Ian M. Rogers

The Blacksmith and the Porcupines launches this coming weekend, and I’m super excited to reveal this awesome front-back cover image by artist Justin Cornell! It’s always exciting for an author to see the cover of their new book—the anticipation of what it might look like, the imagined image in your mind that sometimes (or not at all) captures the real thing, and that moment that crystalizes the story into an actual book. I got the email with the image a few days ago, and it definitely had me reeling with excitement for the rest of the day. It was also very cool to see the wraparound cover that runs onto the back as well. The actual chapbooks will be stapled halfway across the image, and this is the same style Justin uses for the covers of The Charleston Anvil magazine. A few things about the cover really stand out to me—I love the old fairy tale woodblock style, which definitely captures the old timey-ness of the story, along with the rolling hills on the back. It was also really cool to see the blacksmith holding his tools, along with a little anvil mark on the saddle—an intentional tie-in to The

The title says it all—I’m excited to announce that pre-orders for my new chapbook, The Blacksmith and the Porcupines, are now open! If you’re new to this blog or just haven’t heard, The Blacksmith and the Porcupines is a fairy tale political satire inspired by both recent events in my home state of New Hampshire and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It’s also a standalone companion story to my second novel, Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, and takes place in the fantasy world of Granitaria (though you can definitely enjoy The Blacksmith and the Porcupines if you haven’t read Carcrash!). Pre-orders for signed copies are available through my webstore and will ship on or before the release date of September 12th. It’s not available through Amazon or other online shops, just through my webstore or local bookshops. The book is fairly small and easy to mail, which means I’m able to offer international shipping at a more reasonable price if you’re outside in the US. As always, I can also write a personalized message to anyone who wants one! Also, in the spirit of using satire and storytelling to make a difference in the world, I’m donating half of

My new project is almost ready! I’m super-excited to share that The Blacksmith and the Porcupines, my awesome new fairy tale/political satire chapbook, is releasing September 12th! The chapbook is a standalone long-ish short story based in the same universe as Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, narrated by Glimrick Therrinbottom, the Bard of Granitaria. It’s also a thinly veiled fantasy satire of politics in my home state of New Hampshire—think George Orwell’s Animal Farm, but making fun of libertarian extremism. If you haven’t read Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, not to worry! The Blacksmith and the Porcupines is designed to be read on its own, though if you’ve read Carcrash you’ll definitely notice a few tie-ins, particularly with the Granitaria mythology and place names. What is a chapbook, you ask? It’s a small, paperbound book held together by staples—think of it like a slightly longer, more polished version of a zine. The fairy tale blacksmith header image on this post is also just a placeholder—I’ll be doing the actual cover announcement in a few weeks! The Blacksmith and the Porcupines is a true indie project in the sense that it won’t be sold on Amazon or

Summer is upon us, and I’ve been working on a new project that I’m REALLY excited to share with you very soon! First, though, if you’re in the New Hampshire area, I’m happy to share that I’ll be doing some in-person events around the state over the next few months: I’m excited to be back on the road and doing author events (and really excited to be interviewing former NHPR radio host Laura Knoy!), but even more than this, I’m really, really excited to announce my new chapbook project being released in September. Secret New Chapbook Project!! Because some of the specifics are still in flux, details of my Secret New Chapbook Project have to remain secret for at least a little while longer, but here’s what I can tell you now: [Update: The Secret New Chapbook Project is called The Blacksmith and the Porcupines, and you can read more about it here!] The Secret New Chapbook Project is coming together VERY fast—I had the idea and wrote the outline back in May, started the draft and reached out to my collaborator in June, and secured an in-person release date less than a week ago. All of this is possible

Last year I proofread a script for a client’s video ad that compared the experience of using the client’s web design tool to using AI. The ad’s less than a minute long, but sums up an incredibly important principle of how we use and don’t use AI: Note: Readymag didn’t pay me to share or write this mini-essay, but the video did inspire it. Besides the actor’s amazing ability to express their impatience using just their hands, and the AI’s overly smug emojis, I like this ad because it focuses on a specific set of circumstances: After attempting to work with the AI interface and give it clear instructions, the creative person gets frustrated and gives up (“this is not working”), telling the AI that they’re looking for something that feels like it came from them and only them (“i need something that reflects my style”). As a result, the ad ends with our irritated creative putting AI away and deciding to make the website themselves. As a counterexample to this, one of the first AI controversies I saw in early 2023 involved a college-student gymnast and social media influencer who ran a paid post touting AI for writing papers

