Back With Big News

Yeah, I disappeared for a few months again. Sorry about that. I've been a little busy with life and health things. So fifty pounds lost and six months later, I am back on my blog with some cool news. Outrider Studios has two projects approaching completion, and we will be debuting them (unless we hit a snag) at the Origins Game fair in Columbus, Ohio. Hooray!

Space Age!
The first book is Warbirds Space Age, our Space Opera conversion book for the Warbirds. It fast-forwards the timeline of the game into the stars, and the Guild starts exporting their antics to local alien civilizations. We plan to sell it as a PDF, and in a print-on-demand omnibus combined with the WWII and Jet Age Soucebooks. This book would have been out sooner, but Dim, our award winning super artist, is a busy guy and is only just now able to get to our artwork. I am super excited for this one, and it should make it easier for people looking to hack Warbirds for a certain setting that contains stars, and, dare I say it, wars.

Broken Lands II
So this one has been an albatross around my neck for a while now. Fans always ask when the next Remnants book is coming out, and I never have a good answer. The truth is, the Broken Lands setting is hard to write for. I tried so hard with the first book to keep things ambiguous, that I struggle now that I have to dive into the specifics. There have been other problems too, the biggest being time. I just haven't dedicated enough time and energy to dedicate to the book. So despite having a full outline and a big bucket of ideas, the project languished.

But not anymore! One of the unique aspects of my day job is mandatory time off. If I don't take all of my vacation days each year, I have to go on leave to use them all up before the end of March. So I spent all of last week not at work and with nowhere to go. So I decided to write a book. I spent five days in the local Denny's restaurant and pounded the keyboard while eating mediocre breakfast food. The staff was friendly and polite as I ignored everyone and everything and blasted out 4000 words a day for five days. This is a very bad idea, by the way, and I decided to document my slow slide into bleary-eyed misery.

Day 1: Enthusiastic Determination

Look me. I'm almost smiling. This is especially difficult for me, as several people have claimed that I don't just write about robots, but I am an emotionless robot. Anyways, it only gets worse from here.

Day 2: Focused Intent

At 4000 words in, I still look alright, but I've got the weird look in my eyes that says my soul is screaming on the inside. I held it together, OK on Day 2, but it was my least productive day.

Day 3: Mounting Consternation

This is where I transition from intellectually knowing that this was a bad idea to actually feeling its affects. The constant stream of diet coke and salty diner food is driving a burning dump truck through my guts as I start to lose myself to my setting. The Broken Lands might be real now; I think I live there.

 Day 4: Crippling Exhaustion

At this point I should tell you that I am power writing during the day while burning the evening hours playing The Division. Sleep is in short supply, and  I am running purely on the magic of free drink re-fills and a twisted combination of determination and spite. I got a lot done on Day 4, and Day 5 only had to be a half day.

Day 5: Total Burnout

The Aftermath

Cait edited the book in breezy, record time, fixing all the places where my ideas went of the rails. Now it heads off to Patrick for his editing touch and format standardization. Now I just have to create the art plan, wrangle the artists, go through layout, proofing, second proofing, etc. With any luck we will have copies for Origins.

That's all for now. I will keep you in the loop.