One of the hacks I did was to lift the ‘werewolves can’t get wild together’ rule. I messed with the setting and the in-game culture enough to allow characters to be involved physically and emotionally. (Actually, that’s already in the books to some extent, I just removed the parts that punished the characters for doing so.) I also added a mechanic for the levels of love a person can fall in love with and talked about how the People dealt with those stages. It was a BLAST to write and I think a lot of people had a good time with it. (Or so they’re saying on the internet.)

When I was originally writing and planning it out, I wrote a tongue and cheek section talking about what sex and love is like from the various tribes. Before I even showed it to my developer, (David) I cut it for wordcount and because it didn’t quite vibe with the rest of what I was doing. It ended up more like practice writing. (Something I am a BIG advocate for in any kind of writing.)

But anyway, it was still cute, and all this writing about sex and vampires reminded me of it. (Did I mention I just finished my redlines up for Strange, Dead Love? Why I did! And that’s a book about sex and vampires!) So here, for your viewing pleasure is a bit about werewolf sex and love I was too embarrassed to show to my editor.

Shot Gun Weddings and Kissing Cousins

At the end of the day, pack attitudes and the opinions of individual Uratha are what matter when it comes to sex and marriage.

You think so? Really? Tell that to little Billy’s over protective Tribal Elder who raised the kid to be a proud and strong Hunter in Darkness and doesn’t much care for your pretty Iron Master nose sniffing around his boy. Below are some example Tribal attitudes toward sex, marriage, and Uratha offspring.

Blood Talons

Should you marry a Blood Talon, (without being one?) Mm. Probably not. Of any tribe, the Blood Talons are the most hung up on the right breeding, (not good breeding, but the right breeding) and family lines like the Lodge of Garm are so vital that it’s almost impossible to get elder consent to mate with a Blood Talon without being one first.

Would I have a wild, whirl-wind affair with one? Damn right. Stalwart warriors and high idealists, a Blood Talon is the last Uratha you have to worry about giving into a berserker rage and do something you’ll both regret. That said, a Blood Talon won’t hesitate to kill when it’s necessary, so make sure you don’t insult her mother.

Bone Shadows

While the Blood Talons might be very worried about who you’re mating with, the Bone Shadows are likely to be very hung up on how you’re doing it. The preservation of ancient traditions to appease the ancestors and spirits who might over see your relationship is going to be a big deal. Don’t anticipate running to Vegas if your would-be bride a Bone Shadow. Instead, expect to be dragged onto the Hisil and introduced to each one of her ancestors three hundred years back with a formal greeting and exchange of Essence and other gifts.

That said, the Shadows do believe in payment in kind, and so they can be nurturing loves with an eye for giving as good as they get. Keep in mind though, if you screw around, payment in kind can mean something very different.

Hunters in Darkness

If you want the kind of lover you broadcast about to any and all channels, you may not want to hook up with a Hunter in Darkness. The master hunters maintain their affairs with the same silent dedication that they maintain their hunt. It isn’t anyone’s business what they do, or who they do it with, and if you’re along for the ride, you sure as shit better be able to keep your mouth shut.

But you want to talk about tender, romantic, and secretly thrilling? You want to talk about the smoldering passion the Hunters keep in check just aching for an outlet. If you can stand all the cloak and dagger crap, you’ll be thrilled by how they treat your sacred places while in their territory.

… Meaning your heart, of course.

Iron Masters

So, you do want that Vegas wedding after all? Maybe looking a little love outside the status quo? If it’s cutting edge, challenging to the old guard or even just plain freaky, you probably want to hook up with an Iron Master. While there’s something potentially kinky in the hearts and souls of any Uratha, the Iron Master’s willingness to change and try new ideas, it is refreshingly easy with members of this tribe.

Keep in mind, though, since they’re so flexible in their concepts of territory and what territory even means, you might well find yourself in part of the new definition. In which case, expect a lot of honor, and likely a lot of possessiveness.

Storm Lords

Power, authority, purpose.

Scary, huh? The Uratha mate or lover of a Storm Lord has to be prepared to be understanding at best, made of granite at worst. They may be condescending, traditionalist, dominant and obsessive.

But, they’re yours. If you can put up with their driven nature, a Storm Lord will weather just about anything with you, and better still, won’t complain about the little annoying things you do. That might show weakness.

