What’s happened so far
Unlike the last two months, March has been a month of getting back in the saddle. Slowly forcing myself to get back into the old productive patterns, not nuking my sleeping pattern anywhere near as often or as hard, this and a dozen other things.
In addition to the updates on the tasks below, one other thing I’ve spent some time on has been digging though my pile of sketches and notes; I think I was a little pessimistic last month on how many I had left. Not sure how much more beyond what I thought, but possibly enough for 2022 as well. I guess that’ll become a new task before long, to scan those all in and get them ready 🙂
What’s happening next?
The continuing task that’s front and center is finishing off 3rd Elysium. Granted, that at least is moving ahead well enough so I expect it will be done sooner than later. The battle is taking some time to process (a sad truth when you’re looking at something that involves the better part of 70 small craft squadrons), but it’s making continuing progress. I’m expecting it to be fully done in the next week or two assuming I can keep focus and make sure that I’ve got some time focused on it. The story should follow along around a week or so later. It’s a bit of a beefy update already, and I doubt it’ll get too much smaller, even after an editing pass.
Beyond that, it’ll be getting back to going on turn processing and more writing after that. One step at a time as they say. One nice thing is that running the battles provides a few more ideas about what to write about beyond just “X happens”. Some rather nice organic character development. I’ve also got a few smaller “world building” story snippets that I’m looking forward to giving a bit of polish and putting out there as well.
2021 Goals
These goals are approximately in order of priority and in order of precedence (IE have to do #1 before you can do #2). There’s some goals from 2020 that are coming back, but a lot of them are going to be brand new ones as well. It’s also a longer list as well, but some of those entries are one-and-done tasks that shouldn’t be as hard as others to complete.
1) Finish 3rd Elysium
Tactical battle is about half done. As a bonus, I’ve been mixing in some writing at the same time, so both the battle and the writing should be complete within a fairly close proximity to one another.
2) Complete turn processing for all empires up to turn 160
No progress as yet (due to 3rd Elysium still not finished).
3) Do a full overhaul and update of my map (as seen on Fleet Management Mk2) so it’s all on one well-organized map WITH space to expand
As mentioned in previous posts, some good progress on this one. The new map has been completed, printed, and posted on my corkboard. What remains is updating all of the various fleet ID tags (as some of the tags have fallen off, and quite a few are in various stages of doing the same. I’m looking at a few different ways to deal with this, but I haven’t come up with a good way to make more durable flags.
4) Write up a new Mk2 commissioning contract
No further progress on this one yet.
5) Update my internal deWulf Story Document
No new progress here.
6) Finish playtesting and balancing for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War
No progress here.
7) Finish the writing work for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War
No progress here.
8) Introduce and post completed artwork
I’ve gone through the rest of my contracts and found a bit more art that Blu3Dawn14 did for me; I’ve got it saved, but it needs a little work before it can get posted up. I think that makes two different sets of images of her work to post. A bit more than I had initially thought, but I’d rather make sure that I didn’t miss anything!
9) Go do a second pass on the artwork for Scenario Book 1, incorporating new details and design concepts over the past year
Nothing new here, but that’s to be expected as there’s artwork and other things still outstanding.
10) Start fishing in my contacts to find someone who can do proofreading for Scenario Book
This task is sitting low on the to-do list for fairly obvious reasons. Need to be done writing and my own edit pass before the work can get handed off to an editor.
Dollarton Proxima Shipyards 