Volume three of the light novel series is underway now, several chapters into it.

My rewrite of volume one is getting good feedback - planning to publish this for sure now. Still not finding an artist so I've started looking at DAZ and other 3d char gen tools. I still flip back and forth between a cartoony/anime style versus a realistic style for the illustrations.

As for the literature, the more I write the better I get. The main obstacle I encounter now is starting new story arcs, the old blank page problem. I have an outline but coming up with original "daily life inbetween" stuff can require a lot of brainstorming. I'll pick up ideas in the oddest places (shopping, restaurants, etc).

On the gaming front, I'm just done with MMOs for a while -- a new project called Wildstar has my attention mostly because of the humor and the cartoony art style. Seems to be a nice collection of 'best practices'.

Also, purchased Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas on a Steam sale. I'm more a high fantasy RPG fan but this is proving quite entertaining with all the sci-fi/horror/fantasy cultural references, puns, and gags.

Cranking through a light novel series at 1-2 chapters a week

Looks like I'm good for a quarterly update at best.

I'm lurching into volume two of my light novel series. I've gotten enough good feedback about volume one that I'm going to reformat it, fix a bunch of squirrel bits, and digitally publish it. Talking to a couple of artists about having them do some original illustrations to slip into the text. I like writing the story. I do wonder if this is a one-shot wonder or if I can write other stories. I just really like *these* characters though and I'd like to give them a world and a life to be in.

I'm currently not playing any MMOs. Secret World was a lot of fun but the company just appears to have dropped the ball ... or there's just not a lot of interest from the vast horde of gamers in quest lines that actually require one to think. Whichever, the world is very truncated. Tera just got boring. It was severely broken in the roleplay tools (when even an ancient game like EQ2 runs circles around it - not a good sign) and the grindfest that infects most Korean MMOs was only thinly veiled. Might give the lates final fantasy a twirl but otherwise I'm still playing Skyrim. With all the PC mods available, it can still be a 'new game' every time I roll a new character.

Currently, the holidays have permitted both my sons to be home so between them and she-who-is-cute-and-must-be-obeyed have been getting a lot of tabletop gaming in.

Writing a Light Novel

Been a busy summer, not necessarily profitable, but busy.

I've been percolating a concept for a light novel series.  For those not familiar, light novels are popular in Japan.  They're like written novel versions of manga, running 10-20 volumes of about a 100 pages a volume.  I had finished an anime series about a high school pop music club and some friends and I were lamenting that anime almost never moved into college or professional life.

So I started storyboarding a series concept about a 20-something rock band, their adventures, lucky breaks, romances, and roller coaster ride to fame.  The more I messed with it, the more compelled I got to keep going.  I had used Rock Band 3 for character design (my art sucks) and programming their play and watching avatar behavior gave me ideas for their personalities.

Any way, the target audience is young adults - though I think anyone might find it readable.  I've been publishing it in a forum but the material may be edging past the PG-13 point in some moments.  I'm going to start publishing it in parallel.  I may test it here and see whether the blog format handles it or not.

Sometimes, "It Really IS Rocket Science"

On the MMO front - experimenting with both TERA and Secret World.  Tera looks like a few months of fun unless there are substantial changes made.  The devs have largely missed the boat on emote complexity and roleplay tools - and it is far too linear and grindy (standard Korean MMO problem).  Secret World is the most fascinating thing since way back in EQ/EQ2 in terms of quest lines and character design --- some nits (like the character appearance creation is not state-of-the-art by any stretch, I can't even adjust height weight and the hairstyles are repetitive.... then there's the "ape face" problem... )

Apparently, I'm even worse than I thought I'd be about blogging... plus the "fine folks at google" don't really seem to care about online persona - they want your real name blah blah blah (and woe unto you if your real name doesn't fit their "white anglo-saxonized no-nicknames" window of reality).

And yeah.... closed Rift down and returned to EQ2 for my mmo fix. May try Secret World next spring. Otherwise, the game time has been mostly Skyrim, Rock Band, and a few Steam indie games.

Musing on the gaming front... after the meltdown at the Sony Station, we took a break from EQ2 to try Rift out. Results so far ... its a reasonably fun game, competent BUT:
1) You run out of things to do and hit rinse/repeat far too soon.
2) The guild tools are almost non-existent, no housing... equals difficult to create a sense of community.
3) And my usual complaint.... where's the 2-3 player instances? What is it with 10-20 player instances that the devs love so much? They're button mashing fests of boredom...
4) Questing is largely a solo operation.... which would be fine if some of the storylines weren't so shallow (e.g. spot the traitor 10 or 20 levels before the truth is revealed)

I'm getting pretty tired of swapping MMOs every time one of my sons get bored though.. one is already twitching. There's a closed beta of an asian f2p mmo starting up soon and I may just solo over to that (Tiara Concerto), otherwise I'll head back to EQ2 after they overhaul the major cities as they planned before the Sony disaster that left us adrift in MMO land.