In early November 2011, I attended World Fantasy Con in San Diego with John O’Neill and the Black Gate crew. It was a truly eye-opening experience for the ‘writer me’ as I’d attended many conventions in my day, but nothing that was so cloistered and dedicated specifically to the art of writing.

I well remember sitting in my room after the first day of listening to readings and thinking to myself, ‘Holy Crap, you absolutely C-A-N’-T do this!’ [Seriously, just listen to Claire Cooney recite any of her works from memory and tremble beneath the power of a truly gifted writer].

After I got home from the convention, I crawled into bed for three days and didn’t come out again because for the first time in my life I felt the power of ‘real’ writers and how far I had to go to reach the level of their talent.

When I finally emerged from my cocoon of despair, I clicked on Facebook and found a post from old time D&D artist Jeff Dee concerning something he called Kickstarter. It was a curious thing, this Kickstarter platform, and the more I researched it, the more I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’m not Claire Cooney, but I bet I can get a book made anyway.’

At the same time, John O’Neill, our fearless leader at Black Gate, was thinking of creating his own line of novels from Black Gate under the power of the current business model he’d used to help found the magazine, namely his own pocket venture capital. I asked him to try Kickstarter and he declined, so I bet him, in no uncertain terms, that no matter what he managed to do with his book line at Black Gate, that using Kickstarter I would outsell him by a multiple of 10 and produce twice as many original books as he could.

Thus began 2012, something I like to call ‘The Year of Kickstarter’. Not only had I discovered this platform, now three years old in the marketplace and ready to tip the balance of acceptability, but so had EVERYONE else.

By February of 2012, Kickstarter money contribution records were falling almost weekly in every category imaginable, especially in computer games. Funding was surging to unforeseen levels with millions of dollars going to video games, art books, albums, miniatures, you name it.

I watched, I studied, and I saw the evolution taking place right before my eyes, but in so doing I also caught the wave and road with it on my new publishing company I’d affectionately named Art of the Genre after this blog. By February, I’d managed my first successful Kickstarter, The Cursed Legion novel, with former AD&D art legend Jeff Easley.

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When I was a kid, I loved where I lived. Honestly, I had a great childhood, raised along a tranquil riverbank in a peaceful little town in northwest Indiana. I had no siblings to distract me from my internal reverie, was cared for by a loving mother who chose me over all else, and had friends fostered from Kindergarten all the way to High School Graduation.

I would sit and wonder about all the kids in my class that would rage and swear at our small town, and ‘how they were going to get out as soon as they could’. To me, I could think of no place I’d rather be.

However, upon graduation I moved to southern Indiana to go to university, and by my sophomore year had met my wife. She, unlike me, had a turbulent childhood with dozens of moves and no lifelong friends or a place that she identified as ‘home’. As is the case with most single children who become involved with people who have many siblings and large families, I was pressed to follow her family and so began a journey that has taken me all over the U.S. in the intervening years.

Yes, the kid who never wanted to leave his town has lived in half a dozen states and moved more times than I’d like to remember, which is to say pretty much every three years for two decades.

Why do I bring this up, you might be asking yourself? Well, I bring it up because of my books, most specifically my RPG books. If you have ever had to move, you know the burden each piece of your life [bed, couch, clothes, kitchen supplies, etc.] places on you as you try to pack it, protect it, and hump it into trucks, cars, up steps, down steps, and across countless miles.

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Sex… yeah, I said it. Is anyone listening? Probably, because like rubber-necking a car accident, when someone says the word, we all have to take notice, especially here in the U.S. Face it, at our roots, the base Caucasian population is of a repressed Puritanical or Fundamentalist mind, the South, fire and brimstone Baptist, and the fastest growing minority, Latino, inquisition-descended Catholic.

Still, we are Human, and as such, if sex isn’t on our minds, then there is a natural selection breakdown in the root of our Darwin-based evolution.

This creates a hard edge of self-loathing, Hail Marys, and scarlet letters that is terribly hard to overcome, especially for those in the art community. Not that the art community doesn’t produce sexual products, but that doesn’t mean they are accepted without judgment outside that community for it.

I had this problem in 2012, but before I get to that, I’ve got to take the way-back machine to my formative years.

I was raised by a single mother who decided that when my father cheated on her when I was less than a year old, she would dedicate her life to her son, and no other man. So, in that sense, I was raised in a completely sex-free environment. It wasn’t spoken of or seen, and I was educated as a Methodist until my late teens, seeing the church as a counter to the budding feeling of puberty.

