Houston, We Have A Date

[Elita Justice]

It's official, guys: Games Wizards Play will be released February 2nd, 2016.

There's already a blog, and a tumblr, and a twitter.

Let the countdown begin

[Nathan]

...and a new (shorter) blurb

This is indeed exciting! (Though I'm a bit surprised that the release date is so far in the future... [And, indeed, DD mentions on her tumblr that while February 2nd is the official date at present, the book might end up being released somewhat earlier, though still in the Fall/Winter 2015/2016 publication season.])

I noticed that the blurb shown on the GWP website has been changed (updated?) and (as expected) significantly shortened from the "long form" version DD posted here (now redacted there, but still available on the forums here and the copy originally posted on YW.com via the Wayback Machine version herehere thanks to the Wayback Machine, though you'll need to scroll a bit, as the page layout is messed up) was replaced by two paragraphs of rather different material in the final version (which can be seen here). In particular, the mention that Nita "risks becoming far less than human. Or far more..." [ellipsis original] in the first version is completely removed in the final version, which instead mentions the possibility that "the history that left Mars lifeless will repeat itself on Earth." Since I don't remember anything in AWOM that really seemed to put Nita in danger of becoming either less or more than human (though I need to reread it), I wonder whether this part of the change to the blurb was indicative of a change to the book itself.

In particular, I note that all mention of Roshaun has been removed in the new, shorter blurb, while we get a bit more about Penn and Mehrnaz, as well as Nita and Kit's relationship and a rather different (obligatorily ominous) ending, with no mention of the mysterious "silent participant" from the end of the first blurb. There's also no mention of Nita's visions of disaster for Carmela and possibly also Kit in the new blurb. Nevertheless, both blurbs seem like something I'd very much like to read, though the second is definitely superior as a hook (not to mention its brevity): I'm also particularly interested in reading about Penn's heliomancy and Mehrnaz's geomancy,** as well as Mehrnaz's wizardly family.

Also, it might be worth thinking about moving this thread into the GWP section of the forums (or starting another one there) if many more people want to discuss the blurb(s)...

* As is probably to be expected, since the first AWOM blurb was probably from a later point in the editing process than the first GWP blurb, which DD specifically said (in the thread referenced earlier) is "the longer form of what will eventually appear on the book. (It would normally be cut down to about half or at most two-thirds the present length: but for the moment I don't mind everybody seeing this version.)"

** At least, I presume these are the correct termsErrantry Concordance entry for geomancy is currently somewhat broken, since the ErrantryWiki site is down at the moment, as DD mentions here; you can still read the entry in Google's cache hereher ErrantryWiki page, which I can't convince the forum software to let me link to the Google cache of properly).