Your First Published Novel: Part 12

Death by Cliché.

Now that that's out of the way...business. With this post, I should catch up with our current status on Death by Cliché. That means that barring major developments this week, the kind that just demand a blog post, I'll start a new series next week that will run in the same weekly slots, but on weeks where there're no new developments on the novel. This will be a series on plotting. Maybe I'll plot the sequel to Death by Cliché as I write it, (but without spoilers). That will force me to actually prepare the novel. Also, I learned some stuff doing a short story for James Wymore's second Actuator anthology that I'm interested to see integrated into my novel potting process.

I don't have a name for it yet. I suspect it will be something earth shattering, like Plotting Your First Novel: Part 1.

But back to the subject at hand. It only took a few weeks, at the most, before I received the edits back. In that time, I continued to work on these blog posts. I also received the news that I needed to move my hosting my hosting away from Verio in the next year. My entire life is pretty entangled with that company. I used to work for them, as did my friend Gary Llewelyn. Gary had been their longer, and that meant he had a free reseller account. So when I was laid off, we moved my free server to his reseller account and I started paying reseller prices for my hosting. Later when his free employee server was deleted, along with two of my site, I consolidated them onto that one server. That's why it's called Robert J Defendi's Playtesting.net.

Anyway, Verio had always suited my needs, and honestly, I was getting more server and wider capabilities than I can for comparable money in most other places because I wasn't paying retail. I considered both Godaddy and Squarespace, and Godaddy seemed like the better deal, but I've heard a lot of bad buzz about them in reviews and in my tech news feeds, and everyone seems to love Squarespace.
So I told Clare at CQ that I was moving my hosting. Everything to date had been linked to Playtesting.net and that made it all very convenient. I'd build RobertJDefendi.com on Squarespace, point the domain there, and then after Clare had redirected the links on all the old posts to that site, I'd start repointing my other domains. Since I probably needed to rebrand back to my name, the perfect solution. All of that went without a hitch.

Now Tim Powers once told me that it's a terrible story to watch a man changing a tire competently, so you might ask why I told you that story. I told you that story so I can tell you what happened to me later that week, but we aren't quite there yet.

I got my edits back from Michael Cristiano. They were minor enough that he mentioned that there probably won't be a third round, we'll just go straight to proofreading (although I think that's technically copyediting since I don't think the book will not have been laid out yet).

So I dug in. It's interesting. I've spoken before about how I didn't want to change the text very much at first because of the audiobook, and I've spoken about how that was a mistake. This is when that fact became the most obvious to me. At this point, we had cleared enough away, both in the text and in my emotional connection to it, that I could see phrasing issues I'd never seen before. So when it comes to editing for style, this was probably my heaviest pass. (I don't know yet whether that has made Michael angry...he might have assumed that we'd cleared all this stuff previously). A lot of it was in the text I'd added in the first pass, to answer his issues, but there was still a great deal in the stuff I'd written back in 2006-2008.

There were some small hitches. When we did our first pass, I turned off track changes before doing my edits because in my arrogance it didn't occur to me that Michael needed to know every change I'd made. I called out the important ones in comments, but I didn't think he'd need to see everything else. My only excuse is that I'm used to getting back edits as a publisher, not as a writer, and the next person to see my edits, in the past, was almost always a different person from the one I'd just received them from.

So I kept it on, this time.

Michael pointed out more words I overused. I had some form of "look" about 400 times in the novel and 100 "moments". A lot of "sighs" too. Michael told me to check to see if each sigh was really a time when a person would sigh. Evidently, I sigh a lot more than he does, because they all were, but I decided that leaving them in would let me reader know that I was secretly some kind of sighing monster, and so I cut about three-quarters of them.

This is an important point. I bounced a few things back at Michael the first time, and the ones he backed down on I called good, but that was only a few. Far more of them he dug he heals on, and I looked at them deeper. Your editor is always right.

That sentence was important. So I'm going to pull a Strunk and White here.

Your editor is always right. Your editor is always right. Your editor is always right.

Here's the real catch. Your editor doesn't always know WHY he's right. Sometimes, the reason why your editor THINKS he's right is completely up in the night. I mean bat-shit crazy. You know he's bat-shit crazy because you did the exact same thing elsewhere in the book, but he didn't call THOSE out. So why the hell does he think that rule applies here?

I'll tell you why. Because we sometimes know something is broke, but we don't know how.

For example. I do not italicize thoughts in my books except in very special circumstances. I've had people claim that they think in complete sentences, but I don't believe them. I can't think that slowly myself. But more to the point, when you're writing third person limited like I do in almost every book, when you're deep in the character's head, every word and description is a part of his thoughts. There's no difference between the description of the door and his thoughts about how he needs to do something for his wife. We experience both of these things entirely through the filter of his conscious mind.

Also, italicizing thoughts when out in the 80s. Not everyone has figured that out yet.

So Michael insisted that this one thought of my main characters be italicized. This confused me and not just because it was wrong (because even when I'm arguing, I know the editor is always right). My biggest problem here was that this is the only novel I've written that isn't almost exclusively in a third person limited point of view (I should do a post on point of view and tense). This book slips between third person and an omniscient, smart-assed narrator. So maybe my normal rules didn't apply...

When my main character thinks a thought that is an essentially first person, Orson Scott Card would tell me that it's grandfathered in by the line before it and you don't italicize it. My editor insisted that this instance needed to be italicized, but I knew for a fact that I've done similar things throughout the whole novel and this was the only one he noticed.

And that's the crux. He noticed. Your editor very rarely notices when you do something right. That's your JOB. Your editor notices when you do something wrong. But since he didn't notice all the times you did it right, he might not immediately just how exactly you screwed up.

So I cut the joke. Who's going to get a purposeful Jimmy Hendrix misquote anyway? Old people like me? Bah.

I do two passes on any edit. The first time I argue with Michael shamelessly in my comments. No one ever sees that pass. Then I go through and quietly fix everything that's wrong, deleting the argumentative comments and knowing that I'm doing God's work.

So I turned in the edit around Monday or Tuesday.

And now we get to the end of the week. I had all my domains redirected. My hosting was now entirely handled by Squarespace. I'd removed all my files from my Verio Server. My domain hosting was there, but I was less than a month away from a hosting bill. So it was time to turn it off.

I found the place in the hosting to turn off my servers, but all my domains seemed to be attached to it. So I put in a customer service ticket asking if deleting that server would affect my domain registrations. They said it would not. Confidently, I deleted the server.

