shannon_a

Been more than a week since I wrote last ...

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Sick. I've been sick the last several days. Fortunately I dosed myself with a good amount of zinc on the first two days when I thought I was getting sick, and it seems to have helped. Monday I wasn't sure, Tuesday just my throat was raw (but very raw), Wednesday I could barely breathe & had troubles thinking, and today I'm feeling relatively good other than a persistent cough that has me ready to rip my throat out. Hopefully it'll keep trending upward (though I'm also continuing to feel too warm today).

I canceled my usual Wednesday & Thursday gaming nights due to the sickness. I'm a strong believer in not heading out to spread your illness and wish to hell that more people felt the same. It's so damned irresponsible to be the plague carrier. After canceling those events, I was amazed by how the week really opened up before me. I'll have to remember that I don't need to do my board game nights every Wednesday & Thursday.

I haven't made a decision on Saturday gaming yet. I'll make that call tomorrow when I decide if (1) I still feel like I might be infectious -and- (2) I think I'm going to have enough voice to talk for four or five hours. Right now the answer to those questions would be "yes" and "no", but we'll see what a difference a day makes.

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Cats. Cobweb is still about the house. Kimberly and I both think that she looks gaunter than ever, and that certainly can't keep up for much longer. However for the last few weeks she has continued to act very happy and intelligent and active.

Her sickness has of course been a big wrench in our normal pattern of life. Seeing her around every day, and knowing that she won't be here much longer, is bittersweet. Sometimes I feel sad for her for obvious reasons and sometimes I feel happy that we've had her for so long (and three or four weeks feels very long) after we knew that she was terminally ill, that we've really be able to lavish attention and love on her in that time period. By my calculations, we've given her about two and a half years' worth of wet food, which we used to give to her about once a week as a special treat, in the last three or four weeks.

That wet food is the other wrench in our schedule, because Kimberly takes some time out every afternoon to give her wet food away from the other cats, and I do the same every night. The other cats get the scraps when she's done.

Of course this all means that the other cats are wise to the fact that she's getting wet food and they're not and they're always swarming about as a result. So, rather than making this into an obligation, I've made it into a fun game. I try and get up to my office (where I usually feed Cobweb), with Cobweb right behind me, and with the other cats nowhere in sight. It's very challenging.

Fortunately, Cobweb is much smarter than the other cats (as this has certainly proven). She has no doubt that wet food is coming, while the other cats get distracted. It often takes a little bit of slight of hand and a little bit of patience to trick them. Sometimes I just have to outrun the other cats, but Cobweb also stays well ahead when I take that route.

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Cards. My Money iPhone card game is coming well. I think I should be able to play a full game against dumb AIs in an interface that needs some polishing tomorrow. Which is very exciting. That'll give me another week to complete polishing. It's less than I'd like, but I'm happy to have a deadline really pushing me.

(I'll do some more polishing after I send the first release draft out to Knizia.)

Part of the reason that the program has taken a while is that I'm working very hard to create a clean, abstract structure for card games. I'm really proud of the results. There are almost no corners that I've cut*. I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to use my core structure for both the cards *and* the display table for my next game and cut at least half the time off the development.

Which is very exciting, as it's what I've been planning for.

(Though I guarantee that I'll also discover areas where I didn't think I'd cut corners, but where the other game is different enough that my level of abstraction fails. But those points should get fewer as I develop more games with the engine.)

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* I'm aware of one, but I plan to clean it up tomorrow, as I figured out a better abstraction this afternoon when I walked out to Skotos' mailbox and back.

In case you're interested, but haven't been keeping up on what I'm writing, here's notes some of my recent pieces:

BoardGameNews. I continue with my biweekly column over at BoardGameNews about, well, board games. My most recent column, published this Thursday, was on real-life auctions, and how they can correspond to game systems.

RPGnet Reviews. Every Wednesday I publish one (or sometimes two) board game reviews on RPGnet. My most recent couple were reviews of Gem Dealer, Sutter's Mill, High Society, For Sale, and Money (most of those drawn from a new series by Gryphon Games that I wrote about here).

