Cliffhangers

I heard once that motivation was bunk. That a whole bunch of motivational speakers who talked about how to be motivated for something---that they were wrong, it just didn't work. Or if it did, it wasn't really that effective. The key to doing something, the speaker said, was

Election's coming up soon. Soon meaning 72 days. Less than two months. And I've heard people from both sides saying that if the other guy wins America will be plunging into chaos and our country will be destroyed and yadda yadda yadda. Or you could think like I do, and think that this is just going to be another election, and life will go on. Because the 2016 election was also supposed to be, like, the finalizing election to determine the future of the country. And do you know what happened? The nation kept right on moving. However, during this election I really hope that

So many game ideas. Working with A Thousand Faces again. Newlands. History of the Church the Game (a co-op game where you try to move Church headquarters all the way to Utah before too much bad stuff goes down). The Magnificent Machine. A new one that uses colored dice to buy new cards that can do awesome things including affecting future dice and so forth. But, like, I only have so much time. And there are so many ideas. And I have to do school stuff too, and games take up so much time, especially creating them, that I think I will have to

My mother-in-law's birthday was this past week. 61 years old. Older than my own mother. Which I guess makes sense because I'm the eldest child in my family and Heather is the second youngest. You know, I've thought about that. Like, what if the oldest kid in a family (we'll name him Mark) has a kid when he's like 20 or something (we'll name Mark's daughter Julie), and then someone else elsewhere is the youngest kid in their family (we'll name him Ralphie), born like 18 years after Mark was born. So Mark and Ralphie are in the same generation, right? Like, their parents could have gone to school together in the same grade and everything. But Julie and Ralphie meet at BYU or something and they fall in love and since there's only 2 or 3 years difference between their ages it's totally cool, even though one is in a completely different generation than the other! And suddenly the whole generation thing isn't a step by step ladder into the past, it's messy and full of

School is still all online. Our district decided to not meet back up in person yet. And I'm like, hallelujah! Because I like online teaching. You get a ton more time to prep and make cool videos like this one:

Which is part of our Beowulf unit we are doing right now. And the students can go on any time they want and watch, to help them with their homework or quizzes or their huge Beowulf project that involves

I've already mentioned before that I have these story ideas but can't seem to get the motivation to start writing them. I heard once that motivation is bunk, that it's a lot harder to do something you don't want to if you allow yourself to talk yourself out of it. The trick is to just jump in and do it as soon as you think about it. The speaker called it the 5-second rule, that you have 5 seconds after you have a thought to do something (clean the dishes, write a letter, do homework, etc.) before your brain says, nah, here's some excuses. But if you just jump in without thinking too much to think yourself out of it, you can get tons of stuff done, all without worrying about the whole "motivation" thing. I've tried it before and it does actually work. 

Last election year, 2016, was kind of a lose-lose for me, because I didn't want Hillary or Donald to win. This year is kind of a won-win for me because even though I'm not going to vote for Trump, if he does win I'll be like, okay, good, we have a conservative in the White House who's pro-life and stuff. But if Biden wins at least we'll have a President who knows and acts on the fact that Climate Change is real and man-caused, and might actually do something to help save our planet rather than denying it like most conservatives do for some unknown reason. Plus other factors as well (one of the biggest being he's actually Presidential and won't be a complete embarrassment to our country).

I'm just going to have to set some time aside for making games, and maybe even work on just one at a time. Working on too many at the same time drains your resources (no pun intended) and energy and you aren't as effective at any one thing. That's the same reason why multi-tasking is ineffective.

Genealogy is cool because I can have a person that is seven generations back on one side of my family but only five or six on the other. This is where the term "once removed" comes from. For more cool facts, check out this generation chart found here: https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/cousin-chart/

My students' final Beowulf project comes in three parts, and each part has two assignments. However, they only have to do one assignment per part. So in all there are six assignments, but only have to do three. It gives them a bit of choice just in case one of the options sounds terrible to them. They have to 1: a) make a crossword puzzle, or b) make an album cover. 2: a) make a storyboard, or b) write their own song. 3: a) Choose already existing songs that match up with Beowulf and explain how, or b) write a character analysis on six different characters.

