Well, I did it! I finished the Quickstart for Kenoma (at least until people find problems with it).
It took more time and effort than I’d expected to go through it today. I honestly thought I might be done by noon when I went to bed last night, but I wound up working on it until 8 PM, which is part of the reason why I only got out for a single walk today (but it was my long style of walk, about three miles).
I only got seven thousand steps and change, but at least I have the honest excuse that I was hard at work and just got sucked into a time vortex.
I didn’t get done in time to reward myself with the cinnamon sugar pretzel I promised myself, either, so I’ll have that tomorrow (when I’ll get my steps in and can take the hit).
It’s weird looking at it. I went for some very simple design choices while doing the page layout, and I think they paid off in ways that you could be hard-pressed to compete with. You’d probably need two or three times the effort to get a better return, because it’s just hard to beat crisp and legible.
One thing that people don’t realize is that when you’re publishing something like a PDF, you can simulate the feel of really nice high-grade glossy paper by putting a subtle off-white gradient in the background. The gradient makes it easier to get a color that will be perceptible in a subconscious way; you can have imperceptibly off-white sections with quite overtly darkened sections and they’ll come together to give the impression of a creamy texture.
Subtlety is key, and one thing that makes that work is when you have really neat text and enough restraint not to push too many elements over the top. I have basically four things: the text itself, a horizontal ribbon to show what section you’re in, the background gradient, and a page number thing with brush-strokes.
Then I use simple boxes for the side-bars, with a slightly different title text format to push the novelty, and the end result is something quite stark.
It’s a mistake to think simple means easy. You still need to know what you’re doing with text layout to get everything to work.
One trick I used is that I used transparent rectangles to alter text flow so that it didn’t go down too far on a page when I needed a section to be neater. I didn’t do that perfectly everywhere, but it made things easier. Where there was too much white-space, I put an in-universe quote with its speaker and source cited to give a little mystique and draw readers in deeper, though I’m not sure about how I pulled it off (I think the font might be too big, but I’ll wait and see feedback).
Writing-wise, I’m definitely not to my goal today, but when I checked at the end of the day yesterday I was ten thousand words ahead of where I’d need to be if I were aiming to write a million words this year.
I’m not sure if I’ll do that in 2022 or not. I failed hard in 2021, but part of that was working on my MFA (which, ironically, was writing, but which put a tremendous burden on me to make something that I’d never made before) and dealing with my day-job. Since they’ve decided they don’t need people who won’t show papers, I don’t really need to worry about the day-job, and I’d actually like to try to go full-time writer so that I don’t need to worry about mandates and other stuff in the future.
Getting this game out is half of that battle. I don’t know that it will be a revenue stream that I can support myself with, but it will at least be something to show for my time. I’m going to keep working on the core rulebook, but I don’t feel the same crunch for that.
I’ve also got my non-fiction writing, which looks like I’m working on two short (10-15k word) books instead of one because the thesis kind of drifted. Add that on top of blogs and my Substack, and I think I won’t have to blame lack of effort for any failure to make it as a writer.
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