I needed an update. Too much swirling around right now to pin down what's going on. So instead I'll offer some bits of random flak.

• I've actually been watching some of the more prominant campaign speeches lately and taking greater interest in the upcoming election than I ever have before. I won't dare post my thoughts on the subject anywhere online, as I've got good friends—and family—on both sides of the political fence...and most of them are just too testy about it. Rather than choosing a side and slandering the other well in advance, as many of them do, I really like to give each side a listen first. I generally hold a skeptical opinion of politicians anyway; they're more about persuasion and charm than about solid plans for change. And already I've said enough.

• This Saturday comedian Brian Regan (one of the best, if you ask me) will be premiering his new show Epitome of Hyperbole on the Comedy Channel this Saturday at 10pm EDT. And if y ou miss it, again on Sunday at the same time. If you've never seen Brian Regan before, I recommend him highly. So if you're not around to watch this show, TiVo it or whatever it is you people do these days with your fancy television sets. At minimum, type in "Brian Regan" on Youtube and have fun.

• On the writing front, I haven't much to say yet. I have a handful of projects simmering below the surface, trying to decide which will rise first and which I should make rise first.

• I know I stand alone in saying this, but I'm very glad the summer is on its decline. I need cooler air to get me outside. I'm contemplating a lot of things right now, and one of them is forcing myself (possibly even by paying money) into an exercise routine. My day job has me in front of a computer and my writing job has me in front of a computer. That's much too much sitting around. All in all I need to learn to unplug more.

• GenCon has left a lingering desire in me to do some more gaming. Goodman Games East, a squadron of Goodman Games fellow authors and editors who live in and around the New York and New Jersey area, have been meeting on and off recently for some one-session games, like Gamma World. My weekends are already mostly booked for the coming months, but I keep eyeing the calendar and wondering if there's a way I can make one of these games.

So...how fares the rest of the world?

GenCon is difficult to recount in full.

In some respects, this year's was disappointing. In others, not at all. Now, the positive outweighs the negative. Certainly my primary complaint about GenCon (and this is universal) is that I cannot do all that I want to do. Every year I try to mix it up: game a little, meet with people I don't get to see any other time of the year, network, see the showroom floor in its entirety, and attend cool seminars. If you do this, you don't see half of what you really intended to.

As a rule, I try not to put up any pictures on this website of people without their permission. I'm big on that. So if you see someone's face on here, it's because I either asked them first (like my wife) or I just know that they're okay with it (like my brother). That said, here's a few images from this year's GenCon.

Rather than try to chronicle the whole event, here's just a few highlights:

• Goodman Games wins a Silver ENnie for Best Cartography for the product Castle Whiterock. Woo-hoo! Go Jeremy and Joseph!

• Twice I got to sit with Keith Baker (and some other authors, only half of whom I knew) for a book signing. Which really just means I got to sit and talk with him a bit. Regardless of the slowness of that event, I had fun. It was just cool to be there.

• Marisa, as always, likes to help promote. She'd be an awesome agent. If she had her way, she'd have tried to dress up as Charoth himself (mask, robe, and all) and hand out copies of my book to people, to get them interested.

• We (my brother and Marisa) were invited to join in an Eberron game along with Ari Marmell, his wife, and Keith Baker. CA Suleiman was our DM. It's a little daunting roleplaying in Stormreach with two of the guys who wrote the book on the subject. Marisa actually made coconut brownies and brought Mountain Dew to round out the archtypical gaming session. We had fun hunting down the right miniatures to use for the game. We actually managed to locate a female dwarf mini (rare).

The intrepid heroes enter a cave where some sort of undead ogre hacks limbs from corpses. Yeah, some of those corpses rose up to fight.

Soon after, we encounter a massive shadow dragon, parley with her for a bit, then battle her drow "servants" to provide her with entertainment (and so she wouldn't kill us).

It rained only on one day, and was all-around lovely outside for August. It was still too hot for me. Indianapolis at night is actually quite picturesque.

Marisa in the Garden of GenConsemane.

