Writing, Writing, Writing

There's been lots of writing lately.

The iPhone Book. Chris & I hit our third milestone for the iPhone book on Friday, which was the two-third content milestone. To date we've delivered 167 pages of iPhone programming goodness, plus or minus. I took a few days off after that, as iPhone from dawn to dusk makes an Appelcline weary, but I started back in on the editing yesterday afternoon and back in on the writing today.

We're well into the SDK side of things now, with probably four chapters to go, or about 80 pages. I'm currently writing about view controllers. My current pattern is to start writing first thing in the morning. On a good day, I can get my quota for the day written by lunch, but if I'm working on a new topic (or otherwise distracted), it can run well into the afternoon. At the worst I tend to finish at 3 or 4, which usually leaves me with a little bit of time for other work-related stuff.

Except when I hit the occasional bug in the SDK. That can leave me tearing my hair out all day.

Tradetalk. I've heard from the folks at Tradetalk magazine recently*. I last wrote them a couple of articles very early last year, and it seems that the last of those should be coming out soon. So after hearing their schedule I committed to articles for the next three issues. Last night I wrote about half of an article on what other people think of the Thanatari, which I'll finish up over the weekend, then I'm going to unearth an old piece on the Vale of Flowers which I started for another publication that never came about (and is only about halfway done in any case).

* Funny story. I heard from them because one of the editors reads my LJ here, and noted one of my recent journal entries stating that I was ready to start writing stuff other than the iPhone book. Ah, the power of the information age.

The History Book. It's nearing the one-year anniversary of my book getting unceremoniously canceled, and thus I'm getting to point where I have enough distance that I can probably deal with the book again without the false assumptions I had in place because I thought I had a publisher who would do the book as I conceived it right.

Does that mean I'll be getting back to it soon? I'm not sure. I recently put out a proposal for a totally different book that would take up my free time if it were accepted. But, if that new thing falls through, I'll be looking at the history book again soon.

It's amazing to me how much the industry has changed since I last worked on the book. I mean there's big stuff, like D&D 4E, which will deserve a whole section discussing how it was rolled out over the last several years. But, there are numerous other changes. Paizo has totally reinvented itself. Palladium has apparently staved off bankruptcy. Chaosium has returned to its BRP roots. A multitude of companies have begun to branch D&D 3.5E. And of course a few notables in the industry have died, among them industry founder Gary Gygax and Judges Guild founder Robert Bledsaw.

I find it eerie that I have emails sitting around from Bob commenting on the book. I never requested comments from Gary, because I had so many interviews with him, and I also saw how his answers changed from year to year, leaving me to doubt the accuracy of more recent pieces. But I wish he could have seen the book and the huge lump of history that he ultimately created.

The Wallace-a-Thon Continues: Byzantium & Tyros

Over the last week I've played two new-to-me Wallace games.

Byzantium. This got played last Saturday after my normal RPG on Saturday fell through. The core conceit is pretty neat: there's a war going on between the Byzantines and the Arabs, and you simultaneously control armies on both sides, trying to (somewhat) balance your points between them. It was quite a good game; I'm glad I picked it up even after a general non-committal response from the board game world. To a large extent, it's a pure game of efficiency: you try and get the optimal points per turn. It's also got a decent amount of fighting, but in some interestingly constrained ways.

Among the elements I liked: the trademark Wallace alternative victory condition (here, a special Arab win if Constantinople falls); a very strategic resource management system, involving cubes and coins; and a fun combat system that let you empire build across the map.

I'm hoping to play it again relatively soon to get a better feel for it.

Tyros. Eric has been bringing this to Endgame for a while, and we finally got it to the table today. It's a trading and card management game as you build cities in trading empires, struggling for majorities in the most valuable empires.

I didn't have any problem with it, but I wasn't wildly excited either. This may partly be because we had a somewhat unbalanced game, involving (among other things) the other two players fighting, to my pure advantage. I asked Eric afterward what he liked about the game, and he said that it was a pretty unique Wallace German/abstract and that he liked how the game developed (meaning empires expanding and cities getting built, I expect).

This was published through Kosmos, not Warfrog, and it's the Warfrog games that I've liked best.