On Memorial Day, my father checked into the ER and was told he’d be staying in a hospital for a while. Today, he’s been moved into the intensive care unit due to further complications from multiple conditions. If you have any good vibes, thoughts, prayers to spare, please send them his way.
Having just finished another proofing of my novelization of the upcoming Mutant Chronicles film, I poked around the web and found a few new posters for the film. The first shows the film’s cast arranged against some dramatic backlighting.
This is my favorite of those I’ve seen so far. Most of the others show a mutant’s boneblade stabbing through a helmet, which is cool but concentrates more on the story’s horror than its heroism. In contrast, this image is stark, it shows something of the feel of the movie, and the tagline—“Have faith”—works perfectly for the story.
I also love this other one I found. It’s a shot of Devon Aoki toting an assault rifle as she moves through a wasted landscape, but the kicker is that it’s all done in Russian. As far as I know, this is a poster for the Russian release of the film, as there’s nothing else Russian about the movie. Still, the Cyrillic script gives lends the image an even more iconic feel.
The tabletop games industry seems to be contracting again. The last couple weeks have seen more layoffs from Upper Deck, the closing of Tenacious Games, and the ending of games at Press Pass. This put a number of good, talented friends out of work, including Ed Bolme, Sean K. Reynolds, and Hyrum Savage. (If you can hire them, do.)
Traditionally, the tabletop industry does well when the economy starts to tank. Games make for good value for your entertainment dollar, since you can break them out and play them over and over again. Good games not only do not grow stale from repeated use (like, say, films, music, television, books, etc.), they actually get better.
These recent problems seem, then, to show that either the conventional wisdom (there’s a pun or two in there somewhere) is wrong or that (despite much evidence to the contrary) the economy is doing fine. Of course, neither of those things is true.
That old chestnut describes older games: board games, card games, even roleplaying games or miniatures games. The companies having trouble are engaged in the mass market and are selling collectible games, which don’t provide nearly the same bang for the buck and can cost collectors several times the price of a traditional game in the course of their playing cycle.
It’s times like these that make me happy to be a freelancer. It’s true I have to go out and find my own gigs—and then collect payment on them too—but I’m my own boss, and chances that I will fire myself are vanishingly small. As job security evaporates, charting your own destiny seems less like a risk and more like smart money.
Anyhow, best of luck to my friends who find themselves looking for work. If I can do anything for any of you, be sure to let me know.
The IGDA Writers SIG just had its second book published: Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing. While I didn’t contribute to it directly, Beth A. Dillon interviewed me for the “How to Break In and Stay In” chapter that leads off the book. The book also features chapters from many other wonderful game writers, including my friends Alice Henderson and Rich Dansky.
If you’re interested in writing for video games, this is worth picking up. My copy hasn’t arrived yet, so I can’t comment on anything specifically, but browsing the table of contents suggests that the writers and the topics they tackle should make for a good, instructive read.
Late last night I learned that Robert Lynn Asprin had died early that day. I didn’t know him all that well, but I loved his work. In high school, I devoured both the hilarious Myth Adventures books and the gritty Thieves’ World anthologies.
When I went to college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I knew that Bob and his then-wife Lynn Abbey lived in town. Bob had an office somewhere in the Nickels Arcade, in which he wrote many of those book I’d loved, and I’d hoped to meet him.
One night, my pal and mentor Will Niebling took me to dinner at the Full Moon, our favorite bar and grill, and we sat and chatted with a couple of his friends. After the others left, Will pointed out that “Bob and Lynn” were Robert Lynn Asprin and Lynn Abbey.
At the time, I was disappointed I didn’t get to tell them how much I’d enjoyed their work, but in retrospect, I can see that saving us all from that conversation might have been an act of mercy on Will’s part. It meant I got to meet them as regular folks, with no stars in my eyes, and that’s pretty cool.
