Friday, July 24, 2015

Heading to GenCon

This time next week GenCon will be in full swing, and I will be there. I'm pretty excited. It is my second time going, and somehow I'm even more excited than I was last year. My housemate says it is because I don't have the anxiety about the unknown. Maybe she's right.

Last year I also had more of a plan for when I was there. The Writer's Symposium was a big draw for me, and I attended a good 10-12 hours of lectures given by Michael Stackpole. Considering how much that advice improved my own writing, I'd say it was worth the trip for that alone.

This year the writer's symposium is also a big draw and will be featuring two of my favorite authors in the guise of Delilah S. Dawson and Chuck Wendig. The only problem is, when we made the plans to go last year I made the decision that my focus this time around would be more on gaming. That doesn't mean I can't go to one of the Writer Symposium events (or several) but I do want to get my game on while there.

I suppose we'll see what happens. Last year my friend and I had more fun the days we had vague notions of what we wanted to do and just walked around with generic tickets than we did the times we had specific things we wanted to be a part of. We also tended to stray towards the more professional games. Demos run with WotC sponsorship for D&D 5th, an Edge of the Empire game run by Fantasy Flight Game, stuff like that.

This year, well, we'll see.

Either way I'm excited.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

What You Know. What You Don't Know

For the Fourth of July a good friend of mine invited me out to the cape to enjoy the fireworks in his hometown while partaking in a friends and family barbecue on his father and brother's lobster boats. The trip was a lot of fun. Enough so that it made the 4 hour drive there and 6 hour drive back (fatigue + traffic slowed us down) more than worth it. It also was an enlightening experience for me. So much of what I saw was knew, and yet much of it was also things I already knew, just made obvious to me in that way that makes them feel so relevant and meaningful.