Books and Games

Mornings around here have changed. I’ve continued to suffer from sleep issues, which means I drag, and so I’ve been adopting new patterns to try and help. For instance, rather than sitting down and slowly notwriting while I eat breakfast and surf for way more news than even interests me, as soon as my wife leaves I go clean the horse stalls in the morning, then eat breakfast. It gets the blood moving and wakes me up, but it means I’m not plunked in front of the laptop until 10:15 or 10:30, by which time I don’t feel like I’ve got enough time for any kind of lengthy blog post.

I’m allegedly reading War and Peace in the evenings, but I’ve only managed 40 pages. What with the sleep issues, I’m pretty zonked by 8:00 in the evening or so, and a story from The Savage Sword of Conan omnibus collection I own feels much more like my speed.

Here’s three interesting things, though. First, my old friend Patrick Kanouse just sent me his novel The Clearing and I’m looking forward to reading it this month, and not just because it’s considerably shorter than War and Peace. Kanouse is an intelligent and talented writer. I’ve deliberately kept from reading anything about it so the whole thing will be a surprise.

Second, I used to review Dark City Games products for Black Gate, and noticed the other day that they had some new adventures out. They’re a blast, and I ordered the most recent to round out my collection. Here, go take a look. Hopefully I’ll steal time to talk about them either here or at Black Gate in the near future.

Lastly, we escaped to the movies two weekends ago and saw Kubo and the Two Strings. I ended up liking it much more than I expected, and not just because of the astonishing animation. The story ended up taking me to different places than I expected. Honestly, I believe I enjoyed it more than my wife or daughter. It was a good adventure story with lots of surprises. The fight with the giant skeleton alone might have been worth the price of admission.