shannon_a

So it turns out that Designers & Dragons did win one award: a gold ENnie for Best RPG-Related product.

I'd said that I wasn't too concerned about the ENnies because it was mostly a popularity contest. Which, it is. And if I hadn't won anything I would have continued to be not concerned. I thought that winning them would be the same: I have a couple of Origins awards in the closet, from when I worked at Chaosium, and the fact that those Cthulhu products with my name on them won someone wasn't that meaningful, and that's what I was basing my thoughts on. But the difference is those votes were primarily for Chaosium's carefully-created property, while this was for mine. For my Designers & Dragons.

So, cool. And cool to know I have fans too.

(Thanks fans who voted!)

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One of the reasons this is cool is because I am continuing to work on Designers & Dragons books. A lot of that centers around the writing I've been doing for DnDClassics. Every week I write 1-3 histories for them of individual D&D books. I've been doing so since the start of 2013. If you do the math, you can see that I should have 125-375 histories done (exact count: 385, probably due to a rush at the start).

My goal right now is to continue writing these as my main thing through the end of 2016 (hopeful count: 550-600), and then in 2017 see what would be needed to fill in the gaps to have complete books describing the history (and some additional info) on every single D&D product ever put out by TSR and WotC.

This type of work is really time-consuming, because I have to research every single individual product and there's something like 1,000 total. I don't think I could ever do it without the weekly regimen required by having to prepare them as DnDClassics releases them week-by-week. So, I'm grateful to the DriveThruRPG folks for that (continuing) opportunity and the continuing demands, which keep me on track.

I've been slowly working on an outline for these D&D histories, which would (I think) put them at three books. My word count is already a ridiculous 282,000 words, but I'm pretty sure redundant text would get streamlined as I put them into books.

(Thanks DTRPG!)

I'm also thinking about a Designers & Dragons mini-book called something like "Designers & Dragons '00s to '10s: The OSR". I want to position it as the fifth core book of the line, and a good bridge while we're waiting for the opportunity to write a complete '10s book. And, I think it would go well with the TSR and WotC D&D books. Right now I'm just collecting information on the OSR movement and a couple of the first companies I'll write about, so this is a ways off. I thinking this might be a half-sized book at 200 pages or so, covering maybe 7-8 "companies".

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And speaking of roleplaying, I did some today. Mary's Achtung Cthulhu campaign kicked off, and it was my first opportunity to actually play in a game since her very short-lived Dresden campaign (which was in 2011).

I had a blast. Kevin and I had fun when we created characters by randomizing most elements, and today I got to bring my character out to play for the first time. He's an overconfident American guerrilla expert. So I stepped into the fire time after time and kept quoting line and verse of what we should do based on my lessons back in guerrilla school (which I'd never before used in the real world).

My favorite was setting fire to the guard shack after we'd killed the Nazis there, in the village where we were continuing to operate. ("Rule #7: Never leave resources for the enemy".) Sadly our GM didn't take advantage of that potentially horrible choice. But I got to set something on fire.

(Thanks Mary!)

I hit another milestone on Designers & Dragons this week. Last night I finished signing our "premium" copies of the book. I signed about 320 books total, which isn't too horrible of a number — just three hours of work or so. But it's very careful work of a sort I'm not used to. I called it "mindful signing" because I had to concentrate on each signature to make sure I wasn't descending to my usual chicken scratch. I ended up doing it in 3 lots of about 100 books each, and I found that each time my hand started hurting about 90 or so books in, but that it was my mind that take the biggest hit. (I offset it on Saturday with some caffeine, since I had a game to run right afterward, but the other two nights I was toast afterward.)

So what's left?

• Pictures. I'm still collecting these for the Platinum Appendix. I mostly finished this tonight, but I need to put out queries for about a dozen books that I don't have myself. This will be my next-to-last major thing.
  
• Proofing. I may need to answer proofreading questions for the Platinum Appendix, and I'll need to look over the layouts as they come. In the scope of things, this should be pretty minor.
  
• Indexing. Finally, I'm going to do the index myself for the Platinum Appendix. This'll be the last major effort for the book.
  

