Reprint: This article was originally published 4/18/2008

I write too much.

This is not a new or sudden revelation. I've known since college that I could fill a notebook with ideas when preparing for a night's game of Dungeons & Dragons. I might write 12,000 words to describe a three-story arc adventure, and use 1/4 of what I'd written. That’s grossly inefficient, but it was no big deal. I had the time, what I wrote would eventually get recycled into some other adventure, and even if it didn't, that was ok too. After all, it's about journey, not the destination right?

Except now I don't have the time. The hours I used to spend crafting my Dungeons & Dragons campaign are gone, devoured by two fun little monsters for whom quiet time is the villain and bed time the enemy. What I used to spend three weeknights putting together must now be accomplished in an hour, two if I'm lucky. My initial solution to the problem wasn't a solution at all: I simply stopped game mastering.

Analog is a tremendous publication, a long-running flagship of science fiction that never fails to impress and inspire me. It combines excellent fiction -- often with hints of libertarian thought sprinkled in -- with well-written, understandable science stories. This is hard SF at its very best. The Web site reprints some of the magazine's monthly columns, and features the full-versions of those stories nominated for speculative fiction's top honors. Like its sister magazine Asimov's, Analog's Web page isn't tremendous, but it works.