Author Joel Rosenberg died yesterday. The paper reports:
[Mod mod]Added “g” to “Rosenber” in title.[/Mod mod]
I’m saddened to hear this. I knew Joel well from SF conventions when he was still in New York and always enjoyed hanging with him. For some reason, we ended up on the same panels, so I got to see him a lot.
Joel was born to be an SF/fantasy writer. The first book he read was Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo. Literally: he had dyslexia as a child and had never read anything before. In order to get him to try reading, his teacher asked what he liked. He said “rocket ships” and she picked out the first book with that term in the title.
He was a big D&D fan. His wife suggested it to him when he was starting out as a writer, and he used the game as inspiration for his Guardians of the Flame series.
I haven’t seen Joel in 20 years, since he moved to the midwest. One of our last conversations was saying goodbye at the end of the convention and trying to figure the next one we’d both be at. It ended with “There’s always Boskone.” But by Boskone, he had moved away.
RIP, Kemo Sabe
The first time I had heard of Joel Rosenberg I was perusing a bookstore and happened upon the title “Not Exactly the Three Musketeers.” It intruiged me so I ended up buying it.
I got 100 pages into it and something just seemed off about it. Characters came and went as if we should know them. Roads in the major town were given passing reference as if I should already be familiar with them.
So I looked up the title.
It was book 8 in an ongoing series. Lovely. I laughed but ended up finishing the book anyway.
Then I went back to the begining to start the series from book 1.
SHIT. I met Joel at my first ever convention and became an “Official Joel Rosenberg Groupie” (I still have the button somewhere) which amused him to no end. One of my all-time favorite books of his is D’Shai, which isn’t part of a series but is just genius writing. I also read his non-SF mystery books, and they were quite good.
I’ve been following his Second Amendment travails on Facebook; I hope it wasn’t stress-related due to his legal issues.
Shit. 
Sad news. I read and enjoyed most of the Guardians of the Flame series as a youth.
Damn. I am another fan of his, starting with the Guardians books. I always thought that he did a great job of playing with the concepts of folks from our world shifting into a D&D world.
I ran into him online on a gun forum, I made a comment about his name and found out that he was the same guy. We swapped some emails back then. I donated to his legal cause as well.
He will be missesd. I might have to restart the whole series now.