Buying a house is hard, time-consuming work. Remind me not to do this again, assuming I want to have a writing career.
On the plus side, in two weeks I will be out of my cruddy apartment and in a large, pleasant house that has a room my wife has already set aside as a study and writing office. Hopefully, things will flow more easily once I have a dedicated writing space, instead of trying to sneak in a paragraph here or there while I'm having lunch on campus.
The Savage Worlds version of my book Ronin is still up in the air. I've been fiddling a bit with it, but High Moon hasn't given me the formal go-ahead yet. In the meantime, I've been amusing myself with a side project: a wuxia-style setting that isn't set in a thinly-veiled historical China.
I love me some Asian history (as you may have guessed, O readers of this blog), but I think it's almost a disservice to myself to become typecast as "that guy who does historical Asian RPGs." There are worse fates, goodness knows, but I want to write something that isn't just "Sengoku with magic" or "Three Kingdoms with magic." I would very much like to do for China history what Rokugan did for Japan: take all the best parts, and cool things from surrounding areas, and make something new out of it. A Chinese-inspired game rather than a Chinese-historical game.
I can't tell you too much about it yet, not even what system I'm writing it for, but I'm currently doing my research, writing chapter snippets while consulting with my battered copy of Tao Te Ching, casting some trigrams for inspiration, and looking at lots of art about pandas. ^_^ Hopefully, something interesting will come of it.
