For me, at least, hyper-focus leads to boredom and burnout. The all work and no play makes Scraps something something kinda thing. So even though I spent 2 hours, Monday night, working on a post and project for 64 Arts when I could have been wrapping up the last of the change notes, it was a good 2-hour break from staring at Scribus and hitting the same 5 keys over and over again. Besides, even with those 2 hours elsewhere I still managed another 22% of the change notes that night. So there.

Tuesday night’s goal was to finish up the change notes and create the charts and remaining illustrations needed to fill the holes that are left. Illustrations: check! Just need to be scanned and cleaned up. Charts: 1 more needed. The Index is in place but it looks like it’s going to need 5 pages, not the 4 I’ve allotted (no biggie), and the Glossary is yet to be compiled, but may need more than it’s 2 pages I’ve placeholder-ed it. Again, no biggie. After the glossary is done (I have a list of words to include, gathered during the first pass edit, I just need to wrangle them with their meanings) I’ll only have the Acknowledgements and Bio to write.

All in all, I’m encouraged by my progress. I hope you are, too!

Oh, I was almost a hypocrite this week.

Almost.

Our local comics shop, Secret Headquarters, is hosting D&D Encounters sessions starting tonight and Todd and I are planning to attend. [Yes, I know the book's not finished yet! See paragraph 2.] Being that it’s a weeknight and Todd’s office has been demanding some late nights for the past several months, I just figured we’d pick something up for supper rather than cook that night.

And then it hit me: D’oh! Here I was working on a book that, in just so many words, challenges gamers to cook their way out of the fast food dungeon and what was I doing? Yeah, good one, huh?

For the record, I’m not anti-fast food across the board. I’m just against it being the norm rather than the exception. Todd and I have the occasional Fuqit!* Button nights where cooking has zero appeal. We had one of those last week. And, for the record, the Brownie Batter Milkshake at Zaxby’s was not all it’s name claimed it to be. Meh. You’ve been warned.

But the point still stands: there ARE other options, even for hurried nights.

Tonight’s solution is grilled ham & cheese sandwiches. Easy, tasty, and–most of all–fast! I can prep them when I get home and toss them on the griddle when Todd calls to let me know he’s on his way home. If it’s a really late night at the office, they can even be eaten in the car.

Sandwich suppers are fine, of course, but there are other options for busy nights.

The slow cooker is your friend when you need dinner on the table as soon as you walk in the door. Almost any soup or stew can be made in a slow cooker, regardless of the directions given in the original. Salads are another option when a hot soup might be unwelcome (like in the long, hot, summer months to come). Prep the veggies, etc. ahead of time and toss on your favorite toppings.

Sure, some nights a drive-thru might be the best bet for whatever reason, but it doesn’t have to be.

Oh! And speaking of salads. I’ve got a giveaway going on over at Nibbles ‘n Bites for an OXO Good Grips Salad Dressing Shaker. Go. Enter. Maybe you’ll win!

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*the Fuqit! button is sorta like the Staples easy! button but, in this case, it’s the one you press when you just don’t give a damn anymore/decree efforts to be enough for the time being. There is a point in every major undertaking when the Fuqit! button comes into play.

First: Monday morning I turned in the files for the front and back covers to the printer. Not only that, but before the day was half-over I’d already approved the proof. And it looked amazing!

Wanna see something of what this book will look like on the shelf? I thought you’d never ask!

Which brings me to my second bit of news:

Pre-Orders are OPEN!

I’m doing my damnedest to get the text edited within the next 2 weeks and handed over to the printer, so I finally felt okay enough about this getting done to let you guys go ahead and order them!

I announced this on the fan page in the wee, small hours of Tuesday morning, and had a couple of brave souls manage to put in their orders.

Can I just say that online shopping carts might just be the tool of the devil?

First it was just going to be simple PayPal buttons, but there was nothing “simple” about what I needed to do. So then I switched to a WordPress plugin that seemed to do everything I needed (after several fits and starts and some choice words hurled at the screen), so that’s what I announced.

And then, Tuesday morning, the errors started. Some were totally my fault (for instance, I didn’t realize the shipping profiles I’d set up for the cart buttons would be put in place for ANY items ordered from my PayPal account–oops!). Others were typos in the code. Then there was just some altogether oddness that made me look at a 3rd party program.

Um, yeah, ZenCart is not so Zen if you ask me.

The long and the short of it is that if you click on the Pre-Order tab on the website (or the link, there, for you feed readers), you’ll be able to pre-order your very own copy of What to Feed Your Raiding Party. I expect pre-orders to stay open until Memorial Day weekend (maybe longer, depending on the printer’s schedule), but basically until I’ve got the copies in my hands. Books will start going out as soon as I get them and, for the Artist’s Editions, get them sketched. I’ll keep you posted.

