The Wargaming Compendium Completed

On Monday night, I uploaded the completed book to a secret location from whence it has been retrieved by my editor at Pen & Sword, Philip Sidnell.

It’s big.

Very big.

520 pages!

What happens now is that a highly trained team of worker ants (okay, I’m kidding, it’s Phil) set about examining the book with the very finest of toothcombs for typos, general cock-ups and factual errors.

Writing being what it is, I in fact spotted a typo in a picture caption less than 10 minutes after pressing “Send”, but now its correction can wait until that last, momentous session with the final proof, after which The Thing I have been living with for the last four years or so will be out of my hands forever and into yours, dear reader, for your approbation or condemnation as you see fit.

About 48 hours after sending the artwork, it feels very strange not to be thinking “Come on, get on and finish The Book! You’ve got to finish The Book!” It’s been my constant companion, the gremlin sitting on my shoulder and nagging at me since the spring of 2009.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m in fact incredibly busy, and about to get busier because of some new work commitments, so it’s just as well the The Book is finally off my desk. But here I am, idly clicking through the hundreds of files on my Mac that the project generated, realising that I shall probably never look at most of them ever again. Time to move them to a new folder, label it “Archive”, back everything up to a DVD (or two or three – many gigabytes of files have been accumulated in the process of writing this beast), and set them aside to gather digital dust.

More to the point, there’s only one way to fill this strange void.

You got it.

Start work on the next one.

But for the moment, I have the peculiar luxury of getting my hobby back. For years, I have been painting figures and making terrain almost exclusively because they would be used either in Battlegames or in The Book. The thought that I might produce something just for me seems very odd indeed.

I shall have to get used to it.

Temporarily.

Maybe I’ll finish those Baccus Greeks? Perhaps I’ll get all my Newlines painted? What about those fantasy gaming projects I’ve been meaning to get around to?

Whatever happens, you can bet I’ll be reporting it here.