It's been a whirlwind past few weeks, but I wanted to take a breath to report on all that I've had going on.

First, I talked with one of the Paizo developers at PaizoCon about a large writing project. I expressed strong interest in that, and was waiting to get an outline and some further direction. I certainly had enough work to keep my busy--I'm writing a Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition adventure for their organized play program, and that's required fine-tuning my writing to the new system, doing a few rules walk-throughs to make sure I have a handle on the phrasing that game uses, learning a new Styles template in Word, and so on. That task is 10,000 words with a due date of "mid July".

So, in mid-to-late June I didn't feel like a had a whole lot of writing pressure. I even made some good advancement on The Run Amok Bestiary and The Emergency Settlement Collection. 

A different developer at Paizo reached out to me with an urgent project he needed some writing for, also due in mid-July. I took 5,000 words of that, and it was a lot of work. Fun, definitely, but lots of design. (To be as specific as I feel appropriate, it's more work in their Player Companion line, which tests a lot of different rules design skills: spell creation, magic item creation, feat creation, and a little concise summation of world knowledge. In short, lots of crunch and little fluff.) I finished that by last Sunday--on time--and I realized that "mid July" for my 5th edition adventure was almost upon me! I managed to pull together my scattered notes on that, and over the course of this week, I've managed to put together about 9,300 words and more than a dozen questions for my developer at Wizards of the Coast. That draft text plus draft map plus pile of questions will go out tonight, and I'll thereafter turn to polishing up the final draft of that in the next week. I may have to hand-type about 17 monster stat blocks for that, which I do not look forward to!

In the meantime, the large Paizo project finally landed. With the delay in getting outlined, it has an incredibly short turnaround time. I'm splitting the work with another freelancer--so it's about 20,000 words and not 40,000--but I have to get started on that immediately, and it will require a lot of research and creativity (it's much more fluff than crunch). 

I know I'd targeted 1,000 words a day to keep my writing up. I've actually managed that pace in the past couple of weeks, and I have to keep it up for the next couple of weeks as well. It's a lot of work, not surprisingly, but it's helpful that it's three projects of 5,000, 10,000, and 20,000 words, rather than a single 35,000 word project--I get to have several "there, I'm done with that" breaks as I go along, to keep my momentum and satisfaction up.

And, in a not-formally-related-to-Run Amok Games news, I'm also laying out my second full adventure path for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Bloodlust Corsairs. I'd really like to get that out to the public before departing for GenCon. More specifically, I'd like to get it out so people can identify the errors I thought I'd quashed but didn't, so I can get the corrected version out before GenCon!