London, 2nd August — After much debate, the shortlist for the fifth annual Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming has been announced.
The award is given to whatever the Diana Jones Award Committee believes has best demonstrated ‘excellence in gaming’ in the previous year. This year the committee has shortlisted three items. In alphabetical order, they are:
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I had a wonderful weekend. On Saturday morning, I drove down to Games Day Chicago. The team there, led by the Black Library‘s US sales manager Vince Rospond, treated me like gold. They’d flown in 50 copies of Blood Bowl for the show, and we sold out of them just after 1 PM, just over three hours into the show. Lots of people came by later to ask about the book but had to go away disappointed–at least until September, when the book hits stores here in the US. (Of course, if you’re in the UK, you should be able to get it now, and we Americans can also get another early shot at it at Gen Con Indy.)
I helped out with the Black Library’s seminar from 2—3 PM, telling a bit about myself and the book and taking a few questions from the kind and fun crowd. At 5 PM, I helped David, Gary, Jeff, and Vince tear down the booth, after which Vince and his crew took me out for a fine steak dinner to cap an excellent day.
On Sunday, Bill Bodden (from ACD) and John (from Dork Storm) and Judith (from Whad’ya Know?) Kovalic came down for a cookout and a Beloit Snappers baseball game. They got to hang out with the whole family for lunch. Ann did a fantastic job playing the hostess, and the kids behaved themselves and made us proud. Plus, the Snappers staved off a late rally to win the game.
The only real disappointment was that I didn’t bother to keep a copy of Blood Bowl for myself. Better to get it in the hands of readers than to hold on to it myself. After all, I’ve already read it. 🙂
A last-minute reminder that I’ll be at Games Day Chicago this Saturday. As noted on the Guests page, I’ll be there signing copies of my Blood Bowl novel, which is so spanking-new that it won’t be generally available in the UK until August and the US until September (unless you find it at Gen Con Indy, at which I’ll also be signing copies). I’m told I’m to host a seminar of some sort on the book, which could involve a bit of a reading and a Q&A session if I’m left to my own devices. If you’re in the area and are a Games Workshop fan, please stop by!
Wizards of the Coast is launching a new library program called Adventures for Reluctant Readers, aimed at getting kids to read novels. The program includes a copy of Secret of the Spiritkeeper, so if you know any librarians who might be interested, please don’t hesitate to point them in the right direction. Thanks!
It’s been quiet around here for two reasons. First, I just finished Dead Ball, the second in my Blood Bowl trilogy, at 11 PM on July 16. Second, on July 17, I bundled the quads and a couple of able helpers in the minivan and chased up after my wife and eldest son for a week’s vacation near Watersmeet, Michigan. Now I’m home again, struggling to get back into the groove.
In other news, the Black Library now has a page up for my first Blood Bowl novel. They purport to have a sample excerpt up there soon.
I was late on Dead Ball, far later than I’d like to admit, and my editor (Christian Dunn) was terribly understanding about it. He turned around the comments on it before I got back, and they glowed. He’s asked me to change a single scene that may have transcended the borders of good taste, at least in his estimation as editor of many of the Black Library’s fine books. I had wondered about this when writing the scene, so I’ll make the changes soon and send off the final draft straight away. The book’s due out in December, which now doesn’t seem all that far away.
After that, it’s some work on the top-secret game for a toy company that I think I’ve mentioned here before. All of the major chains (Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Toys-R-Us, etc.) have picked up the game, so you should be able to get it just about anywhere in the US–at least anywhere near a city of any size. That should hit stores in December too. That’s about a month after High Stakes Drifter, which I mentioned a week or so back, from WizKids.
Then it’s on to revisions for The Road to Death, the next in The Lost Mark trilogy for Eberron. My editor, Mark Sehestedt, claims it’s better than Marked for Death. At least he asked for fewer revisions, so that’s a good sign. That book sees shelves in January 2006.
When that’s all done, I barrel into the next two books (for me, that is) in the Knights of the Silver Dragon series. These should hit stores in the summer of 2006.
Whew! I think I need another vacation. 🙂
At last I can finally mention something about this. (Non-Disclosure Agreements do cut into my fun.) High Stakes Drifter is the mystery CCG I worked on last year for a then-unnamed company. (It’s WizKids! Ah, that feels better.) It started out as something entirely different and morphed into the final game after several development iterations with guidance from Jordan Weisman and the rest of the WizKids R&D team. I turned the game over to WizKids months ago, and they’ve spent that time hammering my raw work into polished steel.
I’m thrilled to see that WizKids finally announced the game. Now I just have to wait until November until I can actually see it in print.
While I won’t be at Comic-Con this year (thanks to all you who asked), the good people at Conan Properties will. If you’re at the show, be sure to catch their seminar on Friday morning at 11:30 in Room 3. In addition to the guys from CPI, you can get the skinny on the latest Conan stuff from Dark Horse Comics, McFarlane Toys, Funcom, and Ace Books.
As a reminder, the new Age of Conan novels are starting to show up in stores. Loren Coleman’s Blood of Wolves and Cimmerian Rage should be there now. I have copies of both on my shelves now, and I was flattered to be among those to whom Loren dedicated the second book as “fellow barbarians.”
It seems the powers that be at Games Workshop have decided to return hundreds if not thousands of pieces of original artwork back to the artists who created them. Unfortunately, they’ve lost touch with lots of these folks. If you know any of them, please pass this on to them as soon as possible. I’ve included the entire post, plus the list of names, after the break.
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Here’s a fascinating article on sleep paralysis, the phenomenon of finding yourself paralyzed with a terrifying dream just as you drift off or wake up. I never knew this had a name, but I experienced it at least twice when I was in college. These were the sort of nightmares that keep you up for weeks because you’d rather not repeat them, the kinds of things you never forget. Somehow, it’s comforting to know they’re not that uncommon and that scientists somewhere are bothering to study them.
Last night at the Alliterates meeting, we tried something new. We each brought a favorite poem to read and chat about. I choose two. I love “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, but picking it is like saying the Beatles are your favorite band. It’s just too easy.
So, I also brought along a short poem by John Keats that no one at the table turned out to know. I used it as the epigraph for the adventure I contributed to Ghost Stories, a World of Darkness adventure book White Wolf published last fall, but I first found it in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion novels, which feature Keats as a character. Anyhow, here it is, in its creepy entirety:
This Living Hand
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.John Keats