Chapter 4 is completely edited and illustrated and Chapter 5 is edited, too! Now I’m working on the spot illustrations for the last chapter and it’ll be time to figure out what’s missing.

A few things I already know about, like…

• 4 recipes yet to be entered
• some ingredient info to track down (about half a dozen bits and pieces)
• and a few recipes whose nutritional data just isn’t jiving, so I’ve got to dig around and find out which button I hit wrong (because I’m almost certain, in some places, it’s registering much larger units than we’re using!)
• the illustrations for the introductory chapter
• Oh, yeah, and to finish writing the introductory chapter bits.

Details, details.

But after this weekend I expect I’ll be able to start fiddling with my layout program (Scribus, for the curious, yay open source!) and setting up templates and figure out the best (read as: most efficient) ways to put this book together!

I have some theories on that last part, but at the risk of falling down the rabbit hole, I’m putting off trying them out until I’m somewhat less occupied but the illustration list.

Also, I’ve just about finalized the formula I’ll be using to assign XP to each recipe, which means I can finalize the leveling structure for the—

Oh, right, I haven’t told y’all about that, yet.

And I’m gonna be a tease and not really tell you about it, now, either. Except to say what I may have said before about wanting using the book to be as fun as making it and that I’ve got a way to incorporate some game mechanics into doing just that. There will be, in the coming weeks, lots of behind-the-scenes work to that end (at least, I hope it will be behind the scenes and not, you know, break the site in the process of everything).

More will be revealed, as always.

In other news, today is National Margarita Day and I’ve got a couple of delicious recipes over on Sips & Shots for the occasion.

We’d usually be gaming this weekend but we’ve had to adjust our schedule a bit, putting it off til next weekend to accommodate a couple different calendar conflicts.

Until next time!

And speaking of turning up the heat: why, yes, I did manage to finish all of Chapter 3′s illustrations Saturday night and get started on editing Chapter 4. I’m about a third of the way through said grilling chapter and should be able to wrap that up tonight, once I finish this update, and maybe even get the illos done for it this weekend.

I’d call for a pre-celebratory ‘wohoo’ but I don’t want to get too cocky, here.

Hope everyone had as great a day as I’ve had today!

Until next time!

So, the 6 hours in the car turned out to be closer to 7 and for the first 2 and a bit I was pretty much useless. I had the binder and sketchbook in my lap, pencil in hand, but it was a fight to keep my eyes open. A fight I lost over and over again.

Then, suddenly, about an hour from our destination, ‘bing!’ open were my eyes, engaged was my mind, and I started filling up those pages with little spot illustrations.

And then, on the way home, when I’m usually out as soon as we hit the highway? Totally awake and drawing/editing until we hit the Tallahassee city limits. Most of the time with my little book light clipped to the binder. A total reverse from, oh, every other car trip I’ve ever been on, but there you go!

Chapter 2 is now illustrated and Chapter 3 is mostly edited. In fact, I hope to finish the editing tonight once I finish this post. By the time we got home and got dinner in us (totally splurged on Five Guys Burgers and Fries–oh, the indulgence after a day on the road!) we were zonked, and Sunday and after was filled with major to-dos for Character Cocktail partnering with a friend’s book launch. It’s been a hectic week.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, getting back on subject: Chapter 3 doesn’t call for nearly as many spot illos as Chapters 1 and 2 did. Granted, it’s a lot of casseroles and such and there’s just not a bunch of truly visual fiddly bits.

I’m not sure how I feel about this, really. I kinda wanted every page to have some sort of illustration on it, but maybe that’s overkill? Maybe it would be more noise than signal at that point? Obviously I won’t know until I start actually putting pages together, and that’s still a couple/few weeks away. And I’d rather have illos that I didn’t need and just not put them in than have to go back and do a lot of filler later.

Maybe I should be more concerned that I don’t have a cover concept in mind, hmm?

Oh well, until next time!

One of the things I was very much looking forward to, when planning out What to Feed Your Raiding Party, was the illustrated techniques. Drawing food is fun. I have no idea why, but it is.

So far I’ve got Chapter 1 all sketched (inks and scanning left to do) and Chapter 2 edited and the techniques drawn. Still have a dozen or so spot illustrations, and then the other 3 chapters to go. My soft-and-squishy deadline of a 1st-quarter launch is still sounding doable. Right on!

I’ve got to head out of town on Saturday, but only for the day. It’s my first meeting with the rest of the ImagiCon staff (I’m heading up Registration), so I’m looking forward to it. You know what 6 hours in a car means? Prime drawing time, ladies and gents! Providing I don’t fall asleep, lol.

But I even have a book light that I can use on the way home if it gets dark, so I’m being hopeful.

Until next time…

It was pure luck, frantic “reflexes” and really good dice rolls.

