Bill Bodden's Blog, page 18

When Fandoms Collide

Recent events have called up memories of conventions past.

It seems some overly enthusiastic person(s) at Dragon Con this past Memorial Day weekend seriously injured two DragonCon attendees by throwing chairs off a tenth-floor balcony at one of the large hotels in downtown Atlanta. The current prevailing theory is that the person(s) responsible were...

To read the rest of this post, please visit: http://billbodden.com/2017/09/05/when...

CONventional Wisdom

I've attended three conventions over the last six weeks. It's nothing nearly as intense as my buddy Matt McElroy, who usually attends 15-20 (or more!) conventions ever year for his job, but I've been thinking about...

To read the rest of this post, please visit:
http://billbodden.com/2017/08/28/conv...

Quick Update

With barely a week in between conventions, I have to make this late post short and sweet: I will be attending GeekKon this weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, appearing as a local guest and participating in panel discussions. Due to unforeseen circumstances...

To read the rest of this post, please visit: http://billbodden.com/2017/08/24/quic...

Disappointing News

Back in December, I was contracted to work on parts of three different books. I had strong reason to believe all three would be available at GenCon, August 17-20 of this year. After turning in most of my initial material in late January/early February, I was confident things were on track...

To read the rest of this post, please visit: http://billbodden.com/2017/08/14/disa...

Pre-Con Panic!

I leave for Indianapolis and GenCon next week, and between planning the schedule for booth staffing, arranging for a rental van to haul all the stuff, and a few desperate Pokemon Go adventures, life has been hectic!

I will be working the Onyx Path booth at the show, and except for breaks, will be in the booth from open to close (roughly 10a-6p) all four days. My evenings are my own for the most part...

To read the rest of this post, please visit: http://billbodden.com/2017/08/09/pre-...

Fighting Burnout and Rejection

My colleague Owen KC Stephens has a great blog post that just went up about burnout.
Here's the LINK .
In it, he is specifically referencing burnout in the RPG industry, but I think it very easily applies to any job out there. I've been thinking about this subject a lot recently, so his post inspired me to add one of my own. Go read it: I'll wait.

I'm kind of...

To read the rest of this post, please visit:
http://billbodden.com/2017/07/31/figh...

Screw You, Pikachu!

Yeah, I realized I missed posting last week. Truth is, I've been obsessed with something lately -- to the point where I've stopped thinking about much else.

Back in June, my "friends" Matt McElroy and Monica Valentinelli were trying to convince me that I should give Pokemon Go! a try. They were having fun with it, and could use a third player to join them for raids and Gym battles. As they showed me how the game worked in real time, I became intrigued. I was familiar with the TV series and the collectible card game, so I knew roughly what I was getting into...

To read the rest of this post, please visit http://billbodden.com/2017/07/24/scre...

This Place Is A Zoo!

I've been thinking about zoos a lot lately. What started it all was a whiff of nostalgia: one of my all-time favorite commercials EVER, created by and for the Detroit Zoo circa 1982, showed up on YouTube. It was later modified to be a general-purpose zoo commercial run on national television in the US, frequently during Saturday morning cartoons. You can watch the original Detroit Zoo commercial on YouTube HERE .

It reminded me of...

To read the rest of this post, please visit: http://billbodden.com/2017/07/10/this...

Buried Alive!

I just got back from a brief vacation. We often find we need to get away from our day jobs and other concerns for a while, and just be tourists. In this case, we took a short driving trip through south-west Wisconsin to Galena, Illinois.

The entire area was rich in lead and zinc deposits, and during the first half of the 19th century, the region was filled with boom towns and miners, and all that those two things attract. Galena was lovely; a thriving tourist town now, it had seen years of decay and despair as the town dwindled from the second-largest city in Illinois to a town of just a couple of thousand hardy souls. As the home of Civil War General and 18th President of the United States, Ulysses Simpson Grant, Galena capitalizes to the greatest extent possible on Grant's connection to the town, and why not? Few towns can boast such a notable, historic, and influential figure.

But that isn't what caught my attention on this trip. No sir; I was captivated by something in the tiny Wisconsin town of Shullsburg...
To read the rest of this post, please visit http://billbodden.com/2017/07/04/buri...

Being A Writer Can be Discouraging

When you write for a living (or part of a living), it's difficult not to get discouraged. Take me, for example. I'm regularly disappointed to learn of fantastic anthologies coming out -- books I would give me eye teeth to be a part of -- but I only hear about them AFTER they've selected all the authors they want. That's happened to me many times, and even in several cases where the editor or publisher knew of my interest and blew me off anyway. It can be tough not to...

For the rest of this post, please visit: http://billbodden.com/2017/06/26/bein...