These days my focus is on writing fantasy and science fiction, which is what I wanted to be doing from the beginning, but I've taken a lot of detours into other (mostly) fun projects and areas I wanted to explore, from baseball to museums to adult learning to my lone children's book.
I've been editing books since the early 1990s, when I broke into the field as a baby editor at BPVP. In the years since then I've been both a packager and a small press publisher. I still edit occasional books on a project-by-project basis but given my other editorial production, writing, and teaching commitments I have to really like a book to take it on.
Most of my nonfiction output in recent years has gone into books and gaming material, but I do occasionally write essay-length material as well. I've posted the series of essays on “how publishing works” I wrote for DailyKos (which are a bit dated but still useful), along with some updates of them and a few other pieces I think folks may find useful or interesting.
I've written games since I was a kid, mostly for the editification of myself and my friends, but some of them have found a bit of a wider audience. The Wildside Gaming System is a tabletop roleplaying system that I designed and tweaked over many years before it was eventually published by The Wildside Press along with several companion volumes.
When I first started writing professionally, in the early 1990s, I edited the book review column for the short-lived Horror magazine published by John Betancourt of The Wildside Press (who would later publish many of my books and games). I also wrote reviews for a couple of other magazines, before various other publishing work meant I didn't have time to write them anymore. This is a selection of reviews, most of them previously published. I've added some comments and notes below the reviews, but otherwise left them in their original form.
I don't write a lot of poetry, but I've always written a certain amount of it. Some feelings want to come out as poems, and once in a while I want to write something that doesn't lend itself to prose. Unlike prose, I generally don't write poetry with publication in mind, although it's often aimed at a specific audience. In some cases I've altered specific or identifying references to people, and I've added some comments and notes below the poems, but otherwise they're in their original form.