Next week off from school, baby coming soon

This next week I have off from school. Yay! Which means I will be taking time to clean the apartment and getting it ready for the new baby who is due November 10. Also, if you remember the situation with the new school not being ready for us to teach in, and me having to teach in the gym, well the new school is set to be finished this week. Then they will have four inspections, and the plan is to be ready to go by the Monday after the break. We'll see how that turns out. I had really high hopes, up until during an after school meeting with all the teachers when the administrators had a guy come in to encourage us that it would be done on time. After his talk I felt way less optimistic that it would be done. That's called irony: when an event occurs opposite of what you would expect. They expected it to make us more optimistic but instead it made me less optimistic. Dude, I don't know what we'll do if it's not ready by then.

Played my new game Dice Forge at clubs night a few weeks ago and with Heather twice yesterday. I won at clubs night by 5 points and Heather beat me once and I beat her once, by about 6 points and then about 20 points. It's a fun game.

Alex said he'd be interested in playing Pandemic Legacy with more of his brothers than just Eric, and I totally want to, but I have no idea when I'll be in Fallon next, much less for an extended period of time. This year was the year Heather, Henry and I would go to Fallon for Thanksgiving and Mesa for Christmas, but with the baby being born on November 10 we weren't planning on going anywhere for Thanksgiving.

The new baby is coming soon and Henry is very excited. He points at Heather's tummy and says, "Baby sister come out! Right now!" What a cute kid. He's going to be so good around her. Maybe a bit too friendly. We'll have to make sure he doesn't cuddle her too hard. Or try to feed her anything. Or anything like that.

Speaking of Henry, this last week Heather, Henry and I went to a farm place that had a corn maze and was selling pumpkins and had a whole bunch of fun stuff for families and kids. There was a little petting zoo area there that Henry loved, and we got a video. There was also this wide but short metal slide that you could go down into corn seed that Henry absolutely loved. When we got home he still had corn seed hiding in his clothes that we had to get out. I got a video of him playing with it later and singing to himself too.

So this next week I'll be cleaning up and getting the apartment ready for the baby, since I have the week off of work. My Grand Canyon University master's is going well. Hopefully my American Preparatory Academy building will be ready by next week. Speaking of my school, we're already getting ready for Winterim and we're sending in our Winterim proposals! I'm doing Game Design again obviously and I'm also going to offer the Psychology and Science one I did last year too, but now I'm calling it Psychology, Philosophy, and Science wince we talked a lot of philosophy last time, too. For a third class I was thinking about offering a Brandon Sanderson class, and we could talk about the Cosmere and create our own magic systems and the like. I might team up with another teacher who's actually good at writing to do that one though. We'll see.

Summer job, parties, Hero with A Thousand Faces

I got a Summer job working at Provo Parks and Recreation again, just like I did last year. I'm even under the same guys. This last Tuesday was my first day of work, and so far we've dug up some old roots from some cut down trees, fixed sprinkler systems, planted five new trees where the old ones used to stand (my favorite project thus far), pulled some weeds, trimmed some bushes near a jogging path, and unclogged a path near a river whose pump had gone out, flooding the walkway under the bridge up with about two feet of water. That was fun too, actually, we got to get this massive pump and siphon everything out back into the river, then scrape up the muck, then siphon some more, then actually got access to the malfunctioning pump, all while getting splashed occasionally by nasty stale water.

A few weeks ago (which I was going to post about but haven't posted in a while, sorry) was my wife's side of the family's family reunion. It took place up in Idaho, about a three hour drive. We got there around midnight because we left late because we were packing, and set up our awesome tent in the dark. The next day we had breakfast with everyone and I handed out name tags for people to fill out, and there were games for the kiddos. I was one of the stopwatch people for an obstacle course race that Heather participated in with her team and around six other teams. Her team didn't come in first, mainly because of this ridiculous station where you had to stand a few feet from a watermelon half and chuck CDs at it and you had to get them to stick. Super hard.

I played games with some of the cousin guys. We played two games that Heather got me for Father's Day. She got me Cover your A$$ets as well as Splendor. Cover your A$$ets is a really great party game, and was introduced to us by Ryan when he visited us with his girlfriend. Splendor though is now one of my all time favorite games. Heather and I alone have played so much Splendor these last few weeks due to the fact that it is simple, super quick to set up, and engaging and fun. I'll be bringing both games to the family reunion in August. So we played a lot of those during the reunion.

