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!

Okay, MovieTickets.com finally updated with the showtimes. I bought tickets for the 9pm showing on July 4th at the Arena Grand Theatre in Columbus (175 W Nationwide Blvd., Columbus, OH 43215). Considering it's a holiday, you might want to purchase your tickets online if at all possible - one of the 8pm showings is already sold out. Feel free to pass this on to anyone else who might be attending Origins.

After a lot of hard work, Sekrit Project Digital Dirge (yes, it's still a secret) is off to the publisher. It came in at a scrappy 16,101 words, but really it's all solid material -- for every part I fleshed out, another part had some fat to lose. If I need to come up with more, I will, but I think the material as is will work well.

There's always pleasure in officially finishing a project. While this manuscript was painful for me in some ways, now that it's done I'm pleased with how it turned out, and I'm glad I did it. I grew in some new ways as a writer and built back up some old writing muscles. I tend to go through a cycle of excitement, frustration, avoidance, perseverance and completion in my writing, and more and more I'm recognizing the cycle and able to keep it from stopping me cold.

What's next? Well, from now until July 8th I'm pretty much devoted to Origins. After that... I don't know yet. Since Origins is a working con for me, I plan to ask White Wolf and then some other contacts to see if they have any freelance gigs that will work for me. If not, then I'll probably focus on my fiction for a while. I think I'll play around with "The Bureau" just to get a couple of fiction projects done, something for me to dig my teeth into and play around with as I find my voice as a fiction writer.

Got my complete Origins schedule. I'll be flying in on Wednesday, and driving back Sunday afternoon. Wednesday afternoon I'll be helping set up the WW booth. Thursday and Friday are primarily booth work and seminars. Saturday is just MET Mage, so I have some free time before and after (assuming I'm not actually going insane with prep work). Sunday morning is more booth work. Somewhere in there I'll be at the Origins Awards. So, the best way to get a hold of me is to swing by the WW booth on any day but Saturday, and find me there.

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.

For some reason, the Mage LARP is missing from both the event Excel files and the pre-registration book PDF hosted on their website. I just wanted to let everyone know that it's being looked into, and as far as I know there's still a game on. I'll pass along information as I get it.

So, it looks like I will be in Columbus when Transformers: The Movie premieres. It turns out there's a nice movie theatre right down the street from the convention center (if my Google-Map-Fu is strong). I'm debating, if time permits, getting a group together to watch, perhaps in horror, the movie before the convention proper starts. Consider this my attempt to gauge initial interest for such a group.