trying to jinx it

So, hey, I'm working on a book. Think of it as the juvenile delinquent lovechild of the Arduin Grimoire and one of the Armory's D30 books.

My plan is a simultaneous PDF and print release via Lulu, and maybe some ashcan-esque photocopies from the local print shop. The print book will be sold at my cost rounded up to the next half dollar, with the PDF going for like a buck ot two. Some of the contents will be reprints of items appearing here and in the pages of Fight On!, but a bigass chunk of it will be new stuff.

Page count is still up in the air. I want a stapled booklet, so the upper limit will be 88 pages. I'm really keen on the book easily laying open flat, which bigger perfectbound books don’t always do. And 88 pages seems like a reasonably goal I can achieve in a weeks rather than months of work. If I can’t get at least 32 pages of material together I plan on abandoning the book idea and mining the text for Gameblog posts and submissions Fight On!, Knockspell, etc. (So those of you too cheap to pay a buck or two for the download can hope I fail, cause then you get a big chunk of the content for free. )

That "laying flat" part is sorta key to the psychology behind this proposed tome. I'm trying to write a book that I want on the table, open in front of me, at every single session of any dungeony dragony game I run. Yes, I am selfish enough to tell you all about a book that's written primarily for me. But if anyone else likes it, that's super-great. After all I wouldn't consider publishing the darn thing if I didn't hold hope that others might dig on what I have to offer.

If I continue to write at my present pace, I might have the manuscript done in March, with the book on sale in April. That'd be cool. Or I might be completely wrong about that. If I put together everything I have right now into a single file, I'd probably already be very close to the 32 page minimum I set for myself, but I still have a long list of crap I'd like to go into the text.

In case anyone cares, I'm not using any OGL or secondary type license. Since I'm running Labyrinth Lord right now some of the results might be skewed toward that particular incarnation of the Game, but others of it will not be. For example, the section where I threw together six ready-to-go sages started life as me holding some dice and a copy of the 1st edition DMG open to page 32. Labyrinth Lord isn't going to tell you what to do with a neutral evil sage that casts druid spells.