I have a problem with world of bleakness settings.

I have a problem with zombie apocalypse, total apocalypse, bleak darkity-dark-da-dark-dark fantasy games and so on.

The problem is, I play them ‘wrong.’

If you drop a character of mine in the existential bleakness of a setting in which ‘everything sucks’ all I want to do is break it and fix ‘everything.’

Is the Prince King of Discord on the Forever Throne of Depression which he uses to oppress the people and keep the sun from shining? Yeah, I don’t want any victory but the one where I kick Princy-poo in the anus and dismantle his whole society of suffering.

Is ArzTecConTec Co so completely in control of it’s work force that they’ve totally lost free will and thinking is basically outlawed? Yeah, my buddies want to game the system and be rich mercs on the outskirts and in the shadows. *cough, heh cough.* Me? I want to shake ArzTecConTec Co to it’s foundation and liberate it’s literal wage-slaves! Hell, I want to undo the whole system!

Does your setting say I have to end up evil, miserable, and alone? I’m going to fight it. I’m going to sift through all your material for evidence that there’s a light in that dimness and that’s what I’ll focus on and play.

My first D&D character was a pacifist. A complete pacifist. I forced the DM to find other methods to give us EX because we weren’t going to do much by way of ‘killin’ things’ thanks to my pain in the ass character.

Sometimes, people like this. Often times, setting ‘purists’ get mad. Pissed. Because ‘that’s not what’s in the books.’ Though I suspect more often it’s that ‘that’s not what I signed up for.’ That doesn’t make them wrong. Follow your gaming bliss. This may be my issue, but it lends itself to the sort of game I want to make down the road.

I want games where ‘kill the monster, take the treasure’ is not the default. I want a game where killing someone, anyone, is a big fucking deal, (much as I love the Wolf and will keep playing it no matter what, the Humanity system, in any denomination, doesn’t work for me.) I don’t mean in a ‘you’re SCREWED’ so much as, you kill someone, it’s felt. It’s a big decision. It matters.

Leverage keeps coming to mind, because the source material is SO optimistic, and so very much about ‘making things better’ but it leaves off the ‘fall out and repair’ part of things.

I’ve mentioned in several places, my want for a game that involves rebuilding. Act Raiser. Minecraft in some ways. Simcity. But with plot and setting and character development that goes along with soscital rebuilding. I imagine this want comes out of my above problem. My want to fix things over killing things. That’s a ‘progressive’ game to me in the most literal sense. Is it possible to do with standard games? Totally. I could see a D&D game (of any edition) bent and broken into line until it satisfied my desires. WoD. Heck, you could do it with RIFTS if you forced it. But I guess I’m looking for a game that has that carrot-and-stick already in it.

Is it out there? Probably. There’s shades of it in Apocolypes World, isn’t there?

So yeah, if I screw up your Darkity Dark game, this is why and I’m sorry. I’m slowly working on the game that will satisfy my need so I can stop bringing it to your setting. Sorry folks!

So I’m working from a Word template because that’s the program on this machine. We’ll also have a InDesign ‘blank’ I think we’re disributing when we get it finalized, so I guess I’ll be working in that when we have it. But basically here’s what it looks like:

(You know the deal, click to embiggen.)

There are actually only certain sections that I need to worry about. Sections like the Rules and the basic intro are all going to be the same from guestbook sheet to sheet. So too the place for signatures will be handled by the layout so that leaves me with the following to do.

• The Character Story
• The Character Descripton
• Conflicts
• Words
• and of course Story Seeds

I will also have to give consideration for the special hand sign, but that’s still in development, so I can’t give you the inside on that yet.

YET.

So there’s no right way or place to start, but I find the Story Seeds to be the toughest part so I tend to do them last when I’ve figured out everything else first.

Character Story

So this section is what people will first read about the character, in theory, and gives them an idea of why the character is fun. Fun being the operitive word. It should be a little twisted, a little funny, or if you’re doing a more dramatic character really compelling.

Easy, sure, so long as your remember this has got to be in around 100 words. Or, if you prefer, two short paragraphs. So in one hundred words, give or take, you need to:

• Give a feeling for who the character is.
• How they’re in the situation they’re in.
• Potential roleplaying hints, or suggestion of how they might behave.
• A hook to lead them into their seeds.

