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In an effort to clear the decks before kicking out the rest of my Blood Bowl novel, this week I took care of some details for Marked for Death, the first in my upcoming Eberron trilogy. I got the galleys (final author’s proofs) in late last week and turned them around right away. Reading through the book again, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. The first draft was a real mess, written more like a screenplay than a novel, but now the book breathes like an epic adventure should. It’s slated for a March 2005 release, and I can’t wait to see it.

I also revised a “Novel Approach” article about the book for an upcoming issue of Dragon Magazine. This comes complete with stats for a smaller, party-sized airship and a living fireball spell. This article should appear in the same issue as a prefatory short story that introduces four of the characters from Marked for Death as they investigate a mysterious crater on the edges of the Mournland.

I just got my author’s copies of Ghost Stories in today’s mail, and I understand the book should be in stores soon. It’s an anthology of adventures for regular mortals set in White Wolf’s World of Darkness, plus some guidelines on how to use ghosts in your World of Darkness game. Rick Chillot, Geoff Grabowski, Matthew McFarland, Adam Tinworth, Chuck Wendig, and I all chipped in bits under the auspices of developer Ken Cliffe. My story’s about, well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

This the first gaming material I’ve ever written for White Wolf, and the first thing I’ve written for them in somewhere around 10 years. They’re still great people to work with, and the book looks like a blast. Check it out.

Up until a week or so ago, I didn’t have any plans to make it to Gen Con So Cal, despite the wonderful time I had there last year. Then I got a call from a company that wants to fly me out to LA for part of that week for a meeting. I arrive November 30 and depart December 3, so it’s a short trip. With luck, though, I should be wandering around the lovely Anaheim Convention Center for part of the day on that Thursday or Friday. If you’re around, too, I hope to see you there.

My apologies for not posting here much lately. There have been two reasons for that:

1) I haven’t had a whole lot to report.

2) Various colds and viruses have been treating my family like the Packers treat a loose football.

Now, though, it seems like we’re all on the mend, and I’m rolling again. I used the blank spots in the past few weeks to work on a few outlines for upcoming books (like two more in the Knights of the Silver Dragon series) and to craft another proposal or two for some new projects I hope to start working on sometime next year.

Right now, I’m hot in the throes of Blood Bowl, the first in what looks to be a trilogy of novels for my friends at Games Workshop. After that, it’s onto the second book in The Lost Mark Trilogy, my Eberron series for Wizards of the Coast.

In the meantime, the latest issue (#3) of Games Quarterly Magazine should be in stores around now. It contains an article I wrote praising Once Upon a Time, designed by Richard Lambert, Andrew Rilstone, and James Wallis and published by Atlas Games.

Don’t forget to gear up for National Games Week too. That’s next week, from November 21–27.

I built Forbeck.com around Movable Type, a great blogging and content management tool. Like many bloggers, however, spambots inundated my pages with comment spam. I recently upgraded to Movable Type 3.1 so I could implement its new antispam tools. This includes a commenter registration service designed to put a stop to spambots and the like.

I had a few issues surrounding the upgrade, but I’ve worked through them all now. I’m currently blocking comments from anyone not registered with TypeKey. This is a free service that lets you register for commenting on any TypeKey-based blog (like many Movable Type installations) all at once.

The upshot: To comment on posts here, you now need to register with TypeKey. If you do this once, you should be set forever. If you don’t care to bother with it, you can still e-mail me personally. I’ll be the only one able to see your erudite and pointed commentary, but I’m comfortable with that if you are.