Search results

Indeed. Working with a bad editor or someone who is a bad fit for a particular project can be nightmarish. Been there, more than once. This can be an especially soul-draining experience when dealing with a license or shared-world, when you may have several different editors or licensing people...

Most writers work better with an editor. Editors can be a constraint, but a good editor can help a writer clarify his or her vision. It has to be the right editor, and not all writers are going to find the same editors helpful, but editors are not, by definition, a bad thing. Same with...

Passion is indeed important to any writer, and any process that puts artificial constraints on what or how a writer creates can be deadening. However, you are assuming you can see into someone else's heart, their creative soul. You can't. People write for different motivations and readers or...

Thanks for the update, Tony, and to everyone for all the hard work on the awards. While the topic of this year's awards is on the table, I hope you won't mind if I offer a suggestion. Please consider adding some sort of PR/award acknowledgment of the designers, writers, editors, and artists...

Zeb Cook and I announced we were parting ways with TSR a few days apart. He wrote the "First Quest" column for Dragon #207. Mine ran in #208. I recall editor Dale Donovan mentioning that someone else had done a column around that time who also was leaving the company, but I don't remember who it...

I know of very few writers who do not end up battered by deadlines, no matter how long those deadlines are. Some writers do much better work with a lot of pressure. It forces them to stop dithering, to stop tinkering with every sentence, and just write. Many, many writers still operate on the...

I hadn't looked at the Empires Trilogy Novel Ideas column since it was first published, but your comments prompted me to dig out my copy of Dragon #164. Your notes, and the original article, are worth a reply. Unless you're working on a book "on spec" -- that is, without a contract -- you're...

Hi: I've been trying to get to the site here for a few days to respond to this, but ENWorld has apparently been having site problems of their own. Thanks for the warning. The web staff at Devil's Due has been working on the issue. It's still not clear if the problem was with our hosting site...

Interesting stuff. Always good to get a glimpse into the process. Was there a reason there were no "honorable mentions" this year? Cheers, Jim Lowder

Thanks to the judges for all their hard work. And thanks from Devil's Due for placing Worlds of Dungeons & Dragons among the regalia finalists. We're really proud of how those issues turned out, and, personally, it was great to work on them alongside so many of my old TSR compadres. Cheers...

Thanks to everyone at Origins who voted for Worlds of D&D in the fiction category, and to all the writers and artists who worked on the book! Cheers, James Lowder

Small juries made up of area specialists winnow down the submissions to lists of 10 in each category. The jurors are from the various branches of GAMA, including the Academy, but there are some retailers, etc, on the juries. The lists of 10 semifinalists are then put before the retailers at the...

Absolutely. Buck Rogers did a lot to popularize SF tropes and conventions. Saying "that Buck Rogers stuff" was a way of referencing SF in general for a whole generation of people unfamiliar with the genre. That was a dismissive phrase, but it speaks to the influence of the IP when it comes to...

Well, "total BS" is kind of harsh. It's fair to say Dille originated Buck in the form for which the character became most famous. He does deserve a lot of credit, and you could argue that he "originated" the Buck Rogers the public knew and loved. I wouldn't word the description of his role the...

Indeed. One of the things that can be said in Lorraine's favor was the amount of creative freedom the staff had on many, many projects. So long as products made the money they were supposed to make, the staff had a fairly free hand with content. There were individual products that saw too much...

Buck was very influential. It popularized lots of SF tropes and conventions. It was not the birthplace--as in the place where they originated--of rockets or robots or the like. Cheers, Jim Lowder

By the by, if you look around the official Buck Rogers site, the place that started the whole discussion, you'll also find the claim: "Buck Rogers is known as the birthplace rockets, robots, and ray-guns!" (see: http://www.gohero.com/buck_rogers/buck_rogers_influence.htm) That statement needs a...

I was just starting in TSR's book division when the Buck fiction got underway. One of my early assignments was proofing parts of Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century, a very nice hardcover retrospective the company release in late 1988. As I recall the process, upper management...

Absolutely. And moving the character from prose to a comic strip, where the art (no matter how crude compared to some of the competing strips) could sell the SF concepts, was vitally important to the success, too. Dille deserves credit for those things. But to say he "created" the character is...

Actually, the first line on the page is a bit of history bending, too. John F. Dille did not create Buck Rogers. The character originated in a short story by Philip Nowlan, in Amazing Stories, and Dille, a newspaper syndicate owner, arranged for the character to become a comic strip. Now, the...