And that was 1000 XP each.

Nice, huh?

Of course, that was only after we had to smoosh a massive centipede, refight a wasp or two, 3 brutes blocking a path, go up one side and down another of a house and agree to a positively disgusting use of a a stone-to-flesh spell to make a brick wall separating 2 halves of the basement not so separated. And in the process we almost lost one party member to a severe poisoning incident.

But What Did We Eat?

Oh, man, the potluck was definitely a good idea, but maybe too good. So much food and lots of leftovers means we need to streamline things a bit to avoid such mass quantities. But we had chili, Sweedish meatballs, quesadillas, tamales, chips, hot wings, mozzarella sticks, veggies and dip, Spanish rice, refried black beans, and brownies for dessert.

Too much of a good thing is still too much, lol.

Instead I think I’m going to propose the 3 “factions” of our group each rotate between bringing nibbles, main dish, and dessert. We’ll see how that goes.

And One More Thing

While running errands this past weekend, Todd and I decided this would make the perfect gamer’s sofa.

We game around the coffee table to make use of the comfy seating but it means having to get creative with dice rolling since they have a tendency to bounce of couch cushions or roll off the maps on the coffee table. Instead we use some saved box lids (C uses a wooden cigar box)–pack rat tendencies ftw!–but this sofa had a dice-rolling tray already built in, along with a cubby in the center console (hidden by the uppermost padding) and a retractable dual drink holder.

What more could a gamer ask for, right?

Back to the Book

The reason we are here and all that.

Chapter 1 illustrations are nearly finished and Chapter 2 will get edited/evaluated shortly. I have to say, having everything printed out makes this project feel very much real and very close to complete, even if there are countless hours ahead spent formatting the whole kit and kaboodle.

Until next time!

These notes include a space for the different ingredient quantities, what illustration each will need, if there’s a specific technique involved that could use it’s own illustration, any sidebar information, all the equipment or tools needed for the recipe (this will come into play later) and what skill level and XP the recipe will carry. Then I just slip them into the page protector with the recipe and move on to the next one.

I still haven’t figured out my formula for XP per recipe, but as I get the rest of the slots filled in, chapter by chapter, a rubric should present itself. Why is XP important? Oh, just wait and see, my friends, just wait and see. *evil DM laugh*

My working plan (all things subject to change, as usual) is to work on a chapter at a time with the eval sheets, then do the techniques and spot illustrations in batches. Since many of the latter will be small, I can gang them all up in my sketchbook, scan them together and then break them apart in PhotoShop. I did something similar this week for 4 illustrations for 2 of my other blogs and got them all done in just a few hours (and that included coloring 3 of the 4, which won’t be an issue with these).

And with that, I’m off to finish evaluating chapter 1.

Tonight the tangible bits of the book went from this:

to this:

It grew! And let me tell you that those two suckers together are HEAVY. Like lift-with-your-knees heavy. Now I have all of the recipes printed out in draft copies, chapters placed with their preceding comics and little tables of content for each. Holy cats, y’all, that’s a lot of pages! (95 of comics, 90 of recipes). Granted, that doesn’t mean the book’s going to be 185 pages… Well, maybe it does. Actually, I think it’s going to go over 200 by the time I add in everything else that needs to be in there.

Wow.

Now, truth time. I could slap these pages into a design document, add a cover and a full index and send it to the printer and call it done. Only thing is, it wouldn’t be (much) different than any other book out there. It wouldn’t be what I promised What to Feed Your Raiding Party would be. And it wouldn’t be the book I’d want my name on forever and ever.

So I’ve still got some work to do, obviously, but with the drafts printed out I feel SO much better about the progress I’ve made.

Now, about this week’s game.

The first session we had massive ants blocking our path. The second session we had massive scorpions coming out of the woodwork (literally). And there are these evil-intented imps hiding in the walls and hanging from chandeliers gunning for us so much that the party is totally paranoid. This week we had more “fun” with the imps and then–THEN–walked right into a giant wasps nest in the third floor of this dilapidated mansion.

Sigh.

We made it out alive (barely, in the case of one of our members), but now we have to go back because our thief found an underground something or other that requires further investigation. And potentially backup.

But what did we eat?

It was our single guy gamer’s “turn” to provide the nibbles and, for all his worries about stacking up to Lys (whose mother was a caterer) and I, he turned it out pretty doggone good! It doesn’t hurt, apparently, that SGG has a new lady in his life and she’s very much into healthy foods. So he brought a bunch of fresh veggies with ranch as well as sesame dip, chips and salsa verde, peel and eat shrimp and little smokies in a small slow-cooker. He did good!

