What's Next?

I sometimes find myself thinking about what I'll do after The Nameless Way. I'm still not sure. It's not that I don't have any ideas I'm excited about; it's that I have too many. And I talked a little in 2025 about what happens when I fail to keep my imps in line.

One candidate is Ghosts of Blackridge, the one I actually started before I switched to Nameless Way. It's kind of a soap-ish horror thing based loosely on my college years. We didn't have quite so many demons running around then -- not literal ones, anyway -- but adaptations are never perfect. 

The pitch: An inhuman spirit preys on students in a fictional late-80s college town in the Arkansas River Valley. No one knows where it came from or who to trust. Or maybe some of them do. There's another newcomer to Blackridge, someone with plans to put the demon to use in his own schemes. 

I wrote quite a bit of this when Amazon introduced its now-defunct serial fiction platform. It's some of the worst writing I've ever done. I like the plot. I like the characters. I'm even proud of the way I made the setting my own. The actual prose, though, is bland garbage. It reads more like an outline than a finished story, or even a good draft. I think it's worth fixing, though. 

Forgotten Cities of the Komaran Sea is another one I tried to serialize. Like The Nameless Way, this one was inspired by some D&D adventures. Unlike Nameless Way, "inspired by" is pretty much where the relationship ends. 

The pitch: A traveler plunges through a misty otherworld to an abandoned underground temple, where he meets a group of ruthless treasure-hunters and learns that he is in a desert in an unfamiliar, dying, land. Even though he knows he can't trust them, he doesn't see any other way to survive the hostile environment, so he joins the strangers and helps them search for the relics of the lost civilization. 

This one is actually a sequel to Losing Lanterns (for those who've read it, the protagonist is Aradoc), but it stands alone. It digs into a lot of things I've wanted to explore for a while. As far as having emotional patterns I want to infect you with and a vision of life I need to share, this is the best of the three. I'm not sure I'm ready to grow it into what it needs to be, though. 

If I were getting started today, I'd probably be working on one I've been calling "Dogstar" in my head. There is an absolute zero chance of this being the actual title, by the way. The name comes from -- well, let's back up a bit. 

A little while back, I talked about this thing that's been percolating in my head for a long time. Imagine telling stories as a sort of Plato's Cave scenario. There's the story being told now, but, somewhere outside, there's the pure story, the story everyone is trying to tell. No story we tell is the real story; it's just what we've put together from the bits we can see. It's impossible for any medium to convey the pure story. Our stories are only shadows. 

The idea of a pure story behind the story was the foundation of The Nameless Way. I've been digging into a chaotic mess of scenarios and, not just mechanically translating them into a coherent story, but dissolving and distilling and reconstituting them to taste what I can of the truer story they came from. 

So anyway, there was this space opera comic strip I did when I was eleven or so years old, just a grid on sheets of notebook paper. It starred a rocket-powered talking dog (based on Mike's favorite bean bag toy) who gets sucked through a black hole into another universe, where he has a series of outer space adventures. That's why my placeholder name is "Dogstar." 

There's a stack of those comic strips that I've somehow managed not to lose over the years. As I suggested earlier, I'm studying the whole pile like it's a bad translation of a great story, a transmission I was trying to relay, but couldn't get right. 

While I've resisted the urge to actually start writing it, I did build a Scrivener file for it and I poke at the details every now and then. I've already uncovered a promising narrative and a bunch of characters with interesting conflicts and story arcs. There's even a little romance. I think it's going to be a lot of fun. It always looks easier in this phase. I haven't even made up my mind how I'm going to portray the dog. 

Of course, I've got to finish the one I'm on, first. My New Year's Resolution was to publish at least part of it (maybe I'll explain what I mean later) this year, and that still looks like a plausible goal. I got a lot done before I had to go full time on the money-grubbing and, now that I'm adapting to the situation (and the new manager helped me get a schedule that doesn't completely crush my soul), it's picking up again. 

You can also find this on my Substack, Whiskey and Fire. 

2024(-ish): More Than I Thought

A while back, I lamented that it had taken me nine years to write 55,000 (now closer to 60) words of The Nameless Way, and I still had a long way to go. I was thinking about how that happened. I don't much feel like recapping 2024, at least not in public, but the New Year seems to be a good time to look back on the stuff I've been doing since I started this novel in 2015.

