Still working on the layout for several upcoming releases.  I plan to park myself in front of my laptop tonight and put a few hours in.

The Haloween party was fun.  I spent the day with my brother and his wife in Baltimore.  We conned my wife into coming up to join us for the party.  A quick stop at Wal-Mart and we got my daughter and wife costumes and it was off to the party.  They ended up leaving a bit earlier than I did.  I left after 11 pm and started the two hour drive home.  I was really tired coming home and stopped off at a rest stop about 45 min. down the road for a twenty minuite “power nap” that turned into me waking up at 4 am!  I rolled in at 5:00 am just in time to see my brother off at six.  Then I went to bed and crashed for a few more hours.

Still waiting on the revised GSL.  I would love to support 4E but I am not touching the current GSL with a ten foot pole.  I am hoping the revision will make it attractive to do so, but I have my doubts.  If it isn’t I’ll go the straight copyright route perhaps.

Less than one week until the election.  This one seems to be a real nail-biter.  For me it comes down to taxes, gun control and Supreme Court Justices.

Given that, there is no way I can cast a vote for Obama.  I’m no fan of McCain, but he’s far better on all three of those issues that are most important to me politically.

I found out who my state representatives are recently.  One of them is darn near perfect, and the other one isn’t.  (Can you guess who is who?) Time to start writing some letters.

Now that the weather is getting colder I need to get a new motorcycle jacket.  I found the one I want today at lunch.  I stopped by the place where I got my new bike and looked around at jackets and gloves suited for colder weather.  I fell in love with this one.

Now I gotta come up with the four hundred bucks I need to buy it.  Time for some new releases! (Maybe I’ll sell some stuff on eBay too.)

I worked on the layout for Fantasy Firearms II last night.  It’s coming along nicely.

Free20: Forbiddance is “selling” very well.  It’s been downloaded over 60 times in the few days its been up and getting good feedback so far.

I am hashing over a couple of ideas for this years NaNoWriMo competition.  I will be participating this year and am eager to get a good first draft written out.  I am either doing a story I have had percolating for several years or another more recent story idea that is RPG related.  I’m leaning towards the RPG related project.

I also started getting the home office organized the other night.  I got some figures in my display case, books and magazines on the shelves in some semblance of an order and started setting up my painting area for 40K and Warmachine figs.  Still have more to do, but its coming along pretty well. My wife ends up using the office more than I do since she started back to school.  I usually just fire up my laptop and slap it onto a TV tray in front of the TV.

My brother should have arrived in the area this morning.  They drove out from Indiana last night. We’ll get together Friday night and spend most of Saturday together.  Looking forward to it.  Did I mention he’s my twin brother?

Looking over some sales data.  Here is some food for thought for anyone that might be interested.

Products that have sold over 200 copies: 1

Products that have sold over 100 copies: 4

Products that have sold over 50 copies: 32

(OBS only, not counting YGN and other sources; but that would only be a handful of additional copies.)

Lots going on over here at Skortched Urf’ Studios! I just put up Free20: Forbiddance over at OBS.  Forbiddance is our first free PDF ever released.  (But not our last!) Chris Field put it together for his Otherverse Games imprint.

On the PDF front I am currently working on The North Side Spiders and Fantasy Firearms II in addition to a couple projects for Otherverse.  I hope to get one of them out in a day or two with the other a few days later.

Fantasy Firearms II Cover image.

North Side Spiders Cover.

Still waiting to hear word on the new, improved, kinder, gentler GSL.  What an epic fail this whole 4E thing has been.  I honestly WANT to support it.  I would love to.  But not under the current terms.  I’ll go the Kenzer/Goodman/Adamant rout and release under regular copyright if the new GSL isn’t seriously improved.  I would love to convert some of our lines too.  WOTC has really dropped the ball on this one.  (Unless they are actively trying to discourage thrid party support of 4E; if that’s the case they are succeding, just making a public relations hash of the matter.)

I am pretty stoked about my friend wanting to pick up his pencil and start illustrating again.  I have talked to him before about doing stuf for me, and there have been a couple of ‘false starts’ but he seemed very excited about the stuff I sent him. I am going to hook him up with an old copy of Photoshop to use.  (I have CS around here somewhere, since I upgraded to CS3 I can spare it.)

I noticed Adamant has put some stock art to very good use.  Check out Venture 4th: The Linotaur and you will see the race seems based around an illustration from this offering from Anthony.  Very cool concept!  What got my attention was the cut-and-paste on page three where they used two of my stock art images (also done by Anthony) to make a second illustration.  (Here and here.) Very well done, streatching the artwork.  A little creative Photoshopping can go a long way for savvy publishers. Two thumbs up!

Saturday we played our Star Wars RPG campaign.  Until 2:30 am; so I didn’t get to bed until just after three!  Didn’t make it to church on Sunday.  Ooops.

I had sent some stuff over to my buddy when he expressed an interest in doing some illustrations for me.  I sent him most of the Pandora Project material including some concept art Anthony has done and stuff written by Chris Field and myself.  He liked it and started sketching some stuff, asked me some good questions to clarify the ideas etc.  I also sent him home with a Wacom tablet I have.  He’s really good and I am sure I can keep him busy. Fingers crossed that it pans out.

It was also nice to get some ‘outside’ feedback on the Pandora idea; and it was very positive.  His questions, while related to the artwork, also made me think hard on some aspects of the game.  I am excited to get the project fleshed out.  We even talked a bit about how the game would appear once published.

I have been working on some writing; both PDF and other projects. I’ll put some of that on the back burner this week and get another PDF or two out ASAP.

Sorry for the lag in posting; crazy couple of weeks.

Still no new GSL news.  Big surprise there.

I have a few new releases on deck.  I should get a free otherverse release up soon followed by a couple of regular PDF’s.

Work has been really crazy for the last couple weeks, but we just ended our fiscal year so hopefully things will settle down going forward.

I got a call a couple days ago that my other motorcycle was finished.  It needed two new tires and brake pads along with the safty inspection.  Holy crap they are charging a ton of money!  I didn’t even get dinner out of it.  I already had to pay them for the 600 mile service on my new bike, and this repair bill is killing me.  October is a really tight month over here with several other items all due this month.  We can do it but there isn’t a whole lot of play money left over.  But I knew being a homeowner would mean a tight budget, so i have no room to complain.  (Maybe I can get some of that bail-out money to help me out!)

My brother will be out to visit me at then end of the month.  I haven’t seen him in a while so that will be nice.  We’re supposed to hit the Baltimore Aquarium and a big Haloween party while he’s out so that will be fun.