TT&T Game Design. This is my game design column that I write to several times a year nowadays. The auction article could have gone here with a little bit of a different focus. My most recent article, just a few weeks' old, instead looked at the storytelling side of game design: Testing Characters, with a Look at Battlestar Galactica.

iPhone Articles. Christopher and I have set up an iPhone programming blog to complement our recently published book, iPhone in Action. My most recent article, from this week, was on iPhone user interfaces.

Xenagia Commentary. We've recently been joined by content editor, Stace Dumoski, at Xenagia, and so we're kicking off columns to really get the science-fiction, fantasy, and horror site rolling. I'll be writing some editorials called "Rants from the Future", though I'm just getting started on the first one now.

Gloranthan Writing. I've been doing a scattering of writings for Gloranthan things. Since the start of the year I've written "RuneQuest Elf Monsters" and "Plunder of the Ducks" for Signs & Portents, and I'll be starting on "Plunder of the Dwarfs" soon. These will appear online, but haven't been published yet. My most recent work for Tradetalk was a revision of my "Vale of Flowers" article and I'll be getting to an article on "The Redwood Forest" next month. My immediate next article should be on Dorastan elves for Hearts in Glorantha, which I expect to start on tonight or Sunday.

It looks like we worked out a bug in the iPhone in Action blog that I mentioned yesterday.

This is the real, official URL for it, as opposed to the "shadow" URL that I posted yesterday:
http://iphoneinaction.manning.com/

Today my first programming book went to press. It's iPhone in Action, which I co-authored with Christiopher Allen.

It's my no means my first technical writing. I've been writing documents since at least 1996. I worked for three or four months at Sun solely as a tech writer. I actually produced a book's worth of content for them on networking, a field that I was very familiar with at the time, but it never saw publication. I was later hired at the cryptography company, Certicom, with tech writing being one of my prime responsibilities, and I wrote FAQs on smartcards, elliptic curve cryptography, and several other topics. I've also done varying amounts of tech writing for Skotos. I even been published before, in Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2, though that was a real easy piece, more about storytelling than programming.

A programming book, however, is something totally different. iPhone in Action took over 8 months, 50-75% time the whole time to put together a book that came out to about 475 pages. I have no idea of the word count, as it just wasn't important (only pages & content were). Probably around 180,000 words if I remember the average word count per page (400?) correctly.

I'm particularly struck by the differences with the other field where I've done lots of work--RPGs--and I thought I'd write about that a bit.

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Market Research: Generally, the biggest difference between RPG and tech writing was in the amount of work that the publisher put into making sure that they were getting a book that would be widely accepted by the market. From the moment we sent in our proposal, throughout the entire project, the publisher was constantly sending our material out to other people to comment on.

Were they interested in the proposal? What did they think of the chapters so far? Was there anything that we should be doing that we weren't? How did they like our style of writing.

Aside from the occasional survey sent out by an RPG company, you pretty much never hear about them doing market research. Maybe there's the occasional company that outsources a playtest, but it's a rarity, not the rule.

Editorial Critique: In all the RPG work I've done (and I'll count at least four companies that I've done major work for: White Wolf, Chaosium, Green Knight, and Mongoose), there's been very little strategic editorial critique. The outlines I've sent in have usually been accepted fully. The one exception that I can think of was when I was asked to confine myself to an existing format for a product line.

Conversely, with this tech book, the editors (and publisher) occasionally pushed hard when they thought their market research was suggested them ways to change our book. We were open minded as we could be (though every writer has to protect his babies somewhat) and the result was a modified table of contents that I think vastly improved the book with its coverage.

There's something to be said for the fact that the RPG industry allows its writers a lot more latitude, and to really drive their own products, but I've learned well in the board game industry how important developers are. Good editorial critiques can really improve a book, and I think that's something that may be missing from a lot of the RPG industry.

A Huge Team: Even at a mid-sized RPG company like Chaosium, it's amazing how few people can be involved with a project. There were books that I worked on while at Chaosium where I literally did everything: accepting the manuscript from the author, art directing it, copyediting it, laying it out, proofreading it, and coordinating everything with the printer. Contrariwise, I've worked with almost a dozen people for the iPhone book, such a vast an array of people that I sometimes (early on) lost track of who was who.

