Stories about superheroes!
Since George R.R. Martin let the flying, gamma eye-beam flashing invisible cat out of the bag with an announcement on his website yesterday, I guess it's cool for me to let folks know that I'm one of the four new writers (along with Caroline Spector, Ian Tregillis and Carrie Vaughn) joining the group known as the "Wild Cards Consortium." That means I'll be contributing material to a new trilogy of Wild Cards books. I'll just steal a couple of bits from George's release:
The WILD CARDS series is back in business. We've just signed a contract with Tor Books for a new triad of WILD CARDS mosaic novels, to be titled Inside Straight, Busted Flush, and Suicide Kings. Work on the books has already commenced. Tor hopes to release the first volume in hardcover in 2007, with the subsequent volumes following a year apart.
[...]
The WILD CARDS series made its debut in 1987, during the heydey of the shared world anthology... The series has spawned a comic mini-series from Marvel/ Epic, a role-playing game from Steve Jackson Games, and several film options. WILD CARDS has outlasted all the other shared world anthologies of the 80s to become the longest-running series in the history of our genre... and with a little help from our readers, we hope to run for another twenty years at least.
The Wild Cards anthologies probably represent the first superhero prose fiction I read back in the day (with the obvious exception of Elliot S! Maggin's Last Son of Krypton, which all right thinking people everywhere have read at least once, right?) and I cannot tell you how stoked I was to get an invitation to participate in the series relaunch.
Did I mention that this means I'll be working on stories about superheroes!?
The illustration above is by comics penciller Mike S. Miller. It depicts many of the new characters--listed by name in George's release--but doesn't include the character I created and will be writing about primarily. Probably just as well. He's not quite as attractive as some of those guys. Plus, since he would have had to be the back row, all his swirly bits wouldn't have been visible, and that would have been a shame.