There are always Storm Troopers about. But John managed to encounter these two.

I got to briefly meet a few people, including Paul Kemp (second time), Erik Scott de Bie, Jaleigh Johnson, and my usual friends Ed Gentry, Harley Stroh, Ken Hart, and Adrian Pommier. And of course, it was good seeing Keith Baker, CA Suleiman, and Ari Marmell again. But all of this is never enough. And I certainly would have liked Mike Furgeson and Marcy Rockwell to have attended. Next year, guys? I know it's hard. For me, too.

Five days off from work is the longest vacation block I've taken in a long time. Generally any day missed requires a ton of catch up work. Vacation means plenty of preparation work. But it's worth it. Starting tonight, I won't be checking my blackberry emails until....next Tuesday, perhaps.

First is the drive from New York to Indiana, a 12-hour roadtrip made fun by my wife and my brother. Oh, and plenty of gaming talk. See, I have to teach them the basics of 4th Edition D&D en route because all three of us are going to be players in an Eberron game. I'll be playing an elf ranger, my wife a dwarf paladin, and my brother a human cleric. Yeah, let the geekery begin!

Then 3.x days of GenCon madness. I stumbled on the Author's Avenue schedule for the first time yesterday. I know I'm the no-name of the bunch, but it sure does feel good to be put onto a spreadsheet with the likes of R.A. Salvatore. At age 16, I went to a book signing he did at a Walden Books for The Legacy, the first hardcover Drizzt book. This GenCon is Drizzt's 20 year anniversary.

If I never write another book (oh, I sure will try), at least I've done this much. One big dream checked off my remarkably short list, and I guess I'm thinking of GenCon as my celebration of that fact. It's been a pretty crappy summer for me so far, but I know I'm still quite fortunate. I don't forget that for a second.

Then the trip home, which involves driving through Amish country in Ohio and Pennsylvania and maybe a tourist attraction or two.

I brake for kobolds.

When I started writing The Darkwood Mask, I started to wonder if I would be as free to give my impressions of other Eberron novels. Should one author criticize or comment on another author's? It seemed like bad form to say anything at all, or even just an unwise career move. And so I learned that if I have nothing good to say, then I'll just keep my mouth shut. But if I have something good to say...damn it, I'm going to say it.

Now, it's a bit of a heartache seeing new Eberron novels coming out and knowing that I won't likely be contributing any more myself in the foreseeable future. But....when a good book warrants it, I have to plug it. And so the latest Eberron novel (after a spell of no releases) is Don Bassingthwaite's The Doom of Kings, part 1 in the new trilogy Legacy of Dhakaan.

Don's first Eberron novels, the Dragon Below trilogy, really helped to kick off the Eberron line and more than many of them really helped to invigorate the setting. This trilogy continues with some of the same characters—and I personally recommend reading that trilogy first. That said, The Doom of Kings offers some very good reading and some very cool elements: Hobgoblins as a civilized race, struggling to maintain their own nation. What's not to like? More adventures of the the shifter Geth, the barbarian-turned-Deneith-heir Ashi, and the hobgoblin "dirge singer" (i.e. bard) Ekhaas. All very compelling characters.

Tired of reading about goblins as mere fodder for powerful heroes? There's a scene I really enjoyed (and I'm only up to chapter 7) where an impoverished street goblin and his two sons offer Ekhaas, the female hobgoblin bard, a gift of a meal after overhearing her recount the legends of her people, of glories of the long-faded Goblin empire (Dhakaan). She tries to decline the offer, saying she needs no payment for telling a story. But they insist she accept it, even though it is their only food, because her stories filled them.

This book shows off what I've like about Eberron the most: It's a D&D world all grown up. You've still got your dungeons and your monsters, but some of the monsters are people, too. I love that. And I tried to do some of that in The Darkwood Mask, too, with the kobold Verdax and even the bugbear, Rhazaan.

Some items of note:

• Sample chapter.
• Book club discussion of The Doom of Kings. It's only just started. Come talk to Don here!
• Goblin language lexicon.

