Sentinels of the Multiverse: Rook City - How to Kick More Ass in 10 Easy Questions!

Last August, I had the exciting opportunity to play and review Greater Than Game's first published card game: Sentinels of the Multiverse, a non-collectible, cooperative card game based in a vibrant comic book universe. Sentinels of the Multiverse is fun, has awesome pacing, and really captures the feel of the superhero genre.

Now, hot on the heels of the Sentinels release, Greater Than Games is offering the next installment in the Sentinels' story: Sentinels of the Multiverse: Rook City. Rook City comes packaged with new villains, new heroes, and new locations themed around the gritty, urban, Rook City.

As Rook City is entering the last week of its Kickstarter Campaign, Design Director Christopher Badell agreed to an interview with www.nerdbloggers.com about his project - and dispatches our crafty questions with true superhuman skill.

What is Rook City? What secrets are hiding under its urban exterior? And what happens when we play a game of "What If"? Stay tuned for the answers to these, and more exiting questions, starting NOW!

Nerdbloggers: First of all, can you tell me a little about yourself, and your background? I'm always interested to learn about the people who make the games we play.

Christopher Badell: Christopher was born on a dark and stormy night in a dingy hospital in Venezuela . . . oh, that's probably not the sort of information you're looking for.  Well, I have a pretty lengthy background in all the things that led to this game working.  I'm a writer with a history of teaching and tutoring, a game player with a love for cooperative games (obviously), a teacher and storyteller (which is why a strong narrative is so important to Sentinels of the Multiverse), and a fan of comic books.  Now, to be fair, our primary comic guru is Adam Rebottaro, the artist of Sentinels of the Multiverse.  He knows more about comic books than anyone I've ever met, and his knowledge of and love for the medium really led right into this being possible.  Greater Than Games, LLC, is just the three of us, Adam, Paul, and myself, and we're all well suited to making this happen.  I mean, this would never have been a company at all if it wasn't for Paul's business smarts and ability to make things happen.  I'm lucky to be working with such talented people. 

Nerdbloggers: I reviewed Sentinels of the Multiverse during it's initial release, and I was really impressed by the detail and care put into the characters, environment, and gameplay. Sentinels was very successful at portraying unique characters that each played very differently, and it also delivered  a roller coaster ride of interaction between the heroes and the villains. With Sentinels' first expansion, Rook City, how is Greater Than Games planning on enhancing this cinema-like experience?

Christopher Badell: A big part of the way Rook City fits in with the world of Sentinels of the Multiverse is the theme.  Every expansion we have planned has a very specific theme, so we're not just adding more characters and challenges to the game; we're expanding the “Multiverse” experience, as well.  Rook City's gritty, urban theme shows up in all of the characters and settings, and really sets a definite feel to new games.

The two new Heroes, Mr. Fixer and Expatriette, have some exciting new mechanics and card interactions, and there's a lot to discover there, both in terms of how their decks work and how they interact with other heroes. 

The villains are just awful.  They don't have the vast “world domination” plans that the villains from Sentinels of the Multiverse do, but they are very powerful and have terrible goals.  Also, they bring lots of new villain mechanics and flip abilities to the table, so each of the four new villains is an entirely new game.

Nerdbloggers: I noticed in the original games, there were villains who had a hero nemeses that was not included with the base game. In Rook City, are we going to meet some of these heroes?

Christopher Badell: Absolutely!  We've been keeping that information secret, but I'll go ahead and lay it all out now.  Citizen Dawn's nemesis is in this set – it's her daughter, in fact!  Expatriette!  Several clever fans already picked up on that, so it's good to finally officially reveal that.  Additionally, the Rook City villain The Matriarch is the nemesis of Tachyon, and Spite is The Wraith's nemesis.  The Chairman and Mr. Fixer are nemeses, so that just leaves Plague Rat from Rook City and Omnitron from the Sentinels of the Multiverse Core game.  Their nemeses will certainly be in a future expansion.  In fact, we have many exciting plans for both of them!

Nerdbloggers: Can you divulge some details about the backstory, and abilities of the new cards, and do you have any personal favorites?

Christopher Badell: Hmmm, there is a lot that we still have yet to release, so I don't want to say too much.  However, I will say there is a ton of background information on the updates to the Rook City Kickstarter here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1787899968/sentinels-of-the-multiverse-rook-city-expansion/posts

Also, in terms of new card abilities, look forward to being able to deal irreducible damage, and for certain villain cards which cannot be destroyed, changing game play permanently when they are played.  Also, there is one villain in particular who can play through their entire villain deck in just a few rounds.  It's terrifying. 

