From His Red Right Hand...

Diane,

Everything is going well.  I am currently a bit under the weather, but we are closing in on a house!

Over the weekend I had a chance to watch the Clone Wars animated film and play with Wii Lightsaber duels game.  I also didn't get a chance to play my BSG board game, but that's a story for another time.

The film wasn't as awful as I had feared. Big Gay Capote the Hutt was the major misstep,both because it took the Alien Sterotype to a whole nother level, and because his plot was completely unnecessary to the rest.

As Plucky Sidekicks go, Ahsoka had some moments of Being Too Cute, but motuhing off to Anakin won her some points as well.  And I'll be damded, but I thought the Huttlet was kind of cute.

The video game, I'm sad to say, is not the Lightsaber Wii game anyone signed up for.  It's a big waggle fest and while I like the cut scence and quick time events that break up a very pedestrian fighter, I prefered the lightsaber fights of TFU.  On the plus side, it's not as bad as Teras Kasi.

I also should know how much of the next project I'll have.  I'm excited because it looks like there will be a bt more creativity involved in thisone, instead of summrizing Wookiepedia and attaching stats afterwards.
 

I know what my next Star Wars gig will be.

No, I'm not telling you.  But I've already given you a clue.

Diane,

Details are forthcoming, but I am hopeful I will have another gig forthcoming from a galaxy far, far away.

I also pitched something to that rival Angsty Company...and got shot down. 0 for 2 there, but I'm okay with it.

I recieved a tip on a freelance copywriting gig.  We shall have to see about that one.

And I finally got my main characters in line for Indigo.

Work:

SWSE: Revisions returned and awaiting the next pass.

Indigo: Outlining the first five chapters.  Starting on chapter 1 this week.

Play:

Changeling - Season Two starts September 12th.
Hughes High has four episodes left!

Here are some more wikis for your enjoyment -

New World of Darkness - Includes my Vampire, Mage, and Changeling games.
Houses of the Blooded

Strange:

Mark Rein*Hagen, creator of Vampire: the Masquerade, is a refugee from Georgia

I've been out of contact, Diane, to which I am very sorry. I can't promise I'll do better, but I will let you know how things are going.

MegaHex: Work has been mostly ups with a few downs.  The fellow nerd that I knew from xbeyondinsanex 's wedding moved on to other things, but the ground there seems pretty fertile for New Recruitment. I've had to come in on weekends ( and will probably have to do so in the future) to stay on top of my workload, but the other copy writers are in my position well.  This week we find out if we get another copy-writer or if one of the other parts of the department gets our new hire.  If we get it, there are plenty of names from Uncle Herb's I can toss their way.

Writing: The Gig mentioned in my last post proceeds apace, and it is at the same time fun and strangely constricting. It's very exciting to b playing in this particular sandbox, but most of the things I have to write about have already been severely written about.  When I was working at AEG, I had a lot more wiggle room. I guess it's adjust to being in the Bigger Pond.

The Edge of Midnight book is on pace to be a Gen Con release.  I'm excited to see another book with my name as a co-author.  My co-workers at MegaHex seem genuinely excited about my author stuff, so it will be fun to crow around with that book tucked under my arm for a day or two.

I also came up with an idea that straddled the line between "Fun game idea" and "Ooooh, I want to develop this."  I bounced the idea off of romsveld and Rocket Boots and they both told me I should develop it. More will be forthcoming, but I've got the title - "Indigo". I've also been reading 'Firestarter', which deals with a similar premise, but I feel like my take is different enough that it is inspiring me rather than chasing me off.

Life: Still married. It's really not that different, though there seem to be more and more moments where I realized I made the right choice. I'll refrain from burning too much popcorn here, but there are nights where she makes me laugh till my throat is sore and my sides hurt.

We went to my sister-in-law's wedding last weekend.  The interesting thing was, I think linbtl was more stressed about that wedding then our own. It's just their dynamic and it's something I find difficult to understand with my only child background.  \

Reading: In addition to King, which always so easy to pick up because you can always find a dollar copy down at HPB, I traded for a huge chunk of Fading Suns books.  I always wanted to get into the game, and I remember enjoying the one game that muzzie ran for us before he dashed off to his destiny in Minnesota.