There’s no feeling quite like finishing a novel draft. Sure the novel still has a ways to go with revision and polishing and endless rereadings to make sure everything’s exactly the way I want it, and sure the novel’s still not quite ready to be shown off to friends or at a point where I can say it’s anywhere close to finished—but that feeling of I accomplished something! I wrote a fucking book! feels pretty damned good. I’ve been working on Once Upon a Complex, my third novel (technically fourth if you count my unpublished Japan novel) since last January, and I finally finished the draft earlier this month.  All told, this draft took a lot less time than the Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers draft because I didn’t take any long breaks, but it still took longer than I wanted it to because there were many weeks during the year when I couldn’t quite find time for writing.  The draft is still incredibly rough—both in terms of things like character names and technical details needing to be filled in, and in terms of scenes not flowing the way they should—but again, it’s technically finished, with a Beginning,

Last month, my family lost my grandfather, Peter E. Newman, who passed away at the age of 89. A few days after it happened, my brothers and I did a video call to check in and sort through how we were feeling. It was a complicated conversation for a few reasons—while my grandfather was a kindhearted, deeply caring man who always looked out for others (especially his family) with a great sense of humor who loved to laugh, he was also a distant, quiet, and rarely reached out to others. Often, it was hard to know what he was thinking, and we certainly didn’t know how he was feeling. My brothers and I were closer to their grandfather than most kids. When I was eight, a few years after my grandmother died, my family moved from southern Connecticut to New Hampshire to live with my grandfather and my youngest aunt, who was still in high school at the time. The move made sense for a lot of reasons: my family wanted to get out of the city and start somewhere new, and it seemed better for my grandfather and my aunt not to be alone. My grandfather lived in an

When I was in grad school, one of the things that most struck me was the way other writers, (especially the other grad students), talked about their achievements. All of them, it seemed, had a neatly canned bio listing off the magazines where they’d been published, academic positions they’d held, and, of course, awards they’d won. I found the formulaic aspects of these bios fascinating. Their components were more or less interchangeable, their lengths (always a short paragraph) never seemed to vary, and most noticeably, I never seemed to recognize most of the journal and award names. How was I to know, I wondered, whether a literary award or journal I hadn’t heard of was significant, or just some hot air to make the writer look like hot shit? When I started gathering ideas for MFA Thesis Novel, I knew right away that I wanted all of the pretentious writer characters to have their own bios—all of which would be filled with imaginary magazines, literary awards, and academic positions that would disorient readers the same way I’d been disoriented in the academic writing world. Here’s a snapshot from the first page: Kendall Warren is a recipient of the Reginald R.

It’s been nearly two months since Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers made it in to readers’ hands, and since then, people have been asking me a few different questions: How did your book launch go?How many copies have you sold?What else are you doing for book promotion?Where do things go from here? Now that things have cooled down a bit and I’ve had some time to reflect, I thought I’d give a summary of what I worked on for the launch, how it went, and where things are going from here. Carcrash Parker Launch Recap I held the book launch at my hometown bookstore, MainStreet BookEnds in Warner, New Hampshire, the Saturday after the book came out in July. I wanted something that was bigger, but not crazy big, and did a photo slide show about how the novel came to be, focusing mostly on the early Carcrash Parker adventure game project and the Glimrick-Carcrash back-and-forth between fantasy and real-world speak.  More than forty people showed up, which was VERY cool to see, and we had a solid Q&A afterward, plus people stayed to hang out, talk writing, get their books signed, and in general have a good time.

In Part 1 (which you should totally read first), I talked about how Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers began as a point-and-click PC adventure game I worked on with my best friend and fellow adventure game fan Mike Rushia. The novel version comes out July 22nd, and I’m currently taking pre-orders for the book and bonus postcard set through my webstore. Here’s the second half of the story. As the years went on, and especially when I moved to Nebraska for grad school and started working more heavily on my first novel about Japan, the Carcrash Parker adventure game just kind of….fell by the wayside. This is really common for creative projects, I think, and it happens for a variety of reasons.  In our case, Mike and I being busy adults with jobs was definitely a factor, but a bigger reason was that the project itself was incredibly large, intimidating, and went beyond our skill set, especially when it came to the art. Had we been friends with an art person, or been more savvy about finding illustrators online, this hurdle would have been less formidable. However, for us, at that time, the whole project just felt really