Bob and Lynn divorced sometime after that, and he moved to New Orleans. He rode out Hurricane Katrina and lived in the French Quarter at the time of his death. His literary output slowed over the years, for various reasons, but never fully stopped.
My first ever paid writing credit was for the rules for the Myth Fortunes board game from Mayfair Games, based on Bob’s Myth Adventures series. Will and another friend, John Danovich, designed the game but needed someone to write up the rules. They brought me out to Will’s house, then in Lake Geneva, and showed me how it worked. I taped the conversation, took lots of notes, and then wrote it all up.
Today, if anyone tried to draw a line between my Blood Bowl novels and Bob’s Myth Adventures series, I wouldn’t be surprised to see how straight it stretched. The bits about the Big Game in Myth Directions resonate particularly well, especially when you consider how they form a thinly veiled version of the annual Michigan-Ohio State game, possibly the biggest rivalry in any sport—and certainly my favorite.
So, good-bye, Bob. Your books inspired me for years, and I’ll remember you through them for all my days. And I’ll always remember that dinner with Bob and Lynn too.
have the con come to you. Because I skipped GTS this year (for the first time in memory), I missed out on seeing a lot of friends that I often only get to see at that show. Some of them, I’ll run into at Gen Con, of course, but that’s a bigger show with so much going on that it’s easy to miss people entirely. Fortunately, my friends have not forgotten me.
Last night, Dan Tibbles and Anthony Gallela stopped by my place in the middle of their barnburner tour of all the games distributors in the Midwest. They’re pushing their new company, Bucephalus Games, a tabletop games publisher with an aggressive schedule of board and card game releases. They got here in time to meet all the kids before we bundled them off to bed, then I took them out for dinner at Domenico’s, a family-run Italian restaurant here in town.
Dan and Anthony spent the night on brand-new air mattresses in my office. I picked these up that morning to replace the last one that the kids had decided worked great as a trampoline. With my in-laws in town as well, we had a full house, but it worked out great.
Bucephalus launches its first raft of games in August, and it already has 31 games scheduled to hit shelves this year. This sounds like a lot—and it is. However, it’s also clever-smart.
Many people get into game publishing because they have a single game they want to see on shelves, and they either can’t find a publisher for it or don’t trust anyone else to handle it just right. They go to all the trouble to set up a new business and learn the ropes of game production, marketing, distribution, sales, and more just for one game.
The trouble is it’s hard to recoup all those sunk costs and ongoing overhead from things like warehousing, offices, etc., when you have to charge them against a single game. This only works if the game is a huge hit, and it’s foolish to build a business plan around such hopes. If it was easy for smart, experienced people to come up with hit games (or films, or TV shows, or books, or whatever), we’d never have any flops, but that’s clearly not the case.
However, if you can amortize those costs against several games—an ongoing series of releases—you can bring the cost-per-game down low enough that you can comfortably make a tiny profit on each. Then, if any of the games is a moderate or even a huge hit, it’s all gravy.
This is not a plan, of course, for the inexperienced or the faint of heart. Dan and Anthony, however, are neither of those things, and I have high hopes for both them, their company, and their games.
[Edited to fix typo mentioned in the comments.]
“Necessary Distance,” my latest essay for Storytellers Unplugged, is up and ready for your enjoyment. This month, I write about how hard it is to come back to read my own writing—and what I’ve found is the cure.
When we moved into a bigger house last November, we needed a new lawn mower. We’re on just under an acre, and our old electric push-mower wasn’t going to manage it. With the cold weather already here in Wisconsin, I wouldn’t have to worry about it until the spring, but the day would some soon.
On Black Friday, I spotted a great deal on a robotic lawnmower on Amazon.com. For under $1,000, I could pick up a top-of-the-line mower that would cut the grass for me—and transform cutting the lawn from a chore into a techy project, something far more in my vein.
Word from GAMA and the Miniatures Page is that “Uncle” Duke Seifried had triple-bypass surgery last month (much like my father did last year). Duke got through with flying colors and is now recuperating in his home in Janesville, WI.
