My impetus for posting has little to do with Multiverser, though; it has to do with some of my other writing.  I received the proof copies of Do You Trust Me? and read through one; I found four errors, the biggest but least evident of which was that I never actually included the artist credit for the cover, and the most difficult that I have in a footnote a reference to a book I have not yet published and thus for which I am not completely settled on the title (my Romans commentary).  I will either have to settle the title in my own mind or rephrase the note to refer to the forthcoming book without mention of the title.

Now I’m bothered, because I know that the post that did not go through on Sunday contained other information, and I cannot recall what any of it was.  However, it’s good to be back, so let me deal with everything else that has been awaiting my return.

–M. J. Young

One way to raise awareness is by getting reviews posted.  It is not always easy for authors to get reviews of their works; however, in the role playing game world there are sites eager to post reviews, and one in particular which is rather popular and which guarantees that any game-related books it receives will be reviewed.  We have dithered about sending a copy, because of course we have to pay for copies and are still uncertain how the book will be received by gamers generally (and reviewers in particular), but at this weekend’s Annual Stockholders Meeting, after being elected one of two new directors, former and now returning director Evan Young directed me to stop dithering and get the book to them.  After all, even a bad review would promote the availability of the book, and we do have confidence that the contents of the book are particularly good.  The doubts which arise come primarily from the question of whether anyone else will think it a good idea to release in print for money what is already available free electronically and has been for most of a decade.  Thus today I finished packing and mailing a copy of the book to the site in question.  It will take this week to arrive, additional time to be assigned to a reviewer, and ultimately will be reviewed.  I am watchful.

As long as I was sending a package anyway, and paying for postage and packing from my own pocket, I included a copy of Faith and Gaming, which is available here, for which I have similar concerns, although this has sold a few copies probably to members of the Christian Gamers Guild who consider the series one of their strongest assets and view the availability of the book as a boon even though the series has long been hosted in the Chaplain’s Corner of their web site.  Thus this has the double whammy, first that it is a collection of materials already available free on the Internet, and second that it is very clearly a Christian book about role play gaming, which can very quickly garner animosity in the gaming community.  But again, a review will put the book in the public eye, and to some degree a reviewer who is not “religious” himself cannot slam a religious book without blackening his own reputation, so hopefully it will get a fair treatment.

On that note, I wait.

–M. J. Young

I have hemmed and hawed and dithered and dallied since receiving the cover art for my new book, Do You Trust Me? Part of the delay is that I had intended to put a couple of quotes on the back from people who had given favorable responses to copies of the draft, but I lost their comments and couldn’t find them.

In any case, I have posted the book and ordered proof copies, so I can spot any bugs that escaped me to this point and make sure the cover prints well.

I have also decided to make these pre-release copies available to those who have encouraged and supported my ministry, by announcing their availability through Lulu. The printed copies are currently priced at $8.97 and the PDF at $4.49. Once the proofs are approved, the book will get an ISBN and go into general distribution at prices closer to $12 for print and $6.00 for PDF, so it’s a 25% savings now. There might yet be bugs in the book, of course, and the ISBN is not printed on these copies (because it has not yet been issued), and I admit that I am still hoping to get a few positive words I can post on the back cover and credit to people who don’t sound like they’re my relatives.

Anyone interested can obtain either print or PDF at http://www.lulu.com/content/4225728.

Thank you.

–M. J. Young

Fortunately, my inspiration for posting today is related to Multiverser.  Some of you will recall that as part of my work on the novels, I was creating character sheets based on the primary characters therein.  Judging from the blog posts, it has been entirely too long that those efforts have been sidetracked.  However, recently in the forums I launched one of my players in one of the worlds from the second novel, one which I am preparing for use in the next Multiverser Triple Play–that is, next after the horror one that is currently in the hands of the art director, the space-based worlds.  I was going to run it mostly by the seat of my pants and the notes and writing I’ve done on the world description–but as often happens in Multiverser games, the player’s character did something that changed things significantly.  He prayed another character into his scenario, and that prompted me to shift the plans to involve the story of that other character.  It also meant that I needed detailed information concerning the particular character from the story, including skills and equipment, so that I could put together events well.

Thus I returned my attention to the novels, and particularly to the character sheets.  In so doing, I found I had nearly finished all the data gathering from the first, and was almost ready to start the second.  I pushed forward into the beginning of the second novel, and the first bits of information about the character already involved in play, and hoping that this will facilitate both the ongoing game and the work on the novels.

