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Arrr….Good Timing, Matey…

So, there are a couple of trailers for Disney’s forthcoming Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl movie floating around the ‘net: The “corset” teaser trailer, and the full-length trailer (low bandwidth version, high bandwidth version).

Zombie pirates….goofy action…swashbuckley goodness. Looks like the release of Skull & Bones is going to turn out to be perfectly timed…which was completely unplanned when Ian Sturrock and I first started knocking the idea around at the Treasure Island pirate show in Vegas, two years ago. Hell, we didn’t even know the movie was in development.

Life works, sometimes. Not often enough for any of our tastes, but when it slides together seamlessly, it’s always good to make a note of it, out loud, just in case the Fates are listening. You want them to know you appreciate it, after all.

GMS

Know, O Prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis….

I’m a big fan of Conan.

Robert E. Howard’s stories were some of the first fantasy tales I devoured in my discovery of the genre…I remember fondly the day when my father took me into Manhattan with him one day, and in addition to the scads of office supplies I got to scam from his office (the joy of gamers everywhere: notebooks, binders, graph paper!) he took me to a bookstore near his office where he got me my first copy of the Dungeon Masters Guide and the first of the Conan paperbacks from Ace.

Conan the Barbarian was my first R-rated film, and I spent years reading Marvel Comics series, from Conan to King Conan to Savage Sword of Conan.

Needless to say, I am looking forward to the new Conan RPG coming from Mongoose Publishing. I can’t wait to see what they’re going to do with it….and I have high hopes for the quality of the game, given the fact that Ian Sturrock (designer of their Slaine RPG, and one of my co-authors on Green Ronin’s Skull & Bones) has been tapped as the author.

However, if you, like me, can’t wait for it to come out, check out the following fan sites, where industrious gamers have produced their own versions of Conan for the D20 rules system:

Vincent N. Darlage’s Conan the Barbarian for Third Edition D&D site is great, concentrating especially on the portrayal of Conan in the original Howard stories.

The Hyborian Age d20 Campaign Site is another good one, concentrating on the setting as a campaign, rather than focusing on adaptation of Howard’s characters.

Very cool.

GMS

Good line, from comics writer Warren Ellis, sent out this weekend on his email-list sorta-blog, BAD SIGNAL:

“It’s nearly midnight on a Saturday night and I’m still bloody writing.  Writing, as a job, is about as glamorous as a pig tit necklace.”

I’ve settled into my new schedule: Working from home, with the exception of in-office days on Tuesday and Wednesday. Should save a considerable amount of money, considering the daily cost of the commute on NJ Transit. Luckily, I’ve got a reasonable manager.

The realization that, given a return to Kansas, I could afford to write full-time again is never too far from my mind. I really haven’t written ANYTHING in almost 2 years. Nothing finished, anyway. First, I wrestled with a fairly crippling depression, based largely on the stress of failing finances…a nasty little death-spiral: writing was only barely scraping me along, which depressed me, making it hard for me to write, which cut down on my income, making the situation worse. Then, salvation of a sort—I got the current job. Finances got a lot better, but writing dropped off to ZERO, pretty much due to the massive commute and long work-days. The thought of being able to write, with the knowledge that I could make more than enough to live comfortably, is a big part of the attraction of returning to Kansas.

Back to work. More later.

GMS