If you break it down to about one sentence to a paint above, you’ll probably be fine.  If you can have each sentence hit on two points, you’re double plus good. Does this seem a little obsessive compulsive? Yeah, it probably is, but that’s me, counting projects down to 100 word blocks if I have to.  More importantly, a Guestbook character is a lot like Gaming Haiku. All my favorite forms of poetry are very structured forms, so I’m bringing that to this project. YMMV.

So the character I’m doing right now is the Bonus Character we’ll be distributing at Gen Con Indy this year. (Yay! Woo!) In this case she’s a super awesome badass Space Marine. She’ll be a lose tie-in with our game Machine Zeit, you know, marketing and all that. Anyway, that gives me the following information for the sheet.

A hired gun with skills, experience in dangerous environments, she’s being paid good money to be set up to a derelict space station and scope the place out.

That’s 28 words, not bad. But I feel like I can pack more information into this opening line. I’m going to take out the mention of ‘money’ and replace it with ‘credits’ and adjusting the value attached to something more geeky. That propels the character into a more clear sci fi setting with a different system of income than our own. Also, ‘scope the place out’ is very weak. It says nothing about the character, the setting, or her purpose on the station, and so it’s got to go. After thinking about it a while, (and staring at the word ‘derelict’ while trying to figure out why I can never spell it right…) I decide ‘in search of profit and something far more personal. Something his employers don’t know he’s after.’  With a little more fidgeting, that changes out intro into:

A hired gun with skills, experience in an array of battlespaces and covert opts, she’s gotten a frak-ton of credits in search of ‘sensitive company property.’ That’s not the prize she’s got an eye on, however, she’s looking for something far more personal, and something her employers don’t know she’s after.

That’s about 50 words, and it might be a little obsessive, but I feel like almost every word suggests something about setting, character, mood, or motivation. “Sensitive company property’ and how she’s hiding things from her employers gives a feeling of paranoia and EBUL CORPORATIONS that’s vital to this subgenre as well as our game specifically without harping in too much detail about it. (Battlespace is real term. I found it on the DOD Military terms site. I love research!) Even the word ‘array’ feels better to me than ‘variety’ or other synonym because array has a sci fi military feel to it. Every double meaning you can cram into the character is a good one.

So with that, I feel like why She’s there, who sent her, what she’s after and who she is nicely covered. (There’s a little space between the cold hard mercenary and her search for ‘something personal’ so the player of the sheet can take it in either direction. Roleplaying suggestion, not demand, after all.) Now I just want to give a little more punch to the ‘setting’ and the hook for the story seeds to come and I’ve got a whole 50 words to do it! So I hit up the station itself, again, a tie in to our other game, but it needs to stand on it’s own. In this case, I’ll borrow a bit from our cover copy because these are words that have already been labored over and it saves me some work.

She’s heard the ghost stories about the stations and ignored them. She was wrong. The ghosts are real. Whatever they are, they’re hungry and they don’t like intruders. Whatever else she may be, the Space Marine is an intruder.

That satisfies me on the points I want to cover and gives me plenty of angles for my story seeds to come. That clocks the character story in at about 90 words. (I tend somewhere around 88 words. I don’t know why.) It gives me room for a sentence in case David takes a look and decides I’m missing something. But again, YMMV.

Character Description

This is actually just notes you’d give to an artist to describe what you want the piece. I’d give rough age, possibly body type, important details, what have you. In this specific case, we handed the art over to our cover artist George Cotronis. With him, because we know him as an artist we just gave him the layout requirements, that it’s a female space marine, and step back to wait for the magic to happen. If I were working with a new artist, I might get more specific and I might mention our Artist Guidelines. If you have some Creative Commons clip art you’re tossing in there, or you’re going to draw your own stick figure, you can skip this step.

Words

I actually like to do the Words to Use next, because this is simple and gets me juiced about the character. This is a mix of five verb and five Nouns. (Though, admittedly, I cheat sometimes and use adjectives here and there.) Usually, this process involves putting music on too loud and dancing around in front of my white board until the words spring to mind. Sometimes, like with this character, I can borrow from their profession to help with words. In this case, I’m going to hit up words from the DoD site I mentioned above and maybe some words from the Halo playing community. (If I can stand it.) Or maybe movie and TV related, Battlestar Galactica comes to mind and some words that suggest body horror to go along with the ghosts in the setting. After a little research, I come up with these words.