They didn't actually lie. Verio still held all my domain registrations. However, when you delete that last server from a reseller account at Verio it deletes all the zone files, which is the DNS equivalent of that line in an address book that tells everyone how to find you.

So I went dark. Web sites, email, the whole works. The websites could wait, but email. Can you live without email?

I put in a case immediately with Verio and texted Gary. The first thing he mentioned was that if you delete your last server it deletes your zone files. It would have been GREAT if the customer service people had thought to mention that as well.

I decided there was no going back. I wasn't going to buy a new server just to get zone files again, so I did some quick research and found that Hover was rated the top registrar in the latest survey, and they give valet transfers for free (basically, someone there does the heavy lifting if something goes badly). So I quickly initiated transfers to Hover.

It took less than four hours. When the transfer went through I got my email up right away and I took care of the business websites when I got home late that night.

Why did I tell you THIS story? Well all of my thinking about his hosting switch boiled down to one simple fact: switching my hosting was bound to have at least one bump and that bump COULD NOT happen when I was making a big push on my book. This is the time to have a messy house. Next year, everything needs to be in perfect order. When you are publishing your first novel, think ahead. Take care of everything you can in the build up, because once that book hits the shelves, every minute of down-time could lose a potential sale.

And this is the longest post I've done. But I REALLY want to talk about plotting next week.

Your First Published Novel: Part 11

Death by Cliché. Death by Cliché is a novel that I have written. Death by Cliché is a novel written by me. Death by Cliché comes out next year from Curiosity Quills.

Okay. So now I don't have to worry about making sure I mention the name of the novel I'm talking about in this post.

I'd started edits. I'd realized that there were some holes in the explanations that you can't see if you've ever played a role-playing game. I'd decided to throw out the old audio book. I was about halfway done.

In many ways throwing out the audiobook was a release. A revelation, even. You see, when you read a book that you wrote 7 years previously, you're reaction will probably land somewhere between, "Hmm. I was in a different place when I wrote this," and "Ah!!! Kill it! Kill it with fire!".

So now I no longer had to worry about whether or not the Whisper Sync people would start building car bombs with my name on them. I already have places where the text of the book will likely differ from the text of the audiobook, because the joke "..." only works if you can see the ellipses or you can see my face when I deliver it. In an audiobook, it just sounds like an editing mistake. The same with writing something in a really small font. I actually don't know how that works, but I'm told the whisper sync people want it to be exact, so I suspect either some jokes are going to fall flat or I'm going to earn a fair bit of Amazon agro.

So. I'm a different person now, but more importantly. Damico came off, when read in 2015, as a little more of a "bro" than I mean him to be. I mean, he's supposed to be a bit of an ass, but the tuning wasn't quite right. It's all about the jokes coming out of his mouth. As hypothetical example, if Damico had made a joke about gay marriage in the 2007 version, it would probably have a very different structure than one that was written after legal developments this year. (He didn't, but that's the easiest way to illustrate the issue). The same would be true for a joke that referenced women gamers, post gamergate. He comes from a different world with different issues than the Damico as originally written. The bad guy's jokes? They didn't change since the world he came from didn't change. Damico's have to represent who he is as a person, and the things that are funny in one year are just a little off in another. If you pick up a book, you can see what year it was published. You have no idea what year it was written.

I don't mean to say that the edgy humor is out. It's still in. The somewhat controversial scene late in the book is essentially the same (just better written now). There was a joke about sticking a stake through the heart of Bill Cosby that has a very different connotation now than it did then, but my editor seemed to like it and just thought I'd written it to be topical, so I left it as is. So I wasn't trying to make the book less edgy, I just made sure Damico's level of asininity was properly tuned for a contemporary reader.

It's the reason I love writer's groups. They tell you what your words mean. You know what you intended, but the writer has only secondary control over the meaning of his own work. The meaning is extracted by the reader, through the reader's lens of experience. For instance, when Martin Freeman played Bilbo Baggins, he said in one interview that he played it as if using the ring was painful or at least unpleasant. Now, I think we can all agree that this interpretation of the character is so wrong that we should invent a special squad of Thought Police just to follow around Martin whenever he gets to close to cherished canon. Because that is just unspeakable.

However, his performance reads perfectly for any right-thinking human being. It looks like Bilbo is sensing the growing hold the ring has over him and like a nascent alcoholic has started to sense, on some level, that something isn't right. That is the meaning his performance conveys to any people who aren't clinically insane. We are lucky in that Martin has no final control over the meaning he imparts. He has his intention, but once it's out in the world, it isn't his anymore. (Also, I suspect Peter Jackson didn't care what Martin thought on the inside, he only cared about the performance on screen.)

I love you Martin.

Same is true for Tolkien. Or C.S. Lewis. Or Vonnegut. Ever see Summer School? In it, Rodney Dangerfield hires Kurt Vonnegut to write his English paper about Kurt Vonnegut. His teacher, in a later scene, yells, "I don't know who wrote this paper, but he knows nothing about Vonnegut!" I don't know what the writer intended, and the meaning that most audience members got from that joke was that English class is silly and literature professors are talking out of their asses, but I've always taken a different meaning.

An author is often the worst judge of the meanings and themes of his own work.

We'll talk a good storm, but we're talking out of our asses. Sideways. With a lisp. We can only say what we intended to convey. If you've ever emotionally wounded a loved one with a casual joke, you know what I mean.

If you want an interesting physiological experiment, write about ten books. Show them to a group of people who are willing to talk straight to you. Ask them what your themes are. It's from my writers' group that I figured out I feel guilt far more deeply than anyone I know. From them I learned that my idea of happiness is radically different from theirs. We also learned that one of our members doesn't understand insecurity the way the rest of us do.

It's from my writers' group that I've learned how I view death and grief. It's from my writers' groups that I've learned that I have something to work through where the subject of sexual assault is concerned. It's from my writers' group that I've learned countless things about who I am as a person. Once, during a critique, a new member once commented that one of my characters had hit rock bottom. A more senior member of the group laughed. "This is a Bob Defendi book," he said. "You haven't seen rock bottom yet."

Well, the topic on this post has drifted. What was I supposed to be talking about?

Right! My edits. I finished my edits. I turned them in. Took a little more than two weeks.

Your First Published Novel: Part 10

Cliché. So there.

