lowell francis

I am part of the Writer’s Symposium this year at Gen Con and looking forward to it. Last time I went to one, it was in Lake Geneva, and a whole lot tinier, I believe, than nowadays.

One lure is the chance to talk with my brother Lowell, who is (is it possible?) a bigger game geek than I. You may be familiar with his Age of Ravens website, which talks a lot about RPG history, design, and gamemastering.

The SFWA Board and the Game Committee are continuing to discuss how to best tweak the qualifications.

Marc Tassin has very kindly set up a town hall event at the con, where I can talk about the decision, listen to your feedback, and take questions. Here’s my schedule overall; if you’re interested in the game writing decision, please let me know if you’re going to miss the Town Hall and would like to set up a time to come and talk to me. I’m currently writing up another blog post on what SFWA offers game writers, because there’s quite a bit.

Here’s my schedule; I’ll be updating it as it fills up. Unless noted, an event still had tickets last time I checked.

Thursday

9 AM – attend Writers Symposium Opening Ceremonies
1 PM – Writer’s Craft: Writing Stories in First Person
2 PM – Short Fiction: Where to Start the Story
6 PM – Writer’s Craft: Story to Idea Workshop No tickets left
7 PM – Town Hall meeting about SFWA

Friday

9 AM – Writer’s Craft: Novel Writing 101 Very few tickets left.
10 AM – Character Craft: Hearing the Character’s Thoughts
12 PM – Signing
4 PM – attending a panel
7 PM – Attend friend’s reading and dinner after

Saturday

9 AM – attending a panel
12 PM – Lunch meeting
6 PM – Character Craft: Building Them Up
8 PM – Author Hangout Event

Sunday

9 AM – Read & Critique Session C
11 AM – attending a panel
12 PM – Private event
1 PM – Closing ceremonies

I’ve started tabletop playing again, although it’s via Google Hangouts rather than in person. My brother (whose excellent gaming and storytelling blog, Age of Ravens, you should check out) running a Changeling: The Lost campaign and it’s a great way to spend a little time with both him and my sister-in-law, along with meeting some new fellow players. I really love what he’s doing, which is using a system called Microscope in order to collaboratively generate the setting for the game, and it’s making me wonder about the possibilities of it for generating a shared world setting.

We went around the “table” first generating some high level concepts, such as vampires being very rare in this world, the existence of neon elementals, and some rule-specific stuff that kinda flew past my head, but which I’m understanding more as I keep going through the rules. The game’s set in Las Vegas, but successive rounds helped define the specifics of the world and some of the NPCs, like Wayne Newton: Werewolf Hunter or the Count, a bitter, twisted man who runs The Society for the Preservation of Vampires. Lowell’s blogged with more complete details here.

I really love this sort of session, because it’s so much fun to take someone else’s addition and riff on it. After the first round, the person starting each one had to come up with what’s called in Microscope terms a “lens,” something that each addition that round must reference. Ours were: guides, corruption, and alien abduction, and if you look at Lowell’s write-up, you may be able to trace where some of those items came from.

I was just at ArmadilloCon over the weekend, and had a fabulous time of it. There’s an account of that, with sundry photos, on my Google+ page.

For me it was a pretty productive con – I connected with a few people that I definitely wanted to meet or see, I got a chance to hang out with some favorite peeps, I got a little writing done, and I did some career/work stuff that I wanted to get done. And I got the photo of Howard Waldrop with my brother and Gene Ha’s Project Superman.