This is a mostly intact copy of the newsletter I sent out this morning. I'm curious if it is going to post because I tried to share the last newsletter here and it didn't actually appear. Anywhere.
Long story short: Item 3 mentions that the printer I was testing is not up to snuff so now I have to find a new printer. Finding a competent, trustworthy printer in the USA is seemingly impossible and I think I'm going to have choose a reputable place overseas. I still expect the two books will be printed this summer but if it's overseas then that pushes the actual shipping date back a month or whatever.
I'll try and keep better track of the Backerkit comments, too.
If you want to sign up for the newsletter direct it is here: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/pages/newsletter-sign-up
-tim h
ITEM 1: UNSTEADY PROGRESS
I'm very, very happy with the second game I'm delivering alongside So You've Met A Thousand Year Old Vampire.
The game is about your character having a series of conversations with a vampire* who is, in some way, constrained by a third party. It's distinct enough from SYMA and TYOV that it was weeks before I realized that there was a clear connection between it and SYMA via "You are meeting a vampire and learning about it". It's painfully, embarrassingly clear connection that just didn't click because they feels so different in play.
Back when I was teaching I'd tell my students to say the most obvious things about whatever it was we were discussing. The most obvious things can be nearly invisible because they are so obvious we don't stop to think about them. In this case, I failed to see the obvious thing about the two games and I am suitably chagrined. But, to be fair to me, it is more of a discussion technique than something you do alone in your garage.
Toward the end of my teaching I also tried to sell my students on "question harvesting", meaning that when you are listening to a lecturer or speaker you should be very intentional about finding and writing down questions you can ask the speaker about at the end of their presentation.
I'd tell them that they don't have to even be that interested in the questions they were preparing, they just needed to generate questions to have them ready in case no one else asked a question at the conclusion of the talk. Having a question ready was a courtesy to the speaker. It's polite.
Another obvious thing I took far too long to notice about the vampire-conversation game was that "question harvesting" was itself a mechanic in the game. Each round is made up of a chunk of dialogue which, hopefully, generates a new capital-Q Question that you can ask your interview subject.
Final obvious thing I missed: I worked on this for weeks before I connected it with Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, a book I think I read when I was a kid. I didn't make that connection until I started worrying about a name for the second game and Interview with a Thousand Year Old Vampire suggested itself. "Ah," I said to myself.
* In both SYMA and VAPR (that's the arbitrary code name for the second game) vampireness is a spectrum. I really, really want players to let the Prompts and narrative building tell you what the Vampire is rather than the player insisting on writing their own idea of vampireness onto the Vampire. The best games I've had of SYMA are the games in which I'm not quite sure WHAT that person was, and just maybe they were just a very willful character with odd values.
ITEM 2: WOMEN IN REFLECTION
Above are two collages I put together in Photoshop that will go into one or the other of the two books. Neither is quite done.
I've said before that I easily fall out of working on words and, if I'm lucky, I get caught in the safety net of working on pictures to go with words. Sometimes, though, the picture work is a comically large butterfly net that catches me and takes me away from wordworking.
Pictures are good but I got enough of 'em, I gotta focus on putting words in the proper order.
The two collages above pushed my "this is interesting" button, though, because they are combinations of figures from photographs and realistic paintings/sculpture. But this isn't about the nude/naked thing as much as the "photographic record blurred by mixing in a painting that reads as real in the photographic context."
I'm also looking for a new printer, which sucks. Worse than that, I think I'm throwing in the towel on printing in the USA. I've seen some stunning-yet-affordable books coming from printers in Eastern Europe but, honestly, I am through with trusting unproven printers. I'm going to find an established company in Asia and trust them to do good, consistent work.
ITEM 4: ...AND SPEAKING OF CHINAThe folks producing a Chinese translation of TYOV did an -incredible- job. Visually, I mean, because they translated every darned word in the book–including the inserted newspaper articles and things. Seamless job. I have no idea if the actual translation is any good.While reviewing the translation PDF I realized I'd inadvertently hit a life goal that I didn't know I had: A translation of my work needed footnotes.
I mean, lookit this. We've come full circle.
ITEM 5: STATISTERSTICS
(I just editing this out of the Backerkit posting because it is too long and too boring and because I have to go through the copy-and-pasted text and put back in the line breaks and I don't think it is worth it.)
ITEM 6: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THING?
I was poring over the Chinese TYOV PDF and saw the thing up above. A taped piece of paper tucked into the gutter in the appendices.
"What a weird mistake," I though. "It looks like InDesign substituted one image file for another."
People. Friends. It's been like that always, from the first PDF file I released. That's the final layout in TYOV. I clearly made a mistake or didn't notice when InDesign substituted one file for another.
Hilarious.
ITEM 7: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THING? (PART 2)
(I removed this part, and the "other business" stuff too. You ain't missing nothing.)