Three days before the Fourth of July was the Stadium of Fire. Heather and I have never been together, and I have never been. Heather's only gone once when she was working as security (they hire a whole bunch of students every year to do that). I didn't know any of the singers and only one song because it was all country and I'm not a big fan of country music, but what made up for the price of the ticket was we got to see Brian Reagan live! He did some jokes I knew and some I had never heard before, and some about talking jokes with fireworks exploding overhead that he made up on the spot. "I didn't expect to be doing jokes in between firework noises. Timing is hard enough in comedy; trying to do the set up, then hear a blast, and then hit a punch line. Was not expecting that. 'Why did the chicken cross the road? Pow! Pow! Pow! Ka-pow! Pow! To get--Pow! Pow! Pow! Ka-pow! Pow!--to the other side.' That's what I'm dealing with up here."

The fourth of July happened one week before I started work. Heather and I went to the parade and then went to the colonial fair to see a little musical they we putting on about how people throughout history protected liberties and freedom. It talked about not only our country of the United States of America, but also people like Joan of Arc. After the play we went home and napped and then we went to the fair they always have down town in Provo. Every year around the fourth of July they set up a few blocks on Center Street to set up booths and food vendors and there's even a little carnival that's set up, although we never go on the carnival rides because we're not sure we trust the safety of how well they're set up. We got a few things there and headed home to sleep. The day after the fourth (or before, or on it, I can't remember) we went to see hot air balloons go up, and it was so cool! We also went to the downtown place again, and went to the colonial fair.

Parade float

The musical

Gail Halvorsen, better known as the candy bomber, was a the play
the same time we were, so we snagged a picture of him to prove it.

A Thousand Faces: About a year and a half ago my brother Eric sent me this email:

"So in my dream I'm looking at the MTG card Manalith, like a monolith of mana, right, only I misread the card as "Monomyth." And I'm like, monomyth, what kind of card would that be? Is basically how this started out.

So I've got an idea for, probably a deckbuilder?, where cards represent individual characters or settings or whatever, and you arrange them as part of the Hero's Journey, and you get points for having sets, cards in a row and plots that make sense, and maybe for completeness?

It's not my only idea or even my favorite, but it's still an intriguing possibility, and wanted to know what you could make of it?"

I had an idea and then starting working on it, then dropped it, then starting working on it, then dropped it since then and now. I've recently picked it back up again and am getting pretty far into it; it's not quite what Eric envisioned (he had envisioned what I consider to be Elysium, so congrats Eric! Your game is already out there!) but my game is part Elysium, part 7 Wonders, part my own thing. I'm still tweaking it and trying to make it work the best that it can. If all goes according to my plan, this game should also be ready to bring to the reunion in August. fyi the Title "A Thousand Faces" comes from the title of Joseph Campbell's book "Hero with a Thousand Faces," which is where the Hero's Journey and Monomyth comes from.

And some pictures of Henry just because he's cute:

And tomorrow will mark one year since my first blog post! It's been a good year!

My meeting with Alan Bahr, professional game designer

This last week I was supposed to meet with Alan Bahr. Alan Bahr is a professional game designer, meaning that his entire job is literally games. Unlike most every other game designer, who also has a full time job to support themselves, Alan doesn't; games are his full time job.

Anyway, I say was supposed to meet him Wednesday because what happened was during that time that we were supposed to meet he was on an important conference call contacting the manufacturing plant in Hong Kong with the miniature designer trying to work out what type of plastic the miniatures were supposed to be in because the company got it wrong the first time. Alan tried to email me about this, but it got stuck in his outbox so I never got the message. I emailed him after waiting around for about an hour and he got back to me apologizing and wrestling for the next day.

So, Thursday was the day I actually met with him. We met at Chipotle and he bought me lunch, and we talked about his job and I told him how I loved making games. He asked me about money, about if he liked the idea what I had in mind for payment. I had previously thought about this a lot and said that I'd like some sort of precipitance from each sale. I did research and for larger companies the designer gets about 3-4%. He nodded and said that they'd probably pay a little more percentage that that.

He talked about how to get the game on the market if he liked it, since I was a first time designer. There were a couple of different things they've done in the past, one was the game also went through the hands of a more well-known game designer and he makes a few tweaks to it (with the permission of the original designer, Alan was sure to add) and then both of the names would go on the box, so that the famous designer's name on the box would help it sell. After eating I got out my copy of Somerset and showed it to him.

He asked if you played as a certain character, I said no. He said he was a little bias toward Arthurian themed games (which Somerset is). He looked through the rule book and nodded a few times. He then looked through the pieces and asked me questions about them. Like I had little houses which he thought would be used as settlements but I said that those went on the government track but in reality just the little circles would do, like they did for white.

He said there might be a lot there, and for the first printing we could cut the magic book and spells, because he felt that that was the most complex thing in it, but then that could be used for the first expansion. That way it not only got an expansion right off the bat but also the main game could come with less parts, making it cheaper, making it so that more people could buy it.

