Category: Game Design

Gah, all of the words! (A New Semester Update)

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writings

So recently I learned an important thing about myself: I am the kind of person who likes to talk but hates to write about herself. Check out how infrequently I post here and you’ll see exactly how much I hate it. I keep writing posts that say ‘soon I will update you on all the good things’ which… I don’t do. Why? Because I’m out doing the good things and don’t like talking about it. But a friend suggested that being more front-facing about my process of work wouldn’t be bad, so here goes.

I’m back in the saddle after winter break in between my first and second semesters of grad school and the NYU Game Center looks exactly the same as when I left it. In between I spent holidays with friends, went to San Diego with family, came home to run an overarch weekend at Dystopia Rising (and there will be another post to cover that experience, I promise!) and then went on to Orlando. Day one back reminded me that no matter how much vacation you have, once you’re back in the saddle it’s like you never went away.

My classes for this semester stand as one in human-computer interface, one in collective narrative, an upper-level game design and an upper level studio class and (wait for it), a class on Fandoms. I know! I get to study why people become fans and how they go about fanning (is that a thing that doesn’t involve, y’know, actual things to blow air on your face with?) and the culture of fandoms as they are. I’m fascinated by everything I’m taking classes in, and excited as heck to dive right in.

Speaking of things I’m diving into, this is going to also be the year of ALL OF THE THINGS. I’ve got a writing update post in me for things I’m working on plus coverage on the conventions that I’ll be attending. Because I, good readers, will be going to a bunch of conventions this season and doing a LOT of talking about how awesome games are and especially how awesome women in games are.

So here’s to the new year, and I leave you with a quote that I tossed up on Twitter a little while ago. I woke up from a nap and had a killer idea to make this novel concept I had even better. Except, of course, I’m in middle of a few other projects. So instead of putting it away, I wrote it down. The quote I came up with is: “A good writer doesn’t turn down a good idea, but instead says, ‘you wait your turn’.”

Happy February folks! It’s going to be a busy one.

Vacation and Completing A Project

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writings

There is nothing more satisfying than completing a project.

Used to be in the old days I’d be afraid of finishing something. If you finish a project, you have to let it out loose into the world and talk about it and let other people see it. That used to be frightening. These days, there is nothing more that I enjoy than crossing off a project on my list of things to do and going to have a celebratory cup of coffee. (Because really, when is there not an excuse to have a cup of coffee?)

The other day I completed No Exit for Evil Hat Productions. It’s one of the stretch goals for the meteoric Kickstarter that’s under a month to competition. It’s been a joy to work on and now I’m looking forward to poking at more things with Fate Core. Because I’ll say this, it wasn’t just fun to write – writing No Exit gave me tons of ideas. I have been kicking them around in a notebook for a bit. The sky’s the limit with a system like Fate Core and my friends are going to get bombarded with ideas for a tabletop game or six in the next few weeks.

That is, when I get back from drinking butter beer at Harry Potter World.

Vacation is a heck of a thing. I took the opportunity to go in between semesters of graduate school and I’m going to nerd it up at the giant Hogwarts in Orlando for a week. And, y’know, sit next to a pool in the sun and write. Because a change of scenery does ya good.

In other news, I’ve also picked up my novel again last night to finish it. Because, as I said before, I’m not scared of finishing things any longer. Consider that a lesson learned from 2012 — writing is the act of bringing something into the world. And if you don’t let it free, it hasn’t really been completed. I’m not going to be scared of that any longer. Hey 2013, let’s see how much I can get done.

Fate Core: Or, How To Adore Your Editor And Weaponize Memory

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writing Update

It’s been quiet so far on the home front here at my blog. And that’s probably because it got mighty busy around the holiday season. Graduate school final projects are no joke and then the holidays hit, which included my birthday and New Years as it does every year. In between all of that, of course, I’ve been tackling the amazing project I’ve been doing for Fate Core – my setting in psychological horror, No Exit.

The process of creating No Exit has been a learning curve and an eye-opening process for me. Not only am I organizing a lot of thoughts about the basics of psychological horror, I’ve been learning quite a lot about how much to show an audience in a gaming book. Coming from a fiction and screen writing background, writing for games is a whole new ballgame that requires a different way of thinking. Thankfully I’ve got a great editor, John Adamus, mentoring me through the process. His comments on my first draft made me cringe, then laugh, then cringe again. Then crack up a heck of a lot in retrospect. A handy tip: whenever your editor hands you a note, always consider it carefully and decide whether you agree or not before you start making changes. Unless it’s about grammar or layout, in which case you’re probably terribly wrong and should fix it immediately.