However, like my favorite line by Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, ‘Nature finds a way’ and my sexual rebellion was profound, even if I journeyed into that particular bliss blindly. In my home, there was never ‘the talk,’ so when my twelve-year old friends and I entered an abandoned house on the far side of a community woods and found a collection of Penthouse magazines, to say my world was shaken to its foundation is a massive understatement.

At fifteen, I rebelled against the establishment, went to K-Mart and purchased a poster of The Fall Guy’s Heather Thomas, which I pinned to the wall at the foot of my bed and waited. Silence… It was the only reprimand that came from my action, the same stoic suffering that my entire family has practiced since it came to Indiana through the Cumberland Gap in 1840.

Visually, buying into the selling of sex was forefront in my mind, and I got to see first-hand the balance trying to be struck in my new gaming passion, Dungeons & Dragons, concerning the female form in fantasy. In the late 70s, selling sex was something that TSR was willing to take a shot at in black and white illustrations by Jeff Dee, Erol Otus, or Bill Willingham, but then the Bible belt constricted a notch in the 80s and they pulled back from this ideal. Still, beautiful women in questionable clothing crept into the covers of Elmore, Easley, Parkinson, and of course the ‘thigh-master’ himself Clyde Caldwell.

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You can never go home again, or at least I believe that’s the saying. I tend to agree, as my home town in NowhereVille Indiana stands as a shining example of the power that ‘getting out’ has on a person’s life. Still, when I do make it ‘home’ — and yes, although I’ve lived in four other states and half a dozen apartments, condos, and houses longer than the days where I spent my youth, my mother’s house on the Tippecanoe is still my home — I can breathe easy like nowhere else in the world. [On a sad note, someone recently related to me that maturity is achieved the day you lose your last parent because you are truly on your own. I’ve luckily not reached that level of independence, and certainly that is why my mother’s house still holds such warmth, because there I’m still the child, and who doesn’t like being the child once in a while?]

Honestly, I could shed tears as I write such profound revelations, as I think about home, three thousand miles from the City of Angels and all the chaos that goes with it, but I won’t. Instead, I want to try to translate that same feeling to another venue, that being the art of the quickly disappearing MMORPG.

Before I can truly begin to talk about the vanishing, however, I suppose I should first discuss life. On the 16th of March, 1999, Sony’s 989 Studios released Everquest and the world of online gaming was never the same. Sure, Ultima Online had been around since 1997, but it never stole gamers’ attention and basked in the world spotlight like Everquest, or ‘Evercrack’ as it was called by many because of its addictive qualities.

This game, eventually wrapped into the Sony Online Entertainment bundle, had hundreds of thousands of registered players by 2004. Somewhat unbelievably, thirteen years later, another expansion for the game appeared this November [2012], but like most games of its kind, the death throes can be a long and lonely road.

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In a bout of good humor, I bring to you today a topic that has been on my mind for some time and finally reached a writable level whilst viewing an image of this year’s winners of the Hugo Awards for writing.

What could have gotten you so motivated by said picture, you might ask? Well, it drove home the point that I have a theory artists are prettier than writers, and by a large margin. I mean, kudos to writers like China Mieville and Joe Abercrombie for swinging for the fences of rugged or charming beauty, but sadly two home runs can’t bring up the collective batting average of an entire team.

Now surely your hackles are up at such a broad brush [yes, pun intended!] and callously superficial statement, but remember this before you go finding a rope and a solid branch of a tree, I’m also writer!

Therefore, I attest this whole line of thought has to be like Chris Rock blasting African Americans, or Foxworthy busting Rednecks, right?

Well, I’m going with it, so just try to have some fun along the way because that is all this is really about!

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There was this time in my misty past, well before that advent of cable television in my home, when I didn’t have access to giant robots. During those dark days of the 1970s, when I was sick and had to stay home from school, my mother would drive me early in the morning to my grandmother’s trailer before she had to go to work. It was there, snuggled on an old floral patterned couch, that for at least an hour each day I achieved a moment of pure heaven.

I can well remember the incredible color of her small television as it displayed Star Blazers and Thunderbirds cartoons in those wee hours of weekday mornings. God, how it made being sick SO worth it, and during those episodes I grew to love space even more than I did when I watched Star Wars.

Fast forward to 1986, cable having found its way to my household as well as a wonder of wonders in a new piece of technology called a VCR. My oldest friend Mark (then a new friend), having just introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, told me that there was this program on at 7 AM each morning called Robotech and I ‘had to watch it.’