First off, some business. We're not out of material yet, but we're catching up. I don't want the blog to go off the weekly schedule, and I haven't decided what I'm writing in the off weeks. Perhaps, "Plotting Your Next Novel." Feel free to ping me on twitter (@robertjdefendi) or on Facebook (just Robert J Defendi) and chime in. (If you're a member of the Curiosity Quills Hegemony Mind Trust that stands above me in the hierarchy, I SUPPOSE you can vote too, assuming they let brains in a jar use social media.) I suspect we have somewhere between one month and two before I catch up entirely. Although a good crisis could pad that out.

So. I got my first edits. With quivering hand and questionable bowels, I clicked to open.

You know what? It wasn't that bad.

Don't get me wrong. I'm an author. I try to be professional, but part of that is never saying the first thing that comes to mind, because it's almost always defensive, self-centered, and objectively wrong. I sent my editor an email clarifying how certain parts of the process work. I believe there was a carefully worded question or two about the generalities of what happened if we disagreed. His response was equally polite.

BTW, I'm not linking anything in this post, because I suspect I'm in the middle of switching hosting and all the Wymore hyperlinks in Part 9 were messed up in the transfer. Or, for those who don't care how the sausage is made, I'm not linking because: screw links, that's why. Look at the last post for links to Wymore and my editor Michael, and the only new person in this post doesn't have an industry-relevant web presence any longer. Although, if you're looking for a real estate person in Utah, you could worse than Judith Engracia. (Who, on rereading this, I know realize that I never mentioned, so "Hi, Judith!")

But I digress.

Wymore assured me, during one of those drug-induced trips to Vegas that I probably imagined, that the manuscript was solid. It wouldn't need many edits. Logically, I knew he was probably right, since Michael wasn't the first editor to dig into the manuscript. That still didn't mitigate the Kaftaesque existential angst that comes from opening a set of edits the first time.

But Wymore was right (I mean even a broken microwave flashes the correct time twice a day). There were no soul crushing edits. There were some that were annoying, sure, but I brought almost all of those on myself (Damico sighed something like 25 times in the version I sent in, and don't get me started on the word "Leap,")

I left the line-item crap for the full pass, but I read through all the general comments first, because if Michael misunderstood something on page 100, it's likely that the fix needed to go on page 5. I also noted the words he thought I had overused and so I did a find and replace, replacing "jump" with "***jump", and so on, so that they'd all stand out. By the time I was done with that, his email had come back to agree with my overarching question: could I leave threads open for a sequel? My intention was to address them but not resolve them, so the reader would know I was an ass, not an idiot. He replied that yes, indeed, that was fine. Also, he agreed that I'm an ass.

So I started.

Do you know about Murder Your Darlings? Well if you don't, google it (because to hell with links). The first darling was my prologue. I loved my prologue. In it, I depict for those with an encyclopedic knowledge of gaming history (because I never name the characters involved) a fictional version of the conversation between Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson that spawned all of modern gaming. I don't remember his note on that scene, but it was obvious Michael didn't think it was carrying it's narrative weight. Then, as I considered it, I realized that it offered an explanation for the rest of the novel that would suck all of the tension away for a really astute reader. Also, it was an interpretation I might not want to use, going forward. So I pulled out the machete and killed it in cold blood.

Want to know what the best thing about Michael is? Well, it's probably his soulful gaze, but for the purposes of this book, it's his complete lack of knowledge in all things table top gaming.

There are aspects of this book that are so integral to the core concepts of gaming that not one reader has ever asked me about them. I assume that's because anyone I've bumped into where this novel is concerned has at least some tangential connection to the hobby. Michael had none of these.

And that's why he's the best person that could possibly have edited this book. Why would a character in a game need to sleep? What's happening at the table when this is going on? How can a character in a game have a family, does that mean his family came into the game? Are you insane? These are just some of the most basic questions that I stupidly assumed everyone would already know. Not even my mother caught them.

But here's the thing, I want this book to be accessible to people who have never gamed before. I want this book accessible to people who've never had family members into gaming. I even want this book accessible to people who've never been cornered by a looney gamer at a convention. I want ANYONE to be able to understand this book. So I had some core concepts that needed a better explanation.

I started work on the process. I did about six chapters a night, usually starting after 10. Five nights a week (so that I could work on writing group stuff on Thursday night and have an online gaming night on Mondays). That would take me two weeks and change. Wymore was right and the edits weren't super heavy, so that was a sustainable pace.

Now there's an audiobook version of this novel already out in the world and I went and negotiated a contract that guaranteed that CQ would not, under any circumstances, fork out one penny of their own money on rerecording it. I just made it so there was too little financial benefit in doing so.

So while I started the edits, I kept notes on which sections I'd changed enough to warrant re-recording. Meanwhile I sent the audiobook to my audio guy so he could see what would be involved in building a chimera recording out of the two versions. See, his rate doesn't changed based on difficulty (at least I assume it doesn't) but it's hourly, so something ten times harder will still cost ten times more. I needed to start getting an idea of what that involved.

He did not like the current version. He did not like it at all.

I re-listened to it and I could see his point. Matching the room quality of that recording to the quality of his studio would be a monumental task. We couldn't even just go record where the original had been recorded, because that building literally no longer exists.

So thinking about it, I realized that the book is probably less than 8 hours of finished recording (maybe 24 hours of total work on the outside). It was probably cheaper to rerecord the entire thing than to try to match two sets of recordings. Also, I didn't want him to hate me by the time we were done.

So as the minor changes in the edits snowballed, I lost the ability to use the audiobook that had gotten me this far. I had to start from scratch, and I'd negotiated a contract that made sure that all of that fell on my shoulders.

Because I'm brilliant, that's why.

P.S. Dammit. I typed that whole post and didn't once say the name of the book is Death by Cliché.

Your First Published Novel: Part 9

Cliché. There, now that’s done and I have something to copy and paste.
So we signed contracts. Everything was all squared away. I was a contracted novelist.

A lot of things happened in a very short time. First, there were the introductions. I received an email from Lisa Gus to me about a dozen other people. In that email, she listed each person at curiosity quills and their area of expertise if I should need some help. What came after were a flurry of replies, people saying hi, introducing themselves, welcoming me. At the same time, they added me to their super-secret Facebook group. The one I haven’t told you about.

That came with a second introduction, so I not only had a dozen people on the business end introducing themselves, but I have a couple dozen authors. It was a great time, of course, but the fact that I came out of that experience remembering six new names is something of a miracle. A miracle, I tell you.

