusing herself with a fool’s costume. They didn’t listen to her songs, preferring to focus on her looks. Once puberty hit, her mother decided to fit her with a mask to hide her beauty, letting her focus on her fooling skills. But what no one but Rachel realized was if she plied her trade masked, she could do other things unmasked. So she became the Fool’s Guild first unmasked spy.

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