Where Star Blazers began as a child’s infatuation, Robotech took things to the next level in a true love affair. I mean, I was just 15, couldn’t program a VCR (I mean who could, right?), and got my tired teenage butt up before 7 every day for a year so I could record every single episode personally.

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Almost two years ago I got fed up with rules. Well, sure, I’ve probably never been one to take rules seriously anyway, but in RPGs they can become cumbersome very quickly. This is probably one of the biggest knocks on D&D 3rd Edition, although I was still taken with the game the moment I laid eyes on it.

Since 2000, I’d regularly played 3rd Edition in some form or other, either in 3.5 or Pathfinder, and found the boundless customizations, prestige classes, skills, and feats an addictive agent as my gaming world grew. Still, at some point, all the calculations begin to wear on you and you long for the ‘good old days’ when leveling up a character meant rolling for hit points, checking every third level to see if your saving throws went down, or adding a spell or two.

This feeling of being overburdened came to a head in 2011 as I decided I’d take down my long unused and dusty 1E AD&D tomes from the shelf where they looked longingly at me day after day. There, amid the wonder of my youth, I rediscovered the simplicity of the original Gygax and Arneson texts.

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When I think of Joe Kubert, I think of Sgt. Rock, of comic books and of incredible pencils, but first and foremost I think of an inspirational teacher. Most of the time, artists influence the marketplace and world with their art alone, students of their style learning from observing images, but now and again a great artist also becomes a teacher, and for this their lives, and our world, will be forever changed.

So it was for Joe Kurbert, comic icon, and master of his art. Joe’s school, and all the ‘Kubies,’ as his graduates were called, helped define nearly two generations of art since its inception in 1976. Notable names such as Dave Dorman, Tim Truman, and countless others have studied under this master, and because of that, his rank among the all time greats increases tenfold.

Two of his children, sons Adam and Andy, have gone on to follow in their father’s footsteps as well, now respected comic artists in their own right.

His art, so inspiring to all fans, had a subtle quality that somehow managed to be both hard and soft. Emotion was etched into each line, and the movement found in his figures always had a realism I found astonishing when reading gritty war stories from his formative, post WWII, years in the industry.

He was another outstanding member of ‘The Greatest Generation,’ and the principles for which he lived his life, and the kindness and generosity for which he was known, are a shining example to others who I hope will eventually follow in his footsteps.

To this, beyond talented and incredible father, artist, husband, and teacher, I raise a glass. He will be sorely missed, but his legacy, as well as his teachings, will continue. And for that, the world of art will be forever enriched.

I’m not truly sure when I first heard the word ‘Steampunk.’ I suppose it happened recently, because I believe the word is more modern than most realize. Before the 2000s I’d say the genre in question had a different title, although I’m not sure what it was.

I mean, we’d certainly seen it, in movies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or even the Wild Wild West. In gaming, I’d even played it with Frank Chadwick’s Space: 1889, but it somehow was just ‘Victorian Era’ or ‘Old West with a Twist.’ I suppose it could have been called ‘Vernian’ after Jules Verne, although it’s certainly not as catchy as Steampunk.

My thought, as it strikes me in this very moment, is that Cyberpunk, the catalyst of William Gibson, came first and that the ‘punk’ tag got attached to the ‘steam’ aspect of the time period in which the genre takes place. This, however, has begun to get overplayed, and just last week I swore off the word ‘punk’ entirely when I read a quote for a book that labeled the fiction ‘Godpunk’… seriously?! Godpunk?

Ah well, whatever the case, Steampunk is here and it seems here to stay. In my own experience, I’ve had the pleasure of not only gaming in a Steampunk setting, but also writing a novel in the genre with The Gun Kingdoms. That book, inspired by Space: 1889’s lead concept artist, David Deitrick, was a pleasure to create and it certainly gave me a fantastic reason to research the culture of the growing genre.

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I’m still far away from home, four weeks into a seven week stint that takes me all over the U.S. During the trip, I’ve had my fair share of adventures, but something I’ve truly enjoyed during the vacation is time spent sharing memories of my life with my son.

Many of these came in the form of gaming memories during my stay in my home town last week. For some reason, an old fantasy song got into my head as my son was jumping with my DM’s, Mark’s, niece on a trampoline. The song, ‘Towers of the Teeth’ is one of the two greatest Orc lyrical masterpieces ever. It comes from the Rankin/Bass version of The Return of the King.

Now in my mind, especially this version today, this is a very weak film, but the music is another story entirely. For those of you that don’t remember, or haven’t checked the link above, the song goes:

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