eddyfate

I'm back from Origins. I'll try to cover the high points, using a scale of Critical Failure, Failure, Mixed Success, Success and Exceptional Success.

( Lots of name-dropping inside. )

Overall Score: Success. No, I'm not going to calculate it. The point is, I got a lot of work done, I got access to more work, and I had a good time with old friends and potential new ones.

Now, though, I'm going to do some post-con emails, and then fuck off for the rest of the day.

Barring Friday night, I've been working every night since Wednesday on the LARP, and all day yesterday and today on characters. A lot of people have done an amazing job working on characters for me, but I have to go through, fill in gaps, massage passages so they all flow together, and write missing material for those people who couldn't get me stuff on time. Of the 50 pre-generated characters, I have 35 completely done. Tomorrow I'll hopefully get the remaining characters together and sprinkle the remaining plot elements into the characters and print them all up, and Tuesday I can focus on the remaining stuff I need to write and print up. I'll still have stuff to do at Origins, but I'm trying to get everything that requires a printer done, and hope that I'll have willing minions at Origins who can run to Kinko's or the like for my remaining needs. It's been a lot of work, but a lot of fun as well.

Only a few more days until Origins!

This Friday I spent taking some good advice into consideration and hammering out the final changes to the skeleton of the Origins LARP plot. I gave myself the weekend to let some farmed-out pieces of the game filter back in (and devoted some glorious time finally working on my World of Warcraft character for the first time in weeks). Today I took the pieces I had, put them all together, and farmed them back out while I focus on the main introductory game/rule/plot book for players. I also bought my plane ticket for Origins, hammered out some travel arrangements, found the movie theater website STILL doesn't have showtimes for the Transformers movie yet, and generally spent all evening working on Origins. I plan to spend the next day or two working on the new player's book and final revisions to Digital Dirge, and then see what work needs to be done over the rest of the week.

I've been slacking on "The Bureau" a bit, but not a whole lot. I hammered out the six core characters, and I've spent the weekend fleshing them out to be something more than "middle-aged priest." I have a general social dynamic in mind, so I want to put the pieces down so that I can get the basics of that dynamic down, while still leaving a lot unwritten for future ideas and so I can explore the characters as I write. I'm also kicking around what the first plot will be, and in what format I'll be sharing it with the world. There are some weird rights issues if I just put them up here in my LiveJournal, so I have to decide what I plan to do with this in future before I share it out. I'm actually considering podcasting them in audiobook format, and/or a blog with the idea of eventually self-publishing them. Since I haven't actually, you know, written anything yet, these are more vague ideas than anything resembling a plan.

And now, an hour of relaxation before bed.

The past few days have primarily consisted of research and brainstorming for Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. I now have a basic idea of how I want to approach the manuscript, along with a very rough outline, but I'm not entirely sure where I want to go with it just yet. This one is pretty short -- only around 20,000 words -- so I expect it to go much faster than many of my previous projects. Not much else I can say about DD at this point, really.

On the LARP, I'm clearing up some logistical details before I start putting together a crew. In some ways, this is the exact opposite of Digital Dirge -- I know exactly where I want to go with it, but I'm not entirely sure what's the best way to approach it. While I've run many LARP games in my life, I haven't put together a self-contained one-shot from top to bottom like this. I'm looking forward to the challenge of it, and I'm hoping for a different vibe than the typical "campaign LARP" style I and most of my friends are used to.

When I begin work on a new project (or in this case, two), I start getting ideas for a bunch of other projects at the same time. My creative juices start going into overdrive. I've been continuing to kick around my modern fantasy idea to the point where it might actually start to look like a novel outline when it grows up. An idea for a card or board game has been slowly sloshing around in my head, as well as resurrecting a sequel card game to Cam: The Politicking (tentatively titled Prestige: The Whoring).