I'm not going to start my next big project until the new year, and I expect to have most other writing for the year done before we get far into December. So, that means that this Christmas break will be the first one in some years where I don't have a big project I'm working on (minus the possibility of having an index to put together right then, but that's probably just going to be several hours of work; and minus the possibility of a new article to write for Hasbro, but that should again be a discrete amount of work).

As a result: I might relax. Huh.

I was caught up enough in Saturday's San Franciscan adventures that I didn't write about the other exciting events of the last few days.

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On Friday I took a break from work to have lunch at Picán with what was described as most of the Evil Hat West crew. Fred H. was in town for BigBadCon. The dinner also included me, Eric V., Chris H., and Chris R. We were noticeably missing Eric L. and Sean. There was much talk about upcoming plans. We also got to celebrate the success of the recent Kickstarters done for Eric V. and myself. Yay! I also broached the topic of possible future Designers & Dragons books — which we're all enthusastic about. (I swear, I'm going to wait until the New Year to start anything new though; really.) Finally, I received an advance on my first quarterly payment for Designers & Dragons, which was substantive and well-appreciated.

The Menu: a variety of food that felt like it was Cajun influenced. I enjoyed a "BLT" that included a spicy guacamole and shrimp. It was delicious. Also, a chocolate cake which was OK to good. Unfortunately, the owner of Picán has been fighting against the improved minimum wage bill that's up for vote in Oakland next month, despite the fact that studies have shown that minimum wage increases don't have an adverse effect on restaurants, so that'll keep K. or me from eating there in the future.

The High Point: I felt more like a part of a tabletop game publisher than I have since I left Chaosium just more than 15 years ago. It's great to be part of that sort of creative community again.

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On Sunday Kimberly and I celebrated my aforementioned advance from Evil Hat with dinner at Angeline's Louisiana Kitchen, one of our favorite restaurants in Berkeley.

The Menu: I had what I always had there, which is a shrimp po'boy sandwich. They have lots more that sounds great but we go there infrequently enough that I have to have my favorite. We also, of course, had hush puppies for an appetizer. They've changed their desert menu, and they now have a French chocolate pudding which was absolutely spectacular. Mmm mmm!

The High Point: Late in the meal I told Kimberly, "This is the first time I've ever gotten an advance on a book and it was big enough that I took someone out to dinner to celebrate." It made my feel like a "real" writer.

So we hit another major milestone on Designers & Dragons on Monday. Adam and I worked through the final errors in the '00s book, and afterward he sent everything off to Fred to send off in to the printers. And, as of now, I believe the book is at the printers and someone should be getting proofs soon to look at.

The Monday work was a little more stressful than I would have liked, as it ended up being a little last minute, but so it goes sometimes when you have people scattered across multiple countries each working their own schedule. Virtual work has plenty of advantages to.

This theoretically means that the main books are ready to go. However, I have at least two other major milestones on my schedule: (1) finishing the work for the Platinum Dragon PDF we're producing, which I have scheduled to be done on November 2, and which is well on its way already; and (2) signing piles of books, presumably in December.

So, I'll be able to announce I'm done a few more times.

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There are other projects in the offing.

Chris and I have a largely done book on co-op game design. We're not sure on its audience and thus where we can place it with a publisher, but it's a cool, big tome of my writing on a very different topic.

I've also been working on a book about Michael Moorcock's multiverse that I think reflects my Designers & Dragons writing style. I'd hoped to finish it this year, but it's required reading most or all of his books, and that turned out to not be a rational goal for a year. But, it'll be well along by the end of the year, and hopefully I'll be able to finish it in 2015 when there's still a publisher (Gollancz) who has most of his books in print.

And then there's more Designers & Dragons to think about. The Kickstarter was successful enough that I think there's a strong audience for more books, but I'm going to put off thinking about that until I've really finished all the final tasks for Designers & Dragons. So, end of the year.

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Otherwise, life goes on.

We had a heat wave over the last several days, which kept it quite hot. The first couple of weeks of October are very frequently our hottest times of the year here in Berkeley.

I biked out on the Bay Bridge again during out hot Saturday as I thought it'd be cool right on the Bay (and I was right). It was fun to see the old Bay Bridge in partial deconstruction, and the views through the gap in the old bridge are breath-taking.