My favorite part of creating No Exit so far has been messing with the mechanics. I’ve enjoyed finding out the best way to fight an environment in a game and what would be the best way to do things like, oh, attack an apartment building. What fascinated me was the idea that you could do these things with Fate Core easily – need a new mechanic? Hack in there and create what was needed. Don’t have a skill that exactly fits what you need? Make it work yourself. The sky really is the limit. I’ve had a lovely time finding a way to turn people’s memories into weapons and creating a mechanic for it.

Speaking of new things I’m excited to see – the other stretch goal settings and scenarios for Fate Core have me excited to give them a chance. I really want to play White Picket Witches by Filamena Young and Camelot Trigger by Rob Wieland because small town witches and futuristic Camelot just sounds like fun. And it only goes to show what you can do with Fate Core – which, as far as I can tell, is pretty much anything.

I’ve also been delving into some other inspirations for No Exit recently. Here’s some things I’ve been listening to and watching to keep me in the mindset of this setting:

Songs:

“Amen” by Leonard Cohen, “Seven Exodus” by Tub Ring, “No Light” by Florence + The Machine

Television:

“Lost”, “Twin Peaks”

Movies:

“Identity”, “Jacob’s Ladder”

Today I hope to complete draft two and send it on it’s way. A change of scene is hard when you’re trying to write scary and you’re sitting in the bright sunny SoCal sun!

FATE CORE: “No Exit” As Fate Psychological Horror

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writing Update, Writings

Hey all of you out there in gamer land. You might have heard that this week has been HUGE on Kickstarter for a game called Fate Core. You may have heard of it before, but if you haven’t here’s the skinny. Fate Core is the awesome new version of the Fate System, which is the engine behind such games as Spirit of the Century, Dresden Files RPG, and Bulldogs. The folks over at Evil Hat Productions put together a fantastic new Fate Core and the book went up on Kickstarter this week. And, wouldn’t you know, it’s doing pretty well.

Yeah, okay, that’s the understatement of a lifetime. It kind of exploded in a glory of Fudge Dice and amazing stretch goals. The book was funded in the first fifteen minutes and as of this writing is somewhere around $93,o00. The response has been unbelievable and as a huge Fate fan I’m thrilled. But I’m not just here to raise a celebratory glass to Fred Hicks and the folks at Evil Hat. I’m here to tell you about a little scenario called “No Exit” being written for Fate Core – by yours truly.

A few days before the Kickstarter went up, Fred reached out to me to write a supplement that would be included as a Kickstarter stretch goal. We tossed around a few ideas but one rose to the top pretty fast. The scenario’s called “No Exit” and if you’ve heard that title before, maybe you’ve read a certain play by Sartre by the same name. That play’s been one of my favorites for a long time and feeds perfectly into the themes of interpersonal psychological horror I want to explore with “No Exit”.

“It’s what one does, and nothing else, that proves the stuff one’s made of.” – INEZ, Jean-Paul Sartre’s NO EXIT

Folks who know me know that I love games that give you the space to explore powerful interpersonal relationships and interactions. Any time I can really get into deep role-play situations that tug and pull at social dynamics, charged intertwined backstories, or intense psychological drama, you’re singing my tune. I’m a big fan of shows like Lost that play havoc with people’s emotions by twisting each character around the other, making everyone play off each other in remarkably odd circumstances. The goal is to discover how people REALLY are when the chips are down. So I boiled down those elements with a weird, unnerving scenario that came out of a strange encounter in the dead of night.

I had come home late from graduate school late one night and walked into the apartment to find no one home. That’s not unusual so I went about my business. As I was getting ready for bed, I heard a noise at the front door. As it was three AM, I got concerned and went to check. I tried to pull open the front door only to find it stuck. I tugged it over and over, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally I pulled as hard as I could and the door unstuck with a jolt, and I looked into my hallway. Down the hall stood a man, stooped over, looking at the floor. He looked up at me from under a hat for a moment and then walked through the door to the fire stairs. I wondered what the man was doing in the hall and why it sounded like he was at my door. I looked down and saw I was standing on a religious pamphlet going on in tiny, hand-written letters about bringing me back to God. I turned and went back inside and made sure to lock the door. I tossed the creepy pamphlet, forgot about it for the most part and went to bed. But before I fell asleep, I imagined one thing: what if the pamphlet had said something else? What if instead it was just a note.

