The Home Stretch
In just six days we'll be locking in the final layout, including all text and images, for XDM: X-treme Dungeon Mastery. In about ninety minutes Tracy and Curtis Hickman will be coming over to discuss the run-up to final layout with Sandra and I. Hopefully they're happy with the obligatory bit of self-referential humor I cranked out on Thursday. 
There is still a lot of work to be done. I have around thirty pictures left to draw, and half of them are fairly complicated technical illustrations. The editor we've hired, Stacy Whitman, is only about halfway through the book, and her red pen is a barbarian broadsword carving a bloody swath across the battlefield. And Sandra, bless her heart, still has to get all those pictures and all those bloody edits into the layout. But it's working. It's a crushing workload for us all, but we're pulling it off. I've drawn over eighty pictures so far, and there is a very solid-looking draft of the complete book laid out already. It won't be the same book it would have been if I'd had an extra three months, but I'm not the same person I would have been if I hadn't had to work this hard and this fast to get the project complete. And it WILL be complete on time.