It’s convenient that the last Tuesday of the month also happens to be the last day of the month so that this post falls on it’s usual day. I hope everyone had a happy holiday season and have fun and exciting plans for the new year.

As I did last year, I’m not going to do a big yearly retrospective and look forward. I’m going to keep this to the typical monthly perspective and save the year-long views for the anniversary post in May.

Looking Back

In November I predicted that December would be pretty hectic. It turned out to be even crazier that I expected. So much so that a few of my posts didn’t quite get up on time to be posted at their usual 8am Mountain Time schedule. I still managed to get them up on Tuesdays, but some were a little later in the day. I don’t know if anyone other than me even noticed.

The craziness also spilled over into my timeline posts on Twitter. There were a few days right around Christmas that I was just never really near a computer and I got way behind on making the posts. Next year I’ll have to remember the schedule those posts in advance instead of doing it the day of. Part of the problem there was that I had a block of days that I actually hadn’t made entries for yet and so not only did I have to post. I also had to create the entries as well. I’ve gotten a bit behind in that and need to take a day and get the next few months of the timeline sorted out. In getting caught up I found I missed a few entries for one of the threads so the summary post next week will actually contain a few entries that never went out on Twitter.

I finished up the UPF Assault Carrier this month although like everything else it took a bit longer than I expected. I had planned on it being the second post of the month but it ended up being the fourth.

In the meantime I posted another organization, Obar Enterprises, that I use in my games. This is a follow-on post like the Streel post I did a while back.

I also tried something new in the third post of the month by recording the prologue to my novel Discovery as an audiobook to play around with that format a bit. I got a really helpful review from someone on Facebook that gave me some ideas going forward. I had fun doing this so I’ll probably record more of the book in the future, especially if people would like to hear the rest.

Last month I mentioned that there were be a bunch of behind the scenes technical stuff going on with the websites that I’m hosting. I started that process this month moving this site and a couple of my smaller, low-traffic sites from my web hosting provider that I’m not completely happy with to my new server. Progress on this suffered due to the holiday activities but I was able to move one of each of the different types of sites I host (WordPress, Drupal, basic HTML) over to the new server so moving the remaining sites should go fairly smoothly. One of the advantages of moving is that these new versions of the sites will have HTTPS enabled instead of just HTTP.

The other behind the scenes effort that was going on was working on the next issue of the Frontier Explorer. I started strong but then fell behind due to the holidays so I’ll have to put in a bit of effort this next week to get caught up. With any luck, we’ll have the issue out by mid January.

Looking Forward

So what’s coming up in January? We’ll start next week with the usual Detailed Frontier Timeline post. The following week will be a post on the Sathar Assault Carrier. I started and finished that model on the 26th so it’s ready to go, I just need to write it up. I don’t know what the third post will be but I’ll likely do the write-up on another corporation. And we’ll end the month with the State of the Frontier post.

It is also possible that the third post may also be on a completely different topic. I’ve volunteered to host a month of the RPG Blog Carnival this year and while I don’t know what month I’m hosting, I’m going to make an effort to participate more in the topics of other hosts. My main issue in the past has been that a lot of topics have been either areas I don’t usually dabble in, or they’ve been topics completely unrelated to sci-fi games. I’ll by trying harder this year to twist the topics to sci-fi so we’ll see where that goes.

Along the way, I’ll be putting out another issue of the Frontier Explorer as I had just mentioned above. We release the Winter issue each January so that will be a prime focus this month.

I also plan on moving all of the remaining sites off of my remote hosting provider. I have four left, including my personal site, the Frontier Explorer site, and my New Frontier Games site. The fourth is a personal site for one of my sons. Once those are done, I’ll just have a few sites to migrate from my old server to the new one, although some of those will take some work and that probably won’t start until February. Or at least until this month’s Frontier Explorer issue is done and out the door.

Finally I’ve also started working on a UPF Minelayer miniature. This one is going to look a lot like the official Sathar Cutter miniature since that’s the silhouette on the game counter but it will have the stylings of the other UPF ships rather than the sathar stylings. Once that is done, I’ll have miniatures for all of the standard UPF and Sathar ships. From there I have a few more of the original miniatures to reproduce and then I’ll going to start on some new ships. I’ll probably finish the minelayer model this month but it may not be written up until February.

That’s it for now. Keep gaming and have a happy new year!