It’s amazing how quickly that step actually went, and particularly since it could have gone so much faster had I known what I wanted to do before I started.
For convenience in locating specific sections, my Romans notes were written in table format. Each chapter of the epistle was a new “section” in the word processing software, and each section was comprised of one three-column table–the leftmost column for the verse numbers and broad outline, giving the point and parameters of each paragraph, the middle column containing my translation of the text, and the right-hand and widest column giving the detailed analysis. I had considered publishing it in that format, printed “landscape”, that is, eleven inches wide by eight and a half high, probably bound on the long side such that it would be more like a flip chart than a book. However, there was more white space than I wanted, and even with the idea that users might wish to make notes I could not justify the expense of such a long book. Instead, I decided to reformat it more traditionally, to a “portrait” layout, losing the tables and placing the outline, numbering, and translation between the sections of detail. In doing so, I reduced the page count from near a thousand to under six hundred, so I obviously eliminated a great deal of white space.
There were several time-consuming aspects to this. In particular, I wished to convert the tables to text such that there would be a double paragraph break at each cell break, but that was not an option of the conversion. The simple solution was to choose a symbol which was not used anywhere in the text, use that symbol at the cell breaks, and then do a global replace of that symbol with the double paragraph break. It worked, but at one point I forgot which symbol I was using and used one that was used in a few places in the text, so I had to return and correct those places where the replace should not have been made.
The other was that after I had reformatted all the tables to text, I realized that the verse numbers and translation text were not so easily distinguished from the commentary detail. I thus had to go through and, verse by verse, reformat these. I had to do some other reformatting at the same time, adjusting the line breaks, so I would have had to have done the verse by verse work anyway; but it would have saved several keystrokes on each verse had I reformatted that text while it was still in table layout rather than after the fact. I made the decision that the table-to-text conversions had taken long enough that it would not be worth reversing them to save the time on the text formatting, but still spent quite a bit of time on it. For what it’s worth, Romans, the longest of Paul’s epistles, has four hundred thirty-one verses plus a subscription (in the Greek manuscripts, the title and authorship and related information are appended to the end of a book), so I was at this for a while.
The result of this is, with the addition of a title page and the drafting of a brief forward, the Romans book is finished. I will have to do the conversion to PDF, and upload it to the publisher, and design the cover (although being more on the lines of a “scholarly” work, a simple faux leatherette look with the title and author will be sufficient, so I need not hassle with cover art).
Of course, Do You Trust Me? is also waiting to be published, so I face the question of which to publish first–or whether to launch both at once. That, though, is a decision that will have to wait until there is money in the bank, something that doesn’t happen easily in the beginning of September when school expenses hit.
–M. J. Young
September 2nd, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Long time reader, first time poster.
What the hell does any of this have to do with Multiverser?
I don’t really understand because you are very active on these forums which leads me to think the game still remains afloat. But with no new product and all these postings about works on Christian books and bands with teenagers. Reuben Kincaid you are not.
I just don’t get it, you have a following here and all your blog postings seem almost intended to drive your base away. No one on here cares about this crap, we want more Multiverser! I don’t see any forum posts related to bands or Romans. Thanks but no thanks!
More Multiverser please!
September 4th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Rory Storm–Thanks for your comment.
Writing this blog is always a bit of a challenge, because it is difficult to determine what is actually relevant and what is not. Not too long ago I found myself in a bind because a member of the family was upset that I was mentioning family involvements among the tasks consuming my time, but a close family friend was upset when I stopped doing so because it was her best way of keeping informed concerning what was happening in our lives.
O.K., so the blog is not supposed to be about my personal life. It is supposed to be about my creative endeavors, and Multiverser in particular. There are people here who read it to keep informed about Multiverser, who really do not care about anything else.
On the other hand, there are those who are interested in the fact that I am also Chaplain of the Christian Gamers Guild, who want to know about my Christian books and articles in addition to my gaming stuff.
There are people who are interested in Multiverser plus time travel, who came to role playing through my temporal anomalies work, and who want to be kept posted on what is happening there.
There are people here who play Multiverser and are also keenly interested in what I am doing musically, having heard some of my work.
There are people who want to know what’s holding up the next novel, or the next world book–and to them, it is relevant that I am not really sitting around doing nothing, but am actually working on other projects. I’d like to tell you that I make oodles of money from creating game materials, but really I have made more from selling books that are not game-related than books that are. That’s partly because of the different contracts I have in those two fields, but it’s also because of the interest in some of the other materials that does not always extend to the game.
And indeed, there are at least some people who come there to read the blog to find out about my creative work who are not at all interested in Multiverser, except that it is one of the projects that take my time away from the music, or the time travel, or the Bible studies, or whatever it is that does interest them.
Even E. R. Jones wants to know what I’m doing with the music. He hopes that success with the music will feed back into the game, in the same way that so many in the entertainment world find success in one area and parlay it into success in another.
Perhaps I created that situation; perhaps I should not have started a “Blogless Lepolt” with the idea that it would chronicle my progress on all projects in which I was involved. That, though, is what I created, and there are people who have expressed their appreciation for that, for reasons as diverse as that it keeps them informed in relation to their real interests to that it shows them why things have not been coming out as quickly as they might like.
There have been some posts recently about the forthcoming Triple Play collections. The first of these is in the hands of our art director, and I do not know exactly what he is thinking in this connection. However, when I know more I will post more.
Thanks again for your comment.
