The year of too-many-projects continues, and I am Behind no matter how hard I push. My traditional strategy has been guilt and tea; guilt is maxed out, so more tea. More tea. Give me more tea!

The Hands of the White Wizard has finally come out in print, and I managed to snaffle a copy at UK Games Expo. Oh, ‘tis a beautiful thing. Ignore the text. The text here is but commentary on the art.

Then, stop ignoring the text, because I worked really hard on the text. It’s had a bunch of fairly glowing reviews, but the one that’s gotten a bit of attention is this one over at Me, Myself & Die.

(My position in a nutshell: I absolutely understand the position of wanting to leave canon pristine and perfect, and that games should only exist in the interstices. It’s what we pretty much did in 1st Edition with the Mirkwood material. But the nature of roleplaying games demands player choice, adapting a property to a medium should incorporate the unique strength of that medium, and as we’re moving the timeline closer to the war of the thing, the Venn diagram intersection of ‘meaningful choices’ and ‘choices that can be tucked into the interstices’ of the story becomes smaller and smaller.)

The Dungeon Book is up on various flavours of net galley. Early readers have read it, and (mostly) liked it. It’s available for pre-order before its launch in August.

In fact, if you’re feeling enthusiastic, there’s even a Broken Binding special edition in the offing.

I’m off to London next week today for a bookseller’s event with Orbit, and I’ll be back for an event in Forbidden Planet on August 11th.

And an event the next day (August 12th) in Waterstones Liverpool!

Also I’ll be doing reddit AMAs on various rs (/fantasy and /rpg, I believe).

Look at this. Almost like a little book tour. Notions.

Merryshire Detective Club’s crowdfunding impends, inevitable as dinnertime. There’s a sampler plate available at the backerkit prelaunch thingy. If comedic halfling detectives solving murders between snack breaks and cups of tea appeal, please do check it out. I’ll be talking about this one a lot in the weeks to come, so brace yourselves.

Everyone else was writing UK Games Expo Reports. I too shall write a UK Games Expo Report, but first I shall write an International Dublin Literary Festival Report and a MCM London Comicon Report.

International Dublin Literary Festival Report.

That was really good fun. Nice to hang out with some of the Irish fantasy crowd, nice to brush up against the Irish literary scene to some degree.

MCM London Comicon Report.

Do not wear a jacket when in a building that is a) a giant greenhouse b) crammed with a billion people and c) apparently located directly adjacent to the sun. It was very, very, very warm and crowded. The panel was great fun, but the approach to the panel was an ordeal.

UK Games Expo Report.

I told lots of people I haven’t been at Expo in a decade, which wasn’t quite true - Facebook helpfully threw up (aptly enough) a photo of The Pizza That Was So Pathetic That We All Agreed We Had To Take Photos Of It And Send Them To Ken Hite To Provoke A Rant About American Pizza Exceptionalism, and that was from 2019. So, I’ve missed the last six Expos, during which time it tripled in size.

I spent most of my time slinging books and handing out pins on the Pelgrane booth. Pelgrane’s got an absurdly deep back catalogue, and our gimmick this year was “to get a pin, you’ve got to tell us what you like, and we’ll recommend a game”, so we became supplement sommeliers. “Ah, you have an interest in art? How about we pair you with this subtle but strong bodied copy of Dreamhounds of Paris, where you play members of the Surrealist movement in Lovecraft’s dreamlands? No? Then perhaps a delicate mini-game from Seven Wonders?“

I did slip away to talk about humour on James’ panel (the key to humour, kids, is to not have the Audio tech show up, so one of the panellists hits some buttons and the microphones start working, but we’re really not sure if the audio’s going out to (a) the speakers by the stage (b) the whole of Hall 1 or (c) the whole of the convention. I also got to playtest Kieron’s I Can’t Believe It’s Space Margerine, er, Scions, where we were absurdly over-the-top Primarchs. I should play more games at the big cons. I really, really enjoy running and playing games, and I’m far better at doing that than socialising in bars.

Midway through the game - you know the bit in Hitchhiker’s, where the words ‘yellow’ wanders through Arthur Dent’s mind looking for something to connect with, and eventually finds ‘bulldozer’. That, only the words were ‘challenge-based gameplay’ and ‘The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi’. No idea if I’ll do anything with it, but it’s a thought I’ll play with in the absolutely no spare time I have at the moment. That, and the game about occult trench warfare that isn’t just Heart-nicking-Trench-Crusade’s-hat-but-yeah.

I’ll definitely be back at Expo next year, with a better hotel and better shoes.

Project Roundup!

BREAKING GED: For the first time in eight novels, I’ve had to ask for a (small) extension on the deadline for this, mainly because I stupidly started four other novels and lost confidence in all of them before hitting on this one. I’m racing to finish, which means I have no idea right now if it’s good or not. It probably isn’t. It will be. I’m having fun when I let myself have fun (where “fun” equals “animated islands battling like kaiju”, but also angsting about landing the story within the word count.

MERRYSHIRE DETECTIVE CLUB: Still tapping away on the last bits of Dreadful Hare and tweaking the core book.

DIE: METADUNGEON: Still in research phase. I picked up Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons and Gamemasters: The Comic History of RPGS in Dublin.

TERRAFORMING MARS: Waiting on feedback.

PSYCHIC ICEBERG PILGRIM: Done, done, invoices paid, off my plate - and it still hasn’t been announced. Soon!

TUNNELS & TROLLS: Need to get moving on this.

FISH STEW: This is an odd project, in that there’s a fairly complex existing manuscript that I’m editing and reworking and pulling apart and rebuilding. So, instead of writing the book in any sort of linear fashion, I have eight documents that are a mix of my text and theirs, and there’ll be a lot of reconciling soon. But it’s moving.

I’m turning down work at the moment, which is a wrench. One of the best parts of a project is always that initial rush of pure creativity, when you glimpse what you could do with the brief, that first jagged outline of maybes and hey-what-ifs. But it’s not the work, and until I clear the backlog I can’t in good conscience take on new stuff. I have to trust that there’ll be new new stuff.

It’s also a reminder to keep consuming. Writers must ruminate, as cows do; especially long-form writers, it’s all about eating lots and lots of stuff, digesting it, and then… actually, neither of the possible outlets for this metaphor is a pleasant one, so let’s move on.

Currently Reading: Pagans.

Currently Watching: Legends.

Currently Playing: Theoretically, still Mythic Bastionland, but events keep conspiring against us.