Bretwalda and Other Adventures

For the first time in the last half dozen years I missed GenCon. Between the excellence of the Writer’s Symposium — which is growing at a phenomenal rate — the friends and fans to meet or reconnect with, and the sheer size of the game room stuffed full of wonderful things to see, it has become one of my must stops. Especially since it’s the only large convention that’s only a few hours away.

Alas, a perfect storm of events crowned by a family wedding made it impossible for me to attend this year. I did swing through Indianapolis the weekend of GenCon on the way to that wedding, but didn’t get anywhere close to downtown.

While my daughter practiced her driving and my wife coached her, I was in the back seat. Occasionally I managed some writing, but that proved hard given my daughter’s preferred choice of music and its volume, so I ended up reading instead. I finally started in on Brewalda, a collection of twelve stories about a mystical axe forged to safeguard England. The stories date from the pulp days and have reprinted only last year, for the first time. I picked it up because I’d heard about the tales for years. So far, so good, although the first two haven’t bowled me over yet with inventiveness.

I’m also working my way through another one of those pulp treasures I mentioned earlier in the year. I’ll have more details about that later. Right now I’m especially enjoying a swashbuckler by an author I’ve never heard about before.

A major reorganization is taking place here at Jones central. We’re finally getting around to finishing our walk-out basement, which means yours truly has to sort and organize a bunch of stuff that’s accumulated over the years. Between that and the parade of house guests things have been busy, but I’m still working away on revising my eighth novel, and I’m occasionally performing some final tests on my friend Dean’s B-17 game. I need to step up the pace on both while maintaining the basement reorganization.