Last week was a pretty good week. We got The Rifter® done and to the printer, and now we're working on getting the Chi-Town ‘Burbs Anthology book done. In addition to being a fun read, I think the Anthology book of short stories will offer gamers insight to the people of Rifts Earth and life in the Chi-Town ‘Burbs, as well as the workings of the Coalition States. It should also provide plenty of ideas for adventures and maybe even Non-Player Characters (good and bad) to drop into their games. I like it a lot, and if it does well, we’ll publish more novels and anthology books.
After it, our focus is getting the next two Robotech® sourcebooks to the printer for an August and September release. I think everyone is going to love these books. Both will be filled with new art, text, stats and info that should thrill and excite as we expand the Robotech® universe. We’re especially excited about the Southern Cross book which will include all kinds of never before seen information. Cool.
Then it's getting Dead Reign, the Rifter #44 and Dyval out for an October release. A lot of hard work, but fun, fun, fun.
I had planned to get a lot of work done this weekend, but somehow that didn’t happen. I still need to get contracts out to people on a variety of projects (sorry folks), take care of a bunch of other business and do some work on Project X. Thought I’d get caught up a bit over the weekend, but I didn’t.
Fell into a little bit of a funk and couldn’t get motivated to get much business done. I did do a lot, though. Washed two loads of clothes, one load of dishes, saw my girlfriend, wrote a letter, talked to several friends on the phone (although I’m still playing telephone tag with my daughter, Monica), sorted through some paperwork, read a dozen comic books, and saw a trio of movies: Get Smart – which I loved, but then I adored the TV show as a kid, and the movie was very loyal to the show; Sex and the City – I admit it, I enjoy that TV show too (excellent writing, strong characters and hot women); and the Bucket List. After talking business, I had a nice dinner at Kathy Simmon’s place on Saturday, and we watched the Bucket List on DVD. It’s a touching buddy movie about two guys dying of cancer. It was hard for me to watch at times, but it is a truly funny, heartwarming bittersweet film that I must highly recommend. It was also nice to learn, according to the movie, that Erick Wujcik satisfies the two requirements to get into Ancient Egyptian Heaven. Which could mean he’s rockin’ with a bunch ‘o Pharaoh’s right now! Good thing we published Valley of the Pharaohs way back when. Oh, wait, Erick didn’t write that one. Ah, he’ll be fine.
One of the friends I spoke with Saturday was Kay Kozora, Erick’s long time sweetheart. She’s a dear, sweet friend and, all things considered, she is doing okay. In fact, she sounded great. We talked about Erick, Amber, The Rifter #43, auctioning off a bunch of his books (and keeping the precious keepsakes), Palladium, Project X, the Rifts movie (if there ever is one), slow sales for Palladium due to economic woes and fears across the country (and Palladium not publishing enough new product, yeah, that one's our fault!), funny stories about Erick, our feelings about him and how it all ended, and how we are all handling moving forward without him. It was a really good conversation. About an hour long. Lots of laughs. No tears.
Then I popped into the Palladium office to do those darn contracts I keep promising people, but I wrote this Murmur instead, sorted through some more paperwork, and answered some of the many Private Messages that have filled up my mail box. Sorry it took so long folks.
We’ll that’s it for now. I’ll do those contracts and some writing tomorrow. Looking forward to a productive week. Hope you all had a nice weekend. Game on.
Sincerely,
Kevin Siembieda
Publisher, Writer, Artist and Procrastinator (at least for a weekend)
© Copyright June 29, 2008 Palladium Books Inc. All rights reserved.
Rifts®, The Rifter®, RECON®, Splicers®, Palladium Books®, Phase World®, The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game®, Megaverse®, Nightbane®, The Mechanoids®, The Mechanoid Invasion®, Coalition Wars® and After the Bomb® are Registered Trademarks of Palladium Books Inc. Heroes Unlimited, Beyond the Supernatural, and other published book titles, names, slogans and likenesses are trademarks of Palladium Books Inc., and Kevin Siembieda.
Robotech® and Robotech® The Shadow Chronicles® are Registered Trademarks of Harmony Gold USA, Inc.