For dinner though, we decided to get sandwiches from the recently opened Jimmy John’s in our neighborhood. See? I’m not totally against take-out, I just don’t think it should be an every day–or every game–occurrence. Of course, there’s something to be said about the quality of the take-out and I consider Jimmy John’s to be pretty high-up on the list of safe spots for quick eats. (I love their Beach Club–it’s amazing!)

Next time we’ve decided to do a true pot luck supper, so we’ll see how that turns out.

Until next time! (I’ve got some lists to make!)

Granted, I’ve still no clue as to what the outside front cover is going to look like, but hopefully it’ll come to me before too long.

In the mean time, I’m hoping to get those straggler recipes entered, the first proof printed and get the nit-picky organizational bits done. From that “short list” I typed up 2 weeks ago, that looks like:

• print master copy of comics & recipes and decide on general flow
• rank recipes for skill and XP and all that other fun stuff
• decide what techniques need to be illustrated and where each’ll go in the flow

Other than that, I’ve been wondering more and more, now that I have gotten used to (and love!) my Kindle Touch, would anyone be interested in a pdf-style e-book of What to Feed Your Raiding Party? I could do the pdf version myself, a Kindle-formatted version might be a little trickier and require outside services (just thinking out loud, here), and would almost certainly need some manner of reformatting to work best on the smaller screens, but I’m willing to entertain the notion if folks are interested.

Until next week!

If you’d told me back when I started this project that it’d take me more than 2 years to complete I would have laughed and told you you were delusional.

But, hey, you live and learn.

This week’s progress is minor compared to that major milestone I posted about last week. In fact, it’s not even quantifiable in the old % ways. I’m retesting (ie, making and writing down everything this time) several of the missing recipes from my original list this week–got 3 done tonight, actually–but they’re not yet entered into the software yet. So there’s that.

And, then, I put on my list for Tuesday that I wanted to pencil the 5 chapter “covers” for the book, thinking that it was a bit ambitious but, still, maybe doable. Color me shocked that I actually did get them done! Sure, they’re total parodies (even more direct than the comics themselves) of movie posters/book covers so it’s not like I had to be too terribly original, but I managed to whip them out in 2.5 hours total. That’s not too shabby if you ask me!

I still have to ink them (so no sharing just yet) but there’s definitely room on this week’s schedule for that to happen. In fact, it might be the one time that inking takes longer than penciling!

But before we sign off for the year, I wanted to slip you guys a peek from Chapter 5: The Goodies

When you’ve only got 16 pages to tell a story it’s tough to find a sample page that doesn’t give too very much away! (Which is also why you won’t be getting a peek at the epilogue–with only 4 pages there’s not much to choose from.)

Still plenty of work to be done at the beginning of the new year, but this week off from work really is helping–even if I did agree to do a (small) wedding cake for this Friday, time really does feel like it’s on my side for once. (She says knocking on wood so as not to jinx anything!)

Y’all play safe on New Year’s Eve and we’ll see you back here in 2012!

Because we’ve got some big news:

***100% INKED!!!***

Yes, you read that correctly: all 90 pages of comics for What to Feed Your Raiding Party are inked, scanned and have had preliminary digital clean-up done. I pushed myself to do 4 pages each this past Saturday and Sunday so I wouldn’t have to do the final 2 pages over the holiday weekend.

Oh, but that’s not all!

92% Analyzed Recipes

Oh yes, my friends, I even squeezed in some time during the week to do some drudge-work data entry. We’re up to 69 of the minimum 75 recipes (well, okay, the minimum number of recipes for the book was 50–10 per chapter–but I tested around 90 so we’ve made the new minimum 75; I don’t think anyone’s going to complain, do you?) and I was able to track down the notes–well, titles at least–of the missing recipes from my note cards. Some will need to be re-created but that’s okay. It’s my week to cook between Christmas and New Years, so those missing links will get sorted out in due course.

So what’s left? Oh, a lot.

I think I mentioned some of it before but the short list looks something like this:

• draw the “covers” for the 5 chapters
• print master copy of comics & recipes and decide on general flow
• rank recipes for skill and XP and all that other fun stuff
• decide what techniques need to be illustrated and where each’ll go in the flow
• draw said illustrated techniques
• design templates for ingredient charts, page layouts, etc.
• identify and produce needed spot illustrations
• write/edit introductory bits and general help sections (*this has been started*)
• design the outside cover
• layout the whole kit and kaboodle
• edit Index (this part’s gonna suck, but I think my recipe software is going to help with the basics *crosses fingers*)

So, yeah, a lot but not nearly as much as before when there was all that AND all of what I’ve already done.

Setting a deadline at this point is just asking for trouble, but I’m fairly confident that it’ll be sometime in the first quarter of 2012. When I have a better handle on exactly when it’s going to be ready I’ll open up pre-orders so those of you who’ve hung with me this far can get yours at a discount (and I can start planning things like launch parties and convention appearances).

We’re getting so very close!!!