Tag Archives: Nerd Cred

Blog, Nerd Cred

Tobacco-Infused Tequila Hot Chocolate

For my birthday, I went up to a cabin in the woods with no cable and no internet. This was in Pine, Arizona, where there are many pine trees, as one might imagine. There was plenty o’ snow on the ground too. ‘Twas chilly.

I went up there with The Confederacy of Nerds because we like to escape the Man once in awhile—who wants us to be normal and not so unbalanced—and really get our geek on.

Tooth got us started in sterling fashion: “There might be no Internet, but there’s a good phone signal. I’m pulling down four megs on my 3G out here,” he said. “Fuck it, I’m streaming Netflix.” He pulled an adapter out of his ass and hooked his cell phone up to the TV so we could have Star Trek and Lord of the Rings playing in the background while we geeked out on other stuff. I didn’t even know this was possible. Perhaps most astonishingly, he did all this while wearing an orange sweater. I swear I’m not making that up.

The O’Bryans taught Kasian and Tooth the basics of Warmachine using a couple of army starter packs, and I watched because the mechanics are slightly different—and a bit easier, I think—than those for Hordes. But the models, in my opinion, aren’t quite as cool. I’m not into machines and armor so much—I prefer the organic stuff in Hordes much more. But I can see the appeal of Warmachine.

So then Kasian was like, “I want to try this recipe for Tobacco-Infused Tequila Hot Chocolate,” and we were like, “You’re bullshitting us,” and he was like, “Yeah,” because usually he is, but then he realized he wasn’t, and said, “I mean, no.”

It was AMAZING. But it’s not something you pop in the microwave. It takes a while. But it was probably the most awesomely complex-tasting drink I’ve ever had. Here’s the recipe Kasian found on the Internet. There’s even a helpful video thingie. Kasian used an even different method than the chef dude described to infuse the milk with tobacco: He lit the cigar in the aluminum foil boat, then floated it on top of the milk, and then closed the lid on a large saucepan. We used an eight-dollar Monte Cristo. Here’s wee picture of the aftermath:

We weren't sure the tequila and the cigar were edgy enough, so we put a knife in there too. Now it's really edgy.

So here’s what happens when you take a sip: first you taste the chocolate—that sweet, rich chocolate that never comes out of a mix; then, as it hits the back of your throat, the Patron Silver says, “Hola, Amigo. You are the most interesting man in the world.” You swallow and exhale, and then you taste and smell the cigar smoke and the Fernet-Branca liqueur. It’s incredible. If you have the time to give this a try, I recommend it!

What’s the coolest, most incredible doodad you’ve ever eaten? Or drank?

Blog, Nerd Cred, Suvudu

San Diego and next April

So, the Glorious Geekout and All-Nerd Hootenanny is going to happen next week in San Diego. It will be my first huuuge Comic Con and I’m turbo-excited because I mostly get to walk around and be a fanboy. Not many people know who I am yet, and since I won’t be cosplaying, all eyes will slide off me and land on somebody’s tights nearby. I will be just another nerd in the herd, hoping to catch a glimpse of Patrick Rothfuss.

IF you are going or IF you know someone who is, here’s my schedule:
Friday, 11-noon, signing and giveaway at Random House booth #1515. Del Rey is giving away copies of HOUNDED, and I’m giving away my neato-schmeato bookmarks. I think Del Rey will probably help me give those away whenever, so please do stop by and say howdy whenever your schedule allows.
Friday, 8pm, Room 23ABC, Del Rey/Spectra panel with Kim Harrison, Harry Turtledove, and EDITORS! For one hour, you can ask us stuff and we’ll answer! Though that is pretty much how I operate all the time. What makes this special is that it’s okay to squee whenever you like, especially if Patrick Rothfuss walks in. We understand and support squees. You will be safe there.
Saturday, 4-5 pm, signing and giveaway at Random House booth #1515.

See? I won’t be that busy. Much of the rest of the time I’ll be boppin’ around doing my own thing, but I’ll also be doing some interviews and such, which will appear on Suvudu at some point along with a ton of other zany Comic Con content, so definitely bookmark the site and visit early and often!