There are options for Regular Editions (signed) and Artist’s Editions (signed and sketched), saving $5 and $10, respectively, over the cover price until the pre-order period ends. After you’ve chosen your Edition(s), click the link in the text to bring you to the shipping options page. This is my work-around over a sluggish fixed-rate shipping system that came with the plugin. After that, use the “Checkout” link in the sidebar cart widget to complete your order. I accept both PayPal and Google Checkout (the latter has just been activiated after fixing a glitch, let me know if something doesn’t work right), but if you prefer to pay by check or money order, select the Manual payment option and it’ll give you further instructions.

We’ve learned (the hard, oh-so-very-hard way), that if the system gets hung up (say the page refreshes after clicking Purchase instead of taking you to the payment gateway), continual attempts will not fix it. Clear your cart, refresh the page (F5-refresh if you’re so inclined), and start over. Otherwise you’ll get stuck in a loop. Hopefully I’ve fixed that issue, but I wouldn’t put it passed the gremlins of tech to mess with me some more.

If you have any problems you can leave a message on the Fan Page or email me directly.

Now I’ve got to get back to editing those text pages! (I’m up to page 87 of 260 and 45 of them have change notes! It’s gonna be a long week.)

Wish me luck and spread the word, okay?

Thursday evening through all day Saturday were taken up by the Bake Sale; be it in preparation, execution, or recovery. The amazing thing is that we raised $216 for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign and I”m super proud of everyone that took part in that.

Sunday I did get some pages done–wrapped up Chapter 4 and got all the Chapter 5 comics in place before turning in for the night.

Monday was my birthday and I hope you won’t be too disappointed that I let Todd take me out for a decadent dinner at the Melting Pot and then relaxed for the remainder of the evening. After such a hectic week and weekend I figured I was due. At least a little.

Tuesday was back to the usual grind but a rushy-rushy illustration order came in, so my time was admittedly split. Sketches were done last night and sent off and I managed to get about halfway through the Chapter 5 recipes while on a Skype call with a business buddy.

Multitasking, I does it.

The illustration is fairly straightforward, though, and should require very little post-production tonight, so even though I’m going to post this update before the night’s out, I am hoping to get a few more recipes for Chapter 5 laid out once I get the files and invoice sent off to my customer. You other freelancers know how it goes: paying work comes first.

I also had band practice tonight because this Saturday, instead of doing the Free Comic Book Day thing–I swear, one of these days I’m going to be prepared for that!–I’ll be down in Panacea at the Blue Crab Festival “marching” in their parade with the Lofty Pursuits Community Marching Band.

Nonetheless, I plan on finishing the basic layout by the next update. By the end of this weekend if I can manage! The index is going to be a bit of a bitch to compile but it’s a necessary evil to have a useful index instead of just an alphabetical listing of recipes. Who loves ya, baby? That’s right, I do.

Of course, the further I get the more I see that still needs to be done. At some point I’m going to have to call it, say “enough”, but there are some holes to fill, some illustrations that I’d done in good faith that just aren’t going to fit, and some elements that need to be created. Nothing major, thankfully, but that’s probably going to add another week to the editing phase. At least the lion’s share is done!

So that’s it for me for tonight. I’m going to go finish formatting the illustration files and get those sent off and see if I can’t get a few pages done before I fall asleep at the laptop.

Until next time!

If you’ve been following along on the Facebook Fan Page, you’ve watched the page total rise slowly but surely as the week has gone on. Major increases happen whenever I get to a section that all comics, but I’ve gotten progressively quicker laying out the recipe pages, too.

There was an early fight with the concept of Master Pages, some fiddling with appropriate placement of page numbers that had me flipping through a third of my cookbook bookcase before reaching a consensus, and much deliberation over the placement of page elements in the early stages, but once I got those kinks ironed out, it’s been balls-to-the-wall ever since.

Obviously. Since I’ve done 156 pages in a week’s time.

That said, we should be close to the end of the layout process by the next update (the evil Index awaits–the cookbook program didn’t really help on that one, after all) and in the it’s-about-time sector I finally have a clue about the cover design. It was a somewhat surreal command to my muse that made things click, but whatever, now I can get that working, too!

And none too soon, since I had a sit-down with the printer that will be handling these babies and, folks, everything is looking very good. Very, very good.

Oh, yeah, we gamed on Sunday, too!