I'd been thinking about going out to San Francisco and visiting a new museum in the Presidio, but opted out due to a huge concert in Golden Gate Park that I feared would jam the BART trains, making it hard to get my bike there and back; maybe this coming Columbian weekend instead.

And I've been taking it easy yesterday and today after the stressful Monday. Yesterday, after the work day, Kimberly and I went out for some dinner together, and then I sat on my butt all evening reading, which is a huge luxury that I almost never do. Then today I went to my regular gaming at Endgame, but didn't try to squeeze in some work when I got home (unless this journal entry counts). I'll get back to my regular schedule of evening work tomorrow or Friday. Mostly to the final Designers & Dragons platinum article as I've cleared my schedule of WotC history articles for the indefinite future and I don't have any DnDClassics articles due until November.

The Designers & Dragons Kickstarter is over. Now when I hit the KS page, I find that the totals are sadly unchanged. It's a weird change from the last five weeks.

The Kickstarter brought in $115,348 from 3,046 backers. Before the KS had started, I thought we'd raise somewhere between $25,000-$50,000, and once we got going, I thought we'd just hit $100,000. Suffice to say, the Kickstarter exceeded all of my expectations. Clearly, that's ultimately thanks to all the great fans and interested readers. I'd like to think that some of them came to the Kickstarter from the histories that I made available through RPGnet, where they always earned strong acclaim. However, ultimately I have to thank Evil Hat for most of the success.

I've long thought that the average author who decided to do self-publishing through Amazon or other means was shooting himself in the foot. The fact is, the average author isn't a people person, and so he's not going to be great at talking to people about his project or at marketing it. He's also probably not a logistics guy or a financial guy. Certainly, he might have two or three expertises under his belt (I'm a writer, computer programmer, and a researcher, for example, to count my top three proficiencies), but he's unlikely to be able to do everything well. And that's why we have publishers: to do everything well.

In that regard, Evil Hat created a great Kickstarter page and really thought through how to bring people into the project. They did a terrific job of getting the word out and keeping people enthusiastic — and by they, I mean some of the core people at Evil Hat like Fred Hicks, Chris Hanrahan, and Carrie Harris. Alongside that, they had the connections and experience to hire great folks like Adam Jury (layout), John Adamus (editing), Karen Twelves (proofreading), Rita Tatum (indexing), Daniel Solis (graphic design), and Andrew Bosley (cover art) — and to have project manager Sean Nittner keep everything moving.

I certainly could have published Designers & Dragons myself in this world of Kickstarter and the internet. It would have raised substantially less money, and the result wouldn't have been as good, because I wouldn't have had the same wherewithal or the guts to put out the money to make this a superb production. So that's why we have publishers. I've said it for years; I'm glad I stuck with those convictions when I had my own book to publish, even after a few tries with publishers that didn't produce what I'd hoped. And I'm glad that I was ultimately proven right in my beliefs that publishers are great. Or at least that Evil Hat is.

And Evil Hat was great throughout this entire process. They committed to printing the first two books if they raised $7,500 and all four if they raised $22,500. As Fred explained in the fifth update, that just covered the printing costs, not all of the costs of actually producing the book (which came in at about $9,000 per book for all that art, proofing, editing, and indexing). It's a pretty awe-inspiring feeling that Evil Hat was willing to put $36,000 out upfront for something that could have been a hard sell. I'm very appreciative of their trust and faith in Designers & Dragons, and I'm glad it paid off.

I'm also very glad that I entered into a partnership with Evil Hat for this project; instead of royalties on each sale, I only get paid out of profits after those costs. I was given both options, and the partnership route felt like the right one to me, because my first goal was to get the books out, and if anything my second goal was to make sure that Evil Hat's faith in my books didn't result in them losing money (or at least that I didn't get paid if they did). Now, because of that decision, I'm probably going to get more money back for my 10 years of work than a royalty deal would have allowed. So, cool, and another thanks to backers.