I committed to the book as my main project in June of 2015, and started writing the draft (except for the prologue, which I wrote in 1999 or 2000 or so) in August or September. The first chapter was based on the adventure I started the original campaign with. Getting that down was the most fun I had had writing in a long time. I think the second chapter was pretty easy too, although it was an almost entirely new story to explain some stuff from a segment I couldn't use. That's a topic for another blog, though. 

I think it was 2016 when other stuff started eating into my progress. I don't mean the usual stuff. I don't mean the dayjob, or gaming, or conventions, or eBay, or even random crises like bouts of depression. Those are all issues, but not issues worth commenting on. That's just life. The delays I'm looking at now are the side projects. 

Some of those projects were things I felt committed to because I had already done most of the creative part and just never shared it. Some of them were things I thought would make me some money to keep me going while I finished The Nameless Way. On that second purpose, it's worth noting that none of them succeeded. In retrospect, it's almost like I was being scolded for straying from The Plan. 

So, the first thing was Qalidar. I had already given up on my original vision for a Qalidar Role-Playing Game, partly because my soul was crushed in mid-stream by personal shit, but also because I had been thinking for a while that designing games was never going to keep my demons fed. So I settled on a less ambitious way to finish what I started. I made a "basic" book with an adventure and introductory rules. This was before I started on The Nameless Way. Rather than making a book of complete rules or something like that, I decided that I would follow the basic book with supplements, which would eventually expand it to a more complete game. Less satisfying and, obviously, less marketable, but honest. 

I published Supplement 1: The Fire Within, in 2016. The original idea was that each supplement would highlight a particular culture/race/whatever. This got fudged right at the start, though, because my real goal for the first supplement was to make sure the game worked all the way to the standard d20 level cap of twenty, to finish the rules for organizations, and to cover any missing equipment and stuff like that from the basic book. Ultimately, it was obvious to even a casual reader that the cultural focus on the Stardust was just an afterthought. I already knew there would be no more culture-focused books when I finished this one. I was just paying lip service to that plan. 

In another year, there was Supplement 2, the Qalidar Qritter Qatalog. As before, this was something I felt I owed to the two or three people who had actually played or purchased Qalidar. Also, part of the main artist's pay was a cut of PDF sales, so, having already delivered some amazing work, he deserved at least a little effort on my part. By this time, I knew I was never going to go on with the culture-focused supplements. I did have a bunch of creatures I could share, though, and I knew the game wouldn't be complete without them. It was just a matter of formatting it all. And of course formatting takes time. 

Because of its weird production history, the Qalidar game is a little awkward if you want to put it all together and dive right in to the full game. It still works well, I think, if you play the intro scenario and move on to the rest from there. I still enjoy playing it. Well, running it. I'm the only GM, so that's all I can do. Every once in a while, I think I'd like to put it all together into one book like a normal RPG. I know I shouldn't. 

There was a little bit of ghostwriting. Four projects, scattered across the time I was doing this other work. That actually did pay, but not nearly enough to justify the time it ate. And yes, that's all I'm going to say about it.

HOGZILLA! HOGZILLA! HOGZILLA! Or TerrorHog. Whatever. The Hogzilla episode of The Last Drive-In was lots of fun. Not long after that, we had planned one of our "hoot" get-togethers. I started putting together a Hogzilla Crawlspace scenario to run at that event, complete with insanity rules and a drinking game. However, most of our gaming friends in Ohio had become unreliable, so that hoot never happened. 

Anyway, Tom convinced me that I should put it together for publication, because that would be easy. There's a big difference between my convention-event notes and an intelligible scenario that someone else could run. Like, seriously, I'll go to Gen Con with only some pre-gens, a vague idea, and some names scribbled down. If I had to actually prepare for the games I ran at conventions, I would never run games at conventions. 

Thinking I might reach a new audience, I dove into the rabbit hole and made TerrorHog, the Hogzilla game. Joe Bob Briggs held the book up on TV in his goofy Biedermeir/pimp costume, Shudder tweeted about it on their official account, and still nobody bought it. To paraphrase Joe Bob's introduction of the movie, I did all that work, only to find that the world was not clamoring for Hogzilla role-playing games. Another cosmic rebuke for my infidelity.  

