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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bloodstone Press" data-source="post: 1332257" data-attributes="member: 12468">Well, almost 20 of years gaming, Lots of good grades in English and literature classes, lots of amateur success in the short story field (mainly contests and assignments), and lots, and lots, and lots, of words on the page.  In high school, all I did was fill notebooks with stories and ideas, no matter what class I was in, biology, history, geometry, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t taking notes on the class, I was writing space adventures and Conan sequels. Throughout high school and college my teachers and professors always encouraged me to get published.  In the late 90s I ran a business selling T-shirts on the net where I basically blogged to add interesting content to the site. That gave me daily practice of writing for people—inadvertently writing for pay, since content is what drives people back to your site. Today I try to write 2,000-5,000 words a day, 7 days a week. Some say it’s a boring life, sitting here 12 hours a day or more, but hey, its what I’ve always done. It only seems natural to spend 12+ hours a day writing stories and games. The only difference now (with the internet and d20) is that I’m able to get paid for what I love to do.  Like you, I’ve been to business school. As I mentioned, I ran a T-shirt business online before d20 was born. I’ve since closed that business down so I could focus on game designing full time. I’ve been publishing games since 2001, but took a hiatus for about 9 months during 2002 while I went to work full time to build up my savings and restructure my publishing company.  I won’t really be comfortable with calling myself a game designer until I get one of my titles published in Print rather than PDF.   I wrote the Primal Codex in roughly 6 months. It is 120 pages long (roughly 80,000 words). But like I said, I write about 3,500 words a day, 7 days a week. Being my first d20 book, it actually took longer than it would have otherwise. Hell on Earth, my WWII supplement, was written in 4 months and I was working a full time job for 2 of those months.  It is roughly 60,000 words. Of curse, I don’t have anything to divide my time with either. No kids, no full time job (quite that I October), no meddling family members, no classes to take. There is nothing but me, a word processor, a web page editor, and a top-notch group of gamers, editors and artists to back me up. Like others have said, playtesting can take longer than the actual writing of the book. I can write 60+ new spells in a week, but it will take me several weeks to get it all play-tested. That’s one of the reasons I’m expanding as quickly as I can beyond game designing.  In fact, I am starting to think that game designing is actually harder that writing short stories. I used to think it was the other way around.</blockquote>

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