My son, Davis, and I attended Gl!tchCon this past weekend. Davis attended to support the 405th and to wear the Master Chief/Halo Reach/Spartan armor he’s been working on for the past six months.

 

 

He won 1st Place in the Cosplay Contest:

 

 

Here is the weekend in photographs:

 

 

 

 

Time to get back to work!

 

-David

 

 

As I get very little productive work done in December, I usually use the month to help set the stage for the New Year. This year, that means hanging up a “Closed Until Further Notice” sign here on Joe Indie.

 

Since I launched Joe Indie in 2004, my “indie focus” has shifted. Originally, it was all about indie video games (and promoting The Indie Game Development Survival Guide ). For a while, there were the so-called serious games (which I also wrote a book about: Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train and Inform).

 

In 2007, though, I pretty much fell out of indie games. The Paintball Net project died on the vine due to funding problems, and I launched into Project Vee (The Journal 5) full time. I did tackle a small game this year, but it fell victim to the personal issues and changing priorities of a series of artists. I enjoyed working on the game and would love to see my $800 investment in art and SDK’s (not to mention a couple months of work) come to something more than a side note in the for-my-eyes-only essay “What I Accomplished in 2010″, but my own priorities have changed in the last few months.

 

Even indie software development has moved out of the forefront for me. The Journal has been my primary source of income for nearly a decade, and likely (hopefully) will continue to be for years to come. But it’s been 14 years since I launched The Journal 1.0 and nearly 12 years since I “quit and went home” to become self-employed. I’m almost part of The Establishment at this point. Sure, I’m indie (and expect I always will be). But I’m old indie.

 

Back in September I announced my first “indie book”, The Summoning Fire. And a couple weeks ago, I announced my 2nd, The Girl Who Ran With Horses.

 

 

That is the “indie” I’m focusing on now: indie writing and indie publishing. In 2011, my plan is write and write and write and publish more and more stories and novels. (And, yes, of course I write my stories and novels in The Journal. )

 

So far, my indie author experience has been a lot like the early days of indie games and indie software. There are a lot of similarities, I think. I even wrote about some of those similarities recently.

 

If you’re interested in keeping up with this new indie endeavor of mine, I have been (and will be) posting about the experience (good and bad) here:

 

I also have an author page on Facebook:

 

And thus I close this chapter of Joe Indie. It’s been fun.

 

 

-David

 

 

 

It’s summer vacation and all 13-year-old Stevie Buckbee wants is to be close to her family again and to ride her horses–especially Jack Rabbit, her first horse all her own. But past tragedies threaten her plans before the summer even begins. Even as she discovers that she is somehow able to communicate with Jack Rabbit and the other horses on the family ranch, she finds she can no longer get through to her Dad and brother Blake. And what good is it to be able to run with the horses if no matter how fast and how far she runs, everything she knows and loves is lost?

 

 

Available in trade paperback and ebook formats!

 

The Girl Who Ran With Horses Edition	Price
Trade paperback (Amazon)	$9.99
Kindle edition (Amazon)	$3.99
Nook edition (Barnes & Noble)	$3.99
Ebook (Smashwords)	$3.99

 

 

It took him a most of a year, but Davis built a full set of Fallout armor. He paraded it around some today.

 

-David

 

 

In 1996, I released the first versions of The Journal and Paintball Net. The Web was still relatively new, but it was getting huge already. A new Web page selling a product or an online game could easily get lost in the crowd. And often did.

 

It was a slow process, creating any kind of market. We had to find Web pages where we could list The Journal and the game(s). We had to figure out how to get noticed and mentioned in a world before blogs and other social networking (besides newsgroups and IRC). We tried to get mentioned in print, and provided demo versions for magazine CDROM collections. We had never done anything like it before, and we were learning as went along.

 

I like to say “longevity trumps a lot of things”, and The Journal benefits a lot from having been around a long time (the first version predates Windows 98; how many OS generations ago was that?). When I release a new version of The Journal, or even just an update, the accumulation of links and listings and such nifty conveniences as PAD provide a lot of leverage. Word gets out and gets moving.

 

Fourteen years ago, though, in 1996, I was just another programmer wondering how he got so unlucky as to have been born 4 years too early to really benefit/profit from this dot-com thing.

 

Now, as a new “indie author”, I’m back to Square Eff-ing Zero. OK, maybe just Square Eff-ing One.

 

Last week, I spent evening after evening going through a list of book reviewers, submitting review queries to all those that seemed like a good fit. It reminded me so much of going through a list of software sites, clicking on “Submit”, and filling out the details for The Journal over and over. It wasn’t a pleasant memory–though it wasn’t entirely unpleasant either. Sometimes I miss the late 90′s and early 2K’s.

 

I’ve had some positive results already (click here to read one of the first reviews of The Summoning Fire on Amazon), and I’m looking forward to more.

 

I expect to get a new, longer list of reviewers next week and do it all over again. I’m exploring what I can do with Facebook. And I expect to try new things that I’ve never even thought of before, all with the goal of building a new audience for a new venture.

 

It’s like 1996 all over again. But with no ponytail this time.

 

-David