The next thing was that Amazon announced this new feature for publishing serials in 2020. I immediately thought of Blackridge, which had originally been patterned after serial format stuff. I had just moved and, obviously, lost my job, so I thought this could help. It inspired me to start a second serial on a different platform, just to, you know, feel out the market. This stuff actually overlapped the Hogzilla thing, by the way.

The first one was the Blackridge serial on Amazon. I still feel that it's a great story. I like the characters and it had a great plot. Unfortunately, the episodes I published were some of the worst writing I've ever done. Well, the worst since college, anyway. It was more like the Cliff's Notes of a story than an actual story. 

At the same time, I also tried to serialize the Komar novel I had been outlining, the sort-of sequel to Losing Lanterns, starring Aradoc, with characters from my high school D&D group as the sociopathic treasure hunters he gets stuck in the desert with. The stuff I wrote for this was better, but also rushed. As before, I was cranking it out for all the wrong reasons. It was very much a story worth telling. It's still a story I want to tell, but it wasn't the right time. I also think the weird proprietary token buy-in thing Amazon and this other platform were pushing was stupid, but that doesn't redeem my infidelity. 

Part of the plan for TerrorHog was to make it a complete game, since we couldn't assume that the audience we were trying to reach would have any interest in investing in a new game on top of the pig monster book. To make it easier to get into, I made a customized version of Crawlspace, made only for the one-shot with the pre-generated characters. That being the case, we thought it might be nice to have a version of those rules that could stand on its own with character generation and stuff like that. So I put Crawlspace: 21 & Over together for that. 

I collaborated on a novella with a friend. She had already written most of it. All I did was go back through to insert some weird stuff about nephilim and write the end. As it happens, both of us had done much better work on our own projects. Her part was probably the better of the two, but I did enjoy sinking Columbus and a lot of southern Ohio into a giant magma pit. 

After all that, there's another edition of Stars, Specters, and Super-Powers. The first edition had a terrible cover, and I had omitted a story that should have been in it. I also added some background stuff and art Mike did for the comic book plot that led to "The Man Comes Around." Having this book and Losing Lanterns out there and looking good when The Nameless Way finally drops, has been part of The Plan for a long time, so that was unquestionably worth doing. 

So, why blather on about all this? Mostly as a reminder to myself. Memory plays tricks on you. I keep coming back to, "What have I been doing all this time? What's the point if this is all I've got after nine years?" I sometimes wonder if it was all like the past couple of weeks, during which I've hardly written anything because I've been buried in life garbage and it messes with my head even when it's not stealing my time. I can look at this, though, and remind myself that I wasn't just staring at the wall the whole time. 

And I guess it's also a reminder that the time side projects take up isn't free. 

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Words, Words, Words

55,000 words done on The Nameless Way. Not that impressive, considering it's taken me nine years and I'm not even halfway finished, but it's something.

 

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2021: Year of the Cat

Funny year, both creatively and just, whatever. I started off by moving from Cleveland to Northwest Arkansas, where I worked my old job from home for a while and then, predictably enough, got laid off. I didn't get a lot of writing done after that, because job-hunting is at least as time-consuming and more emotionally draining than having a job. 

I had a fairly productive trip to Devil's Den early in the year, though. That place always revives me.  

I wrote a bunch of material for a couple of serials and then decided, as much fun as it was, I needed to get back to The Nameless Way. I wouldn't say I've abandoned the serials, but they're on hold. Gotta get that book done.

While we're talking about the book, I also found a way to do a map I like. It's already changed a bit from the picture up there, but that's pretty close to what I'm going to publish. In other map-related news, I finally got around to putting my venerable World of Greyhawk maps in poster frames so maybe they'll be a little bit better protected.

I finished Hogz-- errr, TerrorHog, as well. I'm not going back to Peryton Publishing in any other capacity, but that's another project like the serials that I drifted into because I thought it would be quick and easy. You'd think I'd have learned by now that it's never quick and easy. Anyway, I'm proud of the result, and now it's done so I can move on and get back to serious writing.  

So where am I with this book I keep saying I'm focusing on? Bgrargh. I mean, I guess I shouldn't put it that way, because I'm enjoying working on the center brain-stage again. I just now started doing that, though, and a few leftover TerrorHog tasks are still nipping at my ankles now and then. We'll see. Seems like this is taking a lot longer than it should. 

