Some Days You Bite the Dog
You want to know what I did? Why, I worked on the Echo of Dead Leaves Player’s Guide. I shifted over to the phase of the project I call stitching. What is stitching, you may well ask? It’s putting together all the different documents together which make a book. I’m going to make a confession. I must’ve been seriously fatigued or distracted when I labeled some of these files. I was gathering stuff together, I began poking around in files because, well, some stuff felt missing. I was looking at this empty, new master document I was creating and putting in the punch list I had in one of the gazillion other files. The usual suspects were there and as I shifted stuff over to the master document, I noted some sections were just not there. Some stuff I was certain I had written some time ago. I dug around. An amateur archaeologist digging through his own backyard. Luckily, I at least put all of the files in the proper project folder, but I saw one with the name of timelines and I figured, y’know, this must be a timeline. The Echo of Dead Leaves campaign takes place over a year, so maybe, just maybe, I had placed this one sacrosanct timeline into this file. No. Not even close. I placed the Player’s Section in there and not just a little of it. Here was the proper intro–not the preface–here were thirty archetypes customized for Charleston. Here were the Social Ties stuff. As a matter of fact, it was about twenty thousand words of stuff I had not noticed was missing. In my defense, the last several days were dealing more with sorting out the Keeper’s Section of the book, but I felt it was time to get organized and begin from the beginning. So I did. I was so elated to have discovered this secret cache of stuff I didn’t have to write, you would’ve though I had found twenty bucks in that pair of pants I rarely wear or a crisp, hundred dollar bill shoved into some book on the shelf for a rainy day. This spurred me on to write some more, so I cleared about 2k new words. Nothing to write home about, mind you, but it was forward momentum when I expected a whopping word count of zero. Some days you bite the dog, and that sort of thing.
I wanted to keep writing. I wanted to ignore communication–this communication–with the outside world. I wanted to forego dinner and the planned gaming and just keep writing. That way lies madness. When I’m working on something like this, I sometimes get really pulled in, but you have to pace yourself, and I’d rather end today on a high note than in the throes of torturous entropy[1. Okay. I’m tending towards hyperbole. Blame the subject matter and HPL.] I did see some interesting things on Twitter today, some things I almost went lazy with and just posted up here. I was going to say, “Listen to this and we’ll discuss.” Hey. I still can.
Here are some interesting panels recorded from GenCon 2011. You should give them a listen and we can, y’know, discuss if you’d like. :)
And my buddy, Alex Flagg of Crafty Games, posted up a link to some good reads. He and Brian (B.D.) Flory both highly recommend The Paradox of Choice which I for one may well snag. This is an important subject for designers of all stripes.
Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu!