Alos for a selling point, his company owns Pendragon and he said that if they did buy it they might relabel it under the Pendragon franchise to help it sell more copies. (Kind of like how Lords of Waterdeep is under the Dungeons and Dragons franchise.) I said I was fine with that (because let's be real, as long as it gets published it really doesn't matter to me).

He said that he liked the idea. He asked me what set it apart from any other game out there. I said that it was a worker placement game where you don't juts get your workers back a the end of every round, but you actually have to care about where they're at in relation to the other actions and care about how they move.

He siad he didn't want to take my copy of the game, but he wanted to play it. He said, "I'm definitely interested and I definitely love the idea." What he wants me to do so that he can get a copy of it to play is to upload my files and such and create a game on the game crafter so that he can buy a copy of it so that he can play it. So my next step is putting Somerset together on the Game Crafter and making it avertible to buy, then sending Alan the link so that he can buy it, play it, and (hopefully) want to publish it.

But even in parting he said that if if he liked it and their company decided not to publish it he would recommend it to other game companies (because, you know, he those kinds of connections). I thanked him and he said no problem.

Anyway, that was our meeting. So I'd say that it went super duper well. I can't think of a realistic way it could have gone better. So thanks for all your prayers and thoughts everyone!

Games in, Plan of Salvation, pics of Henry

The Game Design games came in! They came in on Tuesday, and I spent a lot of Tuesday and Wednesday putting them together, and on Wednesday and Thursday the students picked them up. One thing: the boards for Outbreak are bigger than the boxes for Outbreak. Yep: The board size folded up into quads was still too big to fit into the box I got for the Outbreak game. I'd never gotten that size board before, so I didn't know. I had to literally cut the box, fold a side of it down, and do some fancy tape and cardboard work to it and the top to get the box to be just barely wide enough to fit its board.

Eric got himself a copy of Outbreak, which I will be sending him along with the copy of Somerset I spent a lot of Friday putting together. Friday was parent-teacher conferences instead of school, so when a parent wasn't talking with me and I was by myself in the classroom I starting putting together the Somerset games for Eric and Ryan and for Home. They should be in the mail Tuesday, if not Monday. Speaking of which, Eric and Ryan I need your address.

Normally the Outbreak game cost thirty-something dollars, but Eric's copy is free for him. Why? Because of the amazing artwork he did for my Plan of Salvation card game.
Here's the backs of the cards he did:

And the fronts:

And here are the rules I wrote up:

As many of you know, in a few weeks I'm going to pitch Somerset to a professional game designer in the hopes that it will be published (which is why I need you to play test it! to get out the flaws! I've already play tested it a ton and have gotten rid of many flaws, and am now in the nitty-gritty stage of things) so that's one game that will hopefully be published.

I recently e-mailed Phil, from Covenant Publishing, about this Plan of Salvation game, just like I did a year ago with my Golden Plates game. And, once again, he said yes and wants me to send in a prototype so that they can playtest it and hopefully even publish it. Yay!

So that's two games now that are in the process of getting published.

Okay, so my mom asked for pictures of Henry, and I didn't want to disappoint, so here's 14 of them:

Henry loves drawing! It's one of his favorite activities now.

He also likes to line up the magnet letters on the fridge, and can even recognize some of the letters!

Here's a baby bottom picture for one of his wedding slideshow photos:

Henry also likes getting into trouble eating what he's not supposed to, such as mommy's chocolates.

And making messes with his food. In this case, cheese! All over our living room.

Yay! Mommy taught him how to clean, and he had a blast cleaning the toilet and tub.

Henry's face is just precious here:

Life, the Universe, and Everything (LTUE) Conference

My wife's Valentine's gift to me this year was me going to the Life, the Universe, and Everything (LTUE) Conference last Saturday here in Provo! For those of you who do not know, LTUE is also known as the Marion K. "Doc" Smith Symposium on Science Fiction and Fantasy. So a bunch of fans of science fiction and fantasy come, a good majority of which are authors or artists that are established or want to break in.

According to the official website, "LTUE is a three-day academic symposium on all aspects of science fiction and fantasy. Comprised of panels, presentations and papers on writing, art, literature, film, gaming and other facets of speculative fiction, LTUE is a place to learn all about life, the universe, and everything else you love. The symposium is, most importantly, a gathering place for fans of our creative and innovative world to hang out and share their love of all things amazing, obscure, and even not-quite-real."