It would say, “I know your secret.”

What if it was more specific? How about, “Your husband has been lying to you all along”?

No, more specific. “Your daughter isn’t your daughter after all.”

What if there were more notes, one for every apartment? What if there were phone calls, and mysterious voices that spoke through drains? What if there was a man in a hat who told you as you went to the garbage to think about last Christmas, when everyone went home early from the office party and you stayed behind with that girl from Accounting. And don’t you just remember that night, but you never told your SO for fear of what they’d do…

I lay in bed thinking about these options. Then I wondered about the front door and thought:

“What if it wouldn’t open?”

Intimate psychological pressure, confinement and the search for meaning. To paraphrase Sartre, hell really is other people.

With my stretch goal funded on Day One, “No Exit” will be released at the end of the Fate Core Kickstarter run. And I’ll give more updates about the process as I go along. Meanwhile, this project’s a hell of a ride and I’m excited as can be to be a part of it. Time to get on the writing fingers and go find out just what keeps people between the four walls of Westley House.

Metatopia: Where Game Designers Come To Play

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design

As I mentioned in a previous post, I rode out Hurricane Sandy in Jersey City with some amazing gamer friends of mine. Yet all I could think about while we waited two and a half hours on line for gas, or when sitting in the dark by candlelight playing Munchkin, was that I needed to escape. Not because I don’t love my friends (though I got cabin fever something wicked). No, I needed to get down to Morristown NJ for the second annual Double Exposure game design and playtest convention, Metatopia.

Metatopia as a convention is near and dear to my heart. I cut my teeth on running LARPs and tabletop events at the other two Double Exposure conventions, Dreamation and Dexcon. I also got my first taste of pitching and developing a new RPG idea by attending the indie gaming roundtables hosted at those two conventions, where green folks interested in creating a new roleplaying game could come and pitch their ideas to a table of industry professionals. I was blessed in that time to have folks like Rob Donoghue (Evil Hat Productions) and brilliant editor John Adamus give me advice at these conventions that drove me towards taking game design seriously as a career option for my future. So when the convention’s director Vinny mentioned an entire game design convention, strictly for the sake of bringing game designers together to share information and feedback on developing games, I was excited as hell. Last year’s Metatopia helped me develop my game, Wanderlust, into something approaching a coherent document. GenCon and the First Exposure Playtest hall, run by the Double Exposure folks, gave me the next step. And then came this year’s Metatopia. Here are the convention highlights:

