New Manawaker pages

Look around the Manawaker Studio pages, and you’ll find a few changes this week. Mainly, I’ve been convinced to finally leave the 1990’s, and stop spending time coding my webpages by hand in no-longer-compliant HTML. Thus, the whole site has been switched over to WordPress.

Beyond keeping me in the correct decade, this change has several reasons. The two most important are thus:

First, the pages will now be more flexible and less time consuming. Using the WP wysiwyg editor will allow me to keep the site more up to date more easily, making sure that the page keeps up with me and my projects, and that I don’t have to spend hours coding to make it work.

Second, it will allow me to move away from social media as my primary means of keeping fans informed of what is going on. Recent changes in certain social media platforms have taught me that I cannot rely solely on such services to get the word out, even to the people who truly care and want to know what is happening with Manawaker Studio. I need to do this myself.

Ways to keep informed

The site will now have an updates page which where I will post information about new and ongoing projects. There may be occasional other stuff, like poems and stories, and book reviews or whatever I think of, but mostly it’ll be about what I’m doing and where current projects are going. (Or maybe not, I’ve never done one of these before, so I guess we’ll see. I have been thinking a lot lately about how fun it would be to do a democracy-guided interactive narrative, and perhaps this is the place to do it.) RSS will be available for this blog-thing (here), and links to any new posts will be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and G+. There will also be moderated space for comments, questions, and suggestions.

There is, in addition, a newsletter, which will only ever be used for important and occasional updates, like this one. Anything that gets sent to the newsletter list will also be posted on the updates page, but not vice-versa. You can sign up for the newsletter here.

Other things

New web pages aren’t the only things going on at Manawaker Studio right now.

The big new project is “Dangerous to go Alone!” an anthology of poetry and art from video games and video game culture. The upcoming book is now accepting submissions, so if you or anyone you know has any poetry or art based on video games or the culture that surrounds them, make sure it gets sent my way. There is a token payment for each accepted work. Please feel free to spread the submissions page around wherever you think people might be interested, the more submissions I get, the better the book will eventually be.

Manawaker Studio’s first Kickstarter, The Book of the Isles of the Sun is now finally complete (with the regrettable exceptions of some things lost in the post), and I’m starting to think about what to follow it up with. Perhaps a supplemental book which gives more detail about trade and waterways, with some suggestions for ship-to-ship combat, and even some ship layouts and sea encounters. I wished that I had had the room to actually put some ships into the first book, but I found that ship layouts and descriptions take up a lot of space.

Whatever I might Kickstart next, I learned a lot from the first Kickstarter about budgeting and timing, and I would put those lessons to good use.

Finally, I’m focusing a lot of attention on getting new stories written, something that I haven’t been able to put a lot of time into for a few years now. I’ve written two new stories in just the last month, and I’m making it a point to keep the submissions cycle going as tightly as possible for every piece of fiction in my portfolio. I hope to have enough traditionally published short fiction to release a collection of them from Manawaker Studio sometime in the next few years (publication is a long process, even for shorts, and then I have to wait (usually a year) to get the print rights back). All of that depends on me actually getting the stories written, however, so that’s goal one right now.

Thanks for reading, and for all of your support, now and in the future.