As for favorites?  That's tough.  It's like trying to pick a favorite child!  So, don't tell the others, but Spite's deck is probably my favorite of the new villains.  Shhh!

Nerdbloggers: In my review of Sentinels of the Multiverse, I had erroneously mentioned that the different environments and villains didn't appear to share a common "universe". Since the release of Sentinels, I've come to understand that there is actually a very rich backstory behind Sentinels of the Multiverse. Would you mind giving a general overview of the sentinels universe, and how rook city fits into the bigger story?

Christopher Badell: Yikes!  That's a tall order!  Well,  The primary hero team that drives the Sentinels of the Multiverse story is the Freedom Five, made up of Legacy, Bunker, Tachyon, The Wraith, and Absolute Zero.  They fight crime!  Baron Blade and Legacy have been nemesis forever, really, as Baron Blade's father and Legacy's father (who was also Legacy!) were nemesis back around World War II.  So Baron Blade is the primary Freedom Five villain.  However, Citizen Dawn's “Citizens of the Sun” cause a lot of problems for the heroes as well.  So much that they have to occasionally recruit help from outside the Freedom Five, which is where you start seeing appearances of other heroes like Ra, Fanatic, and Haka.  Tempest first shows up as a precursor to Grand Warlord Voss's troops assaulting the planet, and it's only with Tempest's help that the Freedom Five are able to save the world from Voss's alien hordes.  Baron Blade constantly shows up, regardless of how many times he is “defeated”, and his big story arc, called “Moonfall”, is where he attempts to pull the Moon into the Earth using his TerraLunar Impulsion Beam.  Right after that story arc is Citizen Dawn's big push to take over the world, and that arc is named “Sunrise”.  See what I did there?  At some point in all this, Omnitron gains sentience and decides to stomp all the humans, and The Visionary shows up from her future to attempt to stop the current timeline from becoming the world she lived through in her book “New Memories”.  And that's just a brief look at the stories of these characters!  Whew!
As for Rook City, it's the hometown of The Wraith, so much of her solo crime fighting takes place there.  Unfortunately, crime seems to just attract more crime, and sometimes the villains in Rook City become a large enough problem that The Wraith calls in her teammates, or possibly other heroes she's met in her adventures.  As mentioned before, the villains in Rook City aren't trying to take over the world, but their plans are no less terrible, and they must be stopped!

Nerdbloggers: The basic rules for Sentinels were very simple, with the interesting game interactions delivered through the text on the cards themselves. Will Rook City see any changes to the basic rules?

Christopher Badell: Nope!  The basic rules will stay the same, because that's the core of Sentinels of the Multiverse!  As a player, you play a card, use a power, and draw a card.  On the villain turns and the environment turns, you put the top card of the appropriate deck into play.  Follow all instructions.  However!  Rook City does introduce some new interactions, and all of the villains have unique flip abilities, so there is still plenty of new stuff to keep the game interesting.

Nerdbloggers: Greater Than Games self funded Sentinels of the Multiverse, but Rook City is being offered as a Kickstarter project. Now that you have gone down both routes, what benefits does Kickstarter give you as a developer, and a publisher.

Christopher Badell: The most useful part about Kickstarter for us was finding out what sort of demand there was for a Sentinels of the Multiverse expansion.  And with the fast and overwhelming response we had, we know – there is absolutely a demand.  So, that was probably the best part.  People are excited that we've raised so much money, and we are as well, but the thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of that money is presales of the expansion, so while Kickstarter does give us the ability to offset the costs of printing the game due to those presales, Rook City will need to be strong enough to continue making sales in order to keep generating revenue for future expansions and other games we're also working on.

We have had such a great response from the gaming community with the Rook City Kickstarter that it is likely we will use Kickstarter again in the future to fund the printing of future projects.

Nerdbloggers: Rook City has already met it's funding goals, so it's definitely being published, but there are some pretty interesting stretch goals that have been announced (and some intriguing teases for some that haven't been). Could you tell us a bit about the rewards for these goals?

