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| Exile. Last week started to get uncomfortably hot for the first time in quite a few months, so I engaged in the annual (or semi-annual) running of the computers. Hauled my Mac downstairs and worked out of the dining room for a while. The heat didn't last very long, but the change of environ was increasing my efficacy, so I stayed there until last night.
Now the annual (or semi-annual) running of the computers has been reversed.
Meow. We do indeed have a sick cat. Cobweb's ultrasound showed that she had a problem with her intestines. The vet is hopeful that it's kitty-cat IBS, and we're treating Cobweb for that with two pills a day. Fortunately she loves treats, and so the pill-pouch-treat thingies work well for her. Once or twice she's spat the pill open after chewing on the pill pouch, then immediately gobbled it back up.
We're supposed to bring her in in about 3 weeks to get weighed. Hopefully her weight will be up.
Because, if it isn't IBS, the next guess is the big C.
Urgh. Tension headache is back today. It's been pretty good most of the time since my doc gave me meds a few months ago, but today it's been worsening throughout the day. Don't know if it was staring closely at cards, to get them readable at a size of 100 pixels tall, or the different quality of light in my office, but I'd guess one or the other. Or both.
Scribble. Many writing tasks have gathered on my freelance desk in the last week or two.
I've started writing Traveller articles for Mongoose, so now I'm swapping back and forth between Traveller and RQ for them. I'm enjoying the Traveller more, I must say, but it's still new and exciting. Currently, I've got a red-elf article in progress, but my (second) Traveller article is already planned out.
And, simultaneously, two of the Glorantha mags are getting ready to publish: Tradetalk and Hearts in Glorantha. They each have an article of mine that's part of a series, so I'm due to write the next one for them now. For HiG, "The Poisonthorn Forest" is being published, which means I need to write "The Hellwood". For TT, "The Vale of Flowers" is being published (which I had started writing for a different venue 3 or 4 years ago), which means I need to write "The Redwood".
Yes, it's all elf forests, all the time. | |
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| A fair amount of my time over the last week has spent pretty busily on iPhone programming. Believe it or not, this is actually a change of pace. Yes, I've spent a good chunk of time over the last year writing fragments of code to exemplify iPhone in Action as well as numerous articles, but that's not actually the same thing as sitting down to produce a fully functional program. I really enjoy logic puzzles, and so for me one of the things that's really great about object-oriented programming is figuring out how to create really modular, reusable classes that I can program once and use many times. Yes, it makes the first program take more time, but hopefully it makes every one afterward easier. So, though I have a specific roleplaying program that I'm working on, much of my last week has spent working on two classes: one to run a splash screen on the iPhone, another to better automate use of the iPhone's database. Ironically, this has led me straight back to articles about the iPhone, but this time they're articles based on code rather than code based on articles. Here's my three-part series on creating a splash screen on the iPhone, complete with a creative-commons licensed class that you can plug-in to create a splash screen almost immediately: | |
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| In case you're interested, but haven't been keeping up on what I'm writing, here's notes some of my recent pieces: BoardGameNews. I continue with my biweekly column over at BoardGameNews about, well, board games. My most recent column, published this Thursday, was on real-life auctions, and how they can correspond to game systems. RPGnet Reviews. Every Wednesday I publish one (or sometimes two) board game reviews on RPGnet. My most recent couple were reviews of Gem Dealer, Sutter's Mill, High Society, For Sale, and Money (most of those drawn from a new series by Gryphon Games that I wrote about here). TT&T Game Design. This is my game design column that I write to several times a year nowadays. The auction article could have gone here with a little bit of a different focus. My most recent article, just a few weeks' old, instead looked at the storytelling side of game design: Testing Characters, with a Look at Battlestar Galactica. iPhone Articles. Christopher and I have set up an iPhone programming blog to complement our recently published book, iPhone in Action. My most recent article, from this week, was on iPhone user interfaces. Xenagia Commentary. We've recently been joined by content editor, Stace Dumoski, at Xenagia, and so we're kicking off columns to really get the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror site rolling. I'll be writing some editorials called "Rants from the Future", though I'm just getting started on the first one now. Gloranthan Writing. I've been doing a scattering of writings for Gloranthan things. Since the start of the year I've written "RuneQuest Elf Monsters" and "Plunder of the Ducks" for Signs & Portents, and I'll be starting on "Plunder of the Dwarfs" soon. These will appear online, but haven't been published yet. My most recent work for Tradetalk was a revision of my "Vale of Flowers" article and I'll be getting to an article on "The Redwood Forest" next month. My immediate next article should be on Dorastan elves for Hearts in Glorantha, which I expect to start on tonight or Sunday. | |
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| Back before I kicked off my bike riding last Fall, I used to frequently have very lazy Sundays, often including an afternoon nap in my sun room. Today, the sun came out around 2.30, and I was vaguely tempted to head out for a bike ride, but instead the sun room beckoned, and I napped for a couple of hours with Lucy happily cuddled up with me. As usual, I kept a book nearby to pretend that I was reading, not sleeping. It's probably just as well that I didn't try to ride today, because it got gloomy again pretty quickly, and has progressed on to some badly needed (but probably still too scant) rain.