Next: Progress continues on TRICKED. Wanted to let you all know that it’s now scheduled for publication April 2012, not May as originally reported when I announced the new deal with Del Rey. This is not because I am suddenly writing faster. This is because Del Rey is going to be speeding things up on their end, so major kudos to them! I’m delivering in August, and they’re getting it on the shelves in April. Nine months is pretty fast in this industry from what I understand. It takes six months just to get their poo together with online retailers and get an ISBN assigned. The cover artist needs time to work his magic, and I can tell you they’re already working on it though the book isn’t finished yet. Then there are several rounds of content editing, followed by copy editing, typesetting, proofreading, and presumably some beard grooming. It’s a Whole Lot of Stuff, and I thank you in advance for being patient. I also want to thank you again for your enthusiasm for the series and telling your peeps about it; it’s because of you I get to write more as fast as I can. :) Hope to see you in San Diego, or failing that…somewhere else!

May your sausage be fat and your pint glass full—

Blog, Nerd Cred

Nerds Included!

Whew! Release day was fun! I visited eight bookstores and two Irish pubs! Met many cool booksellers and raised a flagon to Atticus n’ Oberon, my editors and my agent, and my readers. Thanks very much to those of you who have been sayin’ howdy on Twitter, Facebook, and here on the blog; I appreciate it sincerely and am glad you’re enjoying Atticus n’ the gang.

Thought I’d share with you a couple o’ new Nerdscapes with the NERDS INCLUDED! First one requires a wee bit o’ setup.

Last weekend I went up to a secluded cabin in Pine, Arizona, the kind of place where Kathy Bates can tie you up in a bed and knock off your feet with a hammer and no one will EVER KNOW. I was there with The Confederacy of Nerds, comprised of the following: two IT guys who routinely say things like “I don’t want to migrate that to my cluster” and “Fu** Microsoft”; one guy who started out in the A/V Club in high school and somehow translated that into a career where he makes videos and double entendres like “I know how to coil my cable”; and one guy who speaks two languages other than English—Calculus and Klingon. We were there to play games and conduct gastrointestinal experiments.

We played this game called Zombies. It’s simple: You have to make it from the town square to the helipad. The problem is that all the other players are trying to stop you and of course the zombies want to snack on your braaaaaains. So here’s a Nerdscape with zombie action figures from the game, Goldfish and a random pineapple for the food, an ARC of Ari Marmell’s forthcoming release, The Goblin Corps, Longboard Lager and 90 Shilling Ale, and a genuinely excited nerd named Andrew:

Zombies and Bottles and Nerds, Oh My!

Next Nerdscape features an author who walked into Changing Hands bookstore and discovered a little display thingie they’d created for him in advance of his signing party on May 9:

Me Pointing at Me

Heh! I am amused. But now that I’ve introduced the subject, I hope I can meet some of you if you’re in town. I’ll be at the LepreCon at the Tempe Mission Palms on Saturday, May 7, sittin’ on a UF panel with Seanan McGuire and Gini Koch at 2 pm, followed by an autograph session afterward. I also have a reading at 11 am that day. Then, as the picture says above, I’ll be having my own little event at Changing Hands on Monday, May 9, at 7 pm. Hope to see you there!

If you’re in northern AZ, I’ll be at the East-West Book Exchange in Payson on Sunday, May 15, at 12:30. Then during Memorial Day weekend, I’ll be at the Phoenix Comicon. See their website for details on my appearances.

Thanks again for all the support n’ well wishes! :)

Blog, Nerd Cred

Nerdscape Winners!

As I suspected, this was a ridiculously fun contest. I had a blast laughing over these and I can’t resist posting up a few o’ my favorites in case you missed them in the comments. I applaud your creativity and envy your action figure collection! And I am very glad you’re not too old enough to play with them! Thank you all so much for entering!

Check out this one from Hillary: I love the Mystery Science Theater stand-ins watching Terminator. “Have You Seen This Boy?”

