I now publically acknowledge that I’ve now moved away from being ‘Newt the Writer’ to ‘Newt the Publisher’. Its been a confusing transition and lately I’ve been feeling like Robert De Niro’s character in Brazil when he gets smothered by paper work, although in my case its drafts of varying completeness. But some time off work and a mental step back has got my brain in gear.
The first step was to get all the printouts sorted. A couple of trips down to the University print shop saw the drafts of Wordplay, HQ2 and the behemoth that is the Sartar book nicely comb binded. .I’ve also got a nice neat filing system that is reasonably portable, which helps a lot and gets my not so silent business partner, Rachel my wife aka the boss, off my back about loose paper drifting round the house. I’ve got a dedicated area in the garage to store excess stock. So I’m organised in a practical way.
Virtually its not so complete a victory over disorganisation. I’m using Dropbox (www.getdropbox.com) for document management, which has worked smoothly with various collaborators over recent months. Its also been a lifesaver recently as my main Vista machine (Godzilla) has died on me. Normally I’d be cursing that my latest draft was lost, but since the main repository is Dropbox’s servers, when I get Godzilla sorted out I’ll be back in the game. In the meantime I’m able to access and work on the documents on my work and linux laptop. The D101 website is being slowly revamped. Currently Its in the state were the existing content has been migrated over to the new site and the navigation made clearer. I need to some how make the appearance more ‘sexy’ and also integrate a simple shopping cart so you can by pdfs and printed copies directly from me. The website will also see me gather up the two D101 blogs, this one and the Hearts in Glorantha, and stick them under the d101games.com domain, although you’ll still be able to read the d101 blog here as I’ll automatically ship over the posts. Its a slower process than I would like but its worth doing it right , before I really swing into gear publishing stuff.
Talking of which looking at the patterns it looks like my output can be easily described as ‘waves’.
Wave 1 is the Fanzines, specifically Hearts in Glorantha although the unpublished Tales of the Firebird and Gloranthan Adventures. Quick to do and engages with the audience.
Wave 2 is the games I’ve been working on for a couple of years now. OpenQuest and Monkey. Very much building on the experiences learnt in Wave 1 to produce good looking easy to read books. OpenQuest is nearly thorough edititorial, I’m going to be spending a lot of time leaning over InDesign in the coming weeks 🙂
Wave 3 is the stuff I’ve got planned with Wordplay, can’t say much about this at the moment because I want to focus on Wave 2, but lets say I and are very excited about what D101 is going to be doing with his marvelous system.
Exciting as these waves of creativity are I’m also aware that earlier waves are still hitting the shore as the later ones are coming in. Which leads me onto the subject of….
I’ve learnt how to say NO. Mainly to myself and the crazy ideas I come up and then put to other people. I’ve got enough on my plate, time to get it published!
Congratulations on learning how to say “no” – but please don’t do it too often! I’m still amazed at how much you manage to pack into your life when you also have a real job, and a wife and daughter.
How does Dropbox compare with Google Docs? I use the latter a lot, though mainly for spreadsheets rather than lengthy stories.
Cool beans!