On the bright side, I take make good progress on a new article for Signs & Portents called "Plunder of the Ducks", which uses lots of background from Ducks: Guide to the Durulz. I think I'm going to be happy with the article once I've added two more plunder items, so it's almost done. Lots of writing planned for the next week: another review or two and a revision of "Vale of Flowers" are both on my schedule ... | |
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| Today my first programming book went to press. It's iPhone in Action, which I co-authored with Christiopher Allen. It's my no means my first technical writing. I've been writing documents since at least 1996. I worked for three or four months at Sun solely as a tech writer. I actually produced a book's worth of content for them on networking, a field that I was very familiar with at the time, but it never saw publication. I was later hired at the cryptography company, Certicom, with tech writing being one of my prime responsibilities, and I wrote FAQs on smartcards, elliptic curve cryptography, and several other topics. I've also done varying amounts of tech writing for Skotos. I even been published before, in Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2, though that was a real easy piece, more about storytelling than programming. A programming book, however, is something totally different. iPhone in Action took over 8 months, 50-75% time the whole time to put together a book that came out to about 475 pages. I have no idea of the word count, as it just wasn't important (only pages & content were). Probably around 180,000 words if I remember the average word count per page (400?) correctly. I'm particularly struck by the differences with the other field where I've done lots of work--RPGs--and I thought I'd write about that a bit.
Market Research: Generally, the biggest difference between RPG and tech writing was in the amount of work that the publisher put into making sure that they were getting a book that would be widely accepted by the market. From the moment we sent in our proposal, throughout the entire project, the publisher was constantly sending our material out to other people to comment on. Were they interested in the proposal? What did they think of the chapters so far? Was there anything that we should be doing that we weren't? How did they like our style of writing.Aside from the occasional survey sent out by an RPG company, you pretty much never hear about them doing market research. Maybe there's the occasional company that outsources a playtest, but it's a rarity, not the rule. Editorial Critique: In all the RPG work I've done (and I'll count at least four companies that I've done major work for: White Wolf, Chaosium, Green Knight, and Mongoose), there's been very little strategic editorial critique. The outlines I've sent in have usually been accepted fully. The one exception that I can think of was when I was asked to confine myself to an existing format for a product line. Conversely, with this tech book, the editors (and publisher) occasionally pushed hard when they thought their market research was suggested them ways to change our book. We were open minded as we could be (though every writer has to protect his babies somewhat) and the result was a modified table of contents that I think vastly improved the book with its coverage. There's something to be said for the fact that the RPG industry allows its writers a lot more latitude, and to really drive their own products, but I've learned well in the board game industry how important developers are. Good editorial critiques can really improve a book, and I think that's something that may be missing from a lot of the RPG industry. A Huge Team: Even at a mid-sized RPG company like Chaosium, it's amazing how few people can be involved with a project. There were books that I worked on while at Chaosium where I literally did everything: accepting the manuscript from the author, art directing it, copyediting it, laying it out, proofreading it, and coordinating everything with the printer. Contrariwise, I've worked with almost a dozen people for the iPhone book, such a vast an array of people that I sometimes (early on) lost track of who was who. Doubtless this is an issue of size. RPG companies who are anyone but Wizards just don't have the room for that sort of specialization--and unfortunately, I have to say, they suffer for it, because someone is unlikely to be good at every one of those tasks, and even if they were, more eyes usually benefits a project. Most of them will have more than one person inevitably work on a project, but two or three or four are a far cry from a dozen. So, I guess as much as anything, my RPG v. Tech comparison is a comparison of small v. large publishing, but it's nonetheless an intriguing one to see. It makes you really think about how the RPG industry just gets by on the fringe--but still keeps producing products that many of us enjoy. | |
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| Back to work, and it seems like I didn't even get to rest.
