Going Full Circle, Wearing Old Hats

Meditations on a Life in Geekery

Growing up, I was big into Batman, Lord of the Rings, and James Bond. To a lesser extent, Star Trek and Star Wars. Bear in mind, Star Trek was just one television series that had been canceled before I was old enough to know what it was, and Star Wars was just one, then two, then three films and that’s it. But Batman had hundreds of comics, toys, cartoons and a live-action television series. (I met Adam West at least twice as a child.) Lord of the Rings was both impossibly dense and had a whole shelf of related books in the store (encyclopedias and art books mostly). James Bond had books and an ongoing movie series. These things had the depth of content you could pour over for hours. Beyond that, it was fantasy ficition—Michael Moorcock’s Elric loomed supreme there—and Dungeons & Dragons.

The Monster Manual, the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and, perhaps my favorites, the Fiend Folio and the original Deities & Demigods (the one with Cthulhu and Elric and Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser!)—these books were a bridge to an endless world of imagination. Even when I wasn’t playing, I would just study them for hours with an intensity I’ll never match as an adult.

When high school hit, I packed up all these things. One of the cheerleaders actually asked me, “Is it true you put all your comics in the attic?” I replied, “Yes,” to which she responded, “Good. I’ll let the girls know you are available now.”

I traded my imagination for standing with the guys in the parking lot of a Mr. Gatti’s Pizza after hours, hoping to score some beer or meet some girls. (Note: Few girls hung out at Mr. Gatti’s Pizza’s parking lot after 8 PM.)

Then college came. And college did what college does and turned me off reading books for several years. But Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight did come out while I was there. And I did read it. What’s more, in my fifth year, I discover theater. Things were stirring again.

I moved to England to study acting in Oxford for a summer and then in London for two semesters. And in London, I wandered into Forbidden Planet, which was the most amazing store I’d ever seen.

And there I found Call of Cthulhu, the roleplaying game.

After London, I worked in theater for two years in Chicago. The RPG didn’t come with me, but it was there I took a screenwriting class, and then several screenwriting classes. And then, after a year home during which I actually played the James Bond 007 roleplaying game, I mustered up the courage to move to L.A.

I worked as a production assistant for a while on music videos and infomercials. Then I got hired by Titan in London to work as a journalist covering first Star Trek and then Babylon 5 as well. Suddenly, my life was all about genre again.

I wrote a few screenplays—they were optioned but not produced—and then when the shows I was covering were being canceled and sci-fi productions were moving out of L.A. to Vancouver and Australia, I went to San Francisco to work in the dot com industry. I worked for a start up called Bookfase.com. We didn’t make it, but we briefly were an exciting company working on “browser based reading.” We signed up a lot of science fiction and fantasy authors. So many that when everything collapsed, I was able to move into publishing, first as a freelance anthologist, and then as the editorial director and art director of an SF&F imprint at a midsized publisher (where I actually worked with quite a few people I had read as a child.)

Fifteen years later, I left that to write my own children’s novels (and one Star Wars book). And somewhere in that time, I started buying, then actually playing, roleplaying games again. I started back with Fate and then moved on to D&D.

I can’t not involve myself in my hobbies, so I wrote a few things for Kobold Press and River Horse Games.

Then the pandemic hit. And my father died. And I couldn’t write prose anymore.

So I thought I’d take a month and work up a little 30 page PDF adventure set in Norrøngard, the Norse-inspired land of my first novel.

That turned into a huge project that lasted over a year and produced not one but two hefty hardcover volumes. And a 3D printable board game. And VTT maps. And tokens. And a player’s guide. And a soundtrack. And then a whole other book length adventure. And now it’s growing, moving both beyond D&D and beyond Norrøngard.

And I’ve put an old hat back on my head. Editor. Anthologist.

And now Tales from Stolki’s Hall, a short story anthology written by other authors (many of whom are old friends from when I ran the SF&F imprint) with a deluxe gamer edition full of D&D mechanics, is in its last 9 hours on Kickstarter.

And I’m an editor again. An anthologist again. And a game designer. Art director. Playing in a fantasy world with my friends, a bridge to endless imagination. Thanks for walking this bridge with me!