Everything Else I Learned from D&D
Originally published at A Singularity. You can comment here or there.
Shelly Mazzanoble is an author. She is most well-known, by me, for her regular articles, Confessions of a Full-Time Wizard, on the Dungeons & Dragons website. She also wrote the book, Confessions of a Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress: A Girl’s Guide to the D&D game.
I mention this because Shelly has a second novel on the shelves called Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons: One Woman’s Quest to Trade Self-Help for Elf-Help. You can read a preview of it here in one of her Confessions article.
Shelly’s style of humor is self-deprecating and absurd in a combination that keeps one smiling, if not out right laughing. Mix in a healthy dose of humor and a keen capability of explaining the odd world of Dungeons and Dragons to even the most layman of reader, and her book will keep you reading.
Would be authors will find this excerpt particularly amusing:
Maybe other authors aren’t as involved in the publication of their books because they don’t spend eight hours a day with the people who create them. I’d walk past the desk of Matt, the art director, and see the book’s cover on his screen.
“Do you think my name should be bigger?” I asked.
“Sure,” he agreed. “Totally.”
When the galley was routed for approval, I saw my name was bigger. And misspelled.
“There’s no extra e in Shelly!” I yelled when I saw him working out with his trainer in the gym. “You know that!”
“Oops,” he smiled. “My bad.”
(Never mind the second galley routed with Michele and the third with Mouthy Mazzanoble. That’ll learn me. Not.)
My poor editor is one of my dearest friends. At least she was. Editing this beast nearly sent her into early labor. I’m terrified her son is going to grow up having a nervous twitch whenever I’m around.
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