  • Wanderlust Focus Groups: So as I may have mentioned, there was a wee problem of being trapped in Jersey City during the hurricane. That meant that I did not get to go home to Brooklyn and get ANY of my play test material (or business cards, or, y’know, clothes!) going into this convention. Instead of presenting a working playtest, I instead presented two focus groups on my game. One hour focused on the game mechanics and the second on the game world setting and character types. I was blessed to have folks like John Adamus, Michael Consoli, Caius Ward and the amazing Darren Watts sit in to give me feedback (there was a final gentleman at the table whose name I did not catch). I was excited to find that the changes I made after the GenCon focus group seemed to work better and with the feedback from these talks I’m now ready to go into testing to get this game out the door! I also came across a very good saying about my game, it seems: “The act of discovery isn’t gentle or easy.” Take that as you will…
  • Hey, I hear you like panels, so I put some panels on your panels: Who needs breaks? Or food? I’ve got panels to go to! The schedule for Metatopia was jam packed with great games to playtest, but the highlight for me was the amazing panel track. Darren Watts worked very closely with the Double Exposure organizers to put together panels on everything from How to Cultivate A Fan Community to The Care and Feeding of Artists to How Not to Be A Jerk In Your Games. I was delighted to be on three panels as a speaker, including Women in Game Design, Sexism in Gaming, and a long talk on LARP. I attended numerous panels with folks like Brennan Taylor (Galileo Games), Kenneth Hite (Pelgrane Press), John Stavropolous (NerdNYC), Amanda Valentine (Editor Extraordinaire for numerous companies), and Jason Morningstar (Bully Pulpit Games, writer of Fiasco). My favorite panels included the Evil Hat Productions panel, the panel about dealing with artists, an intense panel on how to pitch your game and John Adamus’s writing panel. There were so many I didn’t get to go to, but there’s only so many hours in the day!
  • Pro Tip: Don’t Ever Walk in Late! My most amazing moment of the weekend came on the heels of an epic zonk-out by me on Saturday afternoon. I was rocking a cold so I took a nap, only to wake up late for the RPG Development Panel. I shook a leg downstairs to slip in late to a room full of some of the best folks in the industry up in front of the room: Fred Hicks and Rob Donoghue from Evil Hat, Darren Watts, Jason Morningstar, Cam Banks from Margaret Weiss and the illustrious Kenneth Hite. I got to my seat just as another designer was finishing up pitching and talking about his game. When nobody else raised my hand, Rob decided to toss me to the lions to ask me about how Wanderlust was doing! After mumbling something about just waking up from a nap (I’m so articulate when sleepy) I brought up the pitch I’d worked on at Mr. Hite’s panel earlier that day and tossed it at the panel – and it went great! I got to thank Rob later for tossing me in front of that truck, but it was worth every second.
  • State of LARP Address: It was my privilege to sit on a panel of four to talk to a room full of people about LARP. Considering that I want LARP to be the focus of my academic career at the NYU Game Center, I was glad to get the opportunity to discuss my passion in a serious discussion. What I discovered is that… well, there’s a lot to talk about. I also discovered that while opinions may vary on aspects of the hobby, there are universals across different kinds of LARP that we could all come together about. I was also super excited to hear that Jason Morningstar is developing a LARP version of Fiasco! I can’t wait to give it a shot. I also got the opportunity to speak with William White, one of the authors of Immersive Gameplay, and share some personal insights into the best practices when running and playing a LARP.
  • Women in Gaming? We Have Those! Two other great panels that happened at Metatopia this year came about as a result of some work between myself and Avonelle Wing, one of Double Exposure’s organizers. She and I got into this five hour discussion over the state of women in the gaming industry, both on the professional end and within the community, as well as about female representations in game content and art. We then made sure there would be two panels talking about the problems we saw. One, Women in Gaming, brought together myself, Avonelle, and two amazing women, Amanda Valentine and El Wood. We tackled issues of subconscious bias, confronting sexism, cultivating a female-friendly community, and the duty of women to support one another, without ever once dealing in man-bashing language. I felt a particular thrill when I was able to say to the audience, “First of all, I don’t believe feminism is a dirty word” and got a round of applause. Thank you, Metatopia, for engaging in a great debate about women’s issues and letting me be part of the discussion.
  • Above All, Metatopia Is About The People: The best part about coming to Metatopia had to be the people I got to spend time with. while many folks might spend their time at a convention like Metatopia focusing on the formal aspects of the play testing (because that’s what we’re there for!) or trying to network like mad, I found that I genuinely enjoyed just spending time with and getting to know folks from around the gaming community. I really enjoyed shooting the breeze with plenty of people who I previously had felt too shy to approach. This convention really taught me that, despite my shyness and the intimidation I may have felt to approach some people because of their fame in the indie community, as soon as I relaxed, people were open, friendly and genuine. I was also humbled by how supportive tons of folks have been in regards to my game and my company, Phoenix Outlaw Productions, lending advice, ideas, critique and encouragement while I bring this company and my RPG from dream to reality. If I had to thank everyone it’d take all day, but I can’t imagine not saying a special thanks to Rob Donoghue, John Adamus, Fred Hicks and Brian Engard for being so awesome.

On the heels of Metatopia, I’ve got a bunch of killer notes to update for Wanderlust and preparation for play testing to begin. I’ve also got the name Metatopia going around at the NYU Game Center, because how can these two amazing forces of game design and play testing not come together for more awesomeness in the future? I also obviously cannot wait for next year. Considering the last two years, I want to pledge to myself that come next Metatopia, I’ll be able to talk about the process of finishing and publishing Wanderlust and then going on to the next game on my mind! But if I want to do that, I gotta get to work. Once more, I want to say thanks to the great folks who made Metatopia this year what it was, and I can’t wait until next time!