Of course, I knew a few of the authors. I already knew James Wymore, Jason King, and Holli Anderson from convention work. One of them may have helped me bury a body. You’ll have to guess which. I met Nathan Croft at the local convention Conduit, but I believe that was after we signed contracts. At any rate, the rush of well wishes and introductions was a little overwhelming, and I squirreled away more than one email to help keep it all straight.

One thing Curiosity Quills is pretty clear about is that the lion’s share of the marketing falls on the shoulders of the writer. They set up a lot of things for you, of course, but you have to do the actual work. So with these introductions also came a whole knew phenomena.

Homework.

I expected the editing passes. I was not ready for the level of other homework. There are two questionnaires and a cover worksheet they tell you they aren’t going to use (Insert smiley face here).

The purpose of the cover worksheet is to figure out what your vision of the cover is, but more importantly, you supply them with a list covers that inspire you and covers of books that are similar to yours. They tell you they probably aren’t going to use your idea for the cover itself, but that your notes on other covers will be crucial (for instance, I showed them Pratchett and Asprin covers that I thought had a style that might inspire the cover artist for my book.)

The new author questionnaire is a pretty extensive Q and A. In it they ask you things like bios, credits, more questions on covers (they ask at least one in all three pieces of homework), marketing text and many many other things. I filled those out, some of it painfully, and sent it in.

Nikki Tetreault, marketing guru, was vacationing right about the time this all started, so I put the full marketing questionnaire on the back burner. However, by that point I was writing this blog series, and while my first few emails about it were spam filtered, Clare Dugmore, social media guru, found them and decided they warranted going on the CQ site. She also told me they needed the cover worksheet and questionnaire right away. They needed to make me a person who actually exists on their site. Of course, they still haven’t done that, but it’s the thought that counts. (Second smiley-appropriate location)

Also in there, they assigned me my editor, Michael Cristiano, so things were moving. I just needed to get back my edits.

I hunkered down and prepared to be bloodied.

Your First Published Novel: Part 8

The biggest argument against putting the word “Cliché” in your title is having to copy an paste it into every blog an bit of social media that doesn’t have an auto-correct feature. I know. You weep for me.
So lets take a step back in time. I wanted to end the last blog post on getting the contract, but a whole lot of work happened before then. The entire time I was waiting for the final contract reflecting all our negotiated changes, I was getting a jump on things. Remember that 26 page contract that was half style guide? Well, the style guide wasn’t going to change and I was pretty sure everything was going to go forward at this point. So I started going through it.

I started by getting a good final of the document.  My last official draft had been the 4th, but I was sure I had, at the very least, caught typos when laying it out for self publication. So I started by copying and pasting all of that into one document. I keep draft folders for every book, usually with each chapter as a separate file, so I created a 5th draft folder and I put the document there. Then I started going through the style guide itself.

The majority of the guide was done in the first two or three nights, at two to three hours work per night. That wasn’t the majority of the WORK, but large portions of the style guide can be done either by selecting the whole document with CTRL+A or by running it through Find and Replace.

But a lot of the style guide can’t be automated. For instance, there’s a rule in there about putting the action of one character in the same paragraph of another character, something I have been known to do. There are sections on commonly confused and combined words. Essentially, there’s a whole lot of stuff that takes a full draft of the document to achieve.

Implementing the style guide, all told, probably took me 20-40 hours, spread over a month or so. At the end, you could fairly call the result a new draft.

There was an added wrinkle with this book, however. I already HAD an audio book version. I didn’t know if I was going to need to do rewrites extensive enough to invalidate it, but there was no reason to throw it out unnecessarily. Also, they’d already bought the book, so I knew that my work there wouldn’t lose me the sale.

Was I sloppy? Yes. Would I do it differently? Absolutely, but it wasn’t a huge mistake and it certainly wasn’t the worst one I’ve made in the process. In the end, it was inertia and laziness. I didn’t want to go through the process of re-recording the whole book, and I wasn’t quite at that “murder your darlings” stage of editing yet. One can gain a certain driven momentum when working on a book. There will be a fair amount of darling murdering in the time to come. Not as many as most books I’ll write, but enough.

In my only bit of defense, I’ll say that this book had been through an editing process. My editor for Final Redoubt Press, Josh Peltier, had done extensive work on the novel, and most of the things I saw things I would differently now, and philosophies where I thought differently, but they were a decent representation of who I was when I wrote it, so it occurred to me that there was an argument for keeping it as is until told otherwise. Heinlein’s Rules and all that. (That links to the website of my arch nemesis. He barely knows I exist. Good post, though.)

I made some minor changes to take out things I just didn’t want in the book anymore. For instance, there was a throw away line about the damages of sexual assault that could be read wrong and are really worthy of their own book (and I might have to write a whole series of blog posts justifying that sentence). But for the most part, I kept the entire thing as is and mostly just fixed line item issues.

Finally, it was done. The contract hadn’t arrived yet (If I have the timing right) so I sat back and waited. Things would get hectic again soon enough.

Next week: the frenzy begins.

Your First Published Novel: Part 7

It’s one thing to have accepted the offer for Death by Cliché. It’s another for to finalize the deal. You see, there’s a lot that goes in to buying a book. For a publisher of any size at all, it isn’t the decision of one person. So once I’d accepted James Wymore’s offer, there was still a lot to be done.
First thing was first. He had to convince the other people in the company to buy it. I’m not sure how many people are involved in that decision, but all of them had to read the book (or listen to it) and weigh in on the decision. It took a few weeks, but finally the official offer came back.

I’ve heard that Curiosity Quills has long contracts. It’s true that contracts I’ve had in the past were six pages or so, but they were also a much smaller font and they were work for hire contracts. Also, CQ’s contract includes a style guide. Anyway it was 26 pages long.

I’ve mentioned before that I had been querying an agent. It was Lisa Rodgers at JABberwocky Literary Agency. I sent her an email and asked if she wanted to negotiate the contract. She replied and agreed to look at it, so I sent her the book and the contract.

It took a bit of time. She doesn’t monitor her query email address on a daily basis and then she had to read the entire novel. James was getting a little worried about the time it was taking, CQ had pulled offers in the past, but Lisa got back to me before a month had passed after their official offer.

She had decided not to represent the book.

But here’s where Lisa is just a stand up act. She’d already read the contract and I suspect that she’d taken notes (if she put those notes together after deciding not to represent me, she’s even a better human being than I gave her credit for). She sent me those notes in an extensive email telling me exactly what to fight for when negotiating the contract. The email was pages long. It listed every clause she didn’t like and told me which ones I had to fight for and which fights I could afford to lose. For someone who’s never negotiated a contract like this, it was a god send.

