Bits & Pieces

I still have my hands abundantly full with home, family, and work issues (I just spent all of a three day weekend working on house stuff), but most people reading this don't really need to know all about that. I promise more interesting stuff in the near future, but for now, here are a few bits and pieces of current personal events.

I finished "A Dance of Pairs" for Sorcerer, at least well enough for playtest. That was actually a couple of weeks ago. I don't need to run it until at least March 2008, so playtesting can wait for my life to settle down at bit.

I'm almost done with a major professional education course for work. It's actually a series of four sets of seven books each, and each book is roughly 175 pages, so it's a lot of material. I'm almost at the end of the second to last book, so there's only one full book to go. I expect to reach the end within the next three weeks. After I finish, I get to use the letters SCLA after my name in my work, and I get a trip to Las Vegas in October. It's a significant accomplishment, and means that I officially know a lot about the law as it relates to insurance. Frankly, I'd rather be doing my creative work, but I have to do some kind of coursework for my job, and this was a good one to take on.

I just finished "I Am Legend" by Richard Matheson in my sparse pleasure reading time. I'd seen the Charlton Heston movie "The Omega Man", which is based on it, but the source material is almost always better than the movie, and this one is no exception, though I have to give Mr. Heston a lot of credit for bringing the character across very much like he is in the book. They changed the ending, as they almost always do for movies, and the original is always better. The Powers That Be in Hollywood just can't stand downer endings, but let's face it, sometimes it's the most powerful and emotionally correct ending for the story, and it'd be better left that way. "I Am Legend" was a pleasure to read. You'd think a story about the daily activities of the last man on earth wouldn't be all that interesting, but it truly does deserve classic status, and I might have to scare up more of Matheson's work.

I've been watching movies or TV when I've run out of energy for house cleaning (passive entertainment is easier than creative writing), so I have some reviews I want to do, but that's an entry for another day.