The History Book: Week #1
Mar. 21st, 2010 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aSo I've put in week #1 of my work on the history book. My goal was 4 hours of work, but I put in more like 7-8. I don't either need to or plan to keep going at that rate, but this week I really wanted to get through the TSR article.
So, I did a complete revision of my draft of the TSR history. I found some new sources on the turbulent times in TSR's history surrounding 1984, and my info improved a lot there, all thanks to OD&Dities magazine. I added a final section remembering the founders of our hobby, who both died since last I worked on my TSR article. I also in general made the text read better.
Besides general cleanup (and finishing up the 40% of the book that never went to "final" draft for the previous publisher), I also intend to add more color this time. To do this, I plan to include a pullout quote every 1,000 words or so and a box on somewhat related information every 5,000 pages. In my current draft that means about 200 quotes and 40 boxes.
For the TSR article, I pulled an even dozen quotes from a variety of sources. Since the total word count was 19k before boxes, I want to grab 7 more. I'm going to hunt for at least one Dave Arneson quote (probably in his final interview, in Kobold Quarterly) and find some others based on the sections of the draft that are the weakest, quote-wise right now. That generally means the later ones.
For the boxes, I wrote a box on AD&D computer games (and computer games in general), largely based on some material I had there already, plus my recent reading in Dungeons & Desktops. I plan two other boxes for this chapter, one on Wee Warriors and one on the evolution of Greyhawk over the years.
So that's where I am after a week: not quite done with TSR.
Next week I first up need to integrate all the rest of my computer-game notes, before I return Dungeons & Desktops to the library on Tuesday. After that I'd like to finish up the final work on TSR to have a complete chapter.
Just one chapter after two weeks of work you may say? Well, that one chapter will be 21k-22k words when it's done, which is definitely novella length. That'll make it about 10% of the length of the total book, maybe a bit less as the book will expand as I add quotes, boxes, a few new articles, and an expansion of my Wizards of the Coast article.
So, 10% of the book after the first two weeks will not make me unhappy.
After those I'm going to probably start moving through the book thematically (as opposed to chronologically, which was what I did when I finalized the first 60% of the book last time around). That should give me a different view of things, and hopefully help everything link up better.
That means that on week #3 I'll probably kick things off with New Infinities, then move on to Wizards (the one major article that was never expanded to final form) and Paizo.
So, I did a complete revision of my draft of the TSR history. I found some new sources on the turbulent times in TSR's history surrounding 1984, and my info improved a lot there, all thanks to OD&Dities magazine. I added a final section remembering the founders of our hobby, who both died since last I worked on my TSR article. I also in general made the text read better.
Besides general cleanup (and finishing up the 40% of the book that never went to "final" draft for the previous publisher), I also intend to add more color this time. To do this, I plan to include a pullout quote every 1,000 words or so and a box on somewhat related information every 5,000 pages. In my current draft that means about 200 quotes and 40 boxes.
For the TSR article, I pulled an even dozen quotes from a variety of sources. Since the total word count was 19k before boxes, I want to grab 7 more. I'm going to hunt for at least one Dave Arneson quote (probably in his final interview, in Kobold Quarterly) and find some others based on the sections of the draft that are the weakest, quote-wise right now. That generally means the later ones.
For the boxes, I wrote a box on AD&D computer games (and computer games in general), largely based on some material I had there already, plus my recent reading in Dungeons & Desktops. I plan two other boxes for this chapter, one on Wee Warriors and one on the evolution of Greyhawk over the years.
So that's where I am after a week: not quite done with TSR.
Next week I first up need to integrate all the rest of my computer-game notes, before I return Dungeons & Desktops to the library on Tuesday. After that I'd like to finish up the final work on TSR to have a complete chapter.
Just one chapter after two weeks of work you may say? Well, that one chapter will be 21k-22k words when it's done, which is definitely novella length. That'll make it about 10% of the length of the total book, maybe a bit less as the book will expand as I add quotes, boxes, a few new articles, and an expansion of my Wizards of the Coast article.
So, 10% of the book after the first two weeks will not make me unhappy.
After those I'm going to probably start moving through the book thematically (as opposed to chronologically, which was what I did when I finalized the first 60% of the book last time around). That should give me a different view of things, and hopefully help everything link up better.
That means that on week #3 I'll probably kick things off with New Infinities, then move on to Wizards (the one major article that was never expanded to final form) and Paizo.