Seasons Greetings!

...and that's about it.

Sorry, but really don't expect too much out of me the next...oh, 2 to 3 weeks. I've got in-laws flying in on Wednesday, more in-laws on Friday, my own folks sometime next week, a couple Yule-time parties...oh, yeah, and several dozen Christmas cards to mail out.

This is when I'm not cleaning, shopping, wrapping, and RE-wrapping gifts (the beagles ate a perfectly gift-wrapped box for my mother's boyfriend sometime this afternoon...I don't know how they can smell socks through so much paper and cardboard, but they picked the one thing that was "fun to play with"). Ugh.

Oh, yeah...and I was sick the last two days...as in laid up in bed, sleeping for 20 hours at a time and not even opening the ol' laptop. I did manage to knock out the cold (thank goodness...I've got too many friends and relatives showing up in the next 48 hours!), and I did manage to read the entirety of Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn (what a great, great novel). But that's about it.

However, progress has been made on the B/X Companion with multiple chapters now completed: 3, 5, 6, and 7 are all complete, Chapter 2 needs charts (they're getting easier and 5 and 7) and Chapters 4 and 8 just need a bit of organization (I've already got 4 or so pages written for 8).

It's going to be close on the page count. I really don't want to edit (i.e. "cut") anything already in the chapters, but things are super-tight. I'm either going to need to skimp on the DM section, shave the introduction to 1 page, and bring Chapter 4 in under 3 pages...or I'm going to have to cheat the margins out and cut a few pages of art. But I'd rather not do the latter.

Ahh, well. I'd hoped the thing would be done by Christmas, but the only way that would happen is if I completely blew off my day job in favor of working on this thing (unlike Mr. Raggi, I am not state-subsidized). Maybe, just maybe I'll have the prototype done by New Year.

...'course I still need to get the artwork. I should probably set up some sort of email account for the folks that want to submit stuff. Hmmm...