I'm kinda burned out on gaming. Like, even as a player. Partly it's the teleconferencing stuff, but this just happens occasionally. You could probably scroll back on my blog and find several other times I said the same thing. I'm sure I'll be a fanatic again after a little break. I mean, just look at that Greyhawk map. How could you not get ideas? Also, I'll probably run TerrorHog at least once. 

Here's a picture of my friend, Charlie, who died of COVID early in the year. I don't really have anything else to say about that. And then there's some cat pictures. The cats aren't dead or anything. I just like sharing their pictures.

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Whiplash

Yeah, never mind that other stuff. They're both great projects, but I never should have let myself get sidetracked. I'm working now on the thing I need to be working on. After that I can come back to the serials. 

 

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Devil's Den

Well, I didn't get as far as I'd hoped but, considering that I really wanted to get some hiking in, finishing the whole draft was a little unrealistic. I'm not unhappy with the progress I did make, and the time alone in one of my favorite places was reinvigorating. 

So anyway, here's a clip from last week's work. There's a bunch more pictures after the jump break. You'll probably have to click a link if you're reading this through some kind of feed manager thing.

Ezren woke up in the dark. After some fumbling and tracing of runes with his fingers, he found one of the charms he had made at Ash's house. A few whispered names and the little wooden token lit up. Blood, viscera, and stunted limbs were all around him. Iczifractas was sitting nearby, cleaning herself.

It wasn't the same corridor he had been in when he was knocked out. This one was sloped and unfinished, with a deep thrum pulsing through the stone. On the lower, rougher, side, someone had been liberating a metallic apparatus from solid rock. Stiff brushes and small, precise chisels testified to the care they had been taking. The thing stretched from wall to wall and probably beyond. A crude metal staircase wound through a hole in the ceiling on the other side. 

Iczifractas picked up something in her teeth and trotted to Ezren. With a proud "mmrow," she dropped a huge opalescent eyeball at Ezren's feet. 

Ezren looked around at all the dero parts scattered about and scratched the cat on the cheek. "Somebody's been a very good girl," he said. Iczifractas rubbed against him and purred. Ezren wondered how long Iczifractas had been able to murder a room full of people on her own.

More pictures & stuff below:

Go For It

I haven't really had much to say lately. I did manage to get a fragmentary trilobite article out yesterday, but I wrote most of that closer to New Year's. Since then I've been focusing mostly on moving out and settling in, with a little bit of real writing thrown in here and there, but not much. 

And that's the thing. I've been writing this one book since... what? 2015? People are starting to snicker when they say, "Oh, that's right, you're working on a novel." At least, snickering is what I hear. Sure, I'm making steady progress, but it's slowwww progress. I need to try something different if I'm going to finish this before I'm seventy.

Well, here's something I've never done: the writing retreat thing. It's expensive, and the idea seems to have made some of the humans close to me and one of the cats think I don't love them, but we can sort all that when I get back. Truth is, they enjoy being outraged. I just need to lock up all my stuff so nobody pees on it.

I'm gonna spend a whole week alone in a cabin in my favorite park (although it won't be all green like in the picture). That area is what the wilderness in the first half of the book was based on so, y'know, bonus.  

The goal is to finish the draft. It won't mean the end of the job, but it'll get me to a point where my constant prodding and patching will be a good thing. I have no idea how this is going to go. I might come shuffling back with nothing but a few trail pictures and an embarrassed shrug, but at least I gave it a shot.

A Little More

Here's a little bit of work I got done while hiding in the basement today.

As they neared the middle of the city, the webs became more prominent. Up ahead, a huge spire towered over a circular plaza. A round symbol was painted on its lower reaches in red and gold. The swirling, self-mirroring yin-yang symbol stood out starkly against the otherwise featureless black stone. She had seen the symbol with less garish colors on several occasions before, but most recently in Timber, on Shao Tsang's tunic. The other buildings in the circle were all covered in webs.

Kala and Oeklor were checking every corner now, starting at every echo. They drew their swords. Kala absent-mindedly traced tiny circles with the point of her blade while Oeklor kept switching his grip back and forth from forward to backward. Looking more closely at the webbed-over buildings around the circle, they found human-shaped bulges in the fabric. Each of these had one or two smaller, rounder bulges near it.

Speaking barely above a whisper, Kala said, "I think you were right. This was a--"

Oeklor poked his sword into one of the little round bundles and wiggled the blade.

