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.

“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.

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:

1. Donate everything to my local library.
2. Sell everything on eBay.
3. Sell everything through an online consignment shop like Hobby Hearse.
4. Sell everything to a retailer like Noble Knight Games.

Any recommendations? What would you like to see?