12 to Midnight

Last week I announced that I had only 60 pages remaining to reach the end of the revisions for Degrees of Horror. I set a goal of completing 2 pages a day so that I would finish the revisions in one month. Here were are now a week later and I’ll bet you’re wondering how it went. Both of you.

One thing that I hadn’t counted on was how much I’m adding to each Midnight Tale. Ed’s tales seem to be averaging 3-4 paragraphs and focus mostly on background/setup, letting the GM take it in whatever direction she wants. If these were plot seeds then that would be perfect. Unfortunately, since the idea is to give you adventures that you can prep and play in 15 minutes, the Tales as written leave too much work up to the GM. Some of these really pain me to touch. Ed came up with outstanding adventure ideas that can be taken in many neat directions, depending on the makeup of the group and GM whim. It feels like I’m squeezing these awesome ideas down into a straightjacket. Hopefully you’ll still find the straightjacket fun.

Be that as it may, I’m taking 3 or 4 paragraph Tales and adding another page of detail to flesh them out. The result is that the page count has been growing instead of dwindling. The only positive thing I can add is that now that I’m working in a single document again, it’s a lot easier for me to jump forward to the NPC and Creature section and make adjustments there as well. One day I spent more than an hour distilling our entry on Ghosts, which started out nearly 3,000 words long and ended up less than half that. The end results of all my work over the last week is only a net gain of 6 pages closer to the end of the book. Not exactly what I had in mind when I announced the sprint.

Even so, I have to say that it feels good to really make progress. While I may not see that last page number getting closer as quickly as I’d hoped, hitting my 2 pages a day goal (most days) is still a satisfying feeling.

Under the circumstances I don’t think giving a daily page count or countdown will tell the whole story, so I’ll probably just stick with these weekly updates.