Christopher Badell: At the time of this interview, we are VERY CLOSE to the $25k reward level, which will send every backer some exciting Rook City art prints.  We love art prints, because it gives us a chance to showcase Adam's fantastic art in a size larger than a couple inches on a card.  We already broke the 20k level, which was the big one for most fans, as it means we'll be sending out HP and Damage-Modifier Tracking Cards to all our backers.  That was a big deal for us, because it was asked for by the Sentinels community, and we love having the opportunity to make something that people want.  Moving forward, there are three big levels left: 30k, 40k, and 50k.  The 30k levels is possible, but I'm not holding my breath.  We've already come so far, and we've certainly seen a decline in pledges since hitting 20k.  However, at the 30k level, we print up some awesome Rook City t-shirts and send those to all the backers who are getting the game.  At the 40k level, we have an awesome alternate version of Baron Blade, though it looks like we probably won't hit that level.  But we still have exciting plans for him!

Nerdbloggers: Okay, Last Question! The Wraith and Legacy get into a fight. Who would win?

Christopher Badell: Ooh, that's tough.  First off, which Legacy?  I'm assuming standard Legacy, not his daughter (or his father!) so we have to get past the point of him being unwilling to attack The Wraith, due to their camaraderie and that she's a fellow hero.  Hmmm, so, Legacy believes, due to a mind-affecting beam deployed by Baron Blade, that The Wraith is in fact an imposter who has taken her place!  He fights with all of his power to defeat her, knowing that only in defeating this vile doppelganger can he save his friend, The Wraith, from her imprisonment!  The Wraith has been affected by the same mind-beam and believe that killing this false-Legacy before her will save the world!  Their fight goes for hours, Legacy flying through stone walls in his hunt for the evil Wraith, while she uses all her skills and gadget to not only evade him, but set up a devious trap for her super-powered foe.  However!  Just as Legacy tears through a steel plated floor to find The Wraith, moments before she is able to spring the trap, which would drop Legacy into a vat of flesh dissolving nerve-agent, Tachyon appears between the two heroes holding some odd device.  In half the blink of an eye, Tachyon dons dark sunglasses and quips, “Deal with it” as the device she carries emits a blinding flash.  Both Legacy and The Wraith are stunned momentarily, then realize their error!  This was Baron Blade's dastardly plan the entire time!  Resolved, the three heroes turn their attentions to the now fleeing mad scientist, once again united to defeat evil and stand for justice!

Nerdbloggers: Thanks so much for taking the time out to answer our questions! 

Christopher Badell: Thanks for asking them!  Keep on saving the Multiverse!

Check out the Sentinels of the Multiverse: Rook City Kickstarter page to support Greater Than Games, and pick up a copy of Rook City for yourself. If you haven't already picked up the base game, there are plenty of great packages in the Kickstarter page that include both the base game and the expansion, and an awful lot of really cool kickstarter rewards.

Nightfall: Blood Country - A Board Game Review

Nightfall: Blood Country is an expansion to the supernatural themed deck building game Nightfall. Designed by David Gregg, and published by Alderac Entertainment Group, Nightfall is a deck building game that encourages direct confrontation between players, and rewards the building of card combos through the use of its unique “chaining” mechanism which uses color matching to bring new cards into play. I really enjoyed Nightfall, and its stand-alone expansion Nightfall: Martial Law, and I was very excited to give Nightfall: Blood Country some table time.

While the previous expansion, Nightfall: Martial Law had all of the components to play as a stand-alone game, Nightfall: Blood Country is an expansion in the strictest sense, and requires one of the previous Nightfall incarnations to play. Since I have previously reviewed both Nightfall and Nightfall: Martial Law, I am not going to write an in-depth description of gameplay. If you aren’t familiar with Nightfall, my review of the base game gives an introduction to gameplay.

Components:

The biggest difference between the components in Nightfall: Blood Country and the other Nightfall games is the box. The colorfully illustrated box has a small footprint, at around 6” x 4” x 3”, much smaller than the full-sized boxes of its predecessors. The previous games in the series are already built to hold expansions in them, so Nightfall: Blood Country's small footprint is very economical. Some people may be tempted to put the cards from this new expansion into the original Nightfall box, and simply discard the expansion box, but there is a compelling reason to keep the smaller box around. Even with its diminutive dimensions, the expansion box still has plenty of room for more cards, and it comes with the same foam spacers and divider cards as the original game. In fact, Nightfall: Blood Country even comes with dividers for wound cards, and the starting player decks, making it an excellent portable solution for when you want to take Nightfall with you without the hassle of lugging around a big box.  I haven’t yet checked to see if all of the original Nightfall cards and Nightfall: Blood Country cards will fit into the expansion box together, but there is definitely enough room in there to pack a wide variety of cards, making it perfect for travel.