If you're willing, head on over to the ENnie Awards voting booths and vote for Castle Whiterock, which has been nominated for Best Adventure and Best Cartography! The ENnies are a pretty big deal in the RPG industry. I worked on Castle Whiterock, but not for the particular aspects that have gotten it nominated.

However, authors Adrian Pommier and Chris Doyle and cartographer Jeremy Simmons might certainly deserve the kudos for this one!

And hey, you can also vote Goodman Games as Fan Choice Best Publisher. If you're so inclined...

Well. GenCon 2008 (Indy) is in two weeks, and it can't come soon enough for me. Not only do I badly need the brief respite from my day job, but I'm really looking forward to the unapologetic geekdom the convention represents, and this year both my wife and my brother will be with me. Before my book cancellation, I was thinking of my attendance at GenCon as half work, half play. Work = my freelance writing career. Play = gaming fun. Promotion of The Darkwood Mask has taken a backseat to fun. I hope to meet up with a lot of people, network a bit, maybe brainstorm on some future projects, and come away with . But mostly I just want to have fun. I feel I've deserved it, and I hope Marisa and John (the aforementioned wife and brother) will have even half the fun that I expect to have.

Thanks to Marcy Rockwell and the folks who organized the non-WotC-sponsored Authors Avenue, I'm scheduled to join Keith Baker (of Eberron-creation fame) and Tim Waggoner (of many books fame) at a couple of book signings. I may have only gotten one novel with WotC, but mostly I look forward to talking to these guys about shared experiences, Eberron, and whatever else.

Here are some of the things on my GenCon schedule, in some form or another. Mostly I just want to hang around, walk around, and have a good time.

Thursday, August 14th

• Book signing (along with Keith Baker)
• Secrets of Eberron (seminar)
• Eberron game run by C.A. Suleiman

Friday, August 15th

• Women In Gaming seminar (seminar)
• Villains of Eberron seminar (seminar)
• Eberron Through the Ages (seminar)

Saturday, August 16th

• Hey, I've Got a Day Job! (seminar)
• Book signing (along with Keith Baker & Tim Waggoner)

Not long ago, at my day job, the company did a vicious round of layoffs. The bad economy, blah blah blah, fine, I understand why. That I was spared feels more like the toss of the dice than any value the company holds for me personally. It's not that I didn't understand why people I worked with and had become friends with had vanished overnight—it's for reasons of security. But what I still cannot forgive is the method by which these layoffs took place (and the mess they leave behind). One minute you're working your ass off for the company you've invested your efforts into for years, the next minute a single phone call is received: a study in scripted, ass-covering derision. Oh, there's legal reasons for the minimal wordage. But these people were human long before they were employees. They deserve, at least, a dose of dignity.

Well, my night job (writing) just became disturbingly like my day job.

So, as has been mentioned in a few places now (like here and here and here), Wizards of the Coast has recently made some presumably corporate decisions, resulting in the cancellation of a number of series and books that were in the pipeline. Included in this was the complete termination of the series that my recently finished (well, a 96,000 word first draft) book was part of. The book will not be published, and that's that.

Most of all, I wish I could give the time spent writing the book back to my wife. The nights and weekends for the better part of six months.

There's nothing more to say about it. WotC is well within their rights to pull a book from the schedule of releases, it's built clearly in their contracts. And we sign those, like the freelancers we are.

For the record, I like Wizards of the Coast. Still do. I love the D&D game, glad they saved it by buying it off of the tanking TSR. And I loved writing for Eberron. I was a fan before I was an author, and I have a real passion for the creative efforts of the people who fashioned the still-young campaign setting. Despite some frustrations along the way, I really did love every minute of it. I got a novel published, which is what I dreamed of doing for years.

Will I write for WotC again? Maybe, if they'll have me. But not right now. So it's time to turn my attention elsewhere.

A bit of irony: One of the themes in the book I finished this summer (but will probably never see publication) is that of loss of innocence. A man betrayed looking back in disgust as the naiveté he once possessed, that led him to his current plight. The novel was supposed to have a Western vibe to it, a lone rider of sorts. Funny, just yesterday, I had my wife borrow an anthology of short stories written by Louis L'Amour, the quintessential Westerns writer, so I could gear myself up for the revision of my book.