So I was sad she wouldn’t be representing me, but I was armed for battle. I sent back my counter on the contract to James, listing everything she’d objected to. That started a back and forth that lasted days.

I had another weapon in my belt, of course. I had been ready to self publish. It’s far easier to stick to your guns when you have other appealing options open to you and you’ve already done the prep work.

Anyway, I stuck to my guns. I got what I wanted, relented on things that didn’t matter as much. In the end I was happy with the result.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t pushing for more money in most cases (she did suggest I ask for a higher percentage of audiobook sales since they wouldn’t be producing the audiobook…kudos to Lisa for remembering that on a non-client as well.) CQ’s royalties are generous. Mostly we argued over nuts and bolts clauses about the process.

Anyway, they told me that they’d get me a revised contract in a week. I started going through the style guide and relaxed.

There must be such a thing as karma, because it took much longer than that, but I got my final contract.

Next week: editing!

Your First Published Novel: Part 6

So I had an offer on Death by Cliché. That might seem like a slam dunk. Here’s the thing, though: I wasn’t sure that it was the smartest business move.
If Curiosity Quills had been one of the Big Five, It would have been an easier decision (but still not a slam dunk). You see, I have access to a rather large audience. I am a part of a podcast network that tops out at more listeners than our local ABC news affiliate. On top of that, I’m friends with multiple authors with blogs that gathered more than 50,000 visitors a day. If everyone I knew got the word out, It would probably exceed any marketing push Curiosity Quills is likely to rally. Heck, Orbit Books just asked one of these people if he’d like more review copies after seeing the bump in sales on a book he blogged. This doesn’t mean that these people will all buy, but to get as many interested eyes on the book, Curiosity Quills would need one hell of a marketing push.

For those who didn’t follow why that made self-publishing appealing, let me explain. It comes down to the royalty split. Say for the ease of discussion that I get 25% of the cover price of a book. All things being equal, that reduces the money I make off the readers I bring to the table by 75%. The publisher would need to bring three times as many new readers to my book to earn their split. If I get 50%, they have to bring an equal number. If I make 75%, they have to bring a third. You see how that works.

On the other hand, I don’t know these people are going to blog about the book. Most of them only mention books they really believe in and their are spectacular books they never actually blog. They are too tactful to commit to anything. I’m too tactful to push matters. So while my potential marketing reach is huge for a new writer, there’s no guarantee that my practical marketing reach will come anywhere near that.

There’s another, less tangible benefit to going to Curiosity Quills. There is a credibility that comes from a third party thinking that your book is worth buying. There are many very successful self-published authors, but when you say you’re self published, there’s always that moment where the person you’re talking to thinks, “Oh. Well, a five-year-old can technically self publish.” Again, nothing against that option, obviously I was seriously looking at it myself, but if you’re traditionally published the book shows someone else believes in it merely by the fact it exists.

And then there are a dozen other little perks. Having someone else deal with your cover. Having an editor and a proofreader go over the book without having to hire them seperately. Marketers. Publisher’s Marker subscriptions. Facebook groups filled with other authors from the same publisher. These add up. I couldn’t decide.

So I did what any good writer would do. I stalled.

I had just submitted a manuscript partial to an agent, so that was a good excuse. I told James I’d get back to him when I heard back, but I didn’t want to make any big decisions with a book she might want to represent.  A few months later, she responded and passed on that partial, but asked for another (I always mention what I’m working on in my queries so the agent knows I have more than the one book in me). She rejected that one as well, but I never received the rejection. It was about nine months before I confirmed that with a follow-up query.

I don’t recommend leaving a publisher hanging like this. I think part of me was hoping that he’d have to withdraw the offer and I wouldn’t have to choose. I had the book entirely page-made when he’d asked to buy it. With one evening of work, I could have pulled the trigger on self publishing. I will point out I run an indie RPG press. I have the tools to self publish. I agonized over the right thing to do.

I kept him hanging for over a year.

I put out tentative feelers to my blogging friends, but at least one of them seemed to come back as a very polite refusal to blog about the book . This later turned out to be a miscommunication, but it cast doubt that anyone would be willing to blog a review. I would almost certainly have the podcast network for an ad, but I just couldn’t count on the others.

But while all of that brought me closer to the decision, none of it really made up my mind.

My mind was made up by the Comic Cons in 2014. During that time, I felt an increasing resentment among the writers I respected toward the self-published crowd. A lot of them were borish on panels. There were instances of cash transactions happening during the panels themselves (not before or after). It was a few bad apples causing this shift, but the shift was there. Self publishing proliferated through the cons. I’ve spent years building up networks with these people. I didn’t want to categorize myself with an annoying element.

And there was that implied credibility. For every Michaelbrent Collings out there, there are dozens of self published writers with almost no sales. When I’m buying a book, unless it’s from someone like Michaelbrent, my first question is to try to verify if other people found the book worthy. This might be done through reviews and recommendations, but the easiest first question is, “Did someone else find this book worth publishing?”

So I finally decided that having another person invested in my career was worth it, even if the royalty split meant less money. It showed the consumer that I wasn’t the only one to think the work had value and it meant someone else out there cared about whether I succeeded or failed.

In spring on 2015, I told James I’d accept his offer. Luckily, it was still valid.

Your First Published Novel: Part 5

In the years leading up to 2014, I didn’t give Death by Cliché a whole lot of thought. I had other projects and I was trying to secure an agent. Still, the book never entirely left my mind. Over the years I more or less pagemade the entire thing in InDesign. Sometime in there as well, Nate Shumate put out an offer to do book covers for the ebooks of people who followed him online. I secured a cover from him and my friend Dan Willis offered to help me get the thing up in the ibooks store (which requires a Mac). Still, the iron was no longer hot, so I wasn’t particularly motivated to get the thing for sale as an ebook.
It was still my biggest credit, but I’m not huge in listing my credits at cons when I’m not promoting something. If they are relevant, sure: in an RPG panel, I’ll usually list all my RPG credits. If we’re in a panel on contests, I’m certainly going to mention my Writer’s of the Future win. If we’re discussing Robert J Sawyer I’m going to point out that he’s my arch nemesis. If we’re talking about Middle Grade novels I’ll point out I have the heart of a ten-year-old child (in a box on the mantel).

So I’d mention Death by Cliché if we were talking about self publishing or podcasts or audiobooks. I probably mentioned it in comedy panels and if someone asked me about.