Kristin over at My Bookish Ways, who is Three Kinds of Spiffy and has a Ninja Bird, sent in this Amphibious Nerd Assault:

Evie sent in two really beautiful photos and I suspect she Knows What She’s Doing with a camera. Here is her Nerdscape, and you have to check out the reflection in the sunglasses!

Click to embiggen

Synde sent over this beautifully dark photo with primo vodka, skull action, and a weeping angel (don’t blink!):

Click to embiggen

Random Winners Chosen Randomly from Randomizer Thingie

VVB for Zombies n’ Nutella on a copy of FEED

Braaaaains and Nutella (click to embiggen)

Candice J. for “Dwight’s Hike to Mt. Doom”

Dwight's Hike to Mt. Doom (click to embiggen)

Winner of the Kevin Thinks That is Balls Rad Award:

Teri C’s Dinosaurs and Disney. I don’t know why, but this just cracks me up every time I look at it. There are so many Disney characters I would love to feed to velociraptors. I admire the depth of field here. There’s bonus beer in the background, too!

Jurassic Attack (click to embiggen)

So! Teri C, Candice J, and VVB, please contact me using kevin at kevinhearne dot com with your snail mail address and tell me how you’d like to have your books personalized! Congratulations, and thank you for entering!

Please come on back on Tuesday, my release day (SQUEE!), for a rundown of all the shenanigans I’ll be up to—I’ll have, um, six or seven posts up? I think? And by the way, if you weren’t aware, I’m doing a Babel Clash thingie with Chris Wooding until May 9, and we’ve been talking about filling in the space between sci-fi and fantasy, Insanity Points, and so on. It’s a good time.

Thank you all again for your awesome nerdiness!

Publishing Stuff, writing

To Thine Own Brand Be True

Dr. Nicole Peeler (also known as Nicole Peeler) asked me to whip up a blog post for her students about my experiences with author branding since I’m a newb to publishing, so OF COURSE I said yes. The fact that she threatened to shiv me in my sleep if I refused had no bearing on my decision to do it RIGHT AWAY; I want to make it clear that I’m doing this because I genuinely want to help aspiring authors. In fact, I have a wee series going called “Stuff They Never Told Me About Publishing,” and in the first post I talked a little bit about the author platform thing. Curiously, I now feel the need to expand upon that at length…

The truth is I don’t know what the hell I’m doing and I am deeply jealous that you get to take a class with Dr. Peeler. (She will give me chocolate for that later.) I’ve been told I need an author platform, and I’ve been reliably informed that I need an author brand, but neither of those terms has been defined for me and in my befuddled mind they’re sort of interchangeable. I seriously need to take Dr. Peeler’s class. So here’s what I was told to do by Del Rey: “Blog and tweet.” Okay, sure. What about? “Just be yourself. Look at what other authors do. Take advantage of social media.” And that was the sum of my instruction (or at least it’s all I can remember now—this conversation took place in October of ’09). I thought said instruction was a bit dangerous and bordering on irresponsible, because if I knew anything about how to be social I wouldn’t be a nerd. Still, I gave it my best shot, because if you get an opportunity to be published by the people in very tall New York buildings you don’t do things half-assed. So I started a blog, got myself a Twitter account, joined Goodreads, and created a Facebook author page. Then I sat down with a piece of paper and one of those really nice gel pens and tried to figure out what it meant to be myself. Those two minutes were the most introspective moments of my life. Here is what I discovered:
1. I like beer.
2. I am socially awkward.
3. If you don’t believe number 2, I’m 40 years old and I still collect comic books.
4. I like to make art and design jokes—usually absurd visual ones.
5. Once in a while I can’t stop myself from geeking out or being silly.

It’s not a very impressive list, is it? “Bugger me,” I thought, “if that’s all I’ve got, I’m bloody doomed.” But I didn’t have any choice. I had to go forward. So out of that list emerged some of my regular features. My “Still Life” series was inspired by all of those, and then I decided I’d kinda document what happened to me along the way and share my experiences with other aspiring writers (I won’t technically be published until April 19, so yeah, I still count myself as aspiring, and it’s taken me twenty years of trying to get on the shelves—I’m by no means an overnight success and I EMPATHIZE with the struggle to learn the craft).