Finally we got our own raiding party back together and managed to finish the campaign we started back in November. It was pretty awesome if you ignore that 3 of the 4 of us failed a saving throw and ended up cowering in the corner for several rounds while our thief was battling the Big Bad and his never-ending stream of massive minions. Right about the time he ran out of hit points we were able to work our way back across the room to “help”, only to have Vellora (that would be my 3rd-level Squire) spelled AGAIN and start taking swipes at my own guys. Thankfully my dice knew something was wrong and they rolled horribly. The one time I’m thankful for that.

We took the last wizard standing as a hostage, high-tailed it outta there and back to the guard-post where we found out we’d blundered into capturing our target, for which Sir Justin rewarded us handsomely. Handsomely enough to where my AC is going from a  6 to a 2 with some new armor, a third weapon and some barding for my horse while I’m at it!

The only downside is that I’m a measly 120 XP from a 4th level Squire. Providing I don’t die on whatever next mission Sir Justin has for us, I’ll be sure to level up then, but it kinda sucks to be so close and yet so far away, too.

But what did we eat?

One of these days I’m going to remember my status as a blogger and take some #$%#$^ photos of  the food at our game nights. I decided I was craving burgers, so we provided those, too many toppings to name, and the Redskin Potato Salad that will be in the cookbook. Our not-so-single-anymore guy gamer brought desserts and our other couple brought salad and nibbles galore.

Of course, all these happy fun times did not come without a price. On Monday I had to admit defeat and haul myself to the doctor. I’m not outright blaming the book, but too many nights owl-eyed in front of the laptop until way passed my bedtime certainly didn’t help my body’s defenses any more than the studded leather armor protected me from those lizard-thing claws in one of the caves.

Nothing major, certainly nothing catching, but 10 days of 4-a-day antibiotics are necessary. Bother. At least this week is Todd’s week to cook, giving me more time to stare at the computer during normal waking hours and a prayers chance of getting to bed at a decent hour. At least until tomorrow when I have to start getting stuff together for the Bake Sale on Saturday.

Until next time…

I figure there’s an excellent chance we’ll meet that 200 page mark (if not exceed it). With 95 pages of comics and 20 full-page techniques, that’s half of it right there. And you figure each recipe (77 of them, there are, plus supplemental bits) is going to have at least it’s own page, maybe 2 for some of the longer ones? Yeah, we’ve got a 200 page book easily.

Based on 200 pages, I’m 12% “done.” I think I like the sound of 24 outta 200 a bit better.

Of course, even once it’s laid out completely I’ve still got to do another edit, make sure everything transferred over okay and that I didn’t screw something up from point A to point B. But we’re about to be a lot closer!

Super-huge thanks go out to the denizens of The Unique Geek. I put out a call for beta readers for the wordy intro bits and they came through like champs. Thanks, guys!

And in other news: we’re getting the game back together! Yes, I know I’ll have to work extra-hard on Saturday so I can stay in and play on Sunday, but our game’s been on hold since late January–it’ll be good to get back into the swing of things!

Okay, until next time, when the number in the title will be even bigger!

But I’m hardly despairing, because, you see, in the space of the last week not only have I

• converted 150 spreadsheet charts to eps files, and
• cleaned up and re-sized 95 pages of comics

I’ve also managed to receive news of, recover from, and find a workable alternative to the platform that was going to power the 2.0 goodness that is coming once the book is in print and in your hot little hands!

That seems like so very little when it’s written like that, but I swear to you it took a lot more time than it sounds like! As a result of all that effort, I’m totally behind on my DVR (though I’m practically finished with the Netflix rewatch of DS9) and I’ve done nothing with the box of art supplies that landed on my doorstep last week. But that’s okay, because soon, so very soon, this book will be finished and I can take a week or two off. Eventually. Or something like that.

As soon as I can get a grasp on the rate of page-creation-goodness I’ll be better able to answer the “when can we order it” question some fine, fine folks have been asking. Until then, let’s just go with soon.

Tonight I’ll work on the Introduction wordy bits so that this weekend I can start the nuts-and-bolts page layout. I’ll still be posting a weekly update, here, but I’ve also been giving little brief progress reports over on the Facebook Fan page, so you might want to follow along there, too, so you can watch the page counts rise.

Now, if I could just figure out the @#$%^& cover!

Oh, well, it’ll come to me.

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If you’re in the Tallahassee Area, consider checking out the Great American Bake Sale, April 28th, 2012, at the Market Square Farmer’s Market. Team Helper Monkey! will be selling delectable treats to help Share Our Strength fight childhood hunger (part of the No Kid Hungry campaign).

As expected, the parade and fun stuff wore. us. out. on Saturday. So much so that when we finally got home and sat down for a moment it was instant naptime, just add couch. Just after 9pm I woke up and decided to be semi-productive til about 4 am–it’s a wonder Sunday was anything close to normal.

