Scattered

Well, I suppose I won't be writing anything about roleplaying for awhile ...

I wish I had some hard material to post, but things have been scattered of late.  I'm working on a variety of projects, attacking each as the mood takes me.  And I thought for my own posterity that I'd list off those things.

• There's the monster list continuing (as it should for a long, long time), with semi-intelligent creatures needing to be designed; haven't done much with this for a couple of months.  It isn't one of my favorite tasks.
• I need to rewrite several levels of spells for my players who have recently gone up levels: specifically, 5th level mage spells and 3rd level bard spells.
• I've been starting to put together a gazatteer of all terrain features, with the hopes of adding a lot of descriptive labels to my maps, specifically mountains, plains, forests, that sort of thing.  This involves mostly researching my way through wikipedia and pulling down as many entries as possible. Wikipedia is far more thorough than any source, describing more than just general mountains, such as 'Carpathians'; it also includes a brief description of every sub-feature imaginable.  Commensurate with this project is the collection of data on local fauna, flora and special climatic/geological conditions for those areas (seismic, volcanic, subject to thunderstorms or tornadoes, that sort of thing).  Long project.
• I'm still in the process of adding Denmark and Norway to my distance tables, which are huge now and growing bigger all the time.  This involves quite a lot of number crunching and correcting.
• Rewriting what I call my 'sources' table - the listing of all references for my trade system - into a different format, in order to make it more friendly and more flexible.  That is proving complicated - and I'm beginning to realize I'm going to have to revamp my pricing table (that calculates prices from sources) when I'm done.
• Researching the cities/regions of India, to prepare the creation of India maps.
• Started the creation of my Italy map (finished the coastline yesterday), which I had been putting off since I remembered what a bitch it was to make Germany.  Italy should be about as bad.
• Finishing the reformatting of my old maps, which I started July 2009, when I finally gave in and recognized that the non-symmetrical hexes that I had created back in 2006 needed replacement.
• Researching Spain & Portugal for new references, that being the last part of Europe that needs adding to the total number of references I have.  When I finish that region, I'll move onto Africa.

Mind you, this is in addition to working on my writing.  Starting on April 1 of this year, I committed to writing 1,000 words a day.  It has now been 141 days, and I am 5 days behind ... meaning that I've written 136,000 words since Apr. 1.  That has translated into one complete book, and I am now 57,000 words into my second book.

And somehow I find time to write in two blogs ... not to mention the lovely time I commit to my partner.

Damn, I wish I didn't have to work full-time.