I am enjoying the read very much, because its a perfect example of gaming in the 90's - richly defined worlds where mechanics are an afterthought. After the toolbox, DIY nature of D&D 4th and the nWoD, it's a refreshing change of pace. When I find some open space on my schedule (hah!), I think a chronicle where the PCs discover a lost colony sounds really cool. And the "Beginning is the End is the Beginning" is the perfect theme song for the game.

The Watchmen trailer also got linbtl reading my Absolute Watchmen, which I always find sexy.  She read Preacher and Lone Wolf and Cub because she saw them on my shelf.  How can I not love that?

Game: More ups and downs, though its the opposite with more downs and ups.  Monday is back to Hughes High.  I think I discovered that Star Wars is a game that I prefer to play rather than run. We got a chance to finally play Prince of the City after the abortive attempt that got me sore at Bounty Hunter. I lived it, because it felt like Vampire, which is a tough thing for a board or a card game to do well.  The last time something felt like its source material was the Call of Cthulhu CCG, which has a lot of "Crap, we can only win one, which one do we lose?" moments. Rocket Boots gets more Mondays when he's back in town and after that, we're going to be playing Vampire for reals.

D&D in Milwaukee is going well.  I have no idea if we'll make it to 10th level or whatever, but the fights have run fine and people are getting into filling out the wiki pages.

Madison is my current trouble game.  I didn't like how D&D went, and most of the players are out until Fall.  I want to continue out there, if only because Mr and Mrs. Peacoat Ranger are moving back to Madison in November. It will be fun to see them and who knows, maybe they'll become friends with Lemming Wrangler and I won;t feel like I'm her only connection to a social group.

I apologize for my absence, Diane.  I keep meaning to update, and update, and update but something gets in the way. So what have I been doing with my time?

• Reading the greatest Actual Play thread in the history of man,
• Scoring a sweet freelance gig with the #1 RPG publisher writing for a game I love.
• Exercising on the Wii. Also, playing Lego Indy.
  
• Doing research for my next novel.
• Recruiting for my D&D Fourth Edition game.  If you want to play, let me know.

 The RPG Seasons Project is going into full swing.  The idea is simple - rather than run a game until I lose interest, they lose interest, or Real Life intrudes, I am going to try running short 6-8 session seasons of games.  Depending on how often the group gets together, a season will be over in anywhere from 2-6 months.  It was inspired by my fondness for watching TV on DVD.  If I'm really into a show, I can pound through all the seasons at once.  I can also take a break and get hungry for it again.  It's also telling that my most recent satisfying game experience was the Edge of Midnight miniseries that I ran over the summer.

Here's what's on my plate:

Mondays - Vampire: Because the Night
xbeyondinsanex(The Artist Formerly Known as antigonewest) is a soft touch when it comes to Vampire, but I would be lying if I wasn't excited to try it.  I'd like to try to cycle a new player in here, but the current game has four already, and everyone seems to have signed on.

Friday: Madison - Changeling: Mad World
Lemming Wrangler has been a good sport by coming to game in Milwaukee for years.  Running a game in her neck of the woods isn't so bad.  It's also a shorter trip for Saucy Babylon and Brab. Real Life kicked this game in the head recently, but it looks like we're back on track.

Friday: Milwaukee - Mage: The Secrets of Sidewalks
A slow start, but I've got a few good overarching plots in mind.  Mage still holds a place in my heart, and this version is no different.  The game started to sing when the big ritual went down, and I hope there's more stuff like that in this game's future.

And the future?  Always dreaming, always dreaming.

Colonial Command:  Human clones going on bughunts in the future.  I'd encorporate some bits of Aliens, Halo, Bughunters,  and Tour of Darkness.  This is one of those ideas that's always been Kicking Around, but a recent game where the players got to mug about as the pet Stormtroopers for another PC brought it back.  I think it would also be a good fit for Savage Worlds.  I think that Aces High was not the right fit exactly for Savage Worlds, as it didn't use the systems strengths.

Reign:  While A Game of Thrones RPG would be the easy choice, I almost think I want to do a Warriors style game on the streets of some unknown future dystopia.

I was planning on going to bed at a decent hour, but the Muse showed up at the door in an overcoat and a smile.