Nouns: Sticky, Intangible, EMP Intrusion, Trap,  Radiation.

Verbs: Frag, Strafe, Agonize, Decay, Freeze.

Again, there’s some double meanings here. (Frag could have been a noun, but I think it says more if it’s a verb.) A lot of your micro setting can be drawn out of these words and some of it took some tightening. For example, at first I used EMP Emitter because that sounded like a cool toy. While cruising the DoD site, though, I saw they had the term “EMP Intrusion” which says so much more with less. Now I could have a device that could do such a thing, or maybe monsters or station environment or whatever you want to do with it when you’re running the sheet.

The other fun thing about the Word to Use is that they’re not for you as a player. When you’re being the Space Marine, you can totally ignore this section if you want. It doesn’t come into play until your running the story for your partner. You have a bunch of words that imply things about your character and your setting, but challenge you as a GM because you have to jam them into the story of a character who has nothing to do with them.

Complications

There’s only three of these babies, and again, we’re going to be using the themes and setting tropes and so on from the character sheet even though they don’t get used by the player during his character turn. I like to draw on cliches or things that would regularly be a problem for a character like this. Why? Well, let me show you. Let’s say, these are your conflicts:

1. All Out of Ammo: During your story, being completely out of ammo is going to be a big problem.
2. Fracking Piece of Junk!: Some big important piece of technology will fail during your story and hinder you big time.
3. This Sucks: In your story, a vacuum will threaten your life.

This is all stuff that ties into a Space Marine in a Sci Fi horror pretty well, clearly, but it isn’t for her. These are complications her player throws at the other player. So, if the other player’s sheet is, say, a teenage super hero trying to pass a midterm without getting caught using her powers, that suggestion of a vacuum may not mean the vacuum of space, it may mean a vacuum cleaner that’s gone wrong somehow. Likewise, say the other player has a fantasy elf princess, they’re going to have great fun trying to figure out what ‘technology’ means within their story for the sake of the second conflict. This is really what this game is all about, twisting your head sideways and telling a short quick story while standing on your head.

And, so far as word count and all, lean on the short. Imply instead of say. I don’t say ‘vacuum can be space or a cleaner.’ I leave that to the players to decide. Ambiguity is a good thing when used on purpose, it’s especially useful in poetry, for example, and as I said, this is much more like poetry than it is like prose.

Story Seeds

For me, for whatever reason, this is THE hardest part of a Guestbook character. Partially because we’ve created some really crazy restraints and partially because I know these seeds are going to be what really inspires stories and I’m LOATHED to have them suck. Basically, these are ten (or nine, we’re working on the layout on that,) three sentence story starters that bloom into the adventure your character is going to go through. So, you look at your list on the character, pick a story seed you haven’t done yet, and tell the other player, your GM, what adventure you’re going to tell with her help. Clearly, every time you sit down to play this game it’s going to be different because the conflicts and so on come from a different sheet and person, but with several seeds to choose from, you have even more variety to play the same sheet over and over again.

How are seeds constructed? Well, first I decide if there’s a theme I’m using, or if I’m just drawing from the character. For example, with The Taco Girl, I wanted most of seeds to be ‘about’ her wanting to help her community and her family. This helped me narrow down what sorts of stories would come out of her hook.

For the sake of our Space Marine, I think that each of the seeds is going to draw from either what she’s personally looking for vs what the Company wants her to look for.

Beyond that, the format is very specific. One sentence to set up the story. One sentence to introduce the main conflict or problem the character will face, and one sentence to tell both player and GM what they character must to to resolve the story successfully. That’s it. That’s all the time you have for your seed. But no pressure, because you’ve already got in your head plenty of methods to help with this micro writing. Here’s my process.

1. Once on the station, you’re free to start looking for your daughter, held in cryostasis from before the crisis that shut the station down. Unfortunately, you’re not the only one looking for your daughter, as a bounty hunter appears on the station and now you’re racing to get to her first. Figure out why this bounty hunter wants your daughter and protect her from him before he can escape with her.

