Progress and a Realization

This week has been a little more productive than usual. Well, I can honestly say that I never have an unproductive week, since at the very least I’m working on a chapter of Buck Who?

I had a bit of a conundrum earlier this week. I have been putting the effort into finishing the Harvesting book, and I realized there was no way for the games master to come up with a good way to figure out how much the items are worth.

I set out to start with a simple system to figure out the values. By the end of Wednesday night, I was seriously concerned I had added a minimum of a month’s worth of work to this project. See, what I had been considering was to put a chart with each entry, stating what the harvestable item was, effects and the overall value. I was also going to have an ongoing chart to keep track of the changes I made.

The best tactic I had available to me was to sleep on it. I did just that. I still have a lot of work to accomplish, but if I come up with the basic chart for costs and multipliers, then it will cut down on the amount of work I need to do to finish it.

I need to go through the material I have already written and see if I ever came up with rules regarding starvation and dehydration. Those will need to be written up for this book. After all, harvesting involves food, so…

As I stated already, I did work on Buck Who? I have posted Chapter 23, but I am currently working on chapter 26. When I complete chapter 26, this epic will have been worked on consecutively for half a year! And, as of chapter 25, the novel is 200,000 words in length.

I’ve managed to get halfway to the goal I set, to write this novel for a full year. I’m quite happy about that.

It’s been quite the dry-spell for new material being released by Skirmisher. I know that Michael Varhola is extremely busy at the moment, and he needs to be cloned or find someone who can take over the layout duties.

Anyone know Adobe and looking for a part time job?

I certainly wish I had the time to help!

Those who follow my blog will have realized this was the first week in many a month (well, with the exception of Comicpalooza) I did not write up a top 5 list. As I said last week, I’m running out of topics to write about. So that particular blog is going to be slowing down a little until I come up with some topics.

If you have some suggestions, please feel free to post in the comments – although the only comments I ever seem to get are from spammers trying to sell everything under the sun.

However, one project I have been diligently working on is my New Mutant Monday. This week I posted two more creatures… the Halias and the Set Kkoli Jwi. I know, strange names. If you want to know how I come up with some of these weird names, I just look up the translation. The rat was translated from two tail rat in Korean. The Halias is part of the Bald Eagle’s scientific name.

So, if you were curious, that’s how it’s done. At least one of the creatures I will be posting tomorrow got their name from the same method.

This week also saw the completion of Monster Hunter International: Nemesis. This is the fifth book in this rocking urban fantasy series. Like the third novel, this one deals with one of the other characters – Franks. I will not give away any real details about this character, as a great deal is revealed about him in the book. I was surprised however.

Still, despite his background and personality, I found Franks has grown on me. He’s a heartless and some would say outright evil bastard, but this book goes a long way to explain exactly why that is the case.

Last month I joined the IFWA Calgary or the Imaginative Fiction Writers Association. It’s a group of writers and up and coming writers which meet on the first Thursday of every month. For many years I never bothered with groups like this. I felt that I was good enough as a writer to be able to make it on my own.

Ego – it can be a real bitch.

I recently came to the realization that this was a big mistake. I need to interact with other writers in order to grow. I need to attend the occasional workshop, panels and so forth. To ignore all these potential sources of knowledge will always keep me from achieving my end-goal of becoming one of the 1%. Those who can make a living writing and not have to work a day-job.

So here is hoping that I can learn a great deal from these folks.

One of the reasons I brought this up was to introduce the book I will be starting tonight. It’s called Infection. It’s a zombie novel written by Craig DiLouie, a fellow Calgarian. After listening to him talk last month, I decided to check out his work and see what I think.

So the odds are stacked in his favor I will be reviewing this book next weekend.

Anyhow, that’s it for this blog. It’s summer time, quite warm and I love it!

As always, please follow my personal author page on Facebook, and as of this week I’m closing in on 100 followers on Twitter! Quite the change when you consider this time last year I had a whopping 5.

Until next Sunday – Peace!