I was all set to launch the Kickstarter for the first of the 12 for ’12 trilogies today, but I’ve been sidetracked by delays in Amazon Payments verifying my bank account. I love my small-town bank (1st National Bank of Beloit), but there are times that it would be easier to be one with one of the nationals instead. With luck, it should be a short delay, maybe a day.

In the meantime, since I have the extra time, I thought I’d run the reward for the first Kickstarter past you. These are for the trilogy based on my Brave New World Roleplaying Game, a dystopian world packed with stunning superheroes, powerful themes, and political intrigue.

This is all subject to change until I post the Kickstarter page. Here’s your chance to comment on the particulars before I launch the project, so don’t be shy. Let me know what you think.

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I’ve been wrestling with how I want to run 12 for ’12, and I’ve decided that the best way is to set it up as four groups of books. At least three of these will be trilogies, while the fourth might be a set of standalone books instead. Like most writers, I have loads of ideas for books, so the next question becomes, which trilogy do I want to tackle first.

I want to start things off with a bang, so I decided to return to one of my most personal works: the Brave New World Roleplaying Game I created back in 1999. For those of you who don’t know, Brave New World* is a dystopian setting in which you play superpowered rebels working to take back America after all superpowered people are ordered to either work for the government or go to jail. This all starts when the entire city of Chicago is destroyed in 1976, and the entire nation has been under martial law ever since.

The game’s slogan reads, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what it can do to you.”

I wrote Brave New World more than two years before 9/11, but the themes it raised then seem prescient now. There’s a lot of intriguing ground to cover there, and it’s only gotten more fertile over the past 12 years. I can come up with at least a trilogy worth of stories there, easy.

To top it off, I’ve been working with an independent film house, Reactor 88 Studios, to get a Brave New World feature film in the works. We have an awesome proof-of-concept piece we shot a couple years ago – see below for that – and the setting’s been on my mind ever since. I sold the game to AEG years ago, but they’ve kindly licensed it back to me for this project. (Many thanks to my pal John Zinser for that!)

Better yet, the Reactor 88 guys have offered to pitch in on the production of the novels and the Kickstarter video, so it’s a damn fine match and should make for an excellent Kickstarter kickoff.

If you want to know more about the game and the setting, the Wikipedia entry is an excellent place to start. Be warned, though, that it’s chock full of spoilers.

I hope to get the Kickstarter video shot this week and have the Reactor 88 folks (especially director Darren Orange) slap it into shape over the weekend. If that works out, expect to see the Kickstarter project launch early next week!

[* Yes, I know it shares a title with Aldous Huxley’s novel. It comes from the quote in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. When Miranda, the daughter of the wizard Prospero, sees another person besides her father for the first time – a handsome man who becomes her love interest – she remarks, “O brave new world that has such people in’t.” I couldn’t think of a better phrase to capture a game about superheroes in a dystopian land, so it stuck. To make the difference between my work and Huxley’s crystal clear, the Reactor 88 folks took to calling it Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World, and despite how silly that might make me feel, I’ll probably wind up going with that for the exact same reason.]

My pal Jim Pinto of Postworld Games saw my post about 12 for ’12 the other day and got so excited about it that he went and made me a new logo for it. I think it’s pretty sharp, so I’m going to make good use of it. Thanks, Jim!

Jim also created the card art and graphics for Gorilla Games‘ current Kickstarter project, World Conquerors. Designer Jeff Siadek always puts a lot of heart and fun into his games, so I’d love to see this one get funded. They only have four days left, and they’re about halfway there.

I’m going to shoot the video for the first 12 for ’12 Kickstarter project soon. At the moment, I’m planning to break the whole thing up into four different projects to make it easier for people to get on board. Each project should feature either a linked trilogy or a collection of singleton books.

Of course, all of that’s subject to change as bigger and better ideas come along, but that’s part of the beauty of doing it this way. When a better notion comes along – whether from me or from one of you! – I can jump on it and make it part of the project right away.

Earlier this year, I had this insane idea, and I’ve been trying to talk myself out of it ever since. I call it “12 for ’12.”

It’s a year-long project in which I plan to write a novel every month in 2012.

Yeah, I know. It’s nuts, but I can’t get it out of my head.

It may not be as insane as it sounds. By novel, I mean a work of fiction that’s at least 50,000 words. The Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards each define a novel as anything over 40,000 words, but I want to be a bit more ambitious.

Fifty thousand words may seem like a lot, but most of my novels range from 80—100,000 words, so that makes these substantially shorter, more in line with the size of novels that used to get published before the publishing industry made the push for doorstop-sized tomes we see on shelves now that take years to write and months to read.

That’s also, not coincidentally, the number of words writers shoot for during National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo happens in November every year, which means it’s just around the corner. Last year, over 200,000 people gave it a shot, and 37,500 actually crossed the finish line on time. Of course, I’m hoping to take on not a month-long sprint but a year-long marathon.

I’m a full-time writer – this is my day job – and disasters aside, I write fast, often between 3,000 to 5,000 words per day. That makes 50,000 per month eminently doable. Toss in the other freelance gigs I don’t plan to give up, though, like writing the Magic: The Gathering comic for IDW, and that makes it a bit more of a press.

No matter what angle I attack this from, though, it’s going to consume a lot of time. Much as I’d love to, I can’t feed my kids if I take the better part of my year off to write a dozen novels. That’s where you can help.

I’m planning to launch a Kickstarter project on November 1 – right along with NaNoWriMo– to line up preorders for the books. This is a crowd funding system in which you can pledge a certain amount of money toward a goal that I establish. If we meet the goal, your credit card gets charged, and I get to work. If it falls short, you don’t get charged, and I go on my merry way.

This isn’t a charity, though, in any sense. In exchange for your hard-earned bucks, you can pick from a variety of rewards, including ebooks, softcovers, hardcovers, your name as a character, and so on.

For an excellent example, check out Tobias Buckell’s The Apocalypse Ocean novel, which just got funded last night. Or Jeremy Keller’s Technoir RPG. Or Gareth-Michael Skarka’s Far West RPG, for which I promised to write a short story as part of the campaign.

I’m still wrestling with the format of the project at the moment, and with the types of rewards I hope to offer. I might set it up as a series of four trilogies rather than as a single, massive challenge. I might offer the chance to look over my virtual shoulder as I write. In the end, though, the idea remains the same.

I’d like to write a dozen novels next year, and I want you to dare me to do it.