I actually have no idea how James Wymore found out about it. James does these comedy game panels, such as Choose Your Apocalypse where the contests are each trying to convince the audience that their end of the world is the most desirable. I assume the order of events went something like this:

1) James and I were on some panel or another together. I was damn funny.

2) James hung out with me or others in a green room. I was funnier.

3) James went to dinner with me and a bunch of authors. I was less funny, but so tired that it was still impressive.

4) James invited me to be on one his game panels. I lost with spectacular hilarity.

I didn’t know that James was an acquisitions editor for Curiosity Quills. I wasn’t trying to schmooze him. He probably asked somewhere along the line how he could listen to Death by Cliché. If he did, I didn’t take much note of it. It’s the kind of things authors ask each other all the time at these things, and I don’t think many of us actually follow through most of the time. Hell, by that point the itunes feed had long since gone defunct, so he would have had to listen to it on a computer or sideload the whole thing manually. Not the kind of effort I expect someone to put out for a book I wrote six years before.

I suspect that James really decided to listen to it during a sleep-toxin-induced pitch I totally don’t remember, where I suggested that his Actuator universe needed a story that was “Sailor Moon meets Godzilla.” (This conversation must have happened because he made me put my money where my mouth was and write it some months later.) At any rate, James listened to the book over the summer in 2013.

(From James: “Actually, I heard you talk about it in a panel I attended but was not part of. I did have to download it manually. Then I didn’t listen to it for a few months after that.”)

So we were at Salt Lake City Comic Con, 2013, in the green room most likely (because where else would I be) when James told me he wanted to buy Death by Cliché.

For the life of me, at that point I didn’t know what to do.

(You’ll have to wait for next week to find out why. Unless you’re binge reading these after, in which case you can just click now, you lucky thing, you.)

Your First Published Novel: Part 4

With Death by Cliché released, our story starts accelerating rapidly. Not because things start taking off, but because of the opposite. Over the next years, not a lot happened.
In that first year, I was high on the hog, as it were. My downloads never completely took off, but they topped off at a respectable 5,000 downloads. I had something to talk about when I did the convention circuit. It gave me a little cred.

See, back around 2003 I was one of the winners in Writers of the Future. I was asked to be guest of honor at the local academic symposium, Life the Universe and Everything. Not for writer’s of the future (although they didn’t tell me that), but for my work in RPGs. I’m a pretty charming guy. I’m fairly reliable and you can put me on any panel. If I don’t know the subject, I’ll keep the audience laughing while the smart people dole out knowledge. I spoke of some of this back in Part 2.

Once I was well-liked at one convention, others in the area started asking me to speak or do panels. I ran workshops. I pressed flesh. But there was an unspoken clock over my head.

About the time I stated, I would hear about people who won Writer’s of the Future and never accomplished anything else. They would hang around the cons until they were quietly written out of the schedules. So I had gone, at that point, 5 years without a major achievement in fiction. RPGs, sure, but nothing in fiction. Part of that was that I had high standards. Part of it was that I was still learning my craft.

So the moderate success of Death by Cliché came as a welcome relief. A little cred, at last. Self-published, yes, but few podcast audiobooks hit those kind of numbers. I wasn’t Scott Siegler, but I’d done a second thing and found it relatively well received.

The next few years I had minor moments that brought me joy. Occasionally, I’d find a new review of the book. At one point I found it referenced a few times on tvtropes.org. The status of the book gave me joy from time to time, but my ability to record a new audiobook had withered away, so there wasn’t much more to do in the area. Also, mentioning it at conventions became less and less relevant as the years went by.

In there sits a long period of time where I didn’t write much, either. I worked on my RPG stuff, but I no longer had a writing group and without a writing group (or some other external deadline) I don’t write.

I eventually started another writer’s group with some local pros, but by then Death by Cliché was old news.

By 2014, I had moved on.

Your First Published Novel: Part 3

On the release of the second episode of the podcast audiobook of Death by Cliché, Howard Tayler’s fans brought my server to its knees. For hours, you couldn’t get the page to come up, much less actually download the episode. I had over ten thousand downloads in those first few hours and my little server wasn’t enough to handle it.
At the time I was working for the web hosting company that hosted the site. They sold processing power, but not actual bandwidth. Fortunately when you work at a company like that, you know other employees with servers of their own. By the time episode three came out, I had two mirrors set up to take the stress off the server. It worked well. For the rest of the run of the podcast, every time I released an episode, my server would have about half the downloads and the mirrors would divide the other half between them.

Things went well for the next few podcasts, although I realized right away that I’d made a terrible mistake. Somewhere around episode 2, people started demanding a way to buy the finished book. I had none. Of all the financial mistakes I’ve made in my life, this was probably the worst. If I had been thinking, I would have had e-book and lulu print on demand versions of the book already sitting in my store. Want to find out how the audiobook ends? No sweat, just click here to buy. But I had nothing. Stupid.

I don’t know if what happened next was a mistake exactly, because I don’t see a way to have avoided it, but the next hitch came around Christmas when Carolyn went on vacation. I believe other family issues cropped up at the same time. Obviously, there was no reason for her to vacation-proof the podcast, she wasn’t making any money off it, after all. So when she left, there was nothing we could do but wait for the next episode to come.

A podcast has momentum. Once you take the anomaly of Howard’s stress test for episode 2 into account, my downloads had been steadily building throughout the release. If things had continued, I probably would have hit that critical 10,000 download mark where people start noticing just how popular your audiobook really is. But I didn’t. It was a month before we released that next episode.

In that month, I lost it all.

My downloads dropped to almost nothing. People had walked away from the book. I was at the halfway point and everything I’d done that far had just evaporated with the month off.

I spent the rest of the podcast rebuilding those numbers. In the end, I was close to the numbers I’d had before the break, maybe even a little above them, but I’ll never know for sure how big the book could have gotten if I hadn’t missed a week.

And possibly more critically, although I’d been building an ebook version, it became obvious I wasn’t going to finish it in time to capitalize on people wanting to know how the book would end. So when the podcast ended, it was over. There was very little left to do but note the numbers I did get and move them into my query letters.

It was over. For a second time.

