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I was going to let the above image stand on its own . . . and then I remembered how much I hate it when a blog I like stops posting content and only posts advertising.

I've been trying not to do that from the beginning - to keep putting up content on the blog, advancing new ideas, remaining open for discussion and for questions.  I think this is the only fair.  I am responsible to you, the reader, to give you something to read about - otherwise, I'm not much of a writer.

My head is in the book I'm writing.  It has been a very different sort of process from other novels that I've written; someone asked me the other day if I was finding it difficult because I was used to non-fiction.

Nope.  It's difficult because I am making it that way.  I have heard it said all over, but it is true: an artist begins any work by deliberately sawing off a leg and an arm, with the premise that if the final project can't be managed with those limitations, then it is not worth managing.  There are so many problems I could easily solve by inserting long passages of clumsy, obvious exposition, or by having characters conveniently have knowledge impossible to have, or by simply creating a less intricate plot.  Unfortunately, those things wouldn't solve the only problem that matters to me:  writing a good book.

So I rewrite and redesign and find better ways to get the information across and better ways for people to meet and different ways to use characters that were originally meant to be pushed out of the story, or ways to upgrade the conflict or introduce a different conflict at the moment of a resolution and so it goes, on and on.  I find I am rewriting two words for every new word I write so that each day I go back and rewrite what I wrote yesterday and then make a few hundred words or as much as a thousand words forward - only to rewrite those words tomorrow.

So it goes.  Sorry I can't seem to talk of anything else just now.  I'll try to have something to talk about tomorrow.  The third podcast is being posted this Sunday.  When relaxing, I've been working on the pricing table.  I'll try to put up something for advanced trade table mechanics - but no promises.