QUOTE (Halinn @ Jan 4 2013, 03:35 AM)

Will more SR4 books come out, or are things pushed along so that they'll land in 5th?
There's one more big SR4 print plot book,
Storm Front, coming out soonish. There are a couple of PDF-only things that are also coming up more-or-less imminently. I'm not really the guy to talk to about the scheduling, but with the focus going to SR5, I don't anticipate a lot more SR4-centric books. I could be wrong; I don't run things, I just work here.
QUOTE (hermit @ Jan 4 2013, 03:50 AM)

I ... think I know which one. The one where bits and pieces are being released? Which brings me to the question of how NDAs work in that situation? Can you/could you talk about a text if it was released as a perk on a riddle site?
Yeah, "Sleeping With the Enemy" is mine. I can't really talk about anything but the leaked content, and so I'd rather just stop at acknowledging that I wrote that bit and leave it at that, lest I get myself in trouble.
QUOTE
Despite the sort of strange idea that a smaller corp could maintain such a structure, I've always wanted to see the setting return to Atlanta. Maybe in a short-ish writeup, like Montreal 2074 and Lands of Promise? The CAS is massively neglected.
I always thought that was kind of silly myself. That said, I'd love to see a
Montreal 2074-style piece done on Atlanta.
QUOTE (ravensmuse @ Jan 4 2013, 05:58 AM)

I don't want you to think that I'm riding you, Patrick, but while this loosey-goosey style is a good way to allow some mutability into project deadlines and creativity, it can also feel like there's no direction in the line. That's something I've kind of felt these past few years, at least.
Do you think that flexibility is a good thing or bad?
To be fair, it was much the same way under Rob and Peter, in my experience. Not so much under Mike, but then I was just getting started back then and wasn't as bold as I am now when I made my pitches. If I had come up with anything really cool back then, I imagine Mike would have made more allowances for me.
I think Jason has a direction for the line, though he's not as hide-bound or overt about it as some would probably like. He and I have had more than a few discussions about where things are going, and there has been give and take on both sides in our discussions. There have been a lot of things building and bubbling under the surface in the game world for a while now that have been Jason's doing, for instance. He's guiding things, but he's not doing it in an iron-fisted fashion.
I think the flexibility is a good thing, personally. It makes it a lot more fun to write this stuff, and that's a big part of the reward. For me, at least; as I said, I don't speak for