Friday night. Spent part of the night writing an iPhone article that I'd gotten behind on because of the busy-ness of the week. Finished it (in first draft form), thankfully. Spent the rest of the evening preparing for my D&D game on Saturday.
Saturday. Ran D&D during the day. Came home and revised and polished the aforementioned iPhone article. Also, OKed some final materials for the iPhone book.
Sunday. Felt ill. Napped much of the day. After dinner discovered that I'd been sent a copy of the index for the iPhone book, with just a little time to give my comments on it. Started work on that.
Partway though, Mike A. showed up to drive Kimberly & me to a concert in the city. It was at the Great American Music Hall, which is a very nice, casual venue, though we got there too late to get a seat where we could see the show without standing up. The main show was Jonathan Richman who got going around 9pm. I'm now interested in RIPping my There's Something about Mary CD. (He sang one song from it.) Got home around 11.
After watching The Amazing Race finale, headed back up to my office to finish commenting the iPhone Book index.
Monday. Woke up, back to work.
On the bright side, this week promises to be quieter, on the down side heading toward Christmas. I have another iPhone article to write (the third in a series), but the iPhone Book is supposed to be heading off to the printers momentarily, and that'll be a big load off. I expect I'll write about the iPhone book later tonight. | |
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| I successfully finished another Gloranthan article over the holiday weekend, and another nice meaty one that should have real-game use. It's "Plunder of the Aldryami", and I'd guess it'll be published in the January Signs & Portents. It includes several new Aldryami plunder items for RuneQuest 4, and I also got permission to revise and reprint the Aldryami items from the original Plunder. The article took me a bit more energy than I thought it would. I guess some of my creativity is still tied up with the iPhone book after all. But I'm really almost done there ... 2 more chapters to work with the copy editor on, 4 more to work with the proof reader on, and 9 more to look at in layout. As for RuneQuest stuff, I've got two more things that I want to play with: a HQ article on the Redwood and a RQ4 article full of "Aldryami Monsters" (e.g., nasty stuff you find in their woods). The first is for some indeterminate time in the future while the second is for the next S&P. | |
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| With the iPhone in Action book off my back*, I've got some of my creative energy back, and that's gotten me more enthusiastic about writing RPG-related stuff. I finished up my long-delayed Vale of Flowers article for Tradetalk and I've now moved on to some articles for Signs & Portents. Writing for Signs & Portents is nice because it uses the RuneQuest system, which I prefer. So, I'm quite happy to be doing it again. This time my inspiration came from Stephen Martin, who had nice little Monsters & Treasures sections at the ends of his Books of Drastic Resolution. They were great crunchy bits that also had good background and were very usable in games. So, I've proposed a Elf Plunder article and an Elf Monsters article for S&P and the editor has expressed interest. I hope they'll end up publishing in January & February, but I don't know what the lead time is exactly, since it's been a year since I wrote over there. If you missed my previous four S&P elf articles, they're all listed here and freely downloadable from Mongoose Publishing.
* Technically it's not, as I've still got 6 or 7 chapters that I need to OK with the copy editors, 12 or 13 chapters that I need to do a final read on and OK with the proof readers, and 16 chapters that I need to OK with the layout artists. However, I've now finished the original writing, and that frees up the creative part of my brain. | |
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