This post should have gone up a couple of days ago but I was completely swamped over the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s a pretty busy weekend at our house with my wife running a half marathon, Thanksgiving dinner, Black Friday Christmas shopping, and buying and decorating our Christmas tree. Along with all the regular weekend stuff like grocery shopping and laundry that had to be done. There wasn’t much free time to get the blog post up. But the craziness is behind us so let’s get to it.
Looking Back
The month started with the regular Detailed Frontier Timeline post, the next of which will come tomorrow. After that I finished up the Module Based Campaign thread and wrapped up that series covering all the Knight Hawks modules. I have to admit, it feels good to wrap up a series like that.
The last two posts of the month were the UPF Battleship and Heavy Cruiser models. I’ll admit I didn’t expect to get the Heavy Cruiser done last month but it took considerably less time than I expected to create the model and so the post was ready before the end of the month.
There were some other things going on behind the scenes last month as well. First, I’ve been having some issues with my web hosting provider and made the decision to bring all my web hosting back to my home server for the time being. That said, the computer I’m using as my home server is an old laptop that is about six years old and showing its age. To that end, I used some of the Patreon money from both my Expanding Frontier Patreon and the Frontier Explorer Patreon and purchased a new computer system to serve as a new server for my websites. That computer arrived this month and I’ve been getting it configured and set up. A big Thank You to all the Patreon supporters that made this possible.
The second thing that happened was that, given November is National Novel Writing Month, I decided to participate in a reduced #NaNoWriMo challenge. The normal event is to write 50,000 words on a new project. I knew that I didn’t have time for that, so rather than do the full challenge, I set myself a goal of writing for at least 15 minutes each day working on my Star Frontiers novel. The other part of my goal was to complete at least 10,000 words by the end of the month. And also posting my daily progress on Twitter.
I ended up not writing anything the last three days of the month (see the intro paragraph about how crazy those days were). Despite that, I more than met my word count goal with a total of 12,751 words written this month bringing the total word count of the novel up to 70,243 words. I figure the story is a little more than a quarter of the way finished so expect somewhere between 200k to 250k words when the rough draft is finished. If I had been able to write those last three days, I would have most likely had just over 14,000 words based on my writing rate through the month. Despite not getting to write the last three days, I think this was a success.
Finally, I started putting my miniature model files on-line on DriveThruRPG where people can download them if they want copies. I created a 3D Models product page in my New Frontier Games account where they are being made available. I haven’t quite gotten all the models I’ve created up yet but most of them are there. All future models will appear there as well. The model files that are recreations of the old TSR miniatures are listed as free, pay-what-you-want products while the new models that I’ve created myself will typically have a price of $0.99 or $1.99.
Looking Forward
Going forward, at least for the next few months, there are going to be some changes to my postings here on the blog. I’m going to try to get a post up every week but that may not happen. I’ve been going strong for a year and a half and I don’t want to break the streak, but if I do, you’ll know why.
The main change in posting is going to occur because I’m going to be spending a lot of time working on the websites that I maintain. And there are quite a number of them. Besides this site, I also maintain the Frontier Explorer website, starfrontiers.info, starfrontiers.us, and the Star Frontiersman website. Plus a website for New Frontier Games, an old blog (Programming Space), a website for a OSR gaming magazine that hasn’t launched yet, and personal websites for myself (I’d link to that one but see below) and two of my kids.
Initially all of these sites will just be moved over to my new server. With more memory, (much) faster disks, and a (much) faster CPU, you might even see a performance improvement. For the most part, those migrations should be seamless. There will be a bit of downtime but it should be small. Once I have them all up and running as is, I intend to start making some much needed updates and improvements to many of the sites.
You shouldn’t see any major changes to this site. I’m happy with its current design and so don’t have any major plans for it. The one thing I will be doing is enabling HTTPS and installing SSL certificates on the site to allow that. That’s one of the things I’ll be learning how to set up in the next month or so. That will be happening across all my sites.
The starfrontiers.us site is going to get a major overhaul. It is still the same site written by Bill Logan back in 2006/2007 and needs some major updating. That is going to consume the majority of my spare time over the next few months as I work on it. There will also be some updates to the Frontier Explorer site to make it more mobile-friendly. I’m also going to overhaul my personal site. It’s currently configured as a blog but since I have this one, I want to make it more of a profile site that links to all the various projects I have going instead. The other sites will be much lower priority.
In addition to the website work, I also have an editing job coming down the pipe for a FrontierSpace adventure, and a job doing the index for a new RPG coming from DWD Studios. Plus I’m hoping to continue my novel writing. And it’s time to start working on the next issue of the Frontier Explorer. As you can see, I’ve got a lot going on.
What this means is that I may not have as much time for specific blog posts. Here’s what I see happening for the next few months.
The Detailed Frontier Timeline posts will continue, both here at the first of the month, and daily on the Star Frontiers Twitter feed. I’m continuing to work on that project and intend to keep it going for a long time to come.
I’m really enjoying the modeling and miniature creation. (I think I’ve mentioned that in the past). As such, that is going to be a major part of this blog going forward, at least for the foreseeable future. I’m currently working on the UPF Assault Carrier and that will get posted in December. After that, you can expect to see the sathar assault carrier, a new UPF minelayer, and then recreations of the pirate assault scout, the freighter from the Federations Ships box, and finally recreations of the six ships from the Privateers box. That should keep me busy for a while and those will probably be released one a month for a while. I don’t think I’ll get to them any faster than that. And after that, I have ideas for a whole bunch of more ships.
This State of the Frontier post will probably become the regular last Tuesday post of the month for a while instead of just being an extra post the last day of the month. In it, I’ll update you on progress on the website updates, Frontier Explorer status, and any other projects that haven’t reached completion but which I’ve been working on. It really won’t change much, just go from an extra post to a regular one. Although if I do still have a lot to write about, I’ll bump it back to its extra post status to give you more content.
That leaves me with one or two other posts each month to keep the one-a-week schedule, depending on the way the days fall in the months to come (Dec and Mar have 5 Tuesdays, Jan and Feb have 4). I don’t know what I’m going to fill those with, although I’m leaning toward fleshing out more corporations like I did with Streel a while back. If people are interested, I could also post excerpts from the novel, although most of that is really rough and subject to great change when I get to editing in the future. The other thing that might end up here is bits of a new adventure I’m planning on starting (I know I need to finish the ones I’ve already started so they may show up as well). I hope to go to a con next year and run some Star Frontiers games and need to develop the adventures for those. I’m open to suggestions here for content. If there is something you’d like to see more of, please let me know.
That’s it for now. There is a lot coming up in the next few months so I’d better get to work. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions in the space below.