I should apologize for my absence yesterday, but an explanation would involve details of family matters not at all related to Multiverser, and would thus raise the ire of people on all sides.

–M. J. Young

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

The study began several years ago with Romans, for which I have copious notes which I have been editing.  The originated as preparations for a course I had hoped to teach which never materialized, but when I had finished the postings on the Bible study list I was encouraged to put them into book form.

Over the weekend I reached the end of the editing of the last chapter of those notes.  The edits need to be incorporated into the text, but that is more than half finished at this point.  The text will then have to be reformatted for printing, but in all it looks like the exegetical and logical study of Romans might well go to print before the end of the year.

Of course, I still have to get Do You Trust Me? in print, and I don’t have the cash to launch that formally at the moment (I don’t have the cash at the moment for a family barbecue, and am not certain how I’m going to get enough gas to get my mother-in-law to the store tomorrow, but that’s the way it is sometimes).  It won’t be that way forever, though, so I’ll line up the books and see what works.

I’m also giving serious consideration to doing an abbreviated study in Romans, something which covers the structure of the book without going into the sort of detail the full study does.  That’s a bigger project, though.

–M. J. Young

None of them were mine, although one was an interview with me.  It was an interesting read, reminding me where we were back then.

So that’s how I spent the better part of my evening on my day off.  There were several other options, but none which appealed so much as getting that done.  I’m trying to work my way through to the end of 2001, so I can pick up the Game Ideas Unlimited series for the next volume to be printed.  I could, of course, just jump ahead and do those, but I want to help straighten out this site as much as I can, and someone’s got to do the articles.

–M. J. Young

I’ve also been loaned a solder iron, so assuming I also can find some solder I hope to repair the Hartke speaker tomorrow and get my instrument amplifier up and running.  Maybe if things go well I’ll put together the effects boxes I’ve intended to construct.

Today things did not go so well.  Fortunately, last week I made a decision to put an end to my participation in the Lutheran forum.  I kept inviting Lutheran friends of mine to participate there, and they never do; and some of the new members of that board weren’t really keen on having input from some weird multi-denominational Baptist when they were really hoping to have their own opinions confirmed by others who shared them.  More to the point, I needed to free up some time, and even though I was visiting them only once a week, it was tending to be a long visit that needed shortening.  I’ve now cleared some time on Tuesdays for other projects.

Today, though, did not go particularly well.  Most of the problems lay in the personal problems areas, and outside the purview of this blog; however, one thing that was a bit vexing is that I attempted to e-mail eight files (attached to separate letters) to the radio station to be four episodes of the Quick Word radio show on Faith and Gaming.  Since I still can’t convert to mp3, these are rather large files, and it seems that once seven were moving I was unable to connect to anything else on the Internet for several hours.  This definitely put me behind schedule, and I really ought in future to send fewer at a time and make sure to do so when I go to bed.

It’s getting late, but I’m not tired, so I’m going to attempt to get through a few forum posts at least.

–M. J. Young

I’ve written, recorded, and sent a number of episodes in the Quick Word radio show’s Faith and Gaming series.  I still have not found a way to convert them to mp3 format, but I’ll manage.

I’ve made some progress on the equipment for Collision.  I’ve got two obstacles at the moment, one easily remedied and the other not so.  The easy one is that my solder iron seems to have wandered off–as my tools often do.  I will pick up another at my first opportunity.  I need it for a number of projects, but most specifically because a couple wires are loose on one of the speakers I’ll be using for my instruments amplifier, and I need to reconnect these.

The more difficult and frustrating problem is that I’ve burned out a speaker and need to replace it.  This is difficult and frustrating because I can’t find anyone who sells a speaker that will do the job. It must be 8 inches in diameter, and round, and it must be 4 ohms, and it must be rated at at least 50 watts.  I’ve found a few speakers promoted as being able to handle more power than that, but they’re generally rated 15 to 25 watts and then stated to handle more in peak power.  My best hope at the moment is to find something designed for car stereo use–not ideal, but seriously it’s gotten impossible to find anything in the nature of an electronics hobbyist’s store.  I will probably hit Best Buy sometime for that.

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s all that comes to mind.

–M. J. Young

–M. J. Young