I updated School Spirit for the first time in a long time.  The comic book universe lives.  The most fun that I've had with Bounty Hunter was hashing out this world.  Not to mention filling out the history of WWII with Fortinbras during those slow tour days.

The other stuff....is on it's way....

I made this.

Everytime something like this happens, I think to myself, "Holy Shit, it's really happening."

And it's being released right around my birthday, no less.

Let's see if I can do it again...

I have been asked by two people to write letters of recommendation.  In both cases, I was second choice.  Not that I mind, as I don't really have anything behind me to make my word worth a damn.  These places don't know me from Adam, but if I can bullshit a letter and it helps out my friends, awesome. 

I guess this means I should get cracking on doing something worthwhile, eh?

To wit:

I know I wanted Elves in my fantasy world. I was going to be doing some strange things with the other fantasy races and wanted to keep one close to normal. But I still wanted to make them different and unique. The trick is to twist them a bit and make them a bit more exotic. The naturalist ideas often given to Elves always seemed to contrast with the imperial nature that they always seemed to have. If you believe in the "LotR as WWII europe" idea, the Elves were the British Empire, still lit by the glory of its colonialism but slowly pushing away from the light into the darkness of the future. As this story is set in an earlier era of the fantasy world, looking to an earlier empire made perfect sense.

The idea of "decadent Roman Elves" was an excellent starting point.

I've spent the first part of this week working on 'the novel'. While technically this would be my second, and I probably should be revising my first, this one began before the one I completed last year. I started it shortly after my trip to Gen Con So Cal, when I got all fired up bout writing thanks to Mike Stackpole.

I think the actual novel itself might get put in another LJ for commentary, editing and the like. This space will be for observations, background bits, and world-work. For me, world-work is the most fun part but also the most challenging part. The other half is story work. I often get stuck with one and not the other. "Boy, this is a neat idea for a setting. But what would people actually do?"

Like many creative impulses, this was born out of one of my forays into the nerd. While I have been gaming for 17 years, I had never played a game of AD&D, or D&D for that matter. My first exposure to D&D was 3rd Edition, aka d20. I had played a game or two of it while in Boston, and wanted to see how the kids back home handled the basic 'dungeon crawl'.

Of course, it is never that easy. Looking through the 'Standard Fantasy Races' I began to wonder why they had so many redundancies. What's the difference between a halfling, a gnome, and a dwarf, other than the mechanics? The Pit of Creativity started to murmur a bit, and I started coming up with some slight twists on SFR ideas for my game. We ran it and people had fun, but I wouldn't get a satisfying D&D experience until much later with our Pantheon game.

The crystalizing moment was my trip to So Cal. The Stackpole seminars were full of good writer tidbits and considering I wouldn't mind having a career like his (started out in gaming, went on to NYT Bestseller, works on Star Wars from time to time) I put some serious thought into doing a fantasy novel. Apparently, trash fantasy is the biggest segment of the sci-fi/fantasy market (and this was before the LOTR film trilogy had come out in completion). The trick was, of course, to come up with things to set myself apart from the other guys.

• The Gods are walking around.  I always liked Greek/Roman mythology where the Gods were subject to petty squabbles and human traits.  While they may project a united front for their subjects, they are also vicious little backstabbers too.
• The races, while humanoid, are decended from other creatures. If we are going to take things from Greek myth, why not the idea that the Gods like to get laid?  When they have sex, strange things happen.  Instead of the elves being tree-hugging hippes, why not have them be part plant? Their ethereal beauty comes from the fact that they have colored skin and bright hair like the petals of a flower.
• Don't forget this is one part of history. This is fairly big picture here, but if this book is successful, I want to explore other parts of this world's history.  A lot of places are stuck in one particular era, and the pseudo-Dark Ages aren't going to end until the money stops.  But what abut the Industrial Revolution?  Or World War One?  That intrigues me enough to lay down the basics of the book and come back to different eras later.
• Characters are meant to die.  Just because I like someone and someday my fan will, doesn;t make them immune to death.  Especially if this story becomes generational, not everyone will live through this epic adventure. 

