The writing team splits... :(

Hello, all.

Today I shoved a ton of writeups at Geoff through the email. It was not because he deserves it – he’s been doing a good job with the edits. However, he and his sweetie landed jobs in Japan, presumably teaching younger people the fine points of the gaijin’s tongue. I will have to ask. Meanwhile, between packing and visiting relatives, he has about a week left to do writing of any sort. Then we will bid him goodbye for a while, probably for a long while, until he gets settled in.

He must begin work on the first of September, or so I gathered, so there is not much time to do any work of an extensive nature on each writeup. Now, it is true that we have September and October to work with, but I am assuming it will take Jim Devlin and me at least three weeks to get the whole thing laid out correctly. Meanwhile Geoff will be busy at his new job, setting up house and all the myriad other things one must do when beginning life in a foreign country. I was assigned to Japan for five years, and it is daunting when you are a sailor. I cannot imagine what it must be like for a civilian.

I am deeply sorry to see him go. As many of you know, he is the other half of our writing team and brings the BattleTech universe to life in the writeups we produce. I have a very tenuous grasp of what is going on at the company level in BattleTech in the year 3063. Or any other year, for that matter. But he has the memory and resources, and so far he has brought the story to whatever he’s touched. I have the art, the basic designs and even the technical details, but it is Geoff who connects all that to the world of giant stompy robots.

Dammit.

Well, we will see what happens. He has all the vees nearly done, or so I think. I will go over my files tomorrow and check to make sure he’s had his chop. This is so important I don’t think words can quite convey what I mean. Here is an example from this very evening:

Geoff sent me the writeup for the Roland OmniTank and left a little blue note at the top near the traditional weapons listing. It asked, simply “Isn’t this supposed to be pod space?”

Well, let me tell you, the alarm bells went off right away. I have never personally built an Omni-anything with Heavy Metal Pro, but it occurred to me that while I was faithfully listing what Vlad had sent to me in design, none of the information was presented in the technical listings. At all. It appeared in the writeup, but that was it. I scrambled to assemble an OmniTank in HMP, and got the stats listed properly (and yes, it now says ‘Podspace’ at the beginning of the tank’s description).

Come to think of it, I have writeups for the Culverin OmniMech which probably suffer from the same thing. I will get on them tomorrow morning, after breakfast and laundry. And there is the Blackjack configuration, which is likely suffering from the same sort of neglect. I will get them all.

We are working on the Fox tank; the art required a shift of perspective to keep it visually clear.

I was going to talk a bit about the various tracking systems we have in place to make sure everything is done, and done correctly. You know, in case anyone else wants to attempt something like this. But this evening’s events kinda took the wind out of my sails. Better to fix the errors I *do* find than sit and list all the methods I use to track the corrections. I will probably get to that tomorrow. Or the next day.

Take care. Thanks for visiting.

Steve