Your First Published Novel: Part 2

My friend W Dan Willis has the theory that any given road to publication works once, because they plug up the hole after you get through. It’s certainly true that most writer’s I know have some unique aspect to their story. I, for instance, have never been rejected by a publishing house, only by Agents and Magazines. That isn’t to say that I haven’t submitted to a house. It also doesn’t mean I have a half dozen novels out. It means that historically, if I submit I’m either accepted or they never reply at all. Everyone has a twist to their story.
Mine came shortly after I gave up on Death by Cliché. A member of my writer’s group, Carolyn Nicita, decided that she wanted to build herself a portfolio of audio work. So she offered to record and edit for free if I read. Traditionally, I haven’t been big on self publishing. Even when I have gone the self publishing route, it involved starting my own game company and soliciting licenses from at least one company where I already had a fan base. I would not normally even consider this, but in the end I decided why not Death by Cliché. People seemed to enjoy it and it was unsaleable. If anything it gets funnier when read aloud. If there was ever a book for the experiment, this was it.

So late in 2008, we began recording Death by Cliché. I believe that was the same year that I moved, but I seemed to recall all the recording sessions happening in the old house, to we must have done all the sessions relatively closely together in a big push. Just about the time I actually moved, we were pushing out the first episode.

Howard Tayler has a panel he does called it “Charisma is Not a Dump Stat.” One point of the panel is to make sure writers know that while writing is a solitary task, marketing is not. I’ve always believed this myself. In fact, when I go to conventions, I only attend panels when I’m flying the colors for some topic or another. I do the panels where I’m speaking, and otherwise I spend my time in the green room, networking. I have been accused of holding court, but I like to believe that has more to do with the fact that my back injury makes getting up and sitting down fairly painful, so I spend a great deal of time ensconced in a chair. The more throne-like the better.

At any rate, I didn’t know Howard before I started conventions. I didn’t know any of my writing friends before that. Brandon Sanderson once told me that the first year we met, before he’d published, he hung out with Dan Willis and I in the halls because we were the “real writers.” In retrospect, that’s pretty funny.

At this point I’d been doing the local convention circuit pretty heavily since LTUE made me a guest of honor through a wacky set of hijinks and misunderstanding. I’ve been told that the way I handled that convention has a lot to do with my popularity with the LTUE staff. For instance, at the banquet after I was sitting at the table with the con committee when I won a child’s toy tiara in a giveaway. I don’t know what kind of guests they had in the past, but they were all terrified that giving me a little girl’s toy would insult me, and I was still Guest of Honor for about another two hours. I claimed the prize, put it on my head, and in my deepest and most manly voice declared, “I’m a pretty pretty princess.”

The point is, a great deal of my success can be attributed to the fact that I take great pains to make certain that people WANT to be around me.

So it isn’t terribly surprising that when we released the first episode, Howard Tayler wanted to talk about it on his blog. I believe at the time he had about 50k unique hits a day. The first episode saw a large amount of downloads. The next week, for the second episode, he asked his crowd, “Let’s break Bob’s server.”

And break it they did.

Your First Published Novel: Part 1

In 2006 I began writing Death by Cliché. The book started with a few conceits. I’d written a couple comedic short stories and felt they turned out fairly well, so I wanted to try my hand at a novel-length comedy. I had years of experience writing as a game designer at that point and I wanted to embrace every bad cliché, both in gaming and in bad fantasy fiction. So it had to be a secondary world fantasy where the main character was from our world. I had to write my own chapter quotes and call great attention to the fact. The main character had to look like a complete Marty Stu. Most of all, I wanted a high joke density so that I didn’t have to worry how many people got any one joke. I could write as obscurely as I wanted, knowing that if one out of three jokes landed with any given reader, it would still be a funny book. I call this “The Dennis Miller Quotient.” Because I’m old.
The book worked out well. There were some scenes that were hilarious when read allowed that were merely amusing on the page. Conversely, there are jokes on the page that don’t translate at all to a live reading. For instance, I wrote a chapter where I make a meta joke about the spelling of its and it’s. Still, I was happy with the result. Damico, the main character, was funny and engaging. A little bit more of a “bro” than I am, but while I used a lot of my own experiences in the book (I was called by the Todd McGovern of ICE marketing once to go hijack a demo…Todd was completely correct in reading the warning signs), Damico isn’t actually me. I chose the name because it sounded like I had just slightly changed my own name. Damico was actually the name of my Father’s best friend in College. I called him Uncle Jack.

Through 2006 and 2008 I drafted the novel. I often feel good about a novel somewhere around the third draft. At least I did with this one. In 2008 I started shopping the manuscript around to agents. The reactions were generally positive. Many sent me form rejections, of course, but the ones who didn’t basically came down to a single criticism. The criticism matched the notes of pretty much every critique I received while drafting the book:

“Well I liked it, but no one else will.”

There is an very specific skill that any author must have, but many writers can’t develop. You must be absolutely, head over heels in love with whatever you’re working on, but ready to walk away from it at a moments notice. The main need for this skill is when you write a book, unless you’ve sold a sequel, you can’t just write the sequel. Also, I’ve found that if you do a draft of a book too soon after the last draft, you aren’t objective enough to see the flaws. You see what you had in your head, not what you put on the page. (The amount of time you need to leave a draft fallow probably has a lot to do with you as a writer. Also, I expect it shrinks with experience). I don’t know how many writing groups I’ve been in where a thirty year old writer was beating a dead horse he’d given birth to in high school.

So when you finish a draft, you have to be ready to put it completely aside and work on something else. When I’m writing a book, I spend the last two months plotting my next book. When you’re drafting, though, you have to be so passionate that you’re ready to work and rework the book until you have the best thing you can possibly write. When you’re shopping it you have to be completely passionate about what you’re selling, but the second the query is out, you have to suddenly be passionate about the project you’re actually working on. (Because you aren’t querying books you’re still writing, correct?)

But worst of all, you need to know when to walk away from a book. This book resonated with the readers (at least those who gave me notes). But in the eyes of the business people, it was unsaleable. It didn’t matter whether they were correct or not. Writing is a business and the businessman in me saw the writing on the wall, as it were.

So in 2008 and walked away from Death by Cliché.

My Conduit 2015 Schedule

Greetings!
This weekend I’ll be on several panels for Conduit 2015. This appears to be my schedule:
Friday
3:00 (Zion) There and Back again – the Hobbit Trilogy

Saturday
10:00 (Snow) The Dungeon Escape
12:00 (Arches) What do we know about Star Wars 7
1:00 (Snow) Discworld – Farewell Sir Terry
2:00 (Snow) The Marvel Movie Universe
3:00 (Zion) Choose Your Own Apocalypse

Sunday
12:00 (Zion) Working as a Collaborator

It looks to be a lot of fun. Hope to see you there.

