Summer is a flat circle

Craig Lincoln

— 2 min read
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Detective Rust Cohle from True Detective in a crowded police station room.
Nic Pizzolatto/Matthew McConaughey, “Rust Cohle being interviewed,” True Detective (HBO Entertainment, 2014)

Hi there! It's summer time and that means we go from school schedules for my kids to no schedules, where bed times extend later and pool visits become a daily occurrence. As a kid, I saw it as an endlessly joyous time. As a parent, I see my time evaporate as I need to run kids to camp and find time to hit the grocery store between swim meets and work deadlines. So here we are, officially in the summer, may we endure.

Publishing News

I found out that Transmentation | Transience was shortlisted for the 2026 Manly Wade Wellman Award. This was unexpected and most welcome! For those that aren't familiar, Transmentation | Transience is a science fiction novel I co-wrote with four other writers (Josh Eure, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm), that was published in March 2025 by Blackstone Publishing. I planned on attending ConGregate 12 in Greensboro, NC anyway, but now there might be a fun bonus reason!

What I'm Writing

My writing time used to be in the morning between work starting and coming home from dropping off the kids, and it worked well. Now it's ad hoc, since I'm sleeping in a bit more, but I'm finding time in between child rearing and working.

My agent has my novel revisions and I should hear back from him soon. I drafted a fantasy last month that I need to revise, but first I'm working on two Many Worlds short stories! One of them I'm co-writing with one of my MFA cohort and it's been fun to put our heads together and find an interesting story to tell.

What I'm Playing

I picked up a game called Tidal Blades 2 on a lark, after seeing Dice Tower's positive review. My daughter and I have been loving it! It has cards that are kind of like worker placement on a grid, and you can play one down then choose a column or row to "activate." And the art is incredible. Just look at this box!

Box art for Tidal Blades 2: Rise of the Unfolders by Druid City Games
You can ignore the Part 2, this is stand alone.

Marvel Champions Deck Spotlight

Jubilee blowing a bubble from some gum in her signature yellow jacket. She is tilting her glasses down in a sassy about to blow you up kind of way.
Jubilee about to sparkle some bad guys

Marvel Champions is my favorite game, hands down. It's a constructed card game and I've been playing it since it came out in 2019. I've built tons of decks and love finding unexpected interactions between cards.

I stumbled across this Jubilee deck and had a lot of fun playing it. I'm a sucker for a good theme and unexpected uses for overlooked cards and this has both. I like the whole Wolverine as a teacher and lots of teenager allies to go with the class field trip vibe, and Invisibility Gear is a great include to find neat ways to use Jubilee's heavy status effects.

From the Mouths of Babes

My daughter sometimes compresses terms in order to be more efficient, like calling hand sanitizer "handitizer" and the green bean bag chair the "green bag chair." I think we could use more official terms like these!

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