–M. J. Young
September 9th, 2008 at 2:56 am
Meh.
ER Jones, does he post here as well? I have seen his name often but he seems less hands-on.
I have to ask since you say you make more money from Christian books if you have actual publishers for your game and if not, why not? Books get published for sub-cultures mush smaller than gamers so I would think a game that boasts being the most universal could get a publisher.
I think your game has been in print for close to ten years and it’s the same rulebooks. You need a relaunch, there is an entire new generation of gamers now that need to be reached. Why isn’t that in the pipeline? I don’t know sales figures for your books but I would think the Triple Play series would have very little pre-sales because the rules are not something new anymore. To gamers, seeing a supplement to a game they never heard of or thought long out of print prevents them from going back and buying a book from several years ago.
I’d start on a new edition. I haven’t seen much about that on here, just posts about Christian teen bands playing coffee shops, books about fruit, and the odd misadventures of your daily life.
My opinion but I’d wager if you put it to vote on this forum of your base, I would think they’d want a new rulebook or books. But I don’t see much discussion anymore outside of game threads so I could be wrong.
September 9th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
O.K., all fair and reasonable questions.
There’s a long story to that, which goes back to his decision in 1997 to step away from the game and leave it in the hands of others. He had started working on it around 1985, and had personal life issues at the time plus a hope that by moving away from Multiverser he could get a better handle on what direction the hobby game world was headed. He has more recently come back to try to help with new directions, but that’s going to take some time.
You would think so, but actually in the world of games no one really buys games created by others. In fact, most game companies will not even look at a game created by someone else, unless they know that person already. Thus we do have an “actual publisher”, as a group of our supporters created a corporation as a publishing house. It has been a struggle, though.
In an odd twist, it is likely that I get more for my Christian books than for my game books because I don’t really have a “publisher” in that sense. More precisely, the printing house is the publisher, in a sort of defined partnership with me. I do all the setup work and deliver print-ready books, they print them and get them into distribution, I do all the promotion work. With Valdron, there is a corporation in the middle that has expenses that need to be met; but when Multiverser originally went to press, the options that put the Christian books out there did not exist.
Wow, is this a tough one to answer. When word leaks out that a company is “working on a new edition”, sales go dry very quickly. That’s largely because in this industry a “new edition” has come to mean a completely new game built from the ground up with some of the old ideas carried over to it, but incompatible with anything you bought before. We have promised up front that that will not happen: that if you own our game books, they will always be fully compatible with anything that we release as Multiverser in the future.
Also, it is a massive project for a small company. It took five years to complete the text of the original game books, and I was working on it almost constantly and had a partner involved. Granted, the tools available for this have improved (the first draft was typed in GeoWrite on a C64 and saved on a dozen disks, and the whole retyped into Word when we were forced to upgrade to a PC), and we are working from an original; it is still a massive amount of work that will take at least a few years to complete and edit.
And no matter how many times I say that any such edition will be fully compatible with the current books, people won’t believe me, because that’s not how these things are done. Thus projects with very long lead times don’t get mentioned because rumors of their future arrival hurt sales of existing product. I do hope that a second edition will be completed eventually, and have a framework for the reorganization of all the material in the original book plus expansion “value added” materials that will greatly assist the referee (not all of them available in the free downloads section of our support site). I cannot at this point even guess how long it will take to complete.
As far as whether Triple Play modules will sell, well, I can’t guess that. I do know that many companies (SJGames most notably) create supplements for adventures and world design that sell well to people who do not own or play the core games for which they are designed, and there is some hope that this might happen here. It is also not uncommon for the release of a new supplement to make people aware that an old game actually is still in print, and to revive interest among that segment of gamers that avoids buying games from new companies because they are afraid the support will not be there.
I hope this answers your questions adequately. That really is why I’m here.
–M. J. Young
September 16th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Who is your PR person? Why doesn’t your company make more appearances like Gen Con or Origins? Multiverser is a known brand and being so hands-on with promotion makes me wonder why you never appear at the bigger venues. Does anyone ever inquire to the heads of these shows to get you to appear? I have seen you headline smaller shows on the east coast which is enough to get you in the bigger shows.
I think enough time has passed also that any people you said there wouldn’t be another edition would be able to get over it. They dropped $100 in ten years on your rulebooks at the max, seriously, they won’t hold a grudge considering the amount they’d have to pay for other books. It’s a business and they can get over it where your company needs to remain in business.
I honestly hope to have a new edition in my hands within 5 years.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
We have had several people in charge of PR over the years; the current president asked the board to fire the most recent because he (the president) was unhappy with his (the PR guy) efforts. Unfortunately at the moment I think most of the job falls to me, the president, and the art director, and none of us have the particular talents needed for the job.
Getting to the midwest conventions is a major financial commitment. Transportation and housing and food all have to be covered, and there is also a necessary commitment to product in-hand. (We do most of our work as print-on-demand, so our in-house inventory is kept pretty low. Guessing how much product will sell at any particular venue is quite a trick–guess too low and you run out, guess too high and you’re overstocked and short on funds for a while.) Even so, we have been working on this for a while. We had the room and board end settled for Origins this year, but the person who was supposed to get me on the guest list failed to do so (and has not yet explained this failure) so the trip did not happen. That may have been just as well, because I had a lot of other problems this summer with transportation (not yet fully resolved) and getting there with a load of books would have been an expensive nightmare this time around.
I will sincerely try to get that new edition out within five years.
Thanks for your encouragement.
–M. J. Young