I was mostly there for the game aspect of it. When I first got there, they were doing a demo of a three-dimensional Oculus Rift kind of thing, only it wasn't the Oculus Rift, it was something that the guy had made himself, I think. Anyway, I got to try it out. Here are some pictures of the guy before me doing a 3-D sculpture modeling program on it, making a dude in 3-D. We could see on the computer screen what he was seeing in 2 dimensions, but when I put on the goggle thing it was totally in 3-D and looked way cool.

Okay, so here are some pictures of the game I played, where you had a grappling hook on each hand and were free to explore the environment. You could grapple and pull yourself toward pretty much everything if you were in range of it. The guy after me, Bryant, used his hooks to pull himself along rather than just walking. Below are some pictures of the game as well as Bryant playing it.

After that Bryant and I pretty much hung out together for most of the day. He is 15 and from Logan. After the virtual reality demo we went down and looked at a whole bunch of booths set up. Below is a picture of him checking out some cool leatherwork stuff. He eventually bought one of those leather book covers and a leather pouch.

Some cool leather journals that had designs/artwork o the covers.

Lots of books for sale. The ones pictured below are old used ones but there were several authors there selling their sci-fi/fanstasy books. Brandon Sanderson wasn't there though. Mos of the authors are people you've never heard of.

There was tons of amazing artwork. Most everything was for sale. Below is just a sampling of the stuff that was there. Cool science fiction scenes and fantasy scenes.

These things are made out of folded paper. How cool is that? The detail is amazing. They were selling for a lot of money, like $250 or so.

A booth had some Dr. Who fans who do art. Below are a couple Dr. Who posters which I loved. The one on the right actually has a little key that tells you what episode and which item every picture is from. Te key is not pictured here.

The first workshop I went to had John D. Payne talking to us. e is one of the authors of the Star Trek Beyond movie and is currently working on the script for the fourth Star Trek movie. He talked to us about script writing and pitching ideas and working in Hollywood and his story about how he got to Hollywood and some stories of him working with J. J. Abrams. I snapped a picture of him at the end as proof that I met him.

Later Bryant and I played Somerset and he gave me some ideas. We played one full game and I gained a lot of insight from it adn had some design changes and rule changes.

The Game Room is where I spent most of my time. I even played an hour and a half of Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. I was given a character sheet so I didn't have to make one from scratch. It's an interesting game: it's more of a story-telling kind of thing as opposed to a board game kind of thing, where the main game master tells you this story and you make decisions and interact in that environment. So I guess that now that I've played it I can be considered a total nerd now?

Okay, so that best part of the whole day: there was a workshop on game design from start to finish and the guy teaching it is Alan Bahr. He is a full-time game designer, meaning that designing and playing game sis his entire job and how he makes a living. Jealous. Anyway, at the end of the presentation is a question and answer session and I ask him a few questions about getting your game published by a company if you don't want to go the self-funded route. He said that sometimes people give him pitches of games and he talked about pitching your game to companies and that whole process. So at the end of the workshop when everyone's leaving I go up and I ask him if I could pitch my game idea to him. He laughed and said that he was far too busy and important to take ideas from unproven pipsqueaks like me and that he had better things to do.

Nah, I'm just kidding, he said that he's love to hear my pitch and gave me his business card and personal e-mail so that I could get a hold of him in about a month when he wasn't so busy. He asked if I was local and I said yes, I lived in Provo, and he lives in Lehi so he said he could meet me halfway so that I could pitch my idea to him. I'm so excited. And nervous. The good news is he says he's a big fan of Arthurian lore and games around that concept, and the game I'm pitching to him is Somerset, so that's awesome. I've been playing a game every day now since then (except for Sundays) trying to get it in tip-top shape. I've already made some drastic changes to make to flow better and be more fun. Right now I think I've got it pretty much down, but it could definitely use more polishing. If your'e Alex and Hannah and mom and dad, expect to see a copy coming in the mail so that you can play it. If you're Eric and Ryan, expect to see a copy in the mail coming with a copy of Outbreak so that you can play it and give me feedback. So here's a picture of me at the end of the day, excited that I finally get to pitch my idea to a game design professional.

Later that day I also went to a couple of writing classes, one on apocalypse and dystopia and the differences in young adult and adult science fiction, and one on H. P. Lovecraft. I also ran into my cousin Calista! I should have known she would be there, she's a writer, but it didn't even cross my mind until I ran into her. Well, she ran into me. But it was still cool.