Dice, Dead Deer and Dire Cabin Fever: Hurricane Sandy After-Report

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Random Aside

I, Shoshana Kessock, have never been so glad to sit at a computer and type things to the Interwebs.

It’s been a few days now since I escaped the blacked out portions of New Jersey and got to a place with power, and I’m still counting my blessings every time I turn on a light switch. The devastation of Hurricane Sandy that wrecked portions of the East Coast and walloped the Tri-State area had me sheltering in place with some friends in Jersey City for the duration. We returned from an amazing weekend at Deathcon, Dystopia Rising’s Halloween season ender, just in time to hunker down for the storm. Eschaton Media staffers Ashley Zdeb, Sean and Megan Jaffe, their roommate Shaheen, my best friend Andrea and our friend Schuyler made ourselves at home for the crisis. The story has become my favorite example for how generous and welcoming gamers can be, as the good folks opened their home to me for six days when the power went out during the storm Monday and stayed that way until Friday evening.

Now, you’d ask: what did you do during that time? Well, folks, we did what any good gamers would do during a shut-in period of a few days. In between trips to the local Target to charge our items, gather supplies and generally touch base with the outside world, we did what gamers will do. We found games we liked and we played the hell out of them. What did we play? I’m glad you asked!

  1. Fiasco: For those of you unfamiliar with Fiasco, it’s an amazing tabletop storytelling game written by Jason Morningstar. Described on Amazon.com as ‘a roleplaying game about ordinary people with powerful ambitions and poor impulse control’, Fiasco is an incredible narrative-driven game that lets you essentially play out a Coen Bros. movie with little to no prep and a lot of interpersonal insanity. The version we played was based on a horror world created by Sean Jaffe where some folks from a small town were hanging out in a bar when they’re offered $50,000 each to watch a shiny red Cadillac for one month. The catch? They just couldn’t open the trunk. But what happens when you hear the trunk a’thumping? Yeah, it was that kind of game. Sean also included some amazing horror elements in the game that had us genuinely clawing at each other’s arms and jumping at the smallest noise… which was funny, since we were playing it through the worst of the Hurricane. It’s a testament to how good a GM Sean is and how solid Fiasco is as a game that we barely blinked when the power went out – we just picked up candles and kept going.
  2. Munchkin Cthulhu– What could make a card game like Steve Jackson’s Munchkin better? Toss Cthulhu into it! The popular card game has about a dozen editions now, including one based on Firefly, on White Wolf games, on James Bond and Super Heroes, but it’s the Cthulhu one that’s nearly standard for any gamer nerd. We played the ‘kick down the door and kill a monster, but don’t forget to screw your friends over!’ game by candlelight on the third night of our forced Staycation and it was actually the most civilized session of this game I’ve ever played. Maybe we just didn’t want to get all Lord of the Flies over defeating the Dread Cthulhu, but I’ve had some wicked competitive games of Munchkin in the past. This one managed to stay fun and supportive all the way thru, like when we all let Sean beat up on Dread Cthulhu because, heck, why not?
  3. Lego: It’s not really a game so much as a toy, I guess, but I’ll include this here. Designing Legos by candlelight can be fun. Watching friends try to create a better spaceship than the other is hilarious and awesome.
  4. Super Hexagon: Got some battery left on your iPhone? Why not try an amazing game called Super Hexagon, why doncha? If you can’t get a signal out to friends and family, you might as well play this super abstract, super hard game to pass the time.

The other thing this vacation from the land of power and cell service did was give me an opportunity to prepare for Metatopia, the game design convention which passed this last weekend. Friday I was lucky to get out to Morristown for the con and had such an amazing time, it will get it’s own blog post. However, during the blackout, I got the opportunity to toss around ideas for finalizing the system for my tabletop RPG, Wanderlust. I also gave feedback for a project Sean was working on as we game designed in the dark.

All in all, I learned a couple of valuable things during this hurricane. One, when putting a car in a garage, make sure it has a way to be opened without utilizing electricity BEFORE the power goes out. Two, I can cook better than I ever imagined using just a stovetop. Three, games can make the worst situation so much better. And four, MAN do I get cabin fever in the dark. Special thanks to Justin Cronin’s new book, The Twelve, for helping me to get through it all.

Next post will talk about the amazing time I had at this year’s Metatopia. Until then, let’s wish everyone recovering from Hurricane Sandy good thoughts and much help. Also don’t forget to vote!

