I’ve started my tour for Steelheart! After two very successful Utah signings, I’ve flown off to Texas where I will have events in Houston and Austin. You can check out my full schedule here.

To accompany the Steelheart release, I’ve posted a guest Big Idea essay over at John Scalzi’s Whatever blog. It starts off like this:

Early in my life, I knew I was a geek. I just didn’t know what that meant.

For example, I went to a Star Trek convention when I was eleven or twelve. Now, at that point, I’d only seen a handful of TOS episodes. I hadn’t discovered fantasy novels or reading yet. But I went to a Star Trek convention because…well, I was a geek, right? That seemed like the sort of thing that geeks did.

Fortunately, it turns out my instincts about myself were right. During the next few years, I blossomed. In geek terms, that means I discovered comic books, role playing, and novels—then retreated to my room to pupate for the next six years, surviving on a steady diet of Anne McCaffrey novels and bags of Cheetos.

From there it talks about about Steelheart and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Give it a read!

Something else special today is that the cover to Charlaine Harris’s anthology Games Creatures Play has been revealed. You can see it below. When Charlaine invited me to be part of this anthology and explained what it was going to be about, I knew I had to write a story for it. My contribution is called “Dreamer” and is rather unlike anything I’ve ever written—and it’s even a true short story rather than a novella. I hope you’ll enjoy it when it comes out in April.

Here’s the full list of contributors and stories for the anthology.

• Charlaine Harris: “In the Blue Hereafter”
• William Kent Krueger: “Hide and Seek”
• Jan Burke: “Stepping into the Dead Zone”
• Joe R. Lansdale: “Dead on the Bones”
• Caitlin Kittredge: “The Devil Went down to Boston”
• Brendan DuBois: “On the Playing Fields of Blood”
• Dana Cameron: “The God’s Games”
• Scott Sigler: “The Case of the Haunted Safeway”
• Ellen Kushner: “Prise de Fer”
• Brandon Sanderson: “Dreamer”
• Mercedes Lackey: “False Knight on the Road”
• Seanan McGuire: “Jammed”
• Adam-Troy Castro: “Hide and Shriek”
• Laura Lippman: “Ice”
• Toni L. P. Kelner: “Bell, Book, and Candlepin”