September 11, 2001: The unimaginable happened. But I choose to remember that in that awfulness, we revealed ourselves to be capable of so much love.
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I spent the day discussing art, creativity, storytelling, and life with my students. I am immersed within narratives right now, drinking in their spirits. It was during one of those slow moments that I had a conversation, one muddied with the human-ness of emotions and the personal strands that tether us with the ties that […]
When I teach the Introduction to Magazine Writing class, I make my students read many pieces from the National Magazine Awards. I switch the readings each semester, but one I keep is “The Things That Carried Him,” by Chris Jones. It’s a heart-breaking piece about everyone who comes in contact with an Indiana soldier as […]
Today would have been Gary Gygax’s birthday. Gygax, one of the co-creators of the game Dungeons & Dragons, inadvertently helped create the massive computer game industry that exists by inspiring three decades of future game designers. There’s been much written on the subject [you can read our chapter on the D&D Creation Myth], and there’s […]
The Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down just a bit ago, marking the end of the Shuttle Space Age in America. Throughout my life, Americans have gone to space regularly. Now that is over. As I dug through the Dungeons & Dreamers yesterday constructing a draft of the Second Edition introduction, I was struck by how […]
It’s been almost 10 years since we first started working on Dungeons & Dreamers, a fact that I hadn’t thought about until just now. Time flies. In the game world, not much has changed…and everything has changed. The timing is right, and John + I decided upon a basic framework for the Second Edition of […]
My former student – and The Invictus Writer – David Ake finally got me out to the shooting range today. It was a cold, dreary day but that hardly dampened our spirits. He’s an excellent teacher and an honor to his country. (He’s a veteran of the second Gulf War.) Here’s my first attempt to […]
Grades don’t matter. This is what I tell my students ever week throughout the school year. Education is about the process, I tell them as they roll their eyes, not the product. I implore them to focus on squeezing out every bit of knowledge from their assignments. I want them to attack uncertainty without fear […]
In the next few weeks, I’ll be giving presentations that recap what happened this year at South by Southwest. I’ve asked my friends (and the awesome folks at SXSW) to help me gather links and ideas. Here’s what we’ve assembled so far: SXSW 2011 Mind Map. What do you think? What did we miss? Once […]
If you’ve followed my blog at all, you know that I have a deep and meaningful relationship with Mr. Hank Moody (and Charles Bukowski, the writer the show Californication is based upon). At his highest, Moody is a sharp, witty writer examining the human condition while balancing his on-again/off-again relationship with girlfriend Karen and his […]
I wrote a piece on Tron over at in media res about the importance of Tron franchise for transmedia storytelling and user culture. Tron: Legacy hits theaters on December 17, 2010, 28 years after the original movie debuted. As a geek, Im giddy beyond comprehension. As a storyteller, I cant help think the name Legacy […]
My writing career was less than six months old in 1995 and things were not going well. I’d botched an interview with Jim Carroll. I’d choked a brief encounter with Hunter S. Thompson. I quit my job at Cincinnati CityBeat, a local weekly where I was writing news. Instead, I wanted to do surveys by […]