In retrospective, it's interesting to look at the final numbers for the Kickstarter. As I said, we earned $115,348 from 3,046 backers. Of those, 2,060 backers paid $28,828 for digital copies of the book. The scary thing about that number is that it's about $8,000 less than the the costs of the book (not even including my writing). Another $4,500 came from pure premiums (signatures and platinum dragon patronages), which means that $82,020 came from 986 backers buying physical copies. Though the 2:1 ratio of electronic:physical backers clearly shows the enjoyment of new digital media, without those physical backers we wouldn't have the money to produce books! Which is probably why companies like Hachette are fighting with Amazon over the cost of eBooks. Though cheap books are good, publishers having enough money to produce great books is better.

Though the Kickstarter is over, my work is not. I'm still managing corrections coming in from readers, and I still have one other large task prior to publication: the polishing of the '00s Index. That'll all keep me more busier than I'd like until the index is done, at which point the books will go off to print. After that I have a 20,000-25,000-word book(let) to put together, including four new (short) histories. I've started work on those already, with "The Aurania Gang" finished yesterday and "The Hero Auxiliary Corps" started tonight.

I'm happy to say that almost ten years after I started this project, I still love researching and writing new histories. As I said in one of my interviews, I attribute that love of history in part to my 11th grade history teacher, David Dal Porto. Ironically, I think D&D was the other major influence on my love of the puzzle pieces that make up the world of the past.

1.) Early in the week, I had to make an unexpected trip with Kimberly to a doctor's appointment. The doctor's appointment wasn't an emergency or anything as it had been on her calendar for a few weeks. But she wasn't up to going on her own due to fuzzy head. Fortunately, I was finishing up work on a book I've been editing for Skotos, so I was able to push it over to my laptop and work while I was out and about.

2.) On Friday, Kimberly had oral surgery. I'll have to say that my exhaustion related to this is certainly much less than hers, but I have been busy doing extra housework, collecting extra groceries to give her soft food she can eat, and generally staying on top of things.

3.) Saturday was another Pathfinder run, and one that required quite a bit of prep. We've been shockingly consistent lately, just when I've gotten very busy. Unshockingly, side treks keep the campaign ending in the distance. This would be the campaign I was sure would end in 2013.

4.) Early in the week I also got the index for Designers & Dragons: The '90s, which meant that I suddenly had 10-15 hours of polishing to do in my evening and weekend hours.

5.) Late in the week I also got the second draft layouts for Designers & Dragons: The '00s, which meant that I suddenly had several hours of review to do in my evening and weekend hours, particularly on an article that I'd done a piecemeal revision of after it was in layout.

(I had long dreaded the possibility of simultaneously getting high-priority Designers & Dragons work from two different sources on our team — which is the danger of pushing 4 books out at the same time!)

On the bright side, things are quieted down now! Kimberly is safely ensconced with good food and hopefully recovering. My RPG session went well. All of the immediate Designers & Dragons work is done (the layouts at midnight last night; the index at 11pm tonight). The Kickstarter itself is going quite well. I even spent about 2 hours today on a restful bike ride. I went up to Lake Temescal, finished the first pass on the index there, enjoyed the sun, and then returned. Sadly, a couple of the roads were totally jammed on the way back (Old Tunnel Road & College) because students and student-families are filling the town, but having a bike I was undeterred.

Tomorrow: Back to Skotos work.

So Designers & Dragons, my RPG history book, went out to Kickstarter yesterday. It's here if you want to take a look.

I'd say it was a roller coaster of emotions, but really it's just been an emotional high. The Kickstarter is just 36 or so hours old, but it's done exceptionally well. We've had 1,000 people sign on to get the book in some form, raising $40,000 to date. Before things started yesterday, I was pretty confident that we were going to raise the $22,500 needed to fund all four books, but this has really been beyond my expectations. And we're just a day and a half into to a month-long marathon. In any case, I'm very grateful to all of our backers, and very happy that I've been able to build up a group of enthusiastic fans while I've been working on this project, and very grateful to Evil Hat who has clearly contributed many terrific fans of their own.

Of course Kickstarters have their most popular period in the first and last 48 hours, so I should remember not to get depressed when things slow down to a trickle over the next month. For now, though, I feel like I'm on a sugar-caffeine high -- and I haven't had either all day.

