Writing the Battle Gaming Book Update

Here are were things are at with the new book.

Currently the title is "Battle Gaming: The New American Sport." I am not sure if this is the title that will exist for the release. Margaret had suggested "Battle Gaming Made Fun." The problem I had with this title is that it implied that Battle Gaming was not fun to begin with (on the contrary it is quite fun).

Overall the book is coming together well. I still wish to have a draft out by the end of the year. I have now been printing each section I work on so as to have a binder that represents the entire book. Still do not know how many pages I have. I am trying to keep it under 300 pages in an effort to keep the price of the book down.

Last week activities included:

I was working on the Open Battle Gaming System Dagorhir Variance Document. This is a document that allows players who read the book to convert the books Open Battle Gaming System rules into a set that matches the Dagorhir rule set. As always this force me to loop through yet another revision of the Open Battle Gaming System.

I also spent a good bit of time working on developing a chart categorizing various real weapons to Open Battle Gaming System weapons. This was a nightmare because historical weapon taxonomy is an art more than a science. I ended up writing a few paragraphs about the whole tangled mess of categorizing historic weapons and then went on to just start a table that made sense for most people who are familiar with the common names of weapons used in role playing games. The table is not finished and likely will continue to get updates until the time of publishing.

This weekend was spent attacking the games in Chapter 3. I created my game information rendering template and ran my first mail merge against the Excel spreadsheet I have been loading with games. It was gratifying to see pages and pages of battle game descriptions come out in a good readable form. Of course the spread sheet is still incomplete. I have also taken a hard look at consolidating and reducing the number of games. I am working on how to describe the unique qualities of each game and then reference combining them with other games. I am working on removing redundancy (after all how many versions of zombie can one read about). I think the result will be more concise, with an objective of reduced volume (to keep the price down) along with maximum useful information content.

My objective is to by the end of the year have a draft that I can send out to reviewers. Things are coming together so well I think I may make this deadline.

Reading Update

I noticed that Amazon has rearranged there Pictures on there server so my Blog site looks like a partly built web site or one that is dieing. They always say, copy the pictures locally for your links, but who has time to do that! I will try to get back in the next few days to update things when I can.

Made me realize how far behind I am on updating what I am reading. Things I have read in the past few months include:

Will and I completed the second Warrior series. Felt the first, second, and fifth books were good, while the third and fourth were pretty much filler that stretched out the plot line too long.

Got going on finances listening and re listening to "Your Broke Because You Want to Be" and "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind"

Currently finishing up the Eragon trilogy with Will. Found the books to be derivative works. Really liked the details he puts in, that boy has an eye for detail. Have difficulty with the rate of advancement of the characters. I think this may be the difference between the video game generation where video games players are used to quick advancement and the old rpg generation where we play a campaign for 5 years before our characters have any reasonable amount of power.

With Audrey I have been through most of the Rainbow Fairy and related books. We are now reading works by Gail Carson Levine. I have also picked up a new book "How to Ditch Your Fairy" which we have not started. I hope that this book will give a different view of the whole fairy genre that Audrey is infatuated with.

As for myself, I am mostly rereading titles to find material for the book. This includes going back to Bruce Lee, Miyamoto Musashi, and John Clements among others.