Paul and Storm

UPDATE 4/4/13: In addition to being available on this site, the Shadow War! songs are now available on iTunes, Amazon.com and various other online media outlets. Remember: all proceeds in April go to charity!

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No sense denying it at this point, so here is the unvarnished truth about the situation: yes, we were brought in to help John Scalzi develop a broadway musical based on his Shadow War of the Night Dragons book. Yes, we wrote a good deal of music for it and recorded some demos (with the generous help of our friend Mike Phirman) Yes, it was a complete debacle that ended ugly. No, it was not our fault.

Thank you, Tor.com, for ignoring all prior agreements (and common decency) and sweeping all the dirt out from under the rug. No amount of damage control, however, can put the genie back in the bottle, or prevent it from defecating all over the netterwebs, though Scalzi himself has tried. And thank you, certain so-called “friends,” for greedily picking up our table scraps as soon as we’d left the metaphorical table.

To be clear:  Tor had the temerity to release private recordings of a Skype conference call between Scalzi and ourselves. (We were reviewing the first round of demo recordings, which we had just sent to John) And seeing as Scalzi was the ONLY person with that recording, we have to believe that he was complicit, despite any protestations to the contrary, in the release of the audio. Here is the Skype recording in question:

Well, two can play at the “spiteful leaking” game, Messrs. Scalzi and Tor…

In thanks to Scalzi for wasting our time and to Tor for spilling the beans and making us look like fools—but mostly because we STILL HAVE NOT RECEIVED OUR CHECK YET—we are releasing our Shadow War! demos for public purchase.

But to show that we are truly the bigger men here, we’re donating all proceeds from the sale of the songs during the month of April to the following charities:

• The Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation, which donates instruments to under-funded school music programs
• First Book, which distributes books and education materials to schools serving children from low-income families

So, John Scalzi and Tor, we triple-dog dare you to try and prevent us from selling these demos (which we rightfully own). Show everyone just how much you hate music and education and children!

We are sorry that things ended this way—though, in hindsight, we probably should not have been surprised. But we hope at least some good can come out of this terrible situation.

A final word for Scalzi and Tor: for the eventual musical we write based on Pat Rothfuss’ Kingkiller series—a project that we are not saying exists, but are not denying exists either—if you hear some familiar melodies, you can comfort yourself in the knowledge that they could have been yours, if only you weren’t such a paranoid, controlling douchebag. So consider that as you tuck into your turkey pot pie.