I feel like that’s a fun little seed with plenty of little mysteries to explore, but I think it can be tightened up. A lot actually. For example, we know the Space Marine STARTS on the station, so there’s no need to say ‘once on’ and so on. No need for bridges between the story hook at the end of your character story and your story seed. Start these little monster ‘in media res’ as the smart guys say. (In the middle of the action, if you can’t be bothered to google it and don’t know it already.) Additionally, some of the language can be tightened up and a lot of excess language can be dropped. Honenstly, I wouldn’t try to write the sentences perfectly tight the first time through. You’ll waste a lot of time thinking about doing instead of doing. With writing, especially mircowriting like this, it’s easier to perfect something that exists than it is to create something perfect out of nothing. Write your whole seed first, than go in and trim and adjust. With that in mind, here’s what I cut the seed down to.

1. Your daughter is being held in cryostasis on the station and you’ve got to find her. A cut-throat bounty hunter is on the station with you, he also wants to find your daughter, and it can’t be for any good reason. Get to her before he does or risk losing her forever.

Now, I’ve left some stuff out to make the story more flexible. Finding out why the guy wants her isn’t as important, but mostly that’s because I feel like the player will tend to include that anyway in order for the narrative to make sense as she’s creating it. In this case, I don’t mention ghosts, the evil corps that sent her up or anything like that. The player will again, potentially drawn in from that flavor, or they might not depending on the sort of descriptive words and complications they’re throwing into the mix. I don’t think it’s necessary for each story seed to hit on all points on the character. Quite the contrary, using some and not others gives you more variance out of one sheet and increases the chances for replay which is vital to this game. Three seeds based on the same idea with different parts of the sheets ‘setting’ can help you fill a sheet up pretty fast.

Here are some of the other seeds I’m going to throw on this character.

2. There’s a black box on the station you’re supposed to collect. Not only does it contain the reports of how your husband died up here, but the ghosts of all the other victims up here are trying to protect it from falling into corporate hands. Destroy the ghosts or prove to them that if you get the box, you’ll make sure their deaths are exposed for what they were; murder.

3. Your daughter is being held in cryostasis on the station and you’ve got to find her. Only, your dead husband is up there and he can’t see the difference between friend and foe anymore. Convince him that you are there to help so you can get past the protective spirit before the life support fails and your daughter dies.

4. You know what’s in the hardcopy you’ve been sent up to retrieve, and you know what it’s worth. Due to structural failing, the hardcopy has probably fallen into the lowest section of the ship, through a few ‘circles’ of ghostly-hell. Descend through several floors of ghost infested horrors to find the hardcopy without joining their ranks.

5. They told you it was just some equipment, but as soon as you see it, you know it’s a weapon. So you’ve got a huge radiation-producing megaweapon, but getting out a live with it is going to be hand since it seems to attract the ghosts on the station. Make good your daring escape with the weapon as the ghosts, monsters, and station itself try to stop you.

6. While collecting your bounty, you realize there are still about ten people alive on the station in need of help. They know how to avoid the monsters better than you do, but they don’t know how to survive the mercenaries sent up to ‘erase’ the ‘loose ends.’ Get the survivors out while they help you dodge the ghosts and you help hold off the mercs.

7. The station is supposed to have been ‘dead’ for about six months when you go up. And yet, as you are searching the wreckage for your bounty, your reality keeps getting overlapped by visions of that final fateful day. Don’t lose yourself to the horrific flashbacks of death or get dragged into it by the ghosts who can’t let go.

8. If there’s anything you hate more than bounty hunters, it’s pirates. The station is crawling with a team of pirates up here to steal company property. Fight off the pirates and prevent them from getting to anything too useful without them fragging you and adding your ghost to the community up there already.

9. You’ve been sent up with an engineer who is as brilliant as he is daring. What he isn’t, is prepared for the physical danger of a malfunctioning station full of hungry dead. Keep the man alive while he risks his neck to study what destroyed the station.

Some of these seeds will have identical set ups, they’ll share details, but because of little additions of setting or pieces of background left out, there’s a lot of room to play. Other things to keep in mind while you’re creating your seeds.