I sat next to Duke at Gary Gygax’s funeral, and he seemed fine then. As I saw with my father, though, these things can sneak up on you. I’m glad Duke got the diagnosis and treatment he needed, and I hope to see him at many conventions to come.
As I continue with purging my office of all (well, most) unnecessary things, I discovered I don’t remember everything I’ve worked on. This, again, is the product of a long career in games, I suppose. For instance, I found a bunch of copies of Madness in Freeport, and I couldn’t recall why I had them. Then I checked the credits page and saw that I’d edited the adventure.
A quick flip through the module brought it all back to me, but until I saw that credits page, I’d been tossing the books in the “to go” pile. I don’t think I’ve missed any others. Probably.
In my old office, I had a bookshelf on which I put one of everything I’d ever worked on. It was one of those slap-together, particle-board cheapies from Staples, taller than me, with five shelves. I filled it up a while back and had started in on a new shelf. I’m proud of my work, and I figured if I didn’t display it, who would?
In the new office, though, I don’t have space for two or more shelves of books, so I’ve decided to put away projects on which I wasn’t a primary creative—things that I edited or produced but didn’t write. The metric ton of products we put out when I was at Pinnacle is mostly gone, for instance, as it occupied a couple shelves all by itself.
For other projects, I’m only keeping out a few representative bits. I put away the binders full of WildStorms cards, for instance, and most of the R.E.V.s toys too. They just suck up too much space, especially since I’m on to other things now, and I need those shelves for reference and research books.
It’s a lot of stuff, but that’s what you end up with when you’ve been working on things like this for nearly 20 years. Time to trim back the past, though, lest it suffocate the future.
It’s been quiet on the site here over the past few weeks as I scramble to catch up with deadlines. I’ve had a lot of work tossed at me this year, which I’ll be the last to complain about, but it’s meant long days juggling it all. When I’m crunching on a project, I always hate to post here, as I’m sure some of my editors check up on this site, and I never want them to feel like I’m spending time here that I should be putting toward a project.
That said, it doesn’t take that long to post something. I type fast. So I’m going to step it up a bit, as best I can.
Another thing keeping me busy is cleaning my office. More like consolidating, actually. We moved into the new house here in November, and there’s room for me here, so I’m working at home again. Then, a couple months ago, the landlord at my old office told me he’d lined up a new tenant (I’d warned him I’d be leaving in a bit) and asked if I could get out soon—like “that weekend” soon. So I did.
A few of my good, stalwart friends helped me move, and that Sunday we dumped all the stuff from the old office into the new. And there it sat—until this weekend.
We have relatives coming in this week, so I finally have a deadline on this project to motivate me. My office now looks like a game, book, and comic store exploded inside of it.
There’s no way I can keep all of these things, much as I would love to. While the new house is much larger than the old, we still have seven people in it, and I’m making a real effort to rid myself of things I don’t need. Games, books, and comics I haven’t touched in years—other than to move them from one place to another—rank high on the list of Things That Must Go. I’m keeping at least one copy of everything I’ve worked on (that I have, that is), but the rest has to find another home.
This means I’m going to do one (or perhaps a combination) of several things:
Any recommendations? What would you like to see?
I just sent off the script for Blood Bowl: Killer Contract #4 to my editor Ian Brill at Boom Studios. I’m having a ball writing these comics, and I can’t wait to see them in print, which I’m told should happen soon. I’m eager to wrap it all up with issue #5, just so I can see what happens.
I mean, I know what happens in the larger sense. I outlined the entire miniseries before I started in on it. But there’s so much distance between an outline and a script, and I invariably come up with all sorts of ideas while actually writing that the two don’t often match up. As with reading, writing is an act of discovery.
Right now, though, I need to write an outline for my next novel for Wizards of the Coast. After that, I can get back to my next computer game project or three.
To celebrate finishing issue #4, though, here’s an image of the cover I found while wandering around the web. I hope you enjoy it.
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