I don't want to be a bitter writer (or resentful employee) after all these recent happenings. I just want to be a smarter one.

Fiscus, daughter of Biscus, the stray kitten we've been taking care of since her birth in April, finds a new home today. Stupid cat. Going to miss her. I hate goodbyes.

Finding the mother a home will be another story. Stupid cat.

My wife and I saw Rush yesterday, at Jones Beach on Long Island, New York. They were good. We had fun.

What, did you expect more than that? What, you think I'm liable to write up some big-ass review? Not sure where you'd get that idea.

In other news:

• Rush is going to be on The Colbert Report tomorrow. Don't miss it!
• I took a lot of pictures. And, a few videos. If you like South Park (I don't, but this is fun) and you like Rush, you might enjoy this. Download here.

Random snippets from this week:

Monday

6am - Receive an mpg file from my friend and fellow Eberron author Paul Crilley: footage of a monkey he recorded in his backyard in South Africa. A naughty monkey.

8:26am - Wonder when we'll get to see Wall-E.

9:45am - Reread the introductory text of a zany online serial my brother is gearing up to write. I'm glad of it.

9:30am - Receive a call from my dad as he waits on a plane that hasn't taxied yet; heading to Japan (again) for a single 3-hour meeting. My dad's spent more time on a plane in the last year than I have my whole life times ten.

1:13pm - Choose another awesome picture from Inga Nielsen's gallery to set as my desktop wallpaper.

5:19pm - Wonder if I have time to write up a review for Alanis Morissette's Flavors of Entanglement. (Probably not.) I really like it. It's no doubt the album that will always make me think of this summer. Last year's was Blue October's Foiled.

6:30pm - Go with my wife on another hospital visit for her dad. Things are getting worse.

Tuesday

6:03am - Queue up Fly By Night in my iPod so I can get a fresh listen before the next installment of Dreamlines.

2:13pm - Wonder where Harley Stroh went off to again. The man is a gypsy.

2:14pm - Strongly hope my editor takes a bit longer in sending back comments on my first draft.

8:53pm - Continue posting 4th Edition D&D rules updates behind the scenes for my play-by-post game.

8:58pm - Finally grasp the fact that you can't fight with two weapons in 4E without the use of a power that allows it. (I think.)

10pm - Watch a new episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman that I hadn't seen before with my wife. Fun show. Educational, too. Makes me feel so embarrassingly...Western.

Wednesday

11:30am - Listen to some old Jon & Vangelis while walking around the Wall Street area on my lunch break. What a crazy match-up that is.

2:11pm - Receive email from Netflix that Dr. Katz Season 1 Disk 2 is coming next; seems they skipped Hellboy on my queue, not surprisingly.

6:13pm - Feed the cats that we've been taking care of again.

6:15pm - Hope the tenants upstairs do indeed bring friends of theirs willing to take the cats. The fate of every stray cat on my block, given time, is death by speeding car driven by some a-hole. I don't want this to happen to them.

4:30pm - Sit back and smile as I come across a an Eberron fan's post over on the WotC boards that cites The Darkwood Mask as an example of a good depiction of evil-minded Karrnathi zombies. Yeah.

4:52pm - Dread the next day at work. Thursdays and Fridays are hell lately.

Thursday

11:14am - Meet my wife on my lunch break to walk through Battery Park. Nice day out. The people in the Statue of Liberty costumes have to be burning up, though.

1:04pm - Resist the desire to collapse under weight of a soul-crushing, ever increasing workload at the day job. Okay, I exaggerate. A little.

3:14pm - Ruminate on the delay of Friday. Where the hell is it?

5:25pm - Listen to the first podcast from Atomic Array on my iPod. Very cool game talked about in there called Colonial Gothic.

11:48pm - Get woken up by idiot tenant who's paying late, and not in full. Idiot.

Friday

8:46am - Post this list.