"--Bad idea." Kala grimaced and backed away. Little black shapes squirmed around the blade and the cut began to widen on its own.

Out of Order

I was suddenly hit by the inspiration to do a couple of chapters from the perspective of one of the villains (well, a sort-of-villain, anyway -- it's complicated) so now I've got this thing going on where I'm writing stuff out of order and I have three chapters-in-progress instead of one. Thank Grodd for Scrivener.

Mostly Games

The Nameless Way had been in a bit of a slump, but picked up quite a bit last month. I've gotten up to the part based on When a Star Falls, which is something I've really been looking forward to writing. That adventure leads into their first time travel jaunt in the novel, even though When a Star Falls came after that in the original campaign.

I think I already mentioned that our Icons game is on hold and I'm running the Goodman Games update of Isle of Dread for a change of pace. It's going... slowly. We've only had one session. There was supposed to be a second last weekend... and a few weeks before that, but those didn't happen. They didn't make it to the island last session. I had originally intended to play all the pre-island stuff out, but I've since decided to fast forward through most of it. I don't want this to take all year.

While Tom and I were down with a delightful cold/sinus infection combo, I tried out Audible. Audiobooks are great when it hurts to focus your eyes. It's also something two pathetic sick people can do together. We got through most of Ringworld that way. I'm totally hooked on the service now. Sometimes I even "read" on slow days at work. I'm listening to The Mothman Prophesies right now.

I stumbled across the Kickstarter for Old-School Essentials and was surprised that it was so tempting. I like 5th Edition D&D. I've got a bunch of stuff for it. Do I really want to go back to Basic/Expert, however well it's organized? So I dug up my old books and went through them, kind of ran through stuff in my head. My group didn't really play much B/X before we started on AD&D. Anyway, I decided that yes, I really do want to play this again and I backed the Kickstarter.

Schedule permitting, I intend to go to Carnage this year and run a B/X adventure (OSE if I have it in hand by then), but I didn't have any particular inspiration, so I went back to the DM'ing section and rolled some stuff. For the scenario, I rolled, "Escaping from Enemies," which I've done a bunch of times before and... I dunno. For the setting I got, "abandoned mine," which... okay... I guess. I even rolled the special monsters part using the random encounter tables. I'm planning on using 5th level characters, so I rolled once on the 6-7 table, and three times on the 4-5 table. I got Giant Scorpion, Blink Dog, Hellhound, and Caecilia. It'll be fun to try and make something out of all that.

Not sure what else I'll run. Maybe just Dungeon. Maybe Doctor Who. Still thinking.

Hey, City of Heroes is back! At least for now. Somebody got ahold of the server code and has released it to the public, where these people and probably others are running the game for anybody who wants to play. They've added several servers and it seems to keep running more and more smoothly. I was on last night and didn't get kicked off once. Of course, you never know where this kind of thing will end up. For now, though, it sure is great to be back in Paragon City.

This is Not the Title

Work on The Nameless Way has picked up again after creeping forward for a few months. I also had a great gaming weekend a couple of weeks ago.

I finally figured out how to work in the future party's contribution to "The Beginning of the End" without overshadowing the current one. I had been planning to mostly gloss over it, but instead I'm using it now as a dream sequence everybody got pulled into because the telepath is having fits. And of course, that guy having fits leads into the developments that lead to this freaky time-trip anway, so it's also useful foreshadowing. It has, consequently, become really fun to write again. I'm cramming in writing time all over the place now, above and beyond the schedule I set for myself.

The gaming bit was neat, too. We didn't call it a hoot, but it kind of was. Tom set up a slot to run Spacers at the game store and several friends from out of town joined in. For the after-party, Saharrah volunteered to run an off-the-cuff game of Crawlspace called "Eat Me" in which we made our way through the jungle, starting fires and switching sides, while pursued by magic furry cannibals. The next day, after seeing the other friends off, I ran a session of my Icons campaign for the usual suspects, concluding the long-running backup story of Landshark's possessed dog.

I still need to work out what I'm going to do for Carnage, though.

Thus Says the Tao

One of the challenges of adapting a role-playing game campaign to a novel is getting the characters, settings, and events as close to the original as possible without bringing in details that are meaningless, contradictory, or just plain ridiculous. A lot of this is stuff I worked out before I even started the first draft, but since I had some dead time at the day job that won’t work for art writing, I thought it would be fun to talk about the process. I’m going to start with Shao Tsang instead of the story as a whole, because there were some additional labyrinths to thread surrounding his history.

