For those who care, I’ve finally gotten around to migrating the blog posts from the previous version of the site to the new location. This gives you a couple hundred old posts going back over several years.

Some of the links are broken, and images need to be moved over. That will take some time as I go through, post by post, to add categories and such. I still have a bunch of other content to move over, so perhaps I’ll get to that at some point.

So there was an update to WordPress, and it broke the old theme I was using.

I’ve patched this together in the meantime, but I don’t know how long the site will stay looking like this.

Today had been going pretty well. And then… just kind of slid downhill.

On the plus side, I did put some more reviews up.

I’ve started working on something I’ve been meaning to do ever since I launched this new version of the site, namely migrating content from the old version over to the new one.

You should notice a new category up at the top of the page, where I will be posting reviews of RPG products that I wrote several years ago.

There’s a lot to migrate, so this is likely something that will go in fits and starts over the course of the next several weeks, but I plan to restore a lot of the content originally available through this site, including episode reviews and other commentary about Xena: Warrior Princess, some of my early fiction, and the adventuring journals from my old Earthdawn campaigns.

This blog has come back more often than Jean Grey. When was the last time I actually posted anything here?

September?!?

Sheesh.

Admittedly, I have been rather busy. You know, putting together the new edition of Earthdawn. Managing a successful Kickstarter (with the aid of several wonderful people). Dealing with press and questions and project management… all while learning the ropes as I go, and balancing all that with a regular 9 to 5 job and family life.

What I’m saying is, some things have slipped by the wayside.

Part of it is not really knowing what to talk about here. I have been doing a developer’s blog over at fasagames.com, talking about the new edition and stuff we’re working on with that (but as deadline crunch looms, that has faded a little bit). I haven’t been getting into as much media stuff lately, because time spent on that is time spent away from working on the game. Heck, I haven’t really even gamed much because I’ve had so much going on and only so much creative energy.

Still, the Earthdawn Player’s Guide is locked down and in layout. The Gamemaster’s Guide is still in the works (behind schedule) and a couple of other books are in the wings waiting for me to tackle them. I’m hoping that when the GM guide is locked down things will level out a bit.

But we all know how things like that go, don’t we?

If I’m totally honest, this past winter was rough. I ended up with a major case of Seasonal Affective Disorder this past February, with my Vitamin D levels at really low levels. It took me out of commission for a week, aggravating the depressive tendencies that crop up in my life from time to time (usually stress related).

This isn’t intended as a woe-is-me type of post, by the way. It’s just something that I want to be honest about — stress knocks you on your ass, slows down your output, puts you behind schedule, and makes you feel worse because you’re not meeting some kind of idealized objective you set for yourself.

Blah. I feel like I’m rambling. I suppose that will do for now.

I’ll try not to have another eight or nine months go by without a post.

If you take a look at the very top of the page, you’ll see a new “Articles” link. This will give you a drop-down menu where you can go to a page where I have written a more full-fledged article about something or other. Right now there is only one article, Step by Step — an article that looks at the underlying mechanics of Earthdawn’s Step System. The original article appeared on the old RedBrick forums, but since they moved, the article hasn’t been available online.

Check it out, and I will add more articles to the archive as I continue to work on the site.

This blog and website have been silent for some time, mainly a lack of motivation and the daunting task of figuring out how to work with the changes made by Blogger back in early 2010. I haven’t been writing, editing, or gaming (outside of World of Warcraft). It has been something of a creative drought — largely of my own doing.

But a new year is on us, and I decided rather than try and rebuild my existing website, I would start over from scratch with a new host and migrate the important stuff over from the old version of the site. I’ve got a novel that I’ve been picking at in my brain for years, I’m getting back into tabletop gaming and writing/editing material for Earthdawn.

This version of The Lore Merchant (by my count this is v4) will be focused on my efforts to work on creative pursuits, and my encounters with pop culture along the way. Like life itself, it is a work in progress. I hope you’ll come along.

So, I decided that I wanted to get into this whole “Blogging” thing… I’ve had a website for a few years now, and always wanted to update it more often than I do. Coding and verifying the HTML, posting it, and all the other stuff that goes along with an update just always seemed like a pain.

Not anymore! Thanks to wonderful free stuff like this on the net, I can have a blog of my very own… what a warm, fuzzy feeling it gives me.

Expect a real eclectic mix of stuff here, folks. My brain is a strange and varied thing.

— Josh