Happenings…

Quick update, I suppose.

Update 1: I recently had the chance to interview one of the museum curators at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, as well as tour their latest exhibit “A Song for the Horse Nation.” You can find both articles in the links provided. I rather enjoy blending interviews, history, and museum exhibitions together and really enjoyed the process for these.

Update 2: My wife and I just returned from an extended vacation in Paris. Yes, again. It was fabulous, wonderful, exciting, and much needed. I’ll be posting additional journal thoughts and photos here when I have free moments to construct them.

Update 3: I am pulling back into the writing saddle (so to speak) with both BattleTech and my aforementioned nonfiction book project. I have a few new chapters to complete for Potomac Press and I am in the process of submitting two proposals to Herb for additional sourcebooks in 2012. Plus, I have this whole Handbook: House Kurita to outline and write.

Update 4: And, finally – there’s a new MechWarrior game coming out. And I’ll be skipping this, mostly because of this from one of their game blogs:

So remember this, time and experience (the real kind), will always equal greater skill. Greater skill will always equal more rewards. You can’t buy skill, you earn it.

Let’s face it – for me, time is precious. With my commitments to my wife, work, freelancing, and basic life skills, I barely have time to play Wii and Xbox (first generation – not the 360), much less play with my friends. (They’ll vouch for me here – I see them for a HALO or Black Ops party maybe once in 3 months; you can imagine where I usually place on the kill boards and where my rank sits…) And I ditched my desktop PC last year; the main computers in our house are our laptops, and mine is specifically geared to writing and photo editing.

So as much as it might be fun to play, I’ll be avoiding it.

Place de la Concorde and Pont Alexandre III (Day 5)

The last and final entry of our October 2010 journey to Paris. View some of the 700+ photos I took in my Flickr collection.

We awoke late in the morning – no surprise after a full and relaxing late day/night before. After a brief morning nibble, we wandered the Marias for a bit, souvenir hunting for family and friends and generally determined to enjoy our last full day in Paris. Being a Sunday, there were few people out and about, save the various cafes and brasseries around us.

We stopped for a lingering brunch at a cafe near the Centre Georges-Pompidou. It was probably the first meal I had that was only so-so; my chicken was rather dry, though the coffee more than made up for it. We then took advantage of the few remaining Metro tickets we had left and headed out to the Place de la Concorde where the Luxor Obelisk stands at the entrance to the Tuileries. Roughly a kilometer away was the distant Arc de Triomphe, a straight shot down the Avenue des Champs Elysées. The sky was a perfect blue for photographing.

St. Germain and the Arc de Triomphe (Day 4)

Already halfway through our stay and we’ve seen everything we wished to see, save the Arc de Triomphe – something we planned on doing at night. So today was a morning of leisure and rest. When we were finally refreshed, we headed out to the Batobus and rode it to Faubourg Saint-Germain-des-Prés under a glorious autumn sky. (We had awoken to rain, so the clearing weather was a blessing.) We managed to shoot a few more photos of the Tour Eiffel with the gorgeous blue sky as the boat wound its way to St. Germain.

Reaving Raving – Ask the Author

So the book’s been “out” for a week now and I know many have already devoured it from cover to cover. (When I say “out” I mean that the PDF is available for public sale; the print copy’s GenCon run was 240, of which only 28 survived the GenCon hordes. The book hits store shelves sometime after Labor Day – but don’t hold me to that. CGL reserves the right to override my pathetic attempts at guessing street dates.)

I’d like to give the chance to those who’ve read the book (or who can’t wait and instead consume spoilers) to ask me questions. You can be as pointed or as specific as you’d like; I’ll answer to the best that I can *without* breaking NDA. I normally don’t do this, but I had a lot of guys come up to me at the convention wanting to ask questions but I couldn’t really discuss the book due to the crazy-busyness that surrounded the booth. There’s a lot of answers I can now give about the story process that won’t “spoil” anything, and I’d like to share. But I need you, dear reader, to initiate the discussion.

And So It Begins…

Go forth and enjoy.

See you at GenCon or, failing that, on the battlefield of the future.