Get Lit! 2023 and More in May
Hey folks!
A bunch of amazing milestones occurred since the first blog of this here new website. First, I headed to Spokane, WA with Shelly Mazzanoble to be a part of my first literary festival. The Get Lit! Fest has had a storied history full of writers peddling their wares and I was honored to be invited there by Dr. Terrance MacMullen, department chair of the English AND Philosophy departments at Eastern Washington University. (Our familes now just call him Uncle Terry.)
Uncle Terry moderated a panel with Shelly and myself, and we got to play D&D with Terry and a wonderful party of fun-seekers run by Justice Arman from the D&D team. The group included Travis Baldree, local author and audiobook narrator; Dr. Melissa Bedford, literacy professor and advocate; Greg Tito, author, podcastor and screenwriter; Shelly Mazzanoble, professional D&D writer; and Dahveed Bullis, actor, director, and co-founder of the Spokane Playwrights Lab.
On the podcast front, Re:Engage didn’thave any milestones exactly, but I am proud that our little Gen X rewatch of Star Trek TNG is gaining an audience. Some of our most popular episodes in May were s4e18 Identity Crisis in which Geordi becomes a blue-veined alien and s4e20 Qpid that sends the cast to Sherwood Forest at the command of Q. For Qpid, it was cool to reconnect with an old gaming buddy from my days in Durham, NC, Daniel Solis. He just happens to be working as an art director on Star Trek games for Wizkids. Kismet!
Dragon Talk also had a Star Trek connection this month with actor Todd Stashwick dropping by to talk all about his love of Dungeons & Dragons. He most recently played Captain Liam Shaw on season three of Picard and I got to grill him on what it’s like working with Star Trek royalty. Shelly and I also spoke to Indrani Ganguly, a game developer who’s running D&D games and creating communities in India. The work she’s doing with Desis & Dragons is super inspiring. Lift you up!
The really big milestone this month is that I have committed to digital paper more than 100,000 words of my fantasy novel! That’s a humongous number of words! I have 35 chapters of first draft material complete, and I’m estimating about six or seven chapters are left before I wrap up this volume. Then it’s all about the editing, baby. I personally hate the editing process but it’s going to be necessary for this one as I need to add more early references to things that come up later in the story.
That’s it for this month. Thanks for checking this page out!
Greg
