Plans! Frustration as Ideas Come Faster than the Ability to Follow Through!

There's this feeling in the air that big things are going to happen. But not as many things as there could be.

Here's the to-do list:

• Finish the layouts and proofing for the Grindhouse Edition.
• Finish the formats, get all the final materials, and finish the layouts for Vornheim.

Those are happening pretty much at the same time.

Once those go to press, I'll set up the PDF versions so they'll be available to pre-orderers immediately, and then start the pre-orders and publicize that around the web. (I'm waiting to hear back from another printer about pricing for a "free gift" for those of you who pre-order both items)

I'll have a few weeks before they come back from the printer (offset press this time).

What has to be done during those weeks? Basic layouts have to be done for Isle of the Unknown and Carcosa so I have the page count. Then I need to make an appointment for the printer to get quotes for both those books in a variety of possible formats, as well as another project from another blogger I've got in the pipeline that I won't announce yet because I want to see if any of this is going to sell before I start publicly dragging them into my affairs. (and I have a few other submissions to review for possible release as well)

Once I know what format we'll have for McKinney's books, I can commission art.

Once the Grindhouse Edition and Vornheim come back from the printer, this place is going to be unlivable and I won't have time to do anything else but assemble boxes and pack them to ship. We have warehouse space arranged, but with 2000 boxes that need to be hand-assembled, those pictures I posted last summer are going to look like the epitome of tidiness compared to how full this place is going to be. This is going to take weeks to get them all put together and transported to the warehouse and frankly no writing is going to be done during that time - just packing, shipping, accounting, paperwork, and keeping track of the publicity as copies start to arrive on people's doorsteps. Somewhere in there I have to get the PDFs uploaded to the third-party vendors as well (and the Bits and Mortar people...)

I get excited about working with other people and there's something a little easier about looking at someone else's project and deciding what extravagances to bestow upon it. When I do that for one of my things, it feels self-indulgent. When I do it for someone else's work, it feels like I'm just doing what's best for the project.

The problem is that somewhere in there I want to write some new stuff too. And what I want to do accumulates as these other projects take time. What's on my project list?

• Death Ferox Doom (you'll love this - it has to be delayed way further because the money for the "player handout" visual stuff - and the planned artist! - are going to be used for McKinney's books). But I'm just frothing at the mouth to present the newest expedition to learn about and combat the Duvan'Ku! The Dead Sign will be sighted again! It's been played, mapped, all it needs is the intelligible text written from the notes... although after the Grindhouse Edition, the OMG CANNIBAL ARTZ!!! won't be much of a headline-grabber...
  
• A rework of my old Sanitarium adventure (the first adventure I ran when returning to D&D in 2006!) - I got a cool new idea for the whole thing after my last reading of Horror at Red Hook. It involves combining it with my mothballed "Return to the Old School" concept (involves a university, the working title was a *wink wink* double meaning) and time travel and extradimensional spaces. The original Sanitarium has maps and writeups of the basic space but that would only scratch the surface - the background and premise would need to be changed to reflect the change in concept.
  
• The Tutorial cover pic is so awesome I want to do something with Iri-Khan... and Dario Argento's Three Mothers trilogy has given me some ideas too. (tie one or both of them in with the Sanitarium? And check out Argento's Inferno for different way to deal with occult books!)
  
• The Guns & Renaissance & stuff supplement thingy I've been taking notes on while reading these dozens of history books I've accumulated lately. This one I think is the best for business to pursue...
  
• The Eastern European Sandbox taking real life infamous historical figures and basing it all around the popular legends that surround them.
  
• The "meta-module" which has no adventures in and of itself, but creates background situations (pestilence, drought/famine, invasion, etc) to lay over your own adventures and campaign.

And by the time I sit down and really start working on one of these, they'll be old ideas and I'll want to be chasing a more current muse. (you'll notice Insect Shrine isn't there - this will sound weird, but I think perhaps it's way too "classic D&D" for the direction I've been taking in both play and design. It was conceived as a "classic!" type thing in 2006 and didn't even represent how I was playing then...) I'm still open to submissions for people doing their stuff (more adventure material than setting material right now, thanks), but I certainly don't want to farm out any of my concepts to someone else to actually write.

But as self-employed friends keep telling me, it's much better to be too busy than not busy enough.

But whether it's these ideas or something else that ends up getting done, I can tell you that I'll be at this for as long as you guys let me. Lots of cool things on the way and in the works by a whole load of people - and publishers. It's a better time to be a gamer than it's been in decades, and the bettering isn't stopping here.

And after saying all that, I confess that I basically took the whole weekend off and did jack shit other than read. :D Back to the heavy work in the AM...