My friends over at Gameplaywright.net have just opened up pre-orders for the special edition of The Bones, a book of essays about everyone’s favorite random number generators: dice. It features pieces by some of the brightest lights in the gaming industry, including Keith Baker, Jason L Blair, Greg Costikyan, Ray Fawkes, Pat Harrigan, Jess Hartley, Fred Hicks, Will Hindmarch, Kenneth Hite, …
Keeping Back the Wolf
In a post over at Gameplaywright.net, my friend Jeff Tidball celebrates his first year as a full-time freelancer. In his post, he quotes something I said to him a while back: Day jobs seem permanent, but it’s an illusion. Matt said he preferred knowing right where the wolf was all the time, right outside his door. He’d rather dispense with …
Conduit 2 Coming This Fall
This week, Sega spilled the news that my friends at High Voltage Software plan to release Conduit 2 – a sequel to last year’s The Conduit, an FPS for the Wii – this fall. I helped develop the story for this game about a year back, before the original game debuted, and I’m thrilled that it’s finally been announced. Just wait …
The 100 Best Games Breakdowns
Family Games: The 100 Best should be on shelves Real Soon Now, I’m told. To hold you over for this smorgasbord of essays, check out Alan De Smet’s stunning and thorough breakdowns of both this book and its predecessor, Hobby Games: The 100 Best. Alan goes over the books in terms of writers, designers, and publishers to see who’s inspired …
An Interview with Gamer’s Haven
Ethan Parker of The Gamer’s Haven podcast called me up for a chat last week. The interview covered all sorts of topics from my career, going back to how I got started as a gamer and running all the way up to the impending launch of my first original novels this summer. I had a lot of fun talking with …
Stateline Literacy Council Banquet
This Thursday, March 25, the Stateline Literacy Council is holding its annual awards banquet at La Casa Grande, here in Beloit, Wisconsin. At the SLC’s request, I’ll be there for the social hour, from 5:30 — 6:30pm. They will have some copies of my books for sale, and 100% of the proceeds will go straight to the SLC’s benefit. I’ll …
Spiffed-Up Site
Amortals is due out in the UK on April 1, 2010, not even two weeks away. With that and Vegas Knights and Guild Wars 2: Ghosts of Ascalon coming down the pike this summer, I thought it was time to give the website a new look with a bit more spit and polish. I don’t normally pimp things too hard here, …
Tools I Use: Scrivener
One of my favorite programs over the past few years is the Mac-only writing program Scrivener. If you’re doing any kind of creative writing, give it a try. I raved about it on my Twitter feed a couple weeks back, and David Johnson – the sales and marketing man and chief tea-maker for the program’s publisher, Literature & Latte – …
Family Games: Writers and Games Announced
Family Games: The 100 Best – the sequel to the award-winning Hobby Games: The 100 Best – should be in stores sometime next week. If you can’t find it at your friendly local gaming store, you can pre-order it through Green Ronin‘s site, and they’ll offer you their Walk the Plank game for only $5 (about $10 off). Editor Jim …
How We Learn
Lincoln Stollard, who I met at the GAMA Trade Show a few years back, just told me that he’s completed work on a book called The Learning Project. In it, Lincoln interviews dozens of people in different fields to discover different ways in which people learn. It’s aimed at teenagers, to show them that there are all sorts of different …