This is all particularly gratifying because I've been working on Designers & Dragons for almost a decade. That's a lot of my time and effort, plus emotional energy, gone into it. I started the project in 2005, writing about Imperium Games mainly because I wanted to figure out what had happened to them. Then I wrote more and started publishing some at RPGnet and then I got a publisher enthused about the project who unfortunately decided otherwise just as I was finishing up the book. Then after a year or two of burnout in response (one of my lowest points creatively, I must admit), I started working on an updated edition of the book that Mongoose published but with a print run that was a lot shorter than I'd hoped (somewhere in the 550-700 range; the book was released to the mass-market around Thanksgiving and out-of-print the next March, as I recall). And then after it went out of print, and I recovered my rights, I started talking with Evil Hat almost immediately about an edition that could go out further and to more people, as I'd imagined it. Another year and a half or so of solid work followed.

With absolutely nothing bad intended toward the previous two publishers I worked with, Evil Hat has put together the edition I'd always dreamed of. I think the division of the book into four decades is a brilliant idea that was partly or mostly thanks to Fred. The books use tons of art, like I'd always wanted them to. (At this point I've collected about 2,000 covers of RPG books.) And the editing on this new edition is strong.

And, as I said, the response on Kickstarter is gratifying. I've heard multiple people say that it's very enjoyable reading, and that's something that I've always prided myself in for my writing -- that it's casual and hopefully enjoyable -- but that hasn't always been appreciated.

So, good days. Though even the surplus of good emotions has left me a little emotionally drained ...

So I always take the last week of the year off work, from Christmas Day to New Years Eve. I worked at some job or another that did this, and I liked it, so I've made it into a regular tradition. Some years I spend that week reading and playing computer games ... but it's actually been a few years since I did that. Some years I spend that week finishing off a major writing project ... which is what I did this year.


The major writing project in question was Designers & Dragons: The '00s. I went into the vacation week already done with all the primary writing, but with little bits left: introduction, bibliography, section heads. However the biggest thing I had to do was edit the whole book, and that took some excessive amount of hours over the course of my vacation. I'd guess about 60 hours over the 7 days; yeah, I worked more over vacation than in a normal work week.

It actually took me until New Year's Day night, but Designers & Dragons: The '00s is now done. In fact, I finished up all four books in the series over the course of the year: the first two on January 8th, the third sometime in Spring, and the Fourth two days ago. However, this was all part of a longer sequence of writing that date back to 2005 and involves finishing the book(s) three times: once in 2008 (I think) for the publisher who opted out of it, though I only got partway through the final draft then; one in 2010 (I think) for Mongoose; and once now. According to my notes, the Mongoose version of Designers & Dragons was 362,000 words, while the new one is 535,000 words, so that's a fair amount of text added in the last 18 months -- which is how long I've been working on the new edition for Evil Hat.

There's still some little bits of work to do: some more collection of cover art and some corrections for the '70s, '80s, and '90s books that I've built up while working on the '00s, but the major work is done. Whew!

Mind you, in the last week I've been making a list of additional histories I *could* write and thinking about topics for the RPGnet column from when the Kickstarter goes live, etc ... but none of that will take the same concentration as writing the full books did.

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My other big writing project for the year was histories for the D&D PDFs published to DnDClassics.com. I wrote 2-4 of those a week, for a total of 171 articles and 121,000 words. After some negotiation, the DriveThru folks were willing to let me retain ownership of the histories, so I'm planning to put a book together from them someday as an adjunct to Designers & Dragons.

I also wrote three history articles for DnDInsider's Daily D&D, all toward the end of the year.

Both of these should be continuing into the new year. (I'd kind of prefer to be done with the DnDClassics, because they're a fair amount of regular work, but if I ever want to do a book, I really need to do *everything* so onward it continues).

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For the new year, I've got two big projects planned.

First, I'm going to write a book about the works of one of my favorite authors. I'm hoping I can sell this to a mainstream publisher (and already have one in mind). It requires a lot of reading, so my hope is to have it done by the end of the year.

Second, I'm going to write a book about one of my favorite games, including all of its variants. I'm hoping that I can use it to create a market for actual Mechanics & Meeples books.

I'm probably not going to push too hard on either of these until at least February, but I'm excited about them both ...

Kimberly & I went to the De Young museum on Saturday. It was to see an "Art Slam", which was a slideshow of various art works -- including one great piece that she'd done.