Your First Published Novel: Prologue

When I published my first RPG book, the experience was full of highs and lows. I’m sure a lot of great stories came from that time, but I wouldn’t know because I can’t remember any of them. Lets face it, that oft painful four-year process was a long time ago. I mostly remember the ironic and sad stories, such as the fact that I calculated my hourly after the company in question collapsed and realized that I had made .36 cents per hour.
When I started Final Redoubt Press, I posted a series of blogs about the experience. The posts were popular and I enjoyed them, so it’s occurred to me to do it again.

Last week I finalized my contract with Curiosity Quills to publish my (formerly) podcast audiobook Death by Cliché. So starting with this post, I’ll describe my experience. Many of you are probably interested in the foibles of your first novel. Others might just be interested in what it takes to convert a modest podcast audiobook success into a traditional novel (spoiler, it started as a novel, so it isn’t hard). Either way, these posts are for you.

Here are the rules. I will not lie to you. I will not hold back information that is mine to reveal. I will probably be cagey about actual numbers and checks, because there are others who DON’T want to reveal that sort of thing, and if I reveal my numbers it becomes easier (maybe trivial) to figure out the numbers of others. That’s not my secret to tell. Other than that, I’ll give it to you straight. If something is painful, I’ll tell you. If it delights me, I’ll tell you. When I’m inevitably stupid, I’ll tell you.

So next week we’ll start with backstory. I’ll talk about writing and shopping the book, why I made the choice to go the audiobook route, and how we generated interest in the book years later. I’ll then move on to the contracts and negotiations and everything that came before this point. I’m not sure how many weeks that will take. From there, it will be nothing but tears and agony, I’m sure.

I’m sure it will be a ride. Thanks for reading. I look forward to seeing you again next week.

Death by Cliché is Coming to Print

Hello all!
For all you Death by Cliché fans out there I have a great announcement. I have signed a contract with Curiosity Quills to bring it to print.

I’m very excited to work with such a great company. I’m delighted to see the book published. I want to thank everyone who’s encouraged me and told me how much they love the book.

Thank you!

Regards,

Bob

A Site Adjustment and Upcoming News

Hello all!
I’ve moved the Death by Cliche files audio aside so that they can’t be downloaded any longer. I hope to be able to say why in a few days. Thank you for your patience.

Regards,

Bob

Product 6 Release Eminent

Greetings!I just wanted everyone to know that product 6 in The Echoes of Heaven is just about complete. There won’t be a sourcebook included with this product, but the adventure stands well by itself. This will be part 6 in The Moving Shadow Campaign. We are set to release on New Year’s Eve.
Thanks for your patience and have a great holiday season!
Bob

The Echoes of Heaven Product 5 Released (with special offer)!

Greetings. Final Redoubt Press would like to thank you for your patience and announce the long-awaited release of our 5th Echoes of Heaven Product: In His Name/The Last Hallowed Place. We’re very proud of this product and hope you gain as much enjoyment from its use as we did producing it.
Skip to the end for details on a special release-day discount.

In His Name details the churches of The Echoes of Heaven setting, with mechanical write ups, politics, NPCs, and dozens upon dozens of adventure seeds. It also details the great holy city of the Human church and it inhabitants and special sites. A must for any Echoes of Heaven player or GM.

The Last Hallowed Place is the 5th adventure in The Moving Shadow Campaign. Now that the characters have escaped from the trap set for them in The Tainted Tears, Morthorn has almost completed his plan to end the world. Can our intrepid adventurers stop him in time, or is this the end of the Mortal Realm as we know it?

For those who have waited so long, we’ve provided a special release day sale. Use the link below to purchase the bundle version of the product including the OGL, Rolemaster, and HARP rules for the price of a single version. Get three times the content and help us at Final Redoubt Press return with a bang. It’s our gift to you and your gift to us all at the same time.

http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?discount=73358

Thanks, and good gaming!

Cover Hell Continues

In my last post I said that I made a pass at all the covers. I was hoping I was mostly done but dreading, honestly, that I was anything but. Many, many hours of work later, and I have finished a second pass on all the covers and turned them over for copy editing. How much more work is necessary depends on how many errors the copy-editor finds.
In addition to that I’ve started updating the internal text (including the preview download) to include updated information about the licenses. At the same time I’m upgrading the interior of the preview to full color, like the 4e version of the products. I don’t want to delay the other existing copies with large-scale interior updates, so I’ll restrain myself and only handle the licensing issues in those.

On the Death by Cliche front, I’ve finished an output of the e-pub version with a table of contents. I did this while gaming at a friend’s house, however, so it hasn’t been tested yet. The Kindle version is still pending. I don’t have news on a cover, there.

That’s the major news, the covers are just dozens and dozens of hours of work. With them receding, however, I hope to get updated copies online over the next weeks.

Regards,

Bob

Back in the Saddle.

Just a quick update on the week’s progress. On the Echoes front I’ve been working on bringing the existing books into compliance with the new license situation. That means editing covers and interiors to meet the requirements of the new ICE license. I also need to update the text describing the licenses and the other versions of the products. This is a time-consuming task and I’ve finished my first pass on all the existing covers.
As I mentioned in my recent post on Playtesting.net (this post will be showing up in both locations), it looks like my HERO System license won’t be renewing. Since I’ve started releasing small conversions for 4e, I’m adding that as my fourth system, although the actual 4e conversions won’t have a place in my schedule I finish getting Death by Cliché up and released. Essentially, I only have time to work on two Final Redoubt projects at once.

As for Death by Cliché, I’ve done my initial page making pass and it is finished. I’ve also done a proof of concept export for Kindle and e-pub and some subsequent exports to handle formatting issues. They all look good now. I’ll need to add a table of contents to the e-book versions for navigation purposes. That’s next on my list. I also need to get a cover. It looks like I’m not going to be able to get a piece of reuse art for the cover—my first choice—so I’m going to need to commission an actual piece. We’ll see how that develops. I’ve found some artists I think would do a good job but I haven’t contacted them yet.

We’re within a few weeks of starting the Rolemaster playtest of the final adventure, O What a Hell Would Heaven Be. I’m very excited about it. I’m halfway through the RM/HARP conversion of the final bonded weapon of the campaign and I’m VERY glad that bit will soon be done. There is only one major NPC in this one, so the statting of the adventure itself should proceed apace. I should be able to keep ahead of the playtest group handily enough once the NPC is statted.

So that’s where we are. I’ll try to keep you posted on events and thanks for your patience.

Regards,

Bob