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Designers & Dragons. This weekend I finished up work on the "Platinum Index", our free supplement to Designers & Dragons backers. It contains four new histories, plus edited, commented versions of the yearly reports I've written on the industry for 2008-2013. It totaled about 31,000 words, which as I say in the introduction isn't bad for a couple of months work. To be fair, I had about 12,000 words of yearly reports in advance,but there's a lot of great new text as well. All told, that's about a quarter of one of the printed books.
This is basically the end of my writing and editing work on Designers & Dragons this year. I do still have: (1) signing of Kickstarted books; (2) interaction with editing, proofing, and layout of the Appendix. But, I'm not doing anything new for the series until 2015*. Whew.
More generally, I'm going to take as much of the next week as I can off from extracurricular writing, and enjoy some rest in the evenings instead. Also whew.
* Except I was really tempted today to start in on histories of Morrigan and Khepera for some future book. Must. Show. Discipline.
Optometrists. Last Tuesday I was back to Berkeley Optometric Group yet again. We're theoretically working on getting a new pair of glasses, with prescription verified by a different optometrist and placed in a different frame. So I spent 45 minutes this time looking at frames (really, I let the techs do the looking), but the only place the techs could find similar frames to what I have was in a catalog, so they've ordered them and I get to go back yet again this week.
While I was working with the techs, one of them apologized and said I'd been very patient with the whole process. Which is true, but it really made me think about my one and only appointment with Dr. Chun at BOG. My problem wasn't just that he was trying to dump me as a patient, but also that he continually tried to invalidate my experience. He was so busy explaining how the screwed-up glasses were in spec and that he'd never had a problem like this that he refused to listen to me explain how the glasses were unusable and worse than what I had, that one lens was a blurry smear when I tried to look out of it.
Doctors that don't listen to you? Unfortunately common. Doctors that try to convince you that you're wrong in your personal experience? BAD.
Rain. Yay! We've finally had some real rain this year. It was actually a misty day when I went out to bike last Saturday (the 25th) and I found it joyous, with the smell of damp dirt in my nostrils and the wet air, and I even saw a rainbow on the way home. (And got doused for about a minute at the Knox Miller Regional Shoreline). Then this last Friday (the 31st) we had some real rain again. Still below seasonal norms, but it felt good to see some water falling from the sky.
Halloween. Friday was of course Halloween. Lucky for the kiddies, that rain cleared up before the eve. I generally enjoy Halloween because it feels different than any other US holiday, more about joyous experience than brainwashed merchandising. K. and I always go out to dinner on Fridays, and so I chose Nation's so that we could have a delicious Halloween pie afterward. Sadly, her pecan pie was still in the fridge last I saw, due to ongoing problems with nausea.
Then afterward I got groceries. Riding through north Berkeley, I saw troupes of kids and parents trooping about, which was fun. We don't see that sort of thing in our neighborhood, though it picks up a few blocks south of us. And at Safeway I saw college kids dressed up, with a homemade looking Peter Pan being the best.
Gaming. We rather shockingly had our roleplaying fall off for two months(!). First I was in Placerville, then the next week I was finishing up the Designers & Dragons: The '00s index. Then Mary & Donald were unavailable for three weeks running, with Dave S. unavailable each week too.Then we almost got together on the (rainy) 25th, but Eric F. didn't tell us he was available, so we cancelled, then he showed up at the session(!).
But on Saturday (the 1st), we finally got together to continue Kingmaker! Whew. We're still traveling the River Kingdoms, and I'm trying to push as much RP as fightP, so it's been enjoyable. I feel hopeful that we can have more regular attendance of sessions through the end of the campaign, but who can tell. We also counted up many of the loose plot threads (evil fay, silver dagger, Penny's dad, wedding), but I honest to goodness have them all on the horizon. We probably won't be finishing by the end of the year, but I'm hopeful that maybe we can before Hawaii '15. If we can game regularly.
And after that: Mary might run Achtung! Cthulhu or The Tyranny of Dragons or I might run 13th Age or Burning Wheel or Dungeon World.