Shao Tsang was my brother’s character in the game. His original thought was to create a monk but, after some unusually good attribute rolls, he decided to go with a psionicist. Monks in Second Edition AD&D were watered-down fighter or cleric characters, while psionicists had high requirements and much more interesting abilities. 

Originally, he had telepathic powers similar to the ones we see in The Nameless Way. Not much later on, though, he wanted to switch to psychoportation and psychometabolism, which would, among other things, allow him to do more kung fu-ish stuff. This may have been driven partly by a new supplement purchase. I can’t remember. In any case, I indulged him with a quick diversion to work the change into the story and it was all settled. 

Mike would later sell a couple of stories featuring this time-manipulating martial arts version of Shao Tsang. He also wrote a longer one which I don’t think has ever been published. This set of abilities presented some problems for my Shao Tsang, though. For one thing, I was bringing in Seisha, who also has martial arts skills and psionic abilities, earlier. I’ve downplayed the psychic abilities in my version, but that makes her talents more like martial arts Shao Tsang, not less. Sure, she’s sneaky too, but the stuff she does in a fight wouldn’t be nearly as impressive if Shao Tsang did it too.

Another problem is Mogdar. As a wizard specializing in time manipulation, a lot of the stuff that would be fun to develop for Mogdar would already be in Shao Tsang’s playbook. Mogdar won’t be doing silly Hong Kong movie stunts with it, but that barely helps. We would, again, have a character learning and showing off tricks that Shao Tsang was already doing.

Finally, the whole kung fu aesthetic is boring to me, especially as an element of sword and sorcery stories. The fact that "monks" weren’t too impressive in the version of D&D we were playing didn’t bother me at all. I even scrubbed a few of the far eastern trappings from Seisha. You won’t see the word "ninja" in this book, for example. That’s a minor obstacle, though. I probably would have left it in and found ways to make it fun if not for the issues with Seisha and Mogdar.

So my Shao Tsang isn’t much of a fighter, and he doesn’t distort time. Instead of being a "monk" he’s just a monk. He’ll keep the psionic tricks, Seisha will keep the martial arts tricks (plus a few other surprises), and Mogdar will keep the temporal tricks. None of this affects their personalities, though. I kept almost all of that. 

There’s another issue connected to one of Mike’s stories and one of mine, but it’s more about a particular set of events than about the character. I’ll talk about that in another post.

New Title

I’ve decided to drop "Throne of Gorgudai" and call it The Nameless Way, a title that’s been rattling around in the back of my head for quite a while, instead. Besides being easier on the ears, it says a lot more about where the book is going.

And where is the book going? Meh, I’m still not ready to spill much more than I’ve already said about that, but the writing is clacking along at a much better pace since I started committing to a schedule, so it’ll all be out there one way or another.

Where Is It?

This year, I decided that progress on the novel, while steady, was much slower than it should be. If I had been hired to write this book by someone else, she probably would have fired me by now. To accelerate, I committed to writing for at least an hour every day (with exceptions for some weekends and stuff like conventions). At least five days a week, in any case. I’m only two weeks in, but I’m happy to say that it’s working so far. I even kept up while I was smashed flat by the flu last week. The great thing is, if I worked on it even a little bit the day before, I’m already tuned in when I start working on it again. I don’t have to take a lot of "where was I?" time to get started.

And where am I? The main characters, mostly allies of convenience so far, have started to come together more in this chapter. With sections from Seisha’s perspective and the current one from Shao Tsang’s, I’ve finally given everybody at least one chance to "talk." They’ve explored a new town, developed some new tricks, and detected an impostor. They even got to fight a giant shapeshifting eel. And, if you’re paying attention, you might find out who killed Kasmordo. Of course, you’re not paying attention because you can’t, since I haven’t let you read it, but anyway.

Now I just have to stick with it.

2016: An Extremely Volatile Year

I guess let's start with the bad.

Everybody talks about all the celebrities who died this year, which... yeah, whatever. I was a little bummed by David Bowie's death, but the others were just names. I mean, I don't want anybody to suffer or die, but they do, all the time. If it's not somebody I interact with, I'm not going to give a famous person's death any more time than any other stranger's, even if I admire their work. Usually. I'm not sure why Bowie was an exception, so I'll just leave it there.