But normal or not, the rest of the tables have been created, now I just need to convert them to eps files so they’ll play nice with Scribus. Progress!

No matter how you measure it.

And since I’ve got a few hours tonight, I’m going to get started on those conversions now.

If I can get them done this week, maybe once the family leaves after our Easter-Eve supper I can do the final tidying of the comics pages (some need minor straightening, they all need to be cropped uniformly and a few need a little more digital clean-up than the initial layers fix provided.

Until next time!

Not a server failure, this time, but a no-good, dirty, rotten, scoundrel of a hack that invaded my sites (all of ‘em) with junk sites that made me look like a server-hog to my host who then locked down the sites and my account for 3 days.

It wasn’t pretty.

Now we’re back and things are better, for the most part. I’ve got a lot of work to do to keep this from happening again and I’ve been transferring files and deleting old stuff and unused themes and plugins to basically put out the not-welcome mat for the scum-sucking oxygen thieves that get their jollies from messing with other people’s property.

That said, with no access to my sites this weekend I DID manage to get half the tables put together for Raiding Party. Each of the core recipes needs both an ingredient table as well as a nutritional table, so we’re talking 150 of those bad-boys. I hope to be able to finish this part of the process this coming weekend–though I admit that it somewhat depends on how wiped-out I am after the parade on Saturday.

In fact, I just got home from band practice a little while ago. “Band practice” makes it sound a lot more prestigious than it is, really. It’s tons of fun, though! We’re a bunch of former band geeks playing in a community marching band sponsored by our local game shop/soda fountain/ice cream & candy shop.

And when I say bunch, there’s like 8 or 9 of us for Saturday’s parade.

But we’re playing “I Want Candy” and get to wear funny hats.

You can’t really argue with that.

ETA: So I got totally off-track (surprise!) and forgot to make my point about why What to Feed Your Raiding Party *must* be in dead-tree format!

See, the Internet is a great thing, and websites are awesome, but all it takes is one no-good-nik to go mucking with things and this resource could be temporarily unavailable. Power’s out? No Raiding Party for you. But a book? A real, live, printed version of something? That’s got permanence. It doesn’t need to be plugged in or downloaded, it’s just there.

And if you’re copy is misplaced, someone else will have one.

It’s just that simple.

Next month, folks, I’ve got a really good feeling about April!

Now these guys may not have the soundtrack of Happy Jacks, but where the latter has a way with ribaldry, the hosts of the “Greatest Show in Gaming” present gaming news and issues with sincerity and thoughtfulness. It’s really a nice pairing if you look at it that way.

And bless their hearts, they remember me! I was astounded to hear my little project mentioned a few episodes back in that “man, I wish that project had been funded” sort of way. They’ve actually started their more recent podcasts by highlighting worthy Kickstarter projects in the opening New section.

Which makes them incredibly cool in the eyes of the Raiding Party.

The Bone Scroll, the blog of host-Jeff, is also worth a look-see for more of the same sort of in-depth looks into gaming products, practices and habits.

Bravery is often rewarded, folks, and three of the groups I reached out to took my hand.

One of them was Happy Jacks RPG.

It’s worth mentioning that I’d never listened to any of their shows before asking to be on it. But 2+ years later and I’m still listening.

Part of it, I figured, was continued research.

Part of it, though, is just plain fun.

It doesn’t matter that they prefer beer and I prefer wine. It doesn’t matter that for most of those 2+ years I was still in my gamer-adjacent mode.

The jokes are funny. The music (did you know they’re also the folks behind the Poxy Boggards?) is pretty awesome. And the game-talk is a really great way to learn more about more systems than you realize you needed to know about.

But back to the music for a moment.

Most of the podcast episodes start with one version or another of Laser Printed Hero. Which is a pretty awesome song about D&D characters. And while it’s tough to say one is better than another, ever since I actually started to game and made some truly horrible rolls, I Storked It makes so much sense and runs through my mind almost every. single. game.

If you’ve not heard these or their other charming ditties, you’re in luck. While I do most earnestly suggest you check out their podcast episodes, for a quicker fix you can find the gaming songs on the album “Let Me Tell You About My Character” by the Angryfolk Band over on cdbaby (or search for it on iTunes). The Poxy Boggards specialize in drinking songs and bawdiness and just released their newest album “Wish You Were Beer” on the 17th of this month. And if you prefer the sounds of lovely, lilting ladies, The Merry Wives of Windsor have a number of catchy tunes to their name.

Oh, and I should probably add that there’s strong language all over the place. Just in case there are delicate ears around.

And not a damn link in this post was an affiliate link!