Hawaii. On my TODO list: making reservations for the trip to visit my folks in Hawaii next year. They've offered us a stay in their condo in Honolulu for a few days, so the question is whether we can make a three-leg reservation like that work without increasing our costs too much. So, soon to fight with the bureaucracy of online flight reservations.
This is basically the end of my writing and editing work on Designers & Dragons this year. I do still have: (1) signing of Kickstarted books; (2) interaction with editing, proofing, and layout of the Appendix. But, I'm not doing anything new for the series until 2015*. Whew.
More generally, I'm going to take as much of the next week as I can off from extracurricular writing, and enjoy some rest in the evenings instead. Also whew.
* Except I was really tempted today to start in on histories of Morrigan and Khepera for some future book. Must. Show. Discipline.
Optometrists. Last Tuesday I was back to Berkeley Optometric Group yet again. We're theoretically working on getting a new pair of glasses, with prescription verified by a different optometrist and placed in a different frame. So I spent 45 minutes this time looking at frames (really, I let the techs do the looking), but the only place the techs could find similar frames to what I have was in a catalog, so they've ordered them and I get to go back yet again this week.
While I was working with the techs, one of them apologized and said I'd been very patient with the whole process. Which is true, but it really made me think about my one and only appointment with Dr. Chun at BOG. My problem wasn't just that he was trying to dump me as a patient, but also that he continually tried to invalidate my experience. He was so busy explaining how the screwed-up glasses were in spec and that he'd never had a problem like this that he refused to listen to me explain how the glasses were unusable and worse than what I had, that one lens was a blurry smear when I tried to look out of it.
Doctors that don't listen to you? Unfortunately common. Doctors that try to convince you that you're wrong in your personal experience? BAD.
Rain. Yay! We've finally had some real rain this year. It was actually a misty day when I went out to bike last Saturday (the 25th) and I found it joyous, with the smell of damp dirt in my nostrils and the wet air, and I even saw a rainbow on the way home. (And got doused for about a minute at the Knox Miller Regional Shoreline). Then this last Friday (the 31st) we had some real rain again. Still below seasonal norms, but it felt good to see some water falling from the sky.
Halloween. Friday was of course Halloween. Lucky for the kiddies, that rain cleared up before the eve. I generally enjoy Halloween because it feels different than any other US holiday, more about joyous experience than brainwashed merchandising. K. and I always go out to dinner on Fridays, and so I chose Nation's so that we could have a delicious Halloween pie afterward. Sadly, her pecan pie was still in the fridge last I saw, due to ongoing problems with nausea.
Then afterward I got groceries. Riding through north Berkeley, I saw troupes of kids and parents trooping about, which was fun. We don't see that sort of thing in our neighborhood, though it picks up a few blocks south of us. And at Safeway I saw college kids dressed up, with a homemade looking Peter Pan being the best.
Gaming. We rather shockingly had our roleplaying fall off for two months(!). First I was in Placerville, then the next week I was finishing up the Designers & Dragons: The '00s index. Then Mary & Donald were unavailable for three weeks running, with Dave S. unavailable each week too.Then we almost got together on the (rainy) 25th, but Eric F. didn't tell us he was available, so we cancelled, then he showed up at the session(!).
But on Saturday (the 1st), we finally got together to continue Kingmaker! Whew. We're still traveling the River Kingdoms, and I'm trying to push as much RP as fightP, so it's been enjoyable. I feel hopeful that we can have more regular attendance of sessions through the end of the campaign, but who can tell. We also counted up many of the loose plot threads (evil fay, silver dagger, Penny's dad, wedding), but I honest to goodness have them all on the horizon. We probably won't be finishing by the end of the year, but I'm hopeful that maybe we can before Hawaii '15. If we can game regularly.
And after that: Mary might run Achtung! Cthulhu or The Tyranny of Dragons or I might run 13th Age or Burning Wheel or Dungeon World.
Hawaii. On my TODO list: making reservations for the trip to visit my folks in Hawaii next year. They've offered us a stay in their condo in Honolulu for a few days, so the question is whether we can make a three-leg reservation like that work without increasing our costs too much. So, soon to fight with the bureaucracy of online flight reservations.