Guns & Magic

Welcome to Guns & Magic!

In February 2006, I launched “A Short Story a Day” (ASSAD). I called it “writing practice”.

In brief: Improving my writing via novels seemed slow. Short stories, though, especially short stories written daily, seemed an ideal mechanism for experimenting. I could write about anything and everything in however many different ways I could think of. I could experiment with genre, viewpoint, structure, and more. And then I could judge what I had written and (hopefully) learn from it.

That was the plan. I think it worked, mostly. I’ll conduct a more detailed “post mortem” of ASSAD in the next week or two.

An unforeseen result of ASSAD, though, was that I also created a “writing blog”. A blog that I wanted to continue, but no longer tied to ASSAD–and without ASSAD’s rather explicit obligation to post stories daily.

Back in the summer of 2006, while creating a character for an RPG, I came up with the phrase “guns & magic” to describe the stories I like to write and be involved in. And since I shortly thereafter bought gunsandmagic.com (for no specified purpose at the time), when I decided to launch a new blog, the phrase seemed the obvious choice for the blog’s name (and URL).

My full name is David Michael, but I’m better known as “DavidRM”.

I’m an independent software developer. My primary “job” is designer and developer of The Journal, personal journaling and writing software for Windows. I am also an independent game developer, owner and co-owner of two small companies.

I have written two nonfiction books about game development:

The Indie Game Development Survival Guide, published by Charles River Media in 2003.

Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform, co-authored with Sande Chen, published by Thomson/CoursePTR in 2005.

I have another blog, besides this one, called Joe Indie, where I talk about issues facing independent software developers and independent game developers. I also have an RPG blog that follows the Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’m currently running.

On the fiction side of things, I’ve yet to be published. As of 2006, though, I have accumulated over 200 short stories (some of which I will submit for publication this year) and 2 novel manuscripts and 1 novelette (all of which I will be submitting this year, as well).

As I mentioned, I plan to do a lot of submitting in 2007, both to magazines and other short story venues and novel publishers. I also plan, of course, to continue writing.

The point of the Guns & Magic blog is to track my progress in my writing projects, to track my progress in shopping around completed manuscripts, and to talk about writing and the writing life of a guy who always wanted to be a writer but (somehow) became a software developer instead–and then decided to be both (and a photographer; oh yeah, I also have a photo blog).

I also expect that I will be posting short stories and flash fiction, because I rather have that habit now.

Have a Happy New Year!

-David