• The seeds do not need to be related. They’re only ‘cannon’ in the story they’re used, so even if the seeds contradict each other completely, no worries. (As in the case of number 1 and 3.)
• Cheat if you have to. There are times even the greatest poets broke form, and there’s really no problem with that. If it was good enough for The Bard and Dylan Thomas,  it’s good enough for me. (Just try not to do it too much, that’s half of the fun of the creation.)
• You don’t need to use the conflicts or the words in your seeds. Remember, they’re for the other character’s stories. They should fit themes and tropes and so on, but they don’t have anything to do with what happens to this character.
• Be exacting. Ambiguity in idea is good, in word choice it isn’t. Use exactly the word you mean, and use every word you can to fill in colour and concept. Spare nothing. Abuse your thesuraus. No risk of being flowery here, the work is too brief. (Micro writing fascinates me, but that’s another post.)
• Leave room for interpretation whenever possible, but especially in your ‘solution’ sentence. Don’t tell them ‘kill the monster, get the gold.’ Tell them ‘get around the monster, get whatever he’s hiding.’ Solutions that do not require violence are very good solutions indeed. There are plenty of games focused on slaying the monster. This is a game about solving the problem instead.

So, if you happen to still be reading at this point, thank you so much for sticking around, and I really hope you try your hand at this yourself. I look forward to hearing what you do with these sheets in play, in hacking, and in creation.

• I guess the big one is I had another baby. That’s two. We have replaced ourselves with smaller, more beautiful and probably more intelligent hybrids of our combined DNA. I’m already a more recovered and happier mom than I was, but a lot of that is because I didn’t have major sugry with this birth and I’m no longer a first time mom. (Duh.) I’ll call that a win.
• Tina gets smarter and more beautiful everyday. We’re talking about getting her a desk top next year because she’s already so computer literate. Every time she shows me a craft she’s done or a picture she’s drawn on the computer I tell her, ‘just beautiful.’ Every time I say it, I’m really saying it to her.
• I’m still getting paid to write, and now I’m starting to eek out a qualified career making enough money to get by.
• I think I’ve sold about another 15o,000 words this year, writing about 170 to 180,000 in total. Next year I’ll have a better count. (HA!)
• I’ve spoken at at three Cons this year and helped David land similar apperances, which boosts both of our careers and rocks pretty hardcore.
• I’ve actually seen physical copies of books I’ve worked on, three of which are on my shelf as we speak.
• I wrote for and got accepted in my first anthology. Buried Tales of Pinebox, TX is awesome and you should buy a copy if you haven’t already.
• I’ve been published on The Escapist and now have a regular blogging job at Altern8.com.

Looking over last year, there’s a few things I didn’t get to I wanted to this year, but I’m not too down about it.

• I didn’t hit 250k this year, but I did have a baby so I’m just going to have to live with that.
• I didn’t write and produce any radio drama. I just… forgot about it. What a damn shame. Maybe this year, assuming they go to a 36 hour day all of the sudden.
• I did not get Unhero out, but I’ve come to terms with the rewrites I’ll need to do first so that’ll just have to happen over time instead.

Plans for this year?

• I hope I can get more personal writing done, fiction and the like. I have a few creative writing classes this Spring so I don’t have much choice on that, but after the classes and in terms of novel writing we’ll see.
• I am dying to see Maschine Zeit finished up. I love it so much and believe in it it’s just a matter of time, like everything else.
• I’d like to speak at more cons this year. I have a few lined up, but really any excuse to travel and get out of the house is better than the last.
• I want to read more books this year.
• I want to get back to learning Italian. This entirely novel-writing related.
• And how about a totally arbatrary goal? I want 500 twitter followers by 2011. I have no control over that, it sees like a pretty random thing, so that should be fun to look at next year.

• I did Phauxcon the week before last and it was a certified blast. The smallest and coziest convention I’ve been to yet, I loved the chance for a real personal experience with the other attendees. I want to thank our hosts Robert and Sierra, they were awesome, I’d do it again next year without hesitation, and I think David and I created some new gamers in the crowd. That always makes a nerd-mama proud. While there, I got to hear from writer L.A. Banks, her story is beyond inspiring and developed a pretty immediate admiration for her. David talks about her talk here. The stuff of inspiration.

