Category Archives: Secret Project of Secretness

Realm Fantasy Wargame

21 Wednesday Mar 2012

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A few times on this blog I have talked about a ‘secret project’. I even have a tag ‘secret project of secretness’ on this blog. I have talked about how excited I am about this project and given some details (and a few people who I know read the blog do know more) but I have not revealed all.

Today I can announce that I am now permitted to ‘spill the beans’ on the secret project of secretness…

At the end of last year, I was given an opportunity to write the world building documentation for a Fantasy Wargame. This amounted to almost 40K words of background including the culture of 12 races, the metaphysics of the world and an outline of the history. My brief was to use the familiar fantasy races (elves, dwarves, goblins etc) but spin the cliches a little (after all, elves living in woodlands is just so 1970’s…). There was a lot of discussion over how to do this and some requirements from the developers (the wonderful people at Serious Lemon) but I was largely given free rein in terms of creative input.

The result was what became Realm Fantasy Wargame

This is intended to be an ever evolving game. You subscribe to the site, paying pretty much whatever you want (min $1 Australian, I believe, for a whole year of access), and have access to everything on it for a year. You can download stuff, print it off, all that. The developers will continue to add content (new rules, scenarios, new units) and revise the rules and background.

But there is more… there is another way you can get access to the site and that is through this site: http://www.indiegogo.com/realm-fantasy-warfare

This is a page with the same concept as Kickstarter in that you can donate to a business enterprise and gain benefits. If you subscribe to Realm through this site (again, a min $1 donation) not only do you get the benefits of access to the site for a whole year but there is also the possibility of getting your name listed on the site as a donor. So, access to the game for a year AND an ego boost… There are also other benefits for those who pay the higher amounts, including being drawn by the team’s artist as a character from one of the races.

Oh, and some of my writing appears in the video teaser advertising the game. The quote that opens is one of mine…

So, what are you waiting for… go there and check out what I have written…

More secret project goodness

05 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Musings, Secret Project of Secretness

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My dropbox has just flashed up with a notification telling me that a new file has been uploaded into it. This is not an unusual occurence. I have several people who share dropbox folders with me and who routinely upload different files to them at all times of the day and night. However, this file was a special one. It was an image file of artwork for the secret project I am working on and it looks wonderfully cool.

Unfortunately, I can’t share this artwork with you because I haven’t got explicit permission from the artist to do so. Once I properly announce the secret project and get that permission (maybe by the end of this month) then maybe I will be able to show you some of the art. After all, what is the point of having a secret project if you go and tell everyone about it 🙂

In the meantime, I am posting to find out if any of you have ever had the same sense of squee on seeing art work based on your writing. Did you find it to be as great a feeling as I have at the moment? Feel free to tell us all about it in the comments…

Secret Project and productivity update

12 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in Musings, Productivity, Secret Project of Secretness

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This picture is here for no good reason. Nothing to do with the post at all, honest...

I just got an awesome bit of feedback about a piece I wrote for the secret project I am working on. Apparently they liked it 🙂 I suppose it is one of the advantages of a set up like Dropbox and shared folders. Everytime I update a file in the Dropbox folder, the person I am writing this for gets an instant notification that there is something there for him to read.

Of course, the disadvantage of this is that everytime I update a file, he gets a notification that there is something for him to read…

Anyway, the upshot of this is that the secret project is going wonderfully and at some point over the next month or so I may even be in a position to tell you all what exactly it is. Assuming I manage to make the deadlines, which is where the next bit of this post comes in. Productivity…

This photo is also here for no reason. Enjoy.

My productivity plan is going great with one exception. I have been useless at remembering to post the word counts to Twitter every day. I have been managing to write 200 words a day minimum, every day except weekends and ‘official holidays’ (defined as days where my wife has a day off or days that everyone else in the country considers a holiday such as Bank Holidays). On most days I have more than exceeded that target (today’s, for example, is well over a thousand and today is a Sunday so I was officially ‘off duty’). I am therefore still declaring this method as a success because it has got me writing every day, avoided the ‘no productivity doldrums’ and generally increased my output. Now, the flaw to this is that only doing 200 a day is not likely to see a novel completed in any short time scale but as I said, I only see this as a minimum target, not a maximum. On average I am between 200 and 1000 words a day with the 200s only really coming out on days I am working fulltime. This contrasts with previous efforts to improve productivity by setting a high target of 1000 – 2000 words a day when I soon gave up because there were days where this was not possible.

Therefore, in conclusion, I heartily recommend this method if you find the more traditional ones not to your taste.

Review: Deep Black Beyond

11 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in Reviews, Secret Project of Secretness

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It’s review time again and this one is of a short story collection by Annie Bellet.

The review may be found here

In other news, you may remember me mentioning on Twitter as part of my regular word count updates that I was doing ‘audition pieces’. Well,  I have just had word that those auditions were successful and I will be starting on a ‘work for hire’ project next week. Details are currently secret but if it goes as planned the outcome should be rather cool and will allow me to achieve the unthinkable – make use of skills I have been developing for decades and actually get paid for using them.

Feel free to speculate wildly in the comments about what this project is if you wish.