New Alliterates Site

The new website is up for the Alliterates, the group of friends and published writers to which I proudly belong. Lester Smith, Rob King, and Steve Sullivan did a bang-up job with the thing, so be sure to stop by and check it out. The “history of the Alliterates” section is drop-dead hilarious.

The front page of the site offers you a number of links through which you can contribute to help those affected by the South Asian tsunamis. The Alliterates don’t get a thing for doing this, of course. It just seemed like the right thing to do. We can credit Lester for being our activist conscience there too.

Happy New Year!

Whew! We’re only five days into 2005, and it already seems like it’s flying by. I managed to complete the outlines for my next four novels (which is staggering to think about), and now I’m waiting to hear back from Wizards about the outline for my next Eberron book so I can get to actually writing it. I’m looking forward to getting back to that world after messing around in Blood Bowl for a while. I love both worlds, but they have very different tones, which helps to keep me fresh. I also managed to knock out a quick article for the next issue of Games Quarterly Magazine about Patch Products, a local (and very successful) family game company here in Beloit, WI.

In the meantime, I’m polishing the first couple chapters of a book about my kids and sending it off to an agent who’s expressed some interest. I also hope to squeeze in a proposal for cool new kind of collectable game to a major publisher this week.

Anyhow, I hope you all had wonderful holidays and that 2005 for you is your best year yet.

Marked for Death in Game Trade Magazine

I just spotted the blurb for Marked for Death, the first in my upcoming Eberron trilogy of novels, on page 37 of Game Trade Magazine. This means it’s available for retailers to preorder now through their favorite distributor. If you plan to buy the book, please let your friendly local gaming store or book store know so they can get it in for you right away.

Holiday Update

I finished the first draft of my Blood Bowl novel yesterday, just in time to take a few days off for Christmas. Whew!

Next up, I’m revising my outline for the second book in my Eberron trilogy. Then I’ll revise the outlines for my next two books in the Knights of the Silver Dragon series. After that, it’s the outline for the next Blood Bowl book, which is to be a trilogy too. I’ll squeeze my next article for Games Quarterly Magazine in there somewhere as well. Soon after the start of the year, it’s headlong into writing the second Eberron book.

It looks like 2005 is shaping up well. It should see two of the Eberron novels and at least one Blood Bowl novel see print, plus a few other things I’m working on, although it’s too early to say about those yet.

I’d like to thank everyone out there for your support in 2004. It was as crazy a year as ever, but having wonderful friends and family around me every step of the way meant it was a more fun kind of frenzy. I’m looking forward to sharing 2005 with you all too and having more fun than ever.

Bloody Holidays

I know, I know. It’s been deathly quiet around here lately. My New Year’s resolution last year for weekly updates hasn’t been 100% successful, but it seems that I might be able to slide through with a solid B.

I spent a week in LA in early December, doing some consulting for a company that shall currently remain nameless. They were great people, though, and I think we’ll be making some wonderful games together in 2005.

While there, my hosts and I mounted a field trip of sorts to Gen Con So Cal on the Thursday of that show. They only stuck around long enough to get the lay of the land. After they left, I managed to find all sorts of friends to hang out with into the midnight hour. One of the great things about the adventure game industry is how many friends you make in it, and you get to see them a lot during the summer convention season. When that ends, though, it can be a long, cold winter (especially here in Wisconsin) before you get to see them again. Gen Con So Cal breaks that up nicely. Now I’m looking forward the GAMA Trade Show in Las Vegas in March, where many of us can get together again.

Since I got back, I’ve been buried in my first Blood Bowl novel, which should be out sometime next summer. As I tell people, it’s a fantasy football novel, but not the kind that involves the NFL. It’s dwarves, elves, ogres, zombies, vampires, and more playing a version of American football that’s more like rugby than anything else. It combines sports, fantasy, and humor, which I haven’t seen done in too many other places. One of Robert Lynn Asprin’s Myth Adventures books featured “the Big Game” (a riff on the University of Michigan-Ohio State rivalry), which the closest thing I can think of. Blood Bowl is hyperviolent too, which changes the tone a bit. It’s not gory, per se. It’s so over the top it’s more like a Warner Bros. cartoon at times.

