IT’S COMING… REALLY

Orange Book aka Comedy of Terrors

Hey, look — it’s an image! Just don’t get too excited, I’m still doing it wrong.

WRITING IN PUBLIC

After the last entry’s whine session, I decided to kick my own butt and re-join the world of Camp NaNoWriMo. I don’t recall offhand, but I think this might be the first time I have done both sessions in a year. Normally I do either April or July. Since April wasn’t really a full-fledged attempt, I guess that might still be true this time. Still, even when I only sign up because I “should”, it’s one or the other.

Initially, I was going to write a short piece inspired by a cover on Self Pub Book Covers. This is the lovely site where I purchased the covers to both Seeing Red and Comedy of Terrors. However…

ORANGE BOOK came in earlier than expected! What is Orange Book? See the image. This is the editing copy of Comedy of Terrors ordered from the print-on-demand service Lulu. (I won’t be publishing through them, but they are really good for vanity prints.) I take the ebook version, put it on my Kindle, and have the Kindle read me the book while I read along in the print copy, marking the clunky sentences or typos or flat-out mistakes. After I get through that, I will open up my draft document, make the changes, and go through one last time in an attempt to squash all those stupid little things that get on my nerves when I read other people’s books.

Then I will publish… and, if history is any indication, immediately find one of those stupid little things that get on my nerves when I read other people’s books.

I did not succeed in my truncated July Camp goal, but I kicked April’s number’s butt… so that’s a win of sorts. And I’m still working on it, off and on. (Mostly off.)

GAMES

What blog entry would be complete without my extolling the virtues of board gaming?

This time out, I’m not going to go on and on about the games I have been playing — it has been a very long time since my last entry — but I will mention that in my last Monthly Game Day with my friends from work, we returned to Hogwarts and collectively had our butts handed to us again by Game 7. I think we have a possible strategy going into it next time we play, but it has beaten us so many times at this point that I do not have high hopes for it.

Also, I will be at Gateway 2019 Labor Day weekend. If you’re a gamer and in the Los Angeles area, you could do worse. I haven’t decided yet how much Pathfinder I’m going to play. They’re running the Core Set’s adventure path, and I kind of wanted to run through that one for the first time with my game group, either after or concurrently with our Rise of the Runelords campaign. If I don’t play much (or any) PACG, that will free up a lot of time to check out other demos and tournaments for games I don’t normally get to play.

We shall see.

WRAPPING UP

I have gotten an interesting recommendation from my one blog reader on how to “monetize” my gaming hobby: To create a blog about gaming. My reservations about that are twofold, though: 1) I can’t even keep up my writing blog with any regularity — how the heck am I supposed to do a second one?? 1.5) My weekly gaming group has a Facebook group, and I am tasked with writing a regular column featuring games in the store’s demo library — and I’m not good at keeping up with that, either. 2) A blog, even if those could make money in today’s world, would not be monetizing my gaming — it would be another outlet for my writing. I’m trying to find a way to make money playing games, not writing about them.

That said, she gave me another interesting idea, and that is to incorporate a discussion about gaming as a hobby into this blog. I’m probably going to take that one and run with it.

Unless I get run over by the lazy like I usually do.

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