I'm making pretty good progress on Saving Stone, the Game Night prequel, but it's growing a bit like topsy and I'm not going to have it finished as soon as I was planning. I don't want to take too long on it, because it's supposed to be just a fun diversion from the new novel, but I'm enjoying doing it, and I want to do it properly. So the current plan is to have it ready for release (in free PDF form) by the first part of December.

Now realising this left us with a bit of a problem for Dragonmeet, because we had been planning on producing a print version of the novella to sell there as a special, convention-only item. That's not now going to happen, but we will try to do it for Redemption, which is an SF con we're going to in February. And in the meantime, we've had another idea for something we can do for Dragonmeet: some Critical Miss compilation booklets.

These will be simple A5 folded booklets we can print ourselves, around 38 pages each, and priced pretty cheaply to reflect the fact that they contain content that is not only already published but freely available on the web. Each will contain a number of articles on a common theme, with a new piece at the end of each article where I explain a little about the history of the article and where it fitted into the Critical Miss Story.

An obvious question to ask about this is why publish on paper something that is already available on the web and that people have probably already read? Well aside from the fact that I'd like to think they make quite nice collectibles, the main motivation is that when we were trying to sell Game Night at Dragonmeet last year by telling people that I was the writer behind the "cult webzine Critical Miss", we found that about 19 out of 20 had never heard of it. So they won't have read it, and while we will make it clear that the content is available for free on the web, some of them might fancy snapping it up in paper form.

At the end of the day it's an experiment and we'll see how it goes. I'm certainly having fun revisiting text I wrote a decade ago.

I've already largely finished laying out the first of the booklets - Critical Miss Compilation I: The "How To" Guides. It contains six articles:

• GMing With Nothing.
• Hi You Guys Must Be The Party
• What You Guys Need Is A Lawyer!
• Ending Your Campaign
• Yeah, But... My Character Doesn't Give A Shit!
• Information Laundering 101

To follow will (provisionally) be Critical Miss Compilation II: Rants & Campaign Stories, Critical Miss Compilation III: Stuff (Equipment & Items) and Critical Miss Compilation IV: Free Games (which will come with a free card for Pimp: The Free Collectable Card Game).

Tags: critical miss compilations, saving stone