I’ve been blogging and tweeting now for about a year and a half, not really sure if I’m doing it right, and then last month, BLAM, my editor surprised me by writing a really complimentary post about my social media efforts on Suvudu. I was flabbergasted. Like, WHOA. Did I go and build myself an author platform or brand or whatever? And did I do it using these things called channels? I guess I did. I don’t feel like I have a legion of followers or anything, but maybe they’ll start to show up and say howdy once the books come out. Here’s the funny thing: my most popular post by FAR is this one I did in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep; I was only half-conscious and loopy as hell. I get hits on that post all the time, though, and it’s nothing but pure silliness.

I confess that I made another list back in October ’09 when I sat down with that paper and extremely nice gel pen, but I never wrote it down, because that list was about things I would never write down. What you won’t see on my blog or my other channels (Look! I’m using the correct terminology now!) are comments about political or religious issues. You will have to decide for yourself what’s right for you and your brand—I’m certainly not an authority on what you should or shouldn’t do—but I will share my reasoning behind that decision.
1. I’m a public school teacher, so in many ways the decision makes itself. As an employee of the state, I’m not supposed to talk about such things. Make a First Amendment argument if you wish, but in practice, public school teachers don’t get to say what they want.
2. Apart from number 1, as writer of fiction—specifically urban fantasy—I’m supposed to be providing people with an escape from whatever’s stressing them out. My observations of human behavior indicate that many people get stressed out when confronted with ideas that don’t match their own. So why would I risk stressing them out (or pissing them off) when I’m supposed to be entertaining them?
3. These days, it seems like you’ll offend half the country no matter what you say. I’m sure some readers will like you MORE if they know your views agree with theirs, but some readers WON’T BUY YOUR BOOK if they know your views contradict theirs. In terms of raw practicality, the readers who like you more are not going to shower you with the remainder of their disposable income, but the readers who actively decide not to buy your book based on a comment you made are depressing your bank account. If I am ever going to earn the money I need to pay tuition for Dr. Peeler’s class, I can’t afford to offend people by spouting off on this issue or that.

So what can you take away from this? Well, um, you’re kinda on your own in terms of marketing yourself. Did you SEE all that stuff my publicist is doing to create my author platform/brand thingie on multiple channel doodads? Nope, you didn’t, because it ISN’T THERE. My publicist sends out review copies to people who request them and he was nice enough to arrange my launch party for me. He might be doing other things on my behalf—I’m still over a month away from publication, so maybe he’s planning a party around the base of a volcano that erupts champagne—but if so he hasn’t told me yet. I’m extremely grateful for everything the publisher does for me—good reviews are invaluable, and the fact that they let me post on Suvudu is HUGE!—but the simple truth you need to know right now is that no one will ever build your platform or your brand except you.

If you need to know other simple truths later, feel free to contact me. No, wait, that’s not worded strongly enough. The fact is, friends, I desperately want you to ask me questions, because if you don’t then Dr. Peeler will confiscate my spleen. Email me at kevin@kevinhearne.com or simply comment below. I hope (for my sake as well as yours) that this was somewhat helpful; I wish you all the best and look forward to picking up your book in the store someday.

Blog

Gentlemen Broncos

I realize I’m extremely late to this particular party, but somehow this movie flew under my radar when it came out last year. My friends Alan and Alissa just made me aware of its existence and I’m still laughing over it. It’s a buffet of absurdity served with a side of cheese, and if you’re a writer or in the writing biz, or just a fan of absurdity and awkward social situations, this is a good time.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qdpFpfIBkXc[/youtube]

The opening titles alone are priceless—they’re old sci-fi covers with painfully bad art. But the story young Benjamin Purvis writes—YEAST LORDS—that’s truly hilarious stuff. Battle stags, surveillance does, backup nads—ha! Oh, man—I’m going to watch it again!