Unfortunately, the experience was somewhat subpar. Her slide was literally first, showing before they had the window screen all the way down and before most of the audience even realized that the presentation was starting. They showed it for all of 5-10 seconds. Worse, three of her friends who'd come to see it all missed it because they were running later.

Worser, there were some people right behind us in the auditorium who constantly cheered and gushed and talked about every slide in a way that made K. (and, really, everyone else) anxious. (They were De Restless.) We had to move and then we had to leave. Kimberly's friend Jay gave us a ride home.

On the bright side, we had a nice trip out to the De Young and we had an enjoyable and decadent lunch of Andronico's sandwiches and deserts in the De Young garden before the show. And Kimberly did have a piece of art ever-so-briefly showing at De Young! It was fun to see!

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Got home a lot earlier than expected, so I spent the afternoon and evening writing and editing.

Then today I biked up to Temescal and wrote and edited more. By the by, that turned out to be at the limit of my endurance as I'm still sniffling a bit from my recent (light) cold. And speaking of cold, the park was. After two hours, I headed home. It was 2.30, and I was chilled, and I decided the park was only getting colder from there. Sadly, Winter has come.

And tonight I wrote and edited more.

Total damage was about 8,000 words over Saturday and Sunday: three more D&D Classics articles (2,500 words total) and my eighth new history for Designers & Dragons: The '00s (5,500 words).

Whew!

It has been a very busy week. Beyond the regular work-week, that is. I spent much of my "free" time working on finishing up the third Designers & Dragons book, focused on the '90s. It got heavy attention on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday night — then I did some marathon writing and editing Saturday night and finally finished it today. Whew! 132k words total.

And then there was one.

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You'll likely have noticed that I left out Wednesday and Thursday from my worknights. On Wednesday that's because I was off watching The Coast of Utopia: Voyage with Kimberly.

Thursday's busyness was unfortunately less benign. That afternoon I went down to the co-lo mainly to swap some memory in one of our machines. Unfortunately I found that two others were experiencing problems. When I was moving around one whose power supply had died, I accidentally knocked out a third machine's power cord. And it's power supply died too. Aggh! So I was down at the co-lo from like 1.30 until 6, with problems just stacking up. Chris came and rescued me so that I could attend my Thursday night gaming session (since it was too late too cancel). Fortunately he'd also managed to turn up a spare power supply, which we swapped in after the gaming. It was still a loooong night.

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Thursday was Kimberly's birthday, but we'd agreed that she was going to spend it with friends (a good thing, given my troubles of the day!), then she and I celebrated it on Saturday.

On Satuday afternoon we took some salads & wraps (and chocolate) up to Tilden Park and enjoyed some lunch and a little bit of a walk through forest trails to Lake Anza. Very nice. It was a bit gloomy when we got there, but it cleared up nicely (and didn't start raining until the evening).

That evening we also went to a special place for her dinner: La Mediterranee. I had the most delicious quiche, then I had delicious Ici ice cream afterward (mint chocolate chip), something that I'd never tried before. And then I discovered that I'd found my current limits for dairy, even with Lactaid, as I was sick much later in the night. Ah well, still great food.

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Today I did part of my writing up at Lake Temescal — apparently making the tour of Berkeley lakes. As is often the case when I'm up there I found the editorial work really light and productive. Good and useful changes came to me easily and intuitively. But the ever-threatening weather finally sent me scurrying home, where I finished Designers & Dragons: The '90s after dinner. Whew.

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Mostly been relaxing since, which is very nice. I'm in fact planning to take a few weeks off of Designers & Dragons, as I've been working at the new edition for 9 months and am feeling a little burned.

Of course in the meantime I need to do our taxes, catch up on my reviews, write the most recent AP for my Pathfinder game, run another Pathfinder session, get some games out for the Endgame Auction, and get ahead on DnDClassics. But I should still be able to relax more than normal. Seriously.

And if the weather allows & no late-season colds come knocking at my door, I'm also going to try and go for a long and new bike ride sometime before I get back to work. Maybe in San Francisco. Maybe up past Pinole. haven't decided.

I've decided I have until Tax Day, then it's back to work on the final book, Designers & Dragons: The '00s, which I've got lots of new material planned for.