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Every day, most of this week, I’m sitting down with the manuscript of For the Killing of Kings and slowly reading it aloud. I’m addressing any copyeditor questions and suggestions, and also making some minor tweaks. This is the next to last chance for me to make any changes, and the last real chance to make any substantive changes — adding entire lines and paragraphs and the like. I’ll have a final shot to correct typos, but this is about it. So it’s kind of important.

GenCon is taking place next week, and I’m looking forward to that. I’ve been leafing through some cool game stuff I traded away for on my birthday. One of my favorite acquisitions is a compilation of the first four issues of Fight On! magazine. I’m late to the party, for I think at this point the magazine is defunct. If the first four issues are anything to go by, it’s a wonderful resource for creative old school gaming, with inventive adventures and hex crawls and dungeons, suggestions for alternate rules and classes, and various other goods that are quite inspiring. It really is a treasure trove.

I haven’t been reading much, although two books I’ve been wanting for a while recently arrived, again courtesy of my birthday. Fire Dance, by Illana C. Myer, sequel to Last Song Before Night. I’ve sung the praises of the latter on the site before, and am definitely looking forward to the sequel.

The second book is from the Robert E. Howard Foundation, and collects some final weird fiction uncompiled in any of the other book releases either from Del Rey or the fine line of publications from the foundation. There are a few stories in here I’ve never read, and I realized the other day that I’m actually putting off reading them because (apart from juvenilia, which doesn’t much interest me) they will be the LAST Robert E. Howard stories I read for the first time. It still stuns me how much great fiction that man wrote in so short a span of time. (That book would be Pictures in the Fire, and you can find it here.)

I am in the midst of some really exciting career developments. I hope to announce them prior to GenCon. Watch this space!