Flying Pen Press announces an anthology of short stories by professional game industry people, titled: Of Dice and Pen. The anthology is due out August 1st and will be sold at GenCon, at the ICE booth.

Authors include:

Gary Gygax and K.R.Bourgoine, A Wizard’s Thief (Gary’s last Gord story)

Rick Loomis, Xavier’s Story

Andrew Looney, Message in a Bottle, Delusions of Hunger, and The Emperor Must Die

Matt Forbeck, Prometheus Unwound*

Elizabeth T. Danforth, Imp Possible Situations

Chris Clark, A Christmas Story, Bad Day At The Office, Beauracracy, and Sweet Silence of Solitude

Lisa Steenson, Space 28

Curt Covert, PSY_JACK

Catherine G. Thomson, The Book Sorter

Graeme Thomson, Under the Tuscan Snow

Jason S. Walters, Lefty Sanchez Reporting

Andy Vetromile, Fear of Success

Carey Grayson, The Vegetarian

David Wainio, A Homecoming, and Legend of Santa Claus

James L. Cambias, Murder in Messidor

Tim Pelzel, The Sweetness of Suffering

Thomas Rafalski, A Taint Upon the Kingdom

Lee Kamberos, The DarkSide Of Choice

Patrick Matthews, The Queen’s Gambit

My latest essay is up at Storytellers Unplugged. When you click over to read it, be sure to check out the website’s snazzy and modern new look too.

This time around, I comment a bit more about the cancelation of my next novel from Wizards of the Coast. Now that it’s a few days later, I can honestly say I’m not all that bugged by it, and the essay might help to explain why.

Hobby Games: The 100 Best is up for an ENnie Award for Best Regalia (a “product used to complement role playing game play”). My pal Jim Lowder edited this book of 100 essays written by many of the best designers about the many of the best games, and my friends at Green Ronin published it. I have a single essay in the book myself, so I’d take home less than 1% of the award. Still, I think it’s worth a vote, and if you’re so inclined you can enter your ballot starting tomorrow.

Either way, be sure to check out the ENnie Awards. Even if you don’t vote, they make for an excellent guide to some of the finest things that came out for roleplaying games last year. Congratulations to all the nominees, and good luck to them all in the finals!

Erin Evans, one of my editors from Wizards of the Coast, called the other day. I immediately took this to be a bad sign. Editors are generally happy to work with you entirely by e-mail until something goes wrong. They they call you to break the bad news personally (which, honestly, is a brave and classy act). So when I got the voice mail on my cell phone, I suspected something was up.

I called Erin back, and she let me know in as polite and professional a way as possible that I do not need to keep working on the novel she commissioned from me, as the entire series of books (a sub-line for one of Wizards’ worlds) has been canceled. Management at Wizards apparently wants to do something different with the book department, although I’m not privy to what it is. They’ve removed a number of books from their schedule recently, including (it’s reported) their entire Wizards of the Coast Discoveries line of original fiction.

For myself, this is not a bad thing, as I’ve had too much to do lately to spend any time on the book, which wasn’t due until December. All I ever put on paper for it was the initial pitch. Despite that, I get to keep my initial advance, so I really can’t complain. It’s decent money for a few pages worth of work, and I now have a bit more time to work on more pressing things without feeling guilty about not getting rolling on the book yet.

The news is a bit sadder for the people who’d gotten farther along on their work, like Jeff LaSala, Marcy Rockwell, Paul Kemp, and Ari Marmell, plus Steve and Melanie Tem and many others I probably don’t know about yet. They all have my sympathies.