Oh, okay. I don’t really know the NHL commissioner. But I do know how to name-drop, so I did during a guest post gig just up at Adventures in SciFi Publishing. I was talking about how in Deadroads, Baz makes a deal with a devil not unlike how in the NHL draft, team owners sometimes take a player on “conditions to be named later”. And that maybe Gary Bettman might be the devil in this analogy.

There’s also an excerpt from Chapter 3, in which Baz cuts his deal, the same piece I read at the book launch at Ad Astra. I think it works as a good introduction to the central action consuming the rest of the novel. Oh! And there’s a giveaway, too (to readers or would-be readers in the US).

It’s really weird, to be revisiting the founding basis of Deadroads all this time after I first started thinking about it, and planning for it. That work seems so long ago now. Yet, as I circle back to writing the sequel for le gang, going back to the roots is incredibly useful.

I also owe a couple more guest blogs (I really can’t shut up), so I’m working on trying to not say the same thing. And to not contradict myself.