Dungeons & Desktops, by Matt Barton

So I've got a new contract for my RPG History book. It's got a scheduled completion date of February 28, 2011--which means that it'll hopefully be out somewhere between GenCon and Christmas next year. That's way, way in the future, because I didn't want to run myself into the ground this time around (and you can witness the fact that I did last time by the fact that it took me years to even want to contemplate the book again).

As a result, I've been more actively glomming on to stuff that I think might be useful for the book and reading it. The first such major work is Dungeons & Desktops, a history of computer roleplaying games by Matt Barton. I was alerted to its existence by RPG Examiner, Michael Tresca. (Go forth and give him clicks; he looks at a variety of interesting RPG things on a regular basis.)

The book does a very good job of extensively crawling through every major computer roleplaying game ever, with brief stops with MUDs and MMORPGs. It does a little less of a good job of actually being interesting. The dig-through-every-game bit tends to occasionally result in page after page of dross, which might have been useful in an encyclopedia, but not a historical book. The methodology also sometimes manages to obscure the first-movers by talking so much about everything else.

And I think those are all good lessons for my own book too, though as I recall in my drafts I manage to talk more about the whys, hows, and wherefors than the whats.

(And I didn't really care about the sometimes boringness of Dungeons & Desktops, because if dull stuff was about non-RPG-industry games, I just skipped it.)

Dungeons & Desktops did suggest to me a variety of useful topics. I hadn't know, for example, that Paragon Software was pretty deep in bed with GDW, publishing games for Space: 1889 and Twilight: 2000, not just Traveller. I also now have a really nice and extensive list of D&D games and some of their stories dovetail nicely into the story of TSR's own fall.

So I've got about a week until the book is due back to the library to write about computer topics while I have a good reference on hand. I plan to get started with a revision and update of TSR tonight (or rather a start of that, as the TSR article is novella sized as I recall). It'll be the first active writing I've done on the book in years (minus a revision I did to two of the articles when I pitched it to the new publisher).

Butt in the Chair

One of the first rules for writing is to get your butt in the chair, and that's what I started doing tonight. My current goal is to put a solid hour of writing and revision into the RPG History book at the least every Monday, Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday. Maybe on Friday too, game prep allowing, and Saturday, energy level allowing, but those are less set. At least for the weekdays, that hour will be 10pm-11pm, which is after K. and I usually go our separate ways for the evening.

So today I started off with work on the TSR article. The previous draft turned out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 16,500 words. I edited through the first seven pages of thirty-six today.

My main goal is polishing text and making it sound better. I'm also trying to be aware of where pull quotes can go, since one of my goals for the new draft is to have a pull-quote every thousand words. As luck would have it, I inserted three pull quotes for the first three thousand words, which is right on schedule.

I started off with TSR not because it's first chapter (though it is), but because I have more TSR material to add than anything else, based on the computer book I recently read. I'm hoping to get through the whole draft before I add new computer material, but we'll see how far I can get. Sunday is probably the day when I need to sit down and make sure all my notes make sense while I still have Dungeons & Desktops on hand.

So there's a first butt-in-chair day. Four hours a week won't cut it to finish the book, not even with almost a year to go, but it's a good start to get me back into the habit of writing (and revising) in the evenings.