Well, the new year is here and a lot happened... yet so little.  First of all before Christmas I was able to knock out a few chapters.  I was hoping to keep some momentum going since it is difficult to get going again once you pause.  A certain paralysis.  Fate intervened and I was able to spend an inordinate amount of time with my family during Christmas.  While lovely by itself it did mean that I wasn't able to actually do anything that required concentration.  So I haven't been able to put pen to paper much since a bit before the holidays.  I can't say exactly when this will change.

This isn't to say I haven't been productive.  There have been a ton of miscellaneous activities I have been able to fit in between family.  My website underwent a complete makeover, adding content, aesthetics and mobile-friendly content.  I love my menu with the popup icons but it looked terrible on a mobile device.  The book samples look much better... though whether these are mobile-friendly is up in the air, and I added a lot of images to the pages to make them more interesting.  Much like the image here I am trying out.  So the webpage blog gained a newsticker and news item summary a separate page for the website blog (in addition to the side module elsewhere).

I also added a forum and a messaging system because... well I always wanted one.  I don't expect anyone to use it but it was fun to set up.  I also have a friend who started a D&D campaign and I have devoted a page to that.  Although Fantasy Grounds (basically an online platform to play with the GM and players) is pretty nice its drawback is that when the DM is offline so are all the campaign notes.  This makes it difficult to plan things in between games.  So we have some resources, history, notes and a calendar.  So far only one other player has even looked their but again, it was fun to set up and I learned more about Joomla.  One other player makes a log of all the events that happened each game session and he gave me permission to upload it under his name as a game blog.  Again I don't think he's seen his own work yet.  Ironic.

Fantasy Grounds... the online RPG platform you love to hate.  A bit buggy at times but better than the alternatives.  If you have been reading this blog and my website blog you may have realized that my favorite RPG game is Rifts, not D&D.  However, Palladium is pretty conservative when backing 3rd parties so there hasn't been a way to play it online.  Over the holidays I spent some time working with an Extension for a FG ruleset that should allow people to use FG to play Rifts online.  It takes a bit more elbow grease than D&D since Palladium hasn't licensed the content but if the GM is willing to put in the work it should be pretty darn compatible.  I even did an online tutorial on how to use the FG Extension and put the Youtube video on my website.

There is also a program that allows you to update the Theme (GMW Campaign Toolkit, it basically modifies the artwork in FG) that I played around with.  I re-used some of that work in the website upgrade.  I wanted to do another tutorial to explain a few grey areas on the use of the software but I have literally not been alone in the house since the first video tutorial.  It's hard to get the quiet needed to do that kind of work and frankly its been so long now that the specifics I had wanted to talk about are not as sharp in my memory.  Oh well, it was a nice dream.

And finally, getting back to the book and all that boring writing stuff... when I first published the third book I submitted to many reviewers.  More than fifty I think, though I didn't keep exact track.  Most of them rejected it due to lack of time, interest or it being the third book in a series.  However, two Reviewers actually came through.  One back in October "Mrs Y" and "Amy Shannon" just recently.  Neither one is really a stellar rating but they are actually the only ones I have gotten in five years of asking... so yay!  Also, neither one had read the previous books.  I doubt I could tolerate reading a book starting in the middle of the series so it worked out as best as I could expect.