Back in Milwaukee

So, it's been a week and more since I posted last, having been distracted by preparations for my current trip: tomorrow begins a week's work at the Marquette Archives looking at the Tolkien papers. This time the focus will be on the appendices, which will also involve at least some time with the frontmatter as well, the two being linked in various complicated ways.

For now though I've arrived, arranged for some get-togethers with friends, and gotten settled in. Tomorrow begins the mission.

As for the get-togethers, they've already started. I got to play a CALL OF CTHULHU adventure today, downstairs in The Plaza's Walnut Room, which looks exactly like the ideal background for such a game. This was the third of three adventures written and run by Jim Lowder, the only person I know of to have been on the staff of both TSR (back in the old days, immediately preceding and overlapping with my first few months there) and now Chaosium (which in many ways was an anti-TSR).

Tomorrow after the Archives closes I have plans to see my friends the Burrahobbits, a long-running fantasy book group. Wednesday I'm hoping to see Richard West if he can make it over from Madison for the day. And to round the week out I've got plans on Thursday to see RPG blogger Ben Riggs to share some reminiscencing about Lake Geneva days.

Speaking of which, I hadn't realized a discussion was going back and forth online about TSR's decisions to pass on a Tolkien license back in '92 and WotC's later repeating their mistake; thanks to Allan G. for the link.

In the meantime I've been doing a lot of reading, both light (re-reading J.P.Walsh's fourth Peter-and-Harriet novel* and trying out a late-period Heinlein), heavy (HME.XII, H.Young's 'Habits of Whiteness'), and somewhere in-between (C. L. Moore's NORTHWEST SMITH stories, which strike me as Mythos-in-space tales).

And now to make an early night of it so as to be at my best for working with the manuscripts tomorrow.

--John R.


*this is the one that slanders Tolkien; a sort of belated sequel to GAUDY NIGHT.