Making Soft Magic Systems Work

My essay, "Making Soft Magic Systems Work", is live on the SFWA blog! 

LTUE Cards

These little cards were supposed to show up right before LTUE, but here they are, weeks early! I'm very grateful for one less thing to stress about. If you're at the conference, I have cards to give away now! I'll have some with me, and I'll put some on the freebie table.

Release Day for The Obsidian Palace

The third and final book in the Kitchens and Kingdoms trilogy is out today! The Obsidian Palace is live! I have no idea how it got to be January 24th. Find it here!

I've been DMing Pathfinder 2E for a year and a half now, and I'm really pleased to see Paizo navigating the whole OGL thing not only well, but with style. Today seemed like a good day for a pretty picture.

The LEGO minifigs are not my PCs, but some of my favorite NPCs. The lady with the frying pan has been around since the very first level-one adventure. The PCs have since gifted her a mithral waffle iron (which are supposed to make the very best waffles).

LTUE 2023 Schedule: Books + Boardgames

 LTUE 2023 is a month away, and I will actually be there this year! I was surprised and excited that there will be a boardgame + writing crossover panel, and I'm on it. My stories for Keyforge obviously started with a board game, but so did Ana's Asteroid. I began thinking about orbits, space travel, and ways to easily go back and forth from Mars to Earth during long games of Phil Eklund's High Frontier. That all led to the idea of the Platinum Pheonix—a large asteroid nudged into an orbit that would pass near Earth and Mars, allowing it to function as both a shuttle and a mining colony.

Anyway, my LTUE 2023 (Feb 16-18) schedule, in full:

Thursday, 1:00 PM: Using Games in Your Fiction

Friday, 5:00 PM: Historical Sources for Historical Research

Friday, 7:00 PM: Book Signing

Saturday, 1:00 PM: Top 10 Board Games for Writers

Saturday, 4:00 PM: Influential Tomes of Earth's Cultures

The Obsidian Palace Pre-Orders are live!

You can find The Obsidian Palace here!

Writing books is a strange thing. The Obsidian Palace felt half-finished when I got a solid draft down. It felt finished when I turned it in to my publisher. And then again when we finished our rounds of edits and copyedits. There's that sense of finishing once again, as I see the Kitchens and Kingdoms series page on Amazon with all three books. I'm sure I'll have that same feeling on January 24th, when The Obsidian Palace releases.

But, in many ways, this is also the beginning for this book—a launch out into the world of readers. To everyone who's been reading along and leaving reviews for the series, thank you so much. I'm very proud to be sharing this last book with all of you.