Health, Radio Silence, and Upcoming Projects

We're coming up on three weeks since I've written anything, and I wanted to put up a brief post explaining why. Personal reasons, mostly. The majority of them health related. But I've also been hard at work on an upcoming fiction project, and I wanted to share a little news about that, as well.

Incidentally, if that upcoming release is all you want to know about, skip to the bottom, below the boldface header. I promise I won't be offended. 

First off, the good personal stuff: 

I got to take a road trip two weeks ago to visit an old buddy from my Marine Corps days. He finally fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a municipal police officer, after years of slaving away in private security and DoD Police jobs. He's more cut out to be a cop than anyone I know, and it was a privilege to be there celebrating his academy graduation. I'm keeping his name out of print by request, because he's always been a humble guy who doesn't seek attention.

That said, this is my digital space, and I get use it to tell the world how fucking proud I am of my blood brother. 

And to that brother, I just want to say this: Semper Fi, man. It's been a long time coming. Wear that badge as proudly as you wore the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. 

Of course, I managed to pick up some new and interesting germs on said road trip, and I've been sick as a bastard since getting back. I'm mostly over it now, but I spent a solid week hacking up phlegm and alternating between medicine hangovers and NyQuil-induced comas. Incidentally, my mother-in-law is a saint for making me her famous, fresh chicken soup while I felt like crap. I tell you, that stuff is the nectar of the gods.

I've also been having my usual round-and-round with the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has been about as much fun as an enema of live fire ants. 

Bottom line, I've been running on fumes when it comes to mental energy these days. And what little I have been able to muster has been going into the new fiction project. 


New Fiction Project 

In recent weeks, I mentioned D&D's fiction line and Pink Slime fantasy. The latter was one of the two most popular posts this blog has ever had, with something in the neighborhood of four thousand unique hits. 

Those two subjects aren't entirely unrelated in my mind. The rise of D&D's fiction publishing arm was one of the major driving forces in the overall homogenization of the fantasy genre, and the defining of what "vanilla" or "typical" fantasy looked like. 

By contrast, the D&D game itself looked markedly different in the earliest days, when it was cobbled together from such odd literary influences as Jack Vance's The Dying Earth and Margaret St. Clair's The Shadow People.

As a result, I've lately found myself wondering what D&D fiction would have looked like if it actually drew from those Appendix N sources, instead of leading that homogenization trend. What if—instead of generating more vanilla fantasy "lore" for TSR's branded settings—it was allowed to get as weird and pulpy as the suggested setting in the AD&D Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide?   

In that spirit, I'm currently working on a post apocalyptic, science fantasy dungeon crawler; something equal parts Sign of the Labrys and Swords Against Death, with some hefty helpings of Poul Anderson and Jack Vance in the mix. 

Call it OSR fiction, for lack of a better term. Watch this space for more updates. Or, if you want to be notified as soon as it's available for pre-order, you can click here to sign up for my mailing list. 

As for the immediate future of the blog, I'm planning to put up some more gaming related content, including some more deep-dive stuff into the old AD&D rules.

I also plan to continue my ongoing series of post apocalyptic reviews, which has earned itself at least a few die hard readers. And I'm finally adding books to the review series, starting with Adam Lane Smith's upcoming release Gideon Ira: Knight of the Blood Cross. 

So stick around, folks. There's plenty more to come.