Back of the Envelope

I recently pre-ordered the 13th Age RPG, and I've had a chance to look through the rules and come away with some thoughts. In the same...

I spent most of last night assembling the workbench shown on the left.  It took more time that I expected, but otherwise it went quite smoot...

My latest Black Gate post is online .  No review this month, but I do talk about reviewing.  I'll let you decide whether that's a co...

Coach's Midnight Diner was one of the first places to publish one of my stories.  At the time, it was a yearly anthology of Christian ge...

My latest review , of The Brightest Light by Scott J. Robinson, is now up at Black Gate .

Kristin and I went to see the latest Star Trek movie last Friday.  We had fun, but we ultimately weren't very impressed.  It wasn't ...

I was inspired by this article to start an exercise routine.  I liked the idea of a short, high intensity routine that could include both a...

Kristin and I spent the last weekend in Quebec city, the capital of the French-speaking province of Quebec, where we saw the sights and went...

There's been a lot of talk recently about what motivated the Marathon bombers.  The assumption is that they were following the dictates ...

Not many plot spoilers below, but I might give away an emotional epiphany or two. Kristin and I went to see Iron Man 3 on Saturday.  Whil...

My latest review for Black Gate is now up.  This month, it's Annie Bellet's Avarice .

It's been a week since the bombing attack on the Boston marathon, and if there's one thing you can say about the week, it sure wasn...

I went down to North Carolina last week to attend my grandfather's funeral, where he received military honors, including a three-volley ...

My latest review at Black Gate, of Dalya Moon's Broken Shell Island , is now up .  I thought the plot could have been a little more log...

C. R. Wiley has an interesting post up concerning the different views of the alien as expressed by C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft.  It's...

In a writers' forum I participate, the question has come up of whether writers really need to read.  The answer is yes.  I'm not one...

I'm old enough to have played the original 1985 Bard's Tale game shortly after it came out, in glorious 320x240 4-color CGA. That ma...

Last October, my wife and I went to World Fantasy in Toronto .  One of the things you receive at World Fantasy is a huge bag full of free (i...

A friend of mine, and a contributor to the now defunct Storyblogging Carnival , is running a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a tele...

My latest review is up at Black Gate.  This month, it's Robert Sier's Chains of Loss , but I've been calling it Cyborgs vs. Or...