I looked at my original notes and started working.  On a trilogy, no less.  My goal is to have a salable draft of the first book done by the end of the year.  I have a couple chapters done, but I already know I'm going to rework them.  Hopefully, not that I'm out of the RPG writing game, I can concentrate on larger horizons. 

If you've read this far, you can see my original notes on the game and where I'm coming from.  The next entry will talk about some of the world work and where I'm going.  I appreciate any comments from you all, as I have been blessed with creative and opinionated friends.

( The original notes )

Considering I'm currently waiting for a call from the gubmint, I'm in a pretty good mood this morning.

I splurged a bit yesterday and actually rented something from Blockbuster.  Two somethings to be precise.  GUN for XBox and The Aristocrats on DVD.  A review of the Aristocrats is forthcoming, and my take on Gun is that it's a decent rental but that's about it.  Whereas Red Dead Revolver had the flavor of a Japanese take on the Spaghetti Western, Gun tries to be Grand Theft Deadwood, complete with gore (strangely no boobs) and cussin'.  The gameplay itself is ok but is a little undercooked.  I was in a bit of a western mood after watching "The Gunslinger" off of Lindsay's MST3Kollection.  I think Deadwood will become our next DVD Season project now that we've finally made it through Lost.

After a bit of a scheduling slip due to an impending funeral, we had l5r on Tuesday with all hands present.  I always think its a good sign when everyone has fun at a game even if there's no combat in a session.  I am currently running two games with the occaisional bubble of another idea coming to the surface.  l5r is Legend of the Five Rings.  It's a samurai action game with a good dash of intrigue, politics, and melodrama.  I've been chomping to run a long game ever since Ben ran his Ryoko Owari game years ago and it's been doing well.  I'm also returning to Fireborn, which is a game where players play the modern reincarnations of dragons and also flash back to the mythic days when they were big and scaly.  What can I say?  Its a clever way to do Highlander.

My friends have come and gone into my world of nerding.  Some of them have asked me "Will you be doing this when you're  40?"  I've thought about it and realized how important this silly little dice-rolling is to me creatively.  When you work on a novel or a short story, there's such a long drag period between when the idea is fresh and when you get the piece in any shape to show off in public.  When you show off the end result, you feel good but there's always a tiny part of you that thinks "Man, you don't know what I went through for this."  But gaming allows for a quick fix of that sweet buzz of making something good.  I can think of a half dozen moments in gaming where everyone at the table was locked in and building well.  It's such a hit when you see other people on the same wavelength as you and nothing beats that feeling of "Dude, when do we play again?".  It's more rewarding to me than short stories because everything is right there and on top of that, you get to spend time with your friends instead of locking yourself up in your room with your laptop.

So, that's the long answer.  The short answer?  Yes, I'll be doing this when I'm forty.

Right now, there is somebody out there that doesn't like you. 

Right now, somebody considers themselves less geeky than you.




One of my good associates on her blog talked about how some Serious Writers look down upon the burgeoning blog community.  This isn't surprising in that it's simply human nature not only to categorize, but also to think in terms of "Us Vs. Them".

I'm not immune.  Quite frankly, I was surrounded by plenty of Serious Writers during college (and my freelancer career) and they make me feel woozy.  While I am proud of my English degree, the program that I was a part of taught me precisely the opposite of what I wanted to learn.  They couldn't understand why I would want to spend my talent writing about sex, zombies, and ninjas, and I couldn't fathom writing about my Vagina*.  I ran into a rare few souls that didn't get caught up in the touchy-feely, keep a dream journal by your bed, and align your shakras before typing hype of it all.  This type of writer became my Them.

When I read, I tend to shy away from Oprah's Book Club, because most of the books come from Those Serious Writers.  I am not without sampling.  I picked up a copy of The Lovely Bones by Alice Seebold and made my way through it.  Short review: If you like Toni Morrison, you'll like this book.  I don't like Toni Morrison.  Serious Writers write the type of stuff I don't like reading; stream of consciousness narratives about regular people where nothing really exciting happens to them but people read a lot of stuff into it.

You know, like a blog?

ZING!

I guess I'm just pretentious about pretentions.  Or maybe precocious.

*There were a lot of women in my courses...and many of them liked to overshare.  Also, I'm totally misogynistic.