• My first fully independent role playing game is now up for you to buy at RPGNow. Torn Apart by Radiation Wraiths is a teaser, demo style game written for Maschine Zeit, a full Horror/Science fiction setting David and I are working on and hope to have out next year. Torn Apart by Radiation Wraiths is a full contained game complete with five developed characters full of secrets and motives. Torn Apart is also my first experiment in my Dominadora project. It’s less than $2 bucks over at RPGNow, so head over there and pick up your copy. (Note to new customers. Torn Apart had some strong language in it, so you have to login to view it. Login is free and required to buy anyhow, so it saves you a step later!)
• Next weekend I’ll be at GameXpo just a hop skip and jump from Philly. I’m going to be there pretty much all weekend manning tables, running games, getting people excited and hopefully selling more than a few copies of Torn Apart. In addition to all that, on Sunday David will be doing is WILDLY successful “RPG Design in an Hour” Panel and I’ll be joined with him, this dude, and this other sketchy character to talk about pen and paper RPGs and how awesome our writing is. (Erm, you know, not too much self promotion, I’m sure.) Come on down and hang out or we might have to bring the whole con to you, and trust me, you don’t want that sort of shenanigans going on at your place.
• I’m getting some real movement and support over at A Letter to the Game Industry. If you don’t know what that is yet, in short, it’s an open conversation going on about being a woman gamer and all the highs and lows that entails. Professionals to casual players are welcome to join the conversation, and I hope you will too.

Beyond that, I have about a dozen new projects sitting on various burners and various plates. I cannot wait until I can tell you more about them when I can. Really very exciting stuff.

Why? Well, because you can get you geek on, talk about vampires AND see my husband, (David Hill’s,) hit panel “Design an RPG in an Hour.” Come see that, grab some lunch, and after lunch come back to see us talking about Vampires at your gaming table. Here are the blurbs.

Design an RPG in an Hour

We’re making a pen and paper RPG, and you’re invited to the design meeting. During the panel, you’ll address the problem-solving and analytical questions required to design a successful game. During the discussion, we’ll discuss the basics of game theory and how to outline, centered around an example you’re participating in. Soon after, the fruits of your labor will be published online as a downloadable ebook.

and

Filamena Young, a fiction and game writer, and David Hill, an Ennie Award winning game writer, want you to bring more fang to into your roleplaying. Both Filamena and David have worked on numerous products from White Wolf Publishing, (publishers of Vampire: the Requiem,) but also write for many types of pen and paper games. With a strong understanding of the vampire myth from early Slavic plagues of the undead to the modern Paranormal Romantic dreamboats, there isn’t a vampire that can’t find a comfortable way into your game, no matter what you play.

They’ll be lots of other stuff going on, but I wanted to make sure you all knew to check it out. Have a great weekend and if I don’t see you at the Con, tell Obama I said hi!

So what have I been doing? Celebrating some holiday fun with Thaumatrope Twitter fiction. (Twiction?)

And

Oh, and did you see the Collection of Horrors? You should, I’ve written two bits of it, and you can download one RIGHT NOW. (Or, if you rather, get a subscription and get a whole bunch of Hunter the Vigil goodness, I can’t blame you. There’s some great stuff in there. Even some great stuff by David, the man from whom my babies come.)

Oh, and did I tell you I’m going to be in anthology? A real book and everything. Why yes, you should preorder your copy now.

Later, more book reviews and maybe some links.

This is what I do with a $300 graphics program.

Notes from today’s stick figure blog:

The Philadelphia Inquirer

My Twitter

Now I just have to hope to someday find out when my nerd books will be out so I can seduce the paper into talking to me like I’m a real writer.

So, I start school again tomorrow and I am feeling very very mixed about it. Most of it’s just online classes to satisfy some random person’s idea of what a degree should look like. I am taking a creative writing class on campus in person with, I’m sure, a bunch of 18 year olds hoping for an easy A. 

It might be awesome, and I probably shouldn’t let my general hatred for the education system get in the way of my good time, but the feeling remains and I’m having a hell of a time shaking it.

In other news, I have a few things out to a couple of compainies, and I’m trying not to dismiss them just because it’s taking longer to hear back than I want. I have no outstanding work and that’s making me buggy. I can find my own work, of course, and I will, but contract work is just so much nicer. 

I have a head full of romantic stories. I don’t usually, and so it’s strange to me. Maybe I’m in heat.

On that note, 

TTYL

* The Stepsister Scheme is turning out to be more awesome then I had hoped. Oh dear. There are going to be five of these!! (Mr. Hines, I can’t decide if I love your or hate you!)

* If you’re a Requiem player and reading this, please go immediately and order your copy of Ancient Mysteries. I can honestly tell you at this point this is going to be the most beautifully produced thing White Wolf has yet put out. I was blown out if my seat by it, really. If you aren’t a Requiem player, you should be. 

*The word ‘seemed’ needs to be stricken from my language forever. Really. Done with it.

TTFN