The expansion also forgoes a full-fledged rulebook, opting instead for a single folded sheet that describes new rules, presents a small FAQ, and adds some new game fiction. The majority of the text is devoted to game fiction; a fiction that moves the action to Canute, Oklahoma.

The Game:

Nightfall: Blood Country doesn’t really add much to the core game mechanics; there has been a change to the original drafting rules that call for the random public archives to be selected and revealed before drafting starts. This small change is actually very effective in making the drafting process much more strategic, due to the fact that players now have a frame of reference when drafting cards. In the older drafting rules, the random cards were just that: random. Now, the random cards can better mesh with the rest of the selections.

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Doctor Who: The Movie--let the gnashing of teeth begin

The first thing I saw when I got up this moring was an exchange of fearful messages from some online friends based on the news that "Hollywood" would be tackling a Doctor Who film franchise led by director David Yates.  If you haven't seen the original article from Variety, click here (it pops) to get caught up.  A good deal of the fear about the film will come from the fact that it isn't being made in Britain, but given that everyone involved at the moment from Yates to BBC Worldwide are British, I doubt we are going to get an Americanized version of the Who story.  Nobody wants that.  Of course, I reserve the right to change my opinion when they cast Will Smith as The Doctor.  

That said, I'll be watching the production closely as it moves forward.  My big fear is that the franchise is due for a failure.  Russel T. Davies did such a brilliant job re-imagining the mythology and Moffat has followed up with darker and even more brilliant stories that hearing Yates say that the film would be a whole new re-imagining of the property doesn't feel me with confidence.  It is hard to imagine that Yates has the passion for the character that Davies and Moffat have exhibited.  Throughout the run of the current show, fans have been able to remain confident that The Doctor was in good hands.  Now, we have to wait and see.  

What really interests me, being the nerd I am, is whether the Doctor from the film franchise will count as one of The Doctor's twelve regenerations or, like Peter Cushing, he will be relegated to an alternate reality separate from the television series.  I'm sure it will be the latter but one could hope for further exploration of the Time Lord mythology.

So, what do you think about the proposed film series?  

D-Day Dice Kickstarter - an Interview with the Designer.

I have been keeping tabs on a few of the new board game projects utilizing Kickstarter as a platform to springboard publication. One such title is D-Day Dice, designed by Emmanuel Aquin, and scheduled for publication by Valley Games. The D-Day Dice Kickstarter hit the ground running with incredible momentum, achieving its target funding within 24 hours - but there are still a lot of great goodies to be unlocked within the next few weeks if the stretch goals are reached.

D-Day Dice is a dice based multi-player co-op WWII themed game focused around the organization of resources at hand to build and direct a unit of Allied forces against a German machine gun nest. In it's simultaneous play model, players must effectively manage the resources that are rolled on the dice, and work together to choose how best to utilize their resources.

Game designer Emmanuel Aquin was kind enough to speak with us a bit about himself, his game, and the design process of D-Day Dice. More information about the game can be found on it's Kickstarter page at: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1325766284/d-day-dice-board-game

 Nerdbloggers:

Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk to us! First of all, can you tell us a little about yourself? You have a very interesting background that may resonate with a good number of our readers.

Emmanuel Aquin:

I'm a little French-Canadian with a very uninteresting background. The only thing of interest is that my father, Hubert Aquin, was a very well-known Quebec novelist and intellectual.

I have been all over the place, so focus may not be my best quality. I started as a novelist (wrote my first published novel when I was 20), then I went on publishing 3 more novels until 1995 (when I was 27). These are all "serious" novels -- in French, no less :-). Then, needing a change of pace, I went on publishing a couple of absurd sci-fi novels, in the vein of Alice in Wonderland and the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I also did some illustrations for school books (I wanted to be a comic-book artist when I was younger).

Then I was convinced by my then-girlfriend to start my own publishing house. So I became an editor (I was an assistant-editor before), layout artist, graphic designer and illustrator. I also created an erotic collection, in which I published 4 erotic books. These were very tongue-in-cheek (ouch!) and done in the spirit of the Oulipo French movement of the late 50s (like George Perec and Raymond Queneau, for those of you with checklists). It sounds artsy-fartsy, said like that, but it was mainly books that used sex as a pretext to have fun. 2 of them were "Choose Your Own Patch" novels where you played a sex secret agent who was a Viking in the sack but the stupidest man to walk the Earth, sent on idiotic missions against sexed-up villainesses. Artsy stuff, I tell you.

