My Favorite Trope — Time Travel, Pt. 1

We’ve all fallen down the bottomless pit that is TV Tropes (WARNING: Following this link will result in loss of time ranging from several minutes to several days or longer). Even if you don’t know what a trope is, you know what tropes are. For the purposes of this series, I’m not talking about the…

Clarion West Write-a-thon Wrap-up!*

The Clarion West Write-a-thon is over, and I'm pleased to share that this year was by far my most successful year, both in terms of donations and in terms of blitzing through my main goal. The first goal was to progress on the Super Sekrit Projekt, with 5k words a week. I can now share…

What I’m Doing This Summer

I've recently made passing mention to a super secret collaborative project I'm working on. I've been hesitant to say more because so often projects like this die before they ever get momentum. However, after six-ish months of planning, plotting, and worldbuilding, and three weeks of intense writing that have already pushed us past the 25k…

Changing Up the Pronouns: They/them edition

For a long time I didn't change my pronouns because I've spent my life correcting people on pronouncing my name, and it's exhausting and annoying. However, revising Chiaroscuro (especially the Sadaz chapters) has had me thinking a lot about pronouns, identity, visibility, and the importance of language in disrupting people's gender assumptions. For that reason,…

Art is not Apolitical

I went to see the touring production of The King & I on Thursday night (in order to get Hamilton touring company tickets, we had to get SHN season tickets, and The King & I is one of the season shows). Just before the King's song "A Puzzlement," in a line of dialogue that I…

Can the Subaltern Kick Ass?

We’re two games in on ‘The Path to Power’ chronicle, and I’m thinking I should have subtitled it ‘Can the Subaltern Kick Ass?’ because the entire party is made up of characters from colonized indigenous groups and allied Others. We have Altani, an envoy from the local nomadic Shoanti tribes who were violently pushed off…

T-minus Two Days… and my music isn’t ready

Two days left for the start (restart?) of The Path to Power (my chronicle title for the Crimson Throne/Korvosa game). I still have a long list of stuff to do to get ready. My to-do list, parts redacted for spoilers: Fully outline metaplot/plot points Finish reading/skimming ALL player guides Sort out music/playlists Figure out how…

Prep Weekend Post Mortem

I spent most of my weekend in game prep. A good chunk of prep was piecing together what I'd done and what I'd planned to do five years ago. Some of my notes were helpful, some confusing. I ended up sending a timeline to the players that included two game sessions of stuff that we…

Gaming as Gift Giving

I'm going to be running a game. Pathfinder, based loosely on the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, but so thoroughly reworked that it really only bears passing acquaintance in form or function. This is a revamp of a game I started back in... holy macrame, 2011. It fizzled out when I went to…

Sunk Costs and the 2016 WFC

Back in January, I sent the WFC2016 concom an email letting them know that I would not be attending unless they posted accessibility and harassment policies, as the membership and extended community had been asking them to do for months. They eventually (and very grudgingly) did put up some (painfully anemic) policies, and I decided…