I don't even wanna talk about the political clown show. In day-job news, the company I work for -- that I liked working for -- was bought out by one of the most enthusiastic consumers of those inspirational slogan posters. Yay, mergers, right? Maybe it's for the best; I was probably getting too comfortable with this job. 2017 promises all sorts of messed-up authority figures to keep me... I need a word with positive connotations... let's say "energized." 2016 wasn't all bad, though. It actually had a pretty generous share of awesome, too. I just wanted to get this stuff out of the way first.

For one thing, I went to Hawaii. That was pretty cool. I was surprised that they didn't have seagulls, but they do have feral chickens. Seriously, chickens everywhere, like they own the place.

On the way back from Carnage this year, Tom and I stopped at Niagara Falls, which I had never seen before. There was more to it than I expected. It's a really nice park.

I skipped Gen Con this year for a variety of reasons which aren't really worth going into, but it was still a good year for gaming. The Scrap Pile campaign will probably end up slowing down a bit. I don't think it's dead -- I hope it's not dead -- but, even if it is, it was a great ride. Curtis's Dungeons & Dragons campaign has been fun, too.

I had something of a gamemastering crisis early in the year through the summer. I just didn't feel comfortable with the convention games, somehow. After a successful Carnage, though, I'm pretty sure I'm back in the groove. I've had the opportunity to run some D&D and I rediscovered the joy of the Vortex System. It's my current favorite for scenarios that aren't D&D or four-color super-heroes. I always liked it, but worried about turning everything into Doctor Who. It turns out that making some generic character sheets went a long way toward fixing that problem. We'll see if it holds.

A friend opened up his own store, Weird Realms. I'd probably support it just to help Beckett anyway, but, the truth is, I've got some selfish reasons for wanting it to succeed. I've been really enjoying gaming there and I've picked up some cool stuff that I might not have found otherwise.

I'm not sure I'd ever have gotten around to running Keep on the Borderlands again, if not for Beckett's multi-system B2 theme. It looks like a stable core of regular players is forming, so this could turn into a whole World of Greyhawk campaign. That's something I've often daydreamed about, but never had much hope of actually bringing to life.

And, hey, remember that Qalidar supplement I was working on, then said don't hold your breath for? I finished it! It felt really good to finally get that done. You can check it out on the network of tubes at Amazon or DriveThruRPG, and it should be in brick-and-mortar stores sometime in January. Next up is a "monster manual" type book to consolidate all the Qalidar qritters and publish the ones that still live only in my project files.

Throne of Gorgudai, or whatever I end up calling it, is still moving along. I'm up to their "little shopping trip." That could be somewhat misleading, though, because I moved a few of the early adventures around to fit the story I used to tie everything together. Yes, there is a story. I've fleshed out quite a bit of the plot, and I'm really happy with how it has evolved.

More to the point, though, I've not been a terribly diligent worker. I can't even blame the gaming, because there's plenty of time that just kind of evaporates without any of that. I do keep poking at the book and have made quite a bit of progress that way but, if I had been hired to write this book by someone else, she probably would have fired me by now. I'm thinking I need to do the schedule thing and come up with some time of day that's sacrosanct as writing time. It wouldn't take much. Even an hour every day would make a difference... which probably tells you more than I should admit to about how hard I've been working.

So yeah, the plan for 2017: Like I said, I need to schedule a daily routine for working on the novel. Wouldn't even have to be a tough routine. Just something. And I'll most likely spend a weekend at some point banging out that monster book for the Qalidar game. I should probably commission a cover, first. Ooh! I wonder what I'll do for the Gorgudai cover! No, no, NO -- write first; think about pictures later! I guess I also need to put together a bug-out bag in case the Twitter King and his Cabinet of Horrors keep on the way they're going.

Happy (almost) New Year! Here's some seagulls. Seagulls are cool.

Bright Strange Things

Facebook dredged this up for me from an old post and it seemed appropriate to the book I'm working on.

"It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back  to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes."
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

The Nameless Way

The novel I'm working on is based on a game I played in the late 1990’s. Like, not just inspired by, but actually based on it. Yeah, I know, bad idea.