Then I grew bored of being poor all the time, so I became a TV writer, working mainly on kid shows and teenage sitcoms. I'm still in that phase as of this writing.

Nerdbloggers:

That's quite an interesting background! It sounds like you've been busy, yet still managed to find the time to design a game as well. Can you give a quick description of the components and gameplay found in D-Day Dice?

Emmanuel Aquin:

No, not really.

Well, OK. D-Day Dice takes place, wait for it... in Normandy, on D-Day. You are a soldier tasked with taking out a machine-gun nest that's killing all your friends. Every player has a set of 6 dice (2 red, 2 white and 2 blue), which he will roll each turn to accumulate soldiers, items, courage and stars. These resources accumulate from turn to turn, so you need to plan ahead. The action takes place on a "battle map", divided into sectors. You start at the bottom, at the waterline, and must take out the bunker that sits at the top of the map, On the way, with the help of your dice, you will find soldiers to join your unit, stars to recruit specialists and items that were dropped by dead soldiers. And you need courage to be able to advance toward the bunker.

Gameplay is simultaneous, so no downtime, and cooperative: the players win together or lose together. So they need to trade and share stuff if they want to have a chance. And since it's the Normandy landings, the maps are brutal: you lose soldiers every turn, depending on the "defensive value" of your sector.

The "unique" mechanic of the game is the RWB system: when you roll your dice, you try to obtain a triple result on a red, white and blue die. If you do so, you gain a bonus called an RWB. These bonuses are the key to winning.

So even though you roll dice, the game is not really luck-based. It's more about adjusting your strategy depending on your rolls, managing your resources and moving tactically on the battle map. In a nutshell, there are no bad rolls in D-Day Dice, just bad decisions.

Nerdbloggers:

That sounds like a lot of fun, with some unique mechanics. What was the inspiration for the game, and did you have any design goals when you set out to create it?

Emmanuel Aquin:

I was mostly inspired by 2 things: I played "Roll Through the Ages" and thought is was very bland (although I loved the mechanics), and I discovered a nice print-and-play solo dice game called "The d6 Shooters", by Eric Herman, which was quite entertaining. I'd say these are the main inspirations for D-Day Dice.

And my goal, when designing DDD was simply to create a game that worked. This was my first original design ever. I wanted it to be full of tension, and thematic.

Nerdbloggers:

What was your design process like?

Emmanuel Aquin:

Trial and error, mostly. I had the basic idea of "roll dice to stay alive", then I grabbed a handful of dice. My first prototype was boring as hell, but I had some red, white and blue dice. I was desperate to make it interesting, so I decided to improvise a rule about rolling a triple result on 3 different colors. Once I had that idea, the rest developed itself in a fairly painless manner.

Nerdbloggers:

It's my understanding that D-Day Dice started out as a Print and Play game. Do you think D-Day Dice benefited from it's genesis as a print and play game?

Emmanuel Aquin:

Absolutely. Remember, this was my first design, so I had no idea what I was doing. I thought it was cool, my girlfriend did too, but I couldn't tell if other people -- the ones that weren't sleeping with me -- would enjoy it. Making the game available as a PnP not only gave me access to great feedback from the gaming community, it also gave me the confidence to enter my game in designing contests.

Nerdbloggers:

Will there be differences between the print and play version and the published version?

Emmanuel Aquin:

Changes are big, actually. In the PnP version, when you roll a straight, you win the "Medal of Honor". In the commercial release, there is a slew of "Awards" you can win with a straight (and with select items). Also, instead of a dozen specialists and about 15 items in the PnP, you have 24 specialists, 28 items and 6 vehicles in the Valley Games version. There is more of everything, and with all these new additions come new rules, new twists and more depth.

Nerdbloggers:

 As for components, how will the dice look? Has a choice been made between printed or engraved dice?

Emmanuel Aquin:

All the dice will be engraved, including the 4 "unit marker" dice, which serve as both player tokens and turn counters. Since you roll those dice all the time, they need to be durable.

Nerdbloggers:

Kickstarter has become very popular for introducing games lately. What benefits do you feel that Kickstarter gives to a game like D-Day Dice.

