Congrats Troy!

Congratulations Gerald!

Welcome back Tom!  Tom is our 2nd Clarion West graduate in our group. He had great stories about his workout experiences at Clarion and showed some pictures.

Alley told us about her new copyediting job with Kelly the Search Guru! She also got her short story, “Catsup“, published in Bewildering Stories!

Candace Havens has a book signing for her latest Dragons Prefer Blondes on Saturday, Aug. 22, at Legacy Books in Plano with authors Dakota Cassidy and Michele Bardsley.

Join us Sept 12th at 6pm for our next NTSFW meeting at the Hurst Barnes and Noble Bookstore!

R.I.P. Dungeons & Dragons Co-Creator Dave Arneson, 1947-2009

from GeekDad 

‘For the second time in just over a year, the dice are silent in the gaming world. News has reached us that Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away last night at the age of 61.’

 ~ Back in the late 70’s I began playing D&D with the little stapled gray books and our own maps and leftover Monopoly gamepieces.  My friends and I would gather every other month, one Saturday night, after the kids went to bed, to kick back, have a beer or glass of wine (in my case, a case of wine LOL), and roll some adventurous dice.  Soon after I joined the group, we had online gaming, a BBS system run on two floppy disks on an Apple II developed by a UTA grad student who was also a member of our little group.  He moved on to bigger and better things, but left us the machine and program.  Posting moves late at night, playing a live game catch as catch can, really saved my sanity through a divorce, raising two kids, and jumpstarting my writing again, sporadically, but still.

So my hats off to Gygax and Arneson.  Without them, my life would have been a little more boring.

~Alley

Highway to Hell (Maggie Quinn book three) comes out on March 9, 2009
The Splendor Falls (not a series book, but awesome) comes out on September 8, 2009
Hell Week (Maggie Quinn book two) is reissued in paperback on September 8, 2009

And she’s working on her fifth book for Random House.

Check out Alex’s (aka A. Lee Martinez) latest podcast at

http://www.deadrobotssociety.com/ 

Alex’s next book to be published is “The Automatic Detective” with a release date of Feb. 5, 2008.  Click here to pre-order now!

by Bill Ledbetter

NOW available in the
Sails & Sorcery: Tales of Nautical Fantasy anthology
available from Fantasist Enterprises

to the NTSFW Members who won the

2007 FenCon Short Story Contest!

1st place — Dal Jeanis: “Spirit of Springtime”

3rd place — Becky Huffman: “Good Morning Sunshine”

Details for the 2008 FenCon Short Story Contest will be posted soon, so stay tuned!