Some time in 1998 or early 1999, my brother and I got together at the comic book store we were running and started talking about how much we missed gaming. We set up a plan that we hoped would help our ridiculously busy group keep going, with multiple dungeon masters, a world that we built as we went along, and no fussing about continuity if one or two people couldn’t make it to a session. We went with Dungeons & Dragons, partly because everybody was already familiar with it.

I provided the first adventure (or you can ride the Wayback Machine), establishing the village of Timber, Kasmordo’s tower, and the forested mountains around them as the initial setting. This session also established Ezren’s supernatural bargain, Shao Tsang’s frequent Tao-quoting, and a number of other recurring themes. Before long, there was a forum, a web page, and even a yearly awards poll for things like best quote, best adventure, and so on.

We eventually wrapped up the campaign because we wanted to try 3rd Edition. For a variety of reasons, the group fell apart after only a few sessions of that second campaign. I could blather on for a while about what those reasons were, but it’s beside the point. The only reason I bring up the second campaign at all is that it showed me something about the first one that I hadn’t realized.

Our characters in the second campaign were fairly iconic: the grim fighter, the brash half-orc barbarian, the rogue with the shady past, and the bossy but loyal cleric/sorcerer. In the first campaign, that hadn’t been the case at all. Those characters were flawed, damaged, and often kind of weird. They eventually stumbled their way into heroism, but most of them started out as misfits with something to prove. They learned to be a team, but they didn’t just snap together like pre-fabricated shelves or video game archetypes; they had to work at it, and sometimes they failed.

Around that time, I published a piece of flash fiction that would eventually evolve into this book’s prologue. You can probably find it online if you really want to. I made a few starts on a follow-up story, then got distracted by other things and forgot about it for years,  although Ezren, Mogdar, Seisha, Shao Tsang, and Tellar did lend their names to spells in both the 2006 and 2009 editions of the Peryton Fantasy Role-Playing Game.

Recently, having decided to focus more on novels, I came back to these characters and their adventures, and I found something new. I suppose it could still turn out to be a bad idea, but I don’t care.

Eyes Open

Losing Lanterns was as good as Losing Lanterns could be, but there are things that nag me about it. Chief among them is that it's a novella made out of short stories. It was never really plotted out the way a novel should be, so it has a weird, lumpy, pacing and... other stuff... I guess. Yeah, boring topic. I only mentioned it because I'm excited to be doing this next one the right way.

Okay, technically, my next-up project is another Qalidar supplement, but I don't have a lot more to say about that. Okay, a little bit, but then we move on to novels. The Qalidar supplement is going to have the rules for taking characters up to 20th level, which is as high as I see it going. Beyond that, it's going to focus on a species of aliens called the stardust, including sections about their technology, organizations, goals, and methods. That's pretty much it. Mostly it's material I wrote a long time ago that just needs cleaning up.

One project that isn't next is a fantasy novel that's been slithering around the back of my head for the past 15 or 16 years. It's based on an our 1999-2000 D&D campaign, which is why I have been referring to it as my bad idea. A story like that -- even after I turn it into a coherent story -- is going to be full of nostalgic moments and other memories that mean nothing beyond a very small group of people. Naturally, I can write around that, but my own unreliable instincts would be something I'd have to constantly look out for. See? Bad idea, right? There's still a good chance I'll try it -- I came up with some great stuff just tinkering -- but not this time.

Another contender, one I haven't mentioned before, is a different fantasy novel. This one would feature Aradoc (from Losing Lanterns) on his own in a strange, dying land. The reason for this and for his jumbled memories is something that gets worked out as we go. No, it's not Hell or any other kind of dead people place. The other thing going on is a tense desert journey with a group of adventurers with loosely overlapping agendas and not much in the way of scruples. And lots of other stuff that I'm not prepared to go into here. Again, this is definitely still in the queue; it's just not next in line.

The winner? Welcome to Blackridge, a fictional college town in the Arkansas River valley. A diverse collection of characters plot and scheme in a vaguely soapish fashion. Also, some of them are conjuring spirits and making deals with dangerous alien intelligences. I'm hoping to combine some engaging characters with an area I know very well for a backdrop and some low-key but creepy paranormal/occult stuff to keep them hopping. There's an actual plot in there too, but I'm keeping that to myself for now. I don't have a title yet.

Imagine the perfect conclusion.