Winning Streak: Early November Update

Hello followers of my blog! I’m sorry it’s been so quiet around here. I’ve been working away at Winning Streak: Tales and Trivia of the 40 Most Popular Board Games, as well as helping to edit another art book for Stephen Albair. Both of those are large projects, so it may look like I’ve stopped working from your end. But trust me, I’m busier than ever.

I wanted to share with you some of the progress that Winning Streak has been going through. That said, I’m mostly repeating what I wrote on the Kickstarter Updates page. So if you already read that, you’re done! One more article in the bag! Look at you go!

The last time I showed my Kickstarter backers the progress when it came to getting images for Winning Streak, I showed a spreadsheet of all the images I needed to replace, and about 40% of the images had green progress bars on them, while I was still lookin for my other 60% which was represented in white and gray.  Well take a look at the progress that’s been made:

The purples, blues and light blues are also completed pictures. Those colors are just there to remind me that those images have certain stipulations (for example, the photographer would prefer I hot linked to somewhere else than their Instagram account.)

There’s only a handful of images I need to get, and these aren’t necessarily the ‘tough’ images. They’ve just been the ones eluding me. Or I decided that I needed a non-Fair Use image after all, so it got added to the system late.  The more and more these great images roll in, the more inappropriate a lot of the flat fair use and public domain images look. So I had to double back and find a non-public domain image of Chess or Backgammon from an Instagrammer. That’s okay. The end result will be worth the work. 😉

Meanwhile, Gordon McAlpin submitted his work for the back cover of the book:

He’s actually a really great guy and helped walk me through the minefield of what to ask for when asking for cover art.  If you’re interested in his work, or possibly hiring him, you can find it here. Or perhaps you’d like to see his long standing online comic series Multiplex? You can find that here!

Aaron Yonda from the Beer and Board Games video series submitted his intro about being a kid and falling in love with the game Kings and Things.  Which has strange parallels to an article I wrote for the Arts Fuse: It’s OK to Like Board Games, Even the Bad Ones, in which I delve into when I was a kid and used to play board games by myself in other people’s houses.  Also, pretty cool author interview just got released about me and Winning Streak on Laura’s Books and Blogs.  Don’t worry, I’m not dropping my work on Winning Streak to write a bunch of articles.  I worked on these two while I was promoting Winning Streak; it just took time for them to come out.

There’s still a lot of work to be done over here, but I don’t see any reason to believe I can’t hit that January deadline.  If you want to follow me, I’ve been rather active on Instagram.  You can find that here.  Otherwise I’ll talk to you all soon enough!