Good news! After two weeks of technical issues, the first copies of Human Contact are in! The technical issues persist, unfortunately, so there’s not quite closure, but I have 60 copies now, should have another 200 or so next week, and another 50ish the week after that.
The nature of the technical issue isn’t clear; it’s just one of those thing that happens when printing. But I can say that my printer, 360 Digital, has done a fantastic job of both printing them and keeping me abreast of things that have gone wrong. The measure of a printer, after all, is not that nothing ever goes wrong. Things go wrong. The measure of a printer is in how they communicate and make good when that happens.
I won’t be shipping any books until more are in, but I will have copies at Dreamation, so if you’re one of my backers, please let whoever’s at the Indie Bazaar and I’ll sign and hand you your copy right there.
I’ve wanted to do more sculpture for a while now. In celebration of giving the thumbs up to the press, I started work on an isisaurus colberti. It’s a “small” sauropod (like the apatosaurs, brachiosaurs, and ultrasaurs of our childhoods) of a mere 18m in length. But what gets me is its weird, hyaena-like posture. It’s quite speculative — there aren’t really enough bones to confirm the body shape — but there’s some reason to believe it’s something like this.
Since I’m liable to put a howdah on top anyway, I’m not going to be overly concerned with the actual accuracy. Reproducing the weird structure here will be enough.
A very exciting FedEx package just arrived! I have to confirm a couple of things with the press, but it’s looking good to go straight into production this week!
Are you going to be at PAX East? I am! I’ll be doing a bunch of things, in fact.
1: I’ll be holding down a booth with Vincent Baker, Meg Baker, Emily Care Boss, and Epidiah Ravachol. We’ll be selling, off the top of my head:
Dogs in the Vineyard
Mechaton, if we’re smart
Apocalypse World
Sign In Stranger
Three Short Games About the Human Heart
Dread House
Maybe Dread?
Shock:Social Science Fiction
Shock:Human Contact
Under the Bed
2: I’ll be part of a panel moderated by Kickstarter human Cindy Au, along with Andrew Plotkin and Evan Balster about getting your Kickstarter project to fruition. I’ll be talking about my experiences with Shock:Human Contact, of course, Andrew will be talking about Hadean Lands (Interactive fiction, a medium and community for and in which he’s quite well known), and Evan will be talking about Infinite Blank.
3: I’ll be part of another panel with Jack Graham and Luke Crane, called How To Get What You Want Out Of Your GM. I’m foreseeing some rasslin’.
We are obligated — OBLIGATED — to play games with people, too! Come find us and play with us!
(I was sending what might be the final text of Human Contact to Thor at the moment this came in from Jeff Hobbs. But even publishing deadlines must wait for news as important as this.)
Troy Costisick’s started a really neat thing over at the RPG Crossroads. In addition to hosting designer forums the way the Forge did for years (now closed), we’re also looking to start up a really focused forum to plant garlic as the Forge enters its Winter phase. I’m curious to see what will happen when Spring comes. I hope you’ll join me there.
