Ugh, I hate having to get meta on the blog. Which usually only happens because I haven’t been on for a great long time. So, why? Some good, some bad–none of it a good excuse.
First of all, there’s my day job. I won’t get into it because I hate talking about my day job (here, at least. It’s a good job, but I hate the fact that I have a day job that’s not writing or the business of writing). Anyway, it’s been killing me lately with this big-ass project that I’m in charge of. Even though it’s not too many more actual hours at work, it’s been more brain-killing lately.
Then there’s the pencil-and-dice role-playing games. Now this is a good one! In the last few months I have been planning and prepping and running several games: A new regular Eclipse Phase campaign, a short-run Spycraft (converted to Savage Worlds rules) campaign, and the return of my 1st edition AD&D campaign. Oh, and a couple of convention games of EP I ran at Visioncon. Writing and prepping RPG games is a lot of hard work, but it’s so very much a labor of love! I adore game mastering RPGs! Given the choice between being a player and GMing, well, I like playing now and then, especially under certain GMs, but I pick GMing over playing by default any ol’ day. I love the world-building, creating plot and stories and characters, and then the facilitation of crating a shared experience where players get to play with these elements and create their own story with the tools I provide. Love it love it love it!
Writing, you say? Have I been doing any of it? Well, not much, I’m afraid. Once the day job project is essentially over in early April, and the Spycraft game is done, I should have more time and brain-power to spare to doing writing. I got well into my next novel before time and energy got away from me, and I need to get chugging on that. Especially since there’s been more call for a sequel to Singularity Deferred.
Speaking of my first novel, I got some good news there. I entered the Amazon Breakthrough Novel competition, and mine has advanced to the second-round judging. If it doesn’t move on from there, I at least get an Amazon review out of it and can claim “third prize” (along with 399 other sf/fantasy novels). So that’s neat. (It doesn’t help the competition any; but, if you would be so kind, maybe buy and/or review the novel on Amazon?) 🙂
Okay, that’s as much of an update as I’m going to do now. I have the gumption I’m going to post, I think, two more posts after this on something not meta. Thanks for reading. 🙂