Last night, I tried to figure out how much gaming-related stuff I’ve written over the last decade or so.

The short answer is “a lot.”

A slightly longer answer than that would be “a lot, and most of it was contracted work for various roleplaying game companies.”

A slightly longer answer than that would be “a lot, most of it was contracted work for various roleplaying game companies … and maybe half of it ever got published, and I probably received actual payment for slightly less than that.”

Makes me wonder sometimes why I do this stuff. Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. I happen to agree with good old Albert, except I think "the definition of insanity" is interchangable with "the art of stupidity".

And there are times when I feel like I've eaten a big bowl of stupid for breakfast when I'm working on a project.

I know where it began, though. It all started with Palladium Books. In high school, I moved on from running AD&D and Warhammer games to a pair of games published by Palladium: RIFTS, and the Palladium Fantasy RPG. Yes, those games feature notoriously broken rules systems (particularly RIFTS). It didn’t matter. I houseruled them both into systems my gaming group liked, and those games (particularly RIFTS) became responsible for many, many hours of happy gaming as a teenager. I thought they were phenomenal. The books for the various Palladium game systems weren’t the best things ever written in terms of game mechanics, but they were always filled with great ideas for adventures, stories, monsters, the whole nine yards. I could pick up virtually any Palladium book, flip through a couple of pages, and find something that made me go … “Hell yeah! There’s my adventure!”

(That’s something I try to emulate in my own writing, even today.)

Somewhere during my freshman year in college, I got this strange but unwavering belief that I was going to work for Palladium Books when I graduated as a staff writer. This belief was based upon zero facts. I’d never met anyone at Palladium, or spoken to anyone who worked there. I’d never been to a gaming convention west of Long Island. I had an appalling lack of understanding of how the gaming industry worked, or how much writers got paid – all I had was a bunch of assumptions that were horribly, horribly wrong. I had no published writing credits.

And yet, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to be a writer for Palladium.

I spent many hours of my junior and senior years in college writing two RIFTS books, usually during the wee hours of the morning in a 24-hour campus computer lab. One was called “The Banwok Hunters”, and the other was “Demon Heart Falling”. Both were based on my long-running RIFTS campaign. Both ran about a hundred pages, single-spaced. My friend Eric drew a cover for one of them, and my friend Jon drew a cover for the other. When they were done, I were to the campus print shop, printed up ten copies of each book, and had them spiral-bound. I wrote a cover letter, dumped that and a pair of the books in a large manila envelope (this was well before most people had e-mail), and mailed them to Palladium.

No, I didn’t have any writer’s guidelines. No, I didn’t even know what a non-disclosure agreement was. No, I hadn’t even bothered to contact Palladium to see if they were even accepting unsolicited proposals, let alone unsolicited completed manuscripts. I thought this was how things worked, so that’s what I did.

Shockingly, I received a letter from Kevin Siembieda at Palladium shortly thereafter, saying that he liked the manuscripts, and thought they’d be publishable with “a little work”. That led to two years worth of rewrites, and more rewrites, and still more rewrites … and at the end of all that, I got my infamous letter from Kevin stating “"Mike, I think you have potential but if I were your tenth grade English teacher I'd give you a C- on these manuscripts. I'd feel bad about it, but that's what they would deserve. They will never be publishable."

(I still have this letter. It’s in a frame sitting next to the desk in my computer room.)

At the time, the letter was one of many reasons I bowed out of gaming for a couple of years. But the itch slowly came back. And while I’d learned enough after a few years to realized that my initial assumptions about working in the gaming industry were completely stupid, I still wanted very much to be a writer, and still wanted to write games.

Ironically (or, perhaps more accurately, stupidly), when I decided to try my hand at writing again, my first foray was with Palladium … again. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea, but Palladium was still the game system at the time that I knew and loved best, so I thought it would be worth a shot. This time, I got a chance to write for the Heroes Unlimited game – specifically, a sourcebook called Hardware Unlimited – and spent a bit of time working on a proposal, then an outline, then a completed manuscript … and that’s when history repeated itself and the book got cancelled.

This time, however, I was able to use the unpublished “Hardware Unlimited” manuscript for something good. I’d sent a query over to a new publisher called Goodman Games around this time, and this guy named Joseph Goodman wanted to see some of my writing samples. So I sent over an article I’d gotten published in Dragon Magazine, and the Hardware Unlimited manuscript. Based on that, I started getting some writing jobs for Goodman Games … and still do.

Things weren’t all roses from there, though. My first book for Goodman Games was a Broncosaurus Rex sourcebook called “The Ironclad Solution”, which was basically a steampunk mech sourcebook. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because it never got published, either – Joseph decided that publishing more books for that particular line just wasn’t viable. (Joseph was gracious enough to at least pay a kill fee for that manuscript, though, which is one of many reasons I consider him one of the Good Guys™ of gaming.) Mixed in there during that time was a manuscript for a book called “The Dark Below”, for Fast Forward Entertainment, which again wasnever was published, as well as a few other projects that stalled, sputtered, and for whatever reason simply never saw the light of day, despite lots and lots of hours spent writing.

And that’s something that actually still happens. It’s happened last year, this year … despite however many years I put into writing, it’s something that doesn’t seem to change. The past couple of years have certainly seen far more successes than failures, which is always good, but they’re still lurking out there, and when they happen, they’re still a bitter pill to swallow.

So why keep doing this?

Apart from practicing the art of stupidity?

Well, for one thing, there always seems to be progress, in some weird way. The failure of Hardware Unlimited led (eventually) to success with Goodman Games. Recent problems with one publisher led to some productive discussions and small projects for another … and that’s something I never would’ve pursued if I hadn’t had those problems. If you look at the failures as evolution, and part of a dynamic process, rather than static miseries, you can find the good in them.

Also, plug away at something long enough, and you'll eventually succeed. Maybe there's something to be said for my own stubborn stupidity. If I was smarter, I probably wouldn't have gotten published, and I probably wouldn't have made a lot of the friends I have today.

And the other reason I do this, of course, is because it’s fun.

The business end, to be sure, has its share of headaches. But the actual process of writing – sitting down at the computer, or with a spiral-bound notebook and a pencil, and creating worlds, or characters, or tales of great adventure … that’s always fun. While the path the manuscript may take after it’s written may not exactly be pleasant, the process of creating the manuscript – though it may have its own challenges – invariably is something that I love very much. I’ve always said I would write just as much if there were no publishers; it’s just nice to have some folks willing to pay for the time spent writing, and to be able to share my written words with the rest of the world. It’s been a pleasant surprise over the past year or so to realize that statement isn’t empty – I mean it. And that’s what makes this so worthwhile to me.

Speaking of which …

Back to the joy of writing some new manuscripts.

And with any luck, they’ll find their way to the shelves of gaming stores, too.