All Of The Games: Game Design, Graduate School and Me

by Shoshana, posted in Game Design, Writings

It’s been a long time. I shouldn’t have left without word. Can you ever forgive me?

If you’re still reading, perhaps you have. Maybe you’ve put aside the long wait for this post and wait instead to hear what has been going on in my life. For that, dear reader, I appreciate your patience and would reward you with cookies if the internet had the ability to send real baked-goods thru wifi. But sadly, since I can’t email a brownie, I’ll just give you the low-down on the world as according to me.

Life has exploded exponentially lately. I was accepted earlier this year into the NYU Game Center MFA program for Game Design for it’s inaugural class. For those of you not familiar, Tisch School of the Arts within NYU has a program that studies games of all kinds. It’s built around the Game Center, which is its library of games that students can come in and play as part of an ongoing project to study games as a growing media and job market. This year was the first time they expanded the program to include a graduate program and yours truly was accepted. I’m humbled and ultimately boggled by the fact that I’m studying under amazing teachers like Jesper Juul, Eric Zimmerman, Katherine Isbister and the head of department, Frank Lantz. I applied on a wing and a prayer and now I’m studying game design and theory at one of the best schools in the world! For a while it was hard for me to fathom – the whole thing felt very surreal.

Then school started and surreal disappeared when the work-load began. Graduate school is, no joke, probably one of the biggest challenges I’ve ever had educationally. The work load is pretty intense and, along with the other projects I’m working on, keep me very busy. But I’m designing some great games with some amazing people, all to make me a better designer for my future career, so how can I complain? I’ve met some amazing fellow students so far and we’ve jumped head-first into the work. Already we wrote a kind of cracked-out version of the card game war called WarSlayerz (the Z is very important) and I’m learning how to work on digital games via platforms like GameMaker and Unity. The digital aspect of the program is the most daunting for me, as I’ve never done computer programming at all in my life, and I’m struggling to grok a completely different language to translate game design ideas into little digital dudes. I’m also making sure to rep pretty hard the wonderful world of analog gaming, especially the live action role-play community and their importance as an evolving international media. I’ve been up, burning the midnight oil to do all my work and my other projects outside of school.

Speaking of those other projects, I’m still blogging over at Tor.com even though my posts have slowed down distinctly. GenCon rolled right into a LARP weekend and then into orientation and graduate school, which effectively tore through my writing schedule. I’ve recently taken on reviewing NBC’s newest post-apoc show Revolution for Tor.com and I’ve got a few more posts coming out. I enjoy working for Tor.com so much and the chance to do review and criticism is something I don’t want to give up while going through school. There might, however, be a wee slow down from the posting schedule I had before.

That’s also because, outside of the Game Center, I’m working hard at developing my tabletop RPG game Wanderlust. In the coming weeks there will be more information about it, including the launch of my company Phoenix Outlaw Production’s website, the exciting announcement of new talent being added to our company’s team, and even a schedule of publication and (hopefully) our Kickstarter. We’ll have a Facebook page all set up for updates too that’ll get put up here with commentary from my partner in crime Josh Harrison and more articles here about how things are going development-wise for the game. I believe it’s important to keep folks in the loop about how a game dev is going so they can see the process from the bottom up, and I’m excited as hell to share the development of this game with you. I’m working with a fantastic editor as well in John Adamus and he’s been fabulous at helping me turn this book into a space-epic reality.

I also recently broke through one of my most challenging fears by completing and submitting a short story to an anthology (which I’ll be writing about in a future post). That plus some other freelance work, my storytelling for Dystopia Rising New Jersey and preparation for Double Exposure’s Metatopia convention has kept me busy. When do I sleep? Let’s just say the last few weeks has been full of Red Eyes (lots of espresso!) and power naps.

So that’s the lay of the land, sports fans. I’m working hard to produce what writing I can in both the game design field and in plain creative writing. But I don’t want to forget that I have this blog too and it’s chock full of space for commentary and articles I want to put together too. In the upcoming weeks you’ll hear more about lots of nerdy things, including stuff I’ve read that is keeping me sane throughout the hectic work weeks and some views on writing too. Meanwhile, I’m staring down a pile of work with my name on it so I’m signing off.

Until next time, writers and gamers and geeks out there – don’t let the man get you down. Or the beagle. Those beagles are deceptively shifty.