All right, let's get the writing update out of the way: the current WIP, Nothing Collapses, is so close to completion of the rough draft that I can taste it. Which means I've reached the point where I'm sick of looking at it and have to come up with clever ruses to get myself to work on the damn thing.
Example: I promised myself I wouldn't buy any new board games until I finished the rough draft. So, naturally I've since ordered a copy of Carrier from Victory Games and pre ordered the new edition of Carrier Battle: Philippine Sea from Compass Games. Neither of which has shown up yet, but you can see how effective that particular plan was.
Nothing Collapses is coming along though. I've been getting close to the end for a few months now, and I'll actually finish that first draft one of these months. Then I won't have to look at it again for a while, thank God!
Of more immediate interest is the fact that I'm plugging away at editing my existing first draft, Whether I be False or True. I'm aiming to have that one up and out for you on Kindle by the summer, with a paperback following soon after that. I'll keep you updated here on further progress, so mark your calendar and come back here for more progress reports.
In other news, I'm in the early stages of designing a board wargame on the Aleutian Islands Campaign of World War Two. Still in the research phase at the moment, haven't even fleshed out a concept yet. I'm not exactly sure how to design a game and I'm even less sure what to do with a design once I have it, but there we go. I'm currently reading The Thousand Mile War by Brian Garfield and keeping an eye out for possible game mechanics.
I'm kind of on a Pacific War kick in a lot of areas of my life at the moment. There's the game design, of course, but in my leisure reading I'm working through Ian W Toll's Pacific War Trilogy. Currently about halfway through volume one, Pacific Crucible. The Doolittle Raid just happened and we're moving toward the best parts–the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway.
I love a good carrier battle, as you can tell from my recent gaming purchases.
Speaking of gaming, I currently have a solo run of Empire of the Sun set up on my gaming table. I'm about halfway through the game, playing as the Allies against the Japanese bot. It's amazing how much better the bot gets when the operator is actually sober while playing. It's a finicky system, though, with a lot of footnotes and guidelines for play that you need to read in order to implement it right. Many’s the time I've sent the bot on a poorly thought-out attack only to read the footnotes later and realize it wasn't supposed to attack at all.
Operator error, too late to fix it. The good news is that when I reset the board for the next playthrough the AI opponent will be even better.
Anyway, when I see you next week I might have a report for you on how the game went. Take care.
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As always, The Invisible Woman and Other Stories is available on Amazon Kindle.
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