Anyhow, I’m back to that now. More when I can come up for air! Until then, best wishes for happy holidays to you all!

Marked for Death Update

In an effort to clear the decks before kicking out the rest of my Blood Bowl novel, this week I took care of some details for Marked for Death, the first in my upcoming Eberron trilogy. I got the galleys (final author’s proofs) in late last week and turned them around right away. Reading through the book again, I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. The first draft was a real mess, written more like a screenplay than a novel, but now the book breathes like an epic adventure should. It’s slated for a March 2005 release, and I can’t wait to see it.

I also revised a “Novel Approach” article about the book for an upcoming issue of Dragon Magazine. This comes complete with stats for a smaller, party-sized airship and a living fireball spell. This article should appear in the same issue as a prefatory short story that introduces four of the characters from Marked for Death as they investigate a mysterious crater on the edges of the Mournland.

Ghost Stories Told

I just got my author’s copies of Ghost Stories in today’s mail, and I understand the book should be in stores soon. It’s an anthology of adventures for regular mortals set in White Wolf‘s World of Darkness, plus some guidelines on how to use ghosts in your World of Darkness game. Rick Chillot, Geoff Grabowski, Matthew McFarland, Adam Tinworth, Chuck Wendig, and I all chipped in bits under the auspices of developer Ken Cliffe. My story’s about, well, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?

This the first gaming material I’ve ever written for White Wolf, and the first thing I’ve written for them in somewhere around 10 years. They’re still great people to work with, and the book looks like a blast. Check it out.

LA Bound

Up until a week or so ago, I didn’t have any plans to make it to Gen Con So Cal, despite the wonderful time I had there last year. Then I got a call from a company that wants to fly me out to LA for part of that week for a meeting. I arrive November 30 and depart December 3, so it’s a short trip. With luck, though, I should be wandering around the lovely Anaheim Convention Center for part of the day on that Thursday or Friday. If you’re around, too, I hope to see you there.

It’s Quiet—Too Quiet

My apologies for not posting here much lately. There have been two reasons for that:

1) I haven’t had a whole lot to report.

2) Various colds and viruses have been treating my family like the Packers treat a loose football.

Now, though, it seems like we’re all on the mend, and I’m rolling again. I used the blank spots in the past few weeks to work on a few outlines for upcoming books (like two more in the Knights of the Silver Dragon series) and to craft another proposal or two for some new projects I hope to start working on sometime next year.

Right now, I’m hot in the throes of Blood Bowl, the first in what looks to be a trilogy of novels for my friends at Games Workshop. After that, it’s onto the second book in The Lost Mark Trilogy, my Eberron series for Wizards of the Coast.

In the meantime, the latest issue (#3) of Games Quarterly Magazine should be in stores around now. It contains an article I wrote praising Once Upon a Time, designed by Richard Lambert, Andrew Rilstone, and James Wallis and published by Atlas Games.

Don’t forget to gear up for National Games Week too. That’s next week, from November 21–27.

Comments Working

I built Forbeck.com around Movable Type, a great blogging and content management tool. Like many bloggers, however, spambots inundated my pages with comment spam. I recently upgraded to Movable Type 3.1 so I could implement its new antispam tools. This includes a commenter registration service designed to put a stop to spambots and the like.

I had a few issues surrounding the upgrade, but I’ve worked through them all now. I’m currently blocking comments from anyone not registered with TypeKey. This is a free service that lets you register for commenting on any TypeKey-based blog (like many Movable Type installations) all at once.

The upshot: To comment on posts here, you now need to register with TypeKey. If you do this once, you should be set forever. If you don’t care to bother with it, you can still e-mail me personally. I’ll be the only one able to see your erudite and pointed commentary, but I’m comfortable with that if you are.