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Friday, December 12, 2000 Hello all. Not much progress to report since I last wrote. Frankly, I'm afraid I have too many pots simmering on the stove: I'm in the middle of the scene of Crimp I have to write, I have to do that revision of Corporate Anthropology still, and then there's Amra, Danny, another high fantasy idea I have.... not to mention crits of other peoples' stuff, getting Other Cities critted and submitted, and then there's that Clarion application... For a while it's exciting to keep opening things, but then it gets daunting. I need to let go of being so frenzied, and let myself explicitly leave some things to the side for now, kill off others (The King Who Ran Away is officially toast), and just sit down and get through the rest, one at a time. I'll let you know how it goes. I did edit the galleys for The Ant King. There were only two typos, but I sent a bunch of other niggling changes like cutting adverbs, and I did drop one joke which, on reflection, was lame. GVG was very tolerant of this last-minute fiddling. In other news: nope, no baby yet. Today was actually our birth due date if you go by the last-period reckoning system: the 15th is the due date by the more accurate ultrasound-based method. I've got my pager. ;-) The last company I worked at, Digital Addiction, the one where I got to build the coolest giant ray guns, has folded. The awesome game we created, Sanctum, has been transferred to a non-profit founded by some of the players. I was in on the founding, and am on their advisory board. This has been a very interesting process to watch -- we pulled this thing into existence in like a week, and I was astounded at how much work it took and how about ten guys in the U.S., Canada, Korea and Switzerland were able to come to quick consensus and take quick action on so many things (raising necessary cash, writing a charter, electing a board, divvying up offices, handling the technical details, figuring out how to explain it to the community of players...). It's cut into my writing time a bunch, but that's just during the initial spike of activity (or it had better be, anyway!). It's also been an object lesson in something I've been thinking about a lot -- postmodern gift economies (like Open Source communities -- which this resembles, though for technical and security reasons we can't open source the game ... not for a long while anyway). In the future universe I've been working on -- the one where my stories
A
Messy Divorce, Corporate Anthropology, the unfinished one tentatively
titled "swamp", and now The Trouble With Danny take place -- a reputation/gifting
economy and prestige-driven competitive voluntary associations have largely
replaced capitalism, at least on Earth in the the sprawling mega-society
called the Party, which covers most of Earth's physical area. Kind of like
Open Source for the physical world. So this real-life involvement with
starting just such an association should be enriching to that particular
story-vine which is creeping over the trellis of my cerebrum....
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