Emmanuel Aquin:

Exposure is one of them. Then there is the community aspect of having a group of players join in the fun before the game even reaches the stores. Of course, the money raised ain't nothing to sneeze at, either: it will allow us to print the first expansions at the same time as the base game, which saves money in the long run. On top of all that, it's a great testing ground for the reception your game might have, although, we'll have to wait to verify that statement :-)

Nerdbloggers:

For those reading this after the Kickstarter campaign: Will D-Day Dice be sold through retailers after the Kickstarter has completed? On the other hand, what are the benefits for those who choose to become early adopters and help kickstart the game?

Emmanuel Aquin:

If you join the Kickstarter campaign, you will receive some bonus exclusive cards that are not essential, but fun. In addition, you'll receive a mini-expansion, some cool swag (like "D-Day Dice" pouches and army patches), and a good deal on the game.

If you prefer to wait, the game should reach the stores around April 2012, less the exclusive cards and dice pouches.

Nerdbloggers:

Last question. This one isn't related to board games. November is NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month); aside from your own, what are your favorite novels?

Emmanuel Aquin:

Many are French, as one would expect:

- Mémoires d'un tricheur, by Sacha Guitry (was made into a film by Guitry in 1936)
- L'étranger, by Albert Camus (The Stranger or the Outsider, in English)
- Dieu et nous seuls pouvons, by Michel Folco (about an executioner dynasty in France)
- The Egyptian, by Mika Waltari (adapted into a movie that I never saw)
- The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

A novel I enjoyed recently was World War Z, by Max Brooks. That one took me by surprise.

I also enjoy good short stories, like the ones from Guy de Maupassant, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Roald Dahl.

I have to admit, though, that I much prefer non-fiction. I read mostly historical books, biographies and essays. Go figure.

I'd like to extend my thanks to Emmanuel Aquin for taking the time to talk to us about his game, D-Day Dice, and I strongly urge everyone to check out the Kickstarter project!

Why NaNoWriMo could save America

Today kicks off the annual writing marathon that is the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo.  The goal for those participating in NaNoWrimo is to write a complete 50,000 word novel in the month of November.  I've participated and failed to complete now for two years running, yet I'll be starting on this year's "competition" as soon as I post this entry. Why put myself through the long hours knowing that I could easily hit a two-week stretch without a second to work on the novel, which will basically insure I fail again this year?  Part of it is simply that I enjoy the writing process.  If I'm working on something for publication, the process can start to feel like work, especially during editing and revision.  With NaNoWriMo, participants are pretty much encouraged to turn off their internal editors and embrace the fact that this is going to produce a novel that is likely very bad and not fit for public consumption.  That freedom frees the process from all of the outside pressures and lets me return to when I was writing short stories just because a fun idea had come to me, with no intention of trying to get the work published.  For those of you who don't write, it might be easier to think of drawing.  Lots of people enjoy doodling in a notepad or on the margins of notes from a meeting and it can be a great way to pass the time, but imagine if everything you drew would need to be perfected and then submitted to magazines who may or may not buy the work for publication.  The fun of doodling would be gone instantly.  NaNoWriMo allows me to return my writing to the doodling stage, to return to the days of creation as play.

And that isn't all.  At my core, I'm not a novelist.  For my entire life, private and professional, I have been an evangelist for the short story.  That is the genre that I first fell in love with as a reader, and it is the one that drives me professionally both as a writer and a professor.  Years of trying to learn the art of the short story has destroyed my internal rhythm for writing novel-length work.  The little pacing computer in my head simply doesn't have a setting that goes beyond, say, ten thousand words.  One of my other goals during the NaNoWriMo process is to change that.  Two years ago, my "novel" amounted to little more than a short story cycle like Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.  Last year I got sixteen thousand words into a novel that, by God, felt like a novel.  Progress.  This year, I have a concept and plan for execution that should produce a novel that actually works.  We will see thirty days from now.

America has become defined, in the last few decades, by its consumption rather than its production.  Tablet computers failed when they were first rolled out because you couldn't produce anything on the keyboardless monsters.  Now, everyone wants an iPad to read and watch movies on, damn producing anything.  We can always get other people to do that.  I'm already a producer of content as a hobbyist and a proessional, but the final reason that I'm participating in NaNoWriMo is because I love spending a month hanging out with a group of people reveling in the experience of producing something for themselves.  I've done my best to encourage everyone around me to join in (and we have a nice little group of participants) because I value the art of creation and, chances are, participating in NaNoWriMo will stoke the creative fires for years to come.  

So, good luck from the Nerdbloggers crew to all those participating.  Feel free to tweet us with your word counts and the two Nerdbloggers who are participating will do the same.