This article may also be found, along with loads of other stuff on the 6 Icons Blog which is a journal of my current primary incredibly exciting project. Exciting mostly because it’s the first thing I’ve ever worked on that I thought might turn a coin… Read on at that location.

We finally have three minutes worth of animatic and sat contemplating this last night. Essentially work continues. It’s really very tedious, we’re not having prima donna strops and retiring to our Winnebagos. We’re just quietly continuing to work away and while it doesn’t make for a superb dramatic blog experience at least we’re inching ever closer to Episode 1, Chapter 1.

I would like to tell you a little about the setting of our story, known colloquially as the Good Earth. It is known as such although there is no “Bad Earth” with which to contrast it. The Good Earth is generally known to be an abundant place to live. Indeed all shortage and poverty that exists on the Good Earth is created by its inhabitants. It is blessed with rich seas, and plentiful croplands. The population is advanced but small. If it weren’t for their many disagreements the place would be a paradise.

There are three major continental landmasses, Lacertillia, Uncia and Duntroon. Roughly speaking Jungle/Tropic, Temperate/Desert, Arctic/Mountainous. Lacertillia to the West devolves into a pepper of small islands called the Titan Archipelago. The major conurbations of the planet are to be found on the gigantic landmass Uncia which is actually named for a goddess who came out of the icy Northlands of Duntroon uniting many of the tribes before eventually dividing her Empire into three.

All of the land masses are joined by the Northern Ice Sheet and the two northlands Metatheria in the East and Phaethon in the North. The only inhabitable mountain territories in Duntroon are the land of Aquila which is in the south east bordering the gigantic Corda Valley and in the North West the mysterious kingdom of the Duntrooni who seldom interact with any of the other of the Good Earth’s inhabitants.

The majority of the Good Earth, about three quarters of it, is covered by the vast Titan Ocean and in the distant far flung centre of this ocean are a tiny scattering of islands now referred to as the Broken Islands. Weapons testing have left them hollow, haunted shells.

Anyway I can tell you all this in words but hopefully soon you will be able to see some pictures. And we haven’t even got into the urban areas, the history or the mythology of the Good Earth yet.

Trust me, this is a deep, rich world where we’re hoping you’ll enjoy spending a lot of time.

Summer is, traditionally, a quiet time. It’s funny but as a hobbyist writer you tend to find that quality time is hard to come by in the summer months even though not much is going on.

Quality time is a pain in the butt to be honest. When I wrote that first draft of Starfall I didn’t need quality time, I just needed time. As I close in on the end of the project it’s like I’m an Amberite walking the pattern, it gets harder and harder to push past the veils. Hum, that makes me wonder if the central conceit of Zelazny’s series isn’t all based around the creative process. After all when when one walks to the centre of the pattern then one attains an ability to go “anywhere in shadow”, shadow being the whole infinite multiverse of possibility.

Whatever. The point is that I’ve come to the latest in an artist’s hurdles, the discovery that having produced something rather good the process of turning that into something very very good is just as hard as producing something okay used to be when you’d written less.

Despite this hurdle there’s been quite a bit of movement on other fronts. I’m dug well into my next review title, 6icons is coming along (oh, and for those of you who noticed the absence of my update last Sunday, well, I wasn’t feeling well and my associate had a post to make, check out the 6icons blog to see that, I’ll be back to updating that today). I’ve also been working on other personal projects mostly because these projects are leading me to spending some real quality time with Mrs Monkey and strengthening the bonds at home is never a bad thing.

Overall I have found myself in recent weeks to be very busy. This is a change for late July/early August and just keeping myself on my toes, creatively speaking, has lead to a final tentpole concept which should provide that all important final Starfall push. So without further ado I must return to my writer’s desk. The pattern is calling.

This article may also be found, along with loads of other stuff on the 6 Icons Blog which is a journal of my current primary incredibly exciting project. Exciting mostly because it’s the first thing I’ve ever worked on that I thought might turn a coin… Read on at that location.

It’s been a quiet week in Icon land but that is actually quite a good thing. The reasonb being is that in a quiet week everyone can get their head down and do some work.

I’ve been animating madly and the Doodler’s got further into the whole drawing program thing, basically the team’s been working away quietly and that means that we’re inching ever closer to our first chapter and from there the rest of the exciting saga.

I’d love to post up something a little bit more detailed but I don’t think I really have anything worth looking at. A script for a comic book is only really of interest when the comic book exists. If you’ve got no pictures per se it’s impossible to really get all gung ho about how great the script will look when it’s drawn, after all that depends who draws it.

Rest assured the Doodler’s doing some good stuff and we’re both loving the slowly evolving animatic, when his drawings and my animatic collide we’re going to have one helluva light show for you all.

Until then I’ll get thinking about what else I can tell you about the world of the Six Icons.

What I didn’t know before working on my latest gaming project was what it would be like to actively test something new. I’ve tested things before that were quite standard and taken notes and revised, usually the revision has lead eventually to a point where none of it was actually worth going forward with. It takes a long time to get comfortable with role playing systems to the degree where you could write one worth writing.

The good news for me is that Dreamtime Stories, which debuted in alpha phase on Wednesday last, definitely seems like a system where it’s worth following up the glitches. There are several features of Dreamtime Stories which make it new but the most important is that for the first time to the recollection of anyone I’ve asked the humble domino has been pressed into service as a randomiser.

The precise details are, of course, a trade secret. Many of them even from me because we haven’t even scratched the surface of how the game is going to work. However my accent was on simplicity and we busked our way through the session adequately. Look out for Dreamtime Stories in late 2009 or early 2010.

Much sooner than that I’m continuing work on what, to the same group’s knowledge, is the first “casual” role playing game, titled Confined Spaces. The idea is to write what could be described in the parlance of the narcotics market as a “gateway” RPG leading onto harder and harder RPG experiences for the initiate. Confined Spaces attempts to do away with the hobby’s many disincentives and provide interested parties with a light, one-evening theme party idea which could well lead to a hardcore dice bar habit somewhere down the line.

Heh.

If you’re wondering where that leaves Starfall (although it’s been well beyond the 15 month window for people to long since stop giving a flying one) the answer is that Starfall, although it is a deeply wonderful and rewarding novel is about as likely to earn me money to keep writing it as the sun is likely to turn blue tomorrow. So it’ll have to wait.

The die is cast. Or rather the domino is drawn.