David Chart's Blog

David Chart’s Blog

Latest News

  • Ars Magica Crowdfundings

    My first professional publication for Ars Magica came out in 1993, in White Wolf Magazine. Things rather grew from there, and I spent over a decade as the Line Developer. When I retired from that position, I ended up taking a break for a few years, but now I’m back.

    First, I prepared the text for the upcoming Definitive Edition. The text is now done and is being laid out, and the crowdfunding launches in a few days.

    Second, part of the crowdfunding is the release of Ars Magica under an open license (CC BY-SA), and I have a Patreon at which I am writing for that license. The licensing has not happened yet, but I have permission from Atlas to do that. When you have been working with them on the line for years, you can do that.

    I am looking forward to writing for the game again!

News Archive

My Writing

Fiction

I have written some fiction.

Academic

I have published a few peer-reviewed academic works, on philosophy and Japanese history.

Roleplaying Games

I have written for roleplaying games.

Mimusubi

Mimusubi is my project for non-fiction writing about Shinto. It has its own website.

Recent Blog Posts

  • A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine

    Here we have another example of a book that does what it says on the cover; a recounting of one year’s festivals and activities at a Shinto shrine, together with comments from various of the priests on matters connected to Shinto, Japan, and the shrine’s operation. The writing is clear and lively, and it gives,…

  • Mayuki’s Patience

    Mayuki is learning to be patient. There have been a couple of telling incidents recently. The first was a few days ago, when I was playing with her, and she wanted to watch one of her videos. I wanted to read a book with her first, but she was insistent on watching the video. So…

  • Moving

    We’re almost certainly moving flat in the near future. This has come about rather suddenly; the leaflet about it appeared in our mailbox a couple of weeks ago, we went to see it a little more than a week ago, and we did the contracts on Saturday. The flat in question is in a danchi,…

  • Gamers Help Haiti

    It is unlikely that anyone reading this blog is both interested and does not already know, but just in case I will mention it. DriveThruRPG is running an appeal to help Haiti. If you donate $20, which all goes to Doctors Without Borders, you get over 100 PDF gaming products, worth well over $1000. This…

  • A Mystery

    If you read blogs and websites by foreigners (or former foreigners) living in Japan, there is one experience that you come across repeatedly. People who do not look Asian find that Japanese people will not speak Japanese to them, and insist on speaking English, even when the foreigner has displayed Japanese ability. If the foreigner…

  • Fossil Viruses in the Human Genome

    There is a commonly-heard idea that Japanese science is not creative, although they are very good at refining other people’s ideas. This idea is commonly heard even in Japan; I’ve had to disabuse quite a few of my students of the idea. Including some of the ones working as research scientists. It is true that…

  • ÅŒyama Kaidō: From Akasaka to the Tama River

    For my birthday last year, my sister bought me a book describing the course of the ÅŒyama Kaidō, with directions for walking it. The ÅŒyama Kaidō was one of the Edo-period roads of Japan (the Edo period is 1603-1868; the time when the Tokugawa shoguns ruled Japan from Edo, the city that later became Tokyo),…

  • The Fox and the Jewel

    This book, subtitled “Shared and Private Meanings in Contemporary Japanese Inari Worship”, is the product of extensive research into the Inari cult in contemporary (early 1990s) Japan. The author spent a year at Fushimi Inari Taisha, the oldest Inari shrine and still, in some sense, the centre of the cult, and a further year at…

  • Tamao Post Mortem

    As I mentioned on the Tamao page, the story has now finished, and I’m not currently planning to write a sequel. This is because I have lost money on the project; I have spent more on advertising it than I have received from readers, even leaving aside the fact that I would like to be…

  • Christmas in America

    As I mentioned, we spent Christmas in California with my father. This was Mayuki’s first trip to the USA, although she went to the UK in summer 2008, and met most of the US family then. One thing we discovered is that it really is rather easier to travel with a very small baby than…