LET ME PUT MY THOUGHTS IN YOU
Busy, busy, busy! I’ve started on the Denouement for Mine, and I’ve made good progress. Act IV corrections have come back from my proofreader, and it’s just a matter of hitting those items… along with the ones from Act III that I have yet to touch. Once that’s out of the way, just a bit of cartography is all that stands between me and happiness. Which is to say dealing with Adobe Illustrator and running the adventure through Preflight. From there, the cover file has to be completed, a blurb written for the back, a price decided on for this monster, and little decisions like whether to release it just as a PDF or do a soft and/or hardcover. Right now I’m leaning toward a roughly 128 page softcover book, but this may change. Will advise.
CONVENTION SEASON!
With the coming of Summer comes the Gathering of the Nerds. We all get together to play games and make wildly inappropriate jokes and just kinda hang out to do our favorite things. This year I’ve been volunteered for Free RPG Day at Eclectic Geekery, and I think the game is getting popular again after the pandemic downtime. I’m already running a game there on the 1st and 3rd Saturday of every month, and I’m filling the table week after week. This makes Alan happy. But in July, the local gaming …group? Club? Facebook clan? is holding the annual NEA Game Fest in Jonesboro, Arkansas. I’ve missed the last two years… I think it’s been two years… because of health issues and general family concerns. I had already moved 29 tickets to my games that weekend and I had to pull the plug at the last minute. I’m still sorry for everyone who was looking to play, but I’m going to change the subject before I wind up 4 tangents deep in something I’d rather not remember just now. It’s awfully late as I’m writing this.
PLAYER’S GUIDE 1.0
So my weekends are packed for a good little while, and I have to make decisions about what gets priority for publication. With just 6 weeks between now and Game Fest, do I put literally everything else on hold and get the CoE Player’s Guide ready for its 1.0 release, or do I keep sawing on Mine and get it out of my hair? I know six weeks seems like a long time, but it’s really not. In actual fact, I would have about ONE week to make the remaining corrections, add polish, and colorize about 7-8 more images and run it through Preflight to be sure any New and Improved* copies would be ready FOR SURE by the day of the convention. All the decisions about covers and bindings for Mine apply here, too. I believe I’ll be sunsetting the B&W softcover version and move to a full-color hardcover and just update the PDF. Regarding the PDF, I have to downsample the entire thing to 150 dpi images to reduce filesize; I don’t think people need to be downloading the print quality version with 300 dpi pictures to look at on their iThing or Androgenous Phone.
WORK COMPLETED
I knocked out the new Protean Preserver image to match the one on the promotional poster (Now Sold Here!), and it feels good to have that out of the way. I still don’t like the way the hands came out. Maybe I can fix it with DALL*E. It took a while to get everything put together right, and it involved an image resize and resolution change or two. At one point it put the figure in high heels. As I’m not interested in a sexbot to promote my game, that had to change. Damned if AI doesn’t go completely crazy with hands and feet. I got it done in the end. Of course, I’d prefer it be done in line art style, but I’m all out of sketch artists at the moment. Losing Anna Hanson hurt in more ways than one.
CONCLUSION
Welp, that’s all I’ve got for you today. I’ve got to get cracking and actually have some progress to report. I’m sure you don’t want to watch me wring my hands while somehow, simultaneously stcking my thumb up my ring-piece. And if you find that amusing, YOU are the person your mother warned you about.
— Alan
June 19, 2023