Doubtless this is an issue of size. RPG companies who are anyone but Wizards just don't have the room for that sort of specialization--and unfortunately, I have to say, they suffer for it, because someone is unlikely to be good at every one of those tasks, and even if they were, more eyes usually benefits a project. Most of them will have more than one person inevitably work on a project, but two or three or four are a far cry from a dozen.

So, I guess as much as anything, my RPG v. Tech comparison is a comparison of small v. large publishing, but it's nonetheless an intriguing one to see. It makes you really think about how the RPG industry just gets by on the fringe--but still keeps producing products that many of us enjoy.

Well, I hit another big milestone on the iPhone book today. I finished revising all of the chapters based on the final review. So, at this point the book is largely out of my hands. I still have work to do as I OK proofreading, copyediting, and typesetting, and I may have some work I need to do based on technical edits, but the full-time work is done.

And I have to say, writing a programming book has taken more work than any other writing I've ever done, page for page.

Well, I hit a nice iPhone book milestone today: I finished the first draft of the 20th and final chapter of the book.

Mind you, there's still more to be done: editing of the last two chapters and writing of some appendices for a start. However, that's more minor than the harder work of core content writing, and I expect it to finish up on Friday in any case, just leaving me the back and forth of final revisions (which will span through Thanksgiving, but at a much less frantic pace).

I started this book around the beginning of April. It's taken up many of my working hours since. I'm very happy to have it heading toward bed now.

I'd done quite a bit of technical writing before, but I'll have to admit that I'm somewhat surprised by how much work a whole technical book takes*; whew.

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* The fact that we close to doubled the intended content of the book over the course of the project didn't help.

Last Thursday I hit my latest milestone on the iPhone book that Christopher & I are writing. That was the date to turn in chapters 1-15 of the book, which covers three-quarters of the total chapters. I wrote a bit last week of the Murphy-esque circumstances that surrounded it, but it turned out OK thanks to the fact that I'd been running ahead before my schedule ground to a halt.

That was the last of the web-development sections (which included two new chapters that we decided to write, one on the WebKit and one on Dashcode). Now I'm back to SDK, which means building and programming in Xcode.

We're really pushed in the book on the idea of always using the right tool (web or SDK) to do your programming, and I hope people will see the sense of that. But, similarly, I can see how people can be thrown off by moving back and forth. I started in on preferences and files today, and I recognize that Objective-C programming is quite different from the JavaScript that I was doing the week before last.

In some ways, though, it's not as bad a difference as moving from Perl to PHP when doing web development, because Objective-C and JavaScript are different enough that you don't mistakenly get your syntax confused, unlike with Perl and PHP where I sometimes used the wrong syntax.

In any case, I'm happy to get back to the SDK, because it means that I'm on the solid path to finishing the last part of the book (though I only get to stay here for a week, before I do another pass on the first parts of the book, following comments).

I've been writing for a couple of months that I've been working on a book on the iPhone. I actually started it on or around March 31st, which means I'm 9 weeks into it (whew).

If there's one thing I've learned through my years of writing it's set a schedule and keep it when working professionally. My schedule for this book has been 15 pages a week, which is a modest amount, but an amount that gives me time to also write the code needed for the book and generally keep on top of everything else. At 9*15 I should be at 135 pages, and my current page count seems to be 140, so I'm happy with my current speed.

Today my publisher, Manning, announced the book through their early readers program. After some back and forth we've decided on the title iPhone in Action, and their page on the book is now here:
http://www.manning.com/callen/

They don't have the cover up yet, alas.

I have to say working with a truly professional company like Manning is a totally different experience from working with even a theoretically top-end game company. I'm used to game companies pretty much ignoring me until the manuscript is done, then handing it off to an editor, and I never hear from them again until I see a book at my local game store and have to query about where my money and author's copies are. Mongoose did me a little better than that last year, because I got to briefly see the manuscript in laid-out form before it went to press, but that was by far the exception.

Conversely, I've talked with folks over at Manning frequently via email and a couple of times via phone, and that web page marks the start of their marketing for the book, which is currently scheduled for February.

A game company actively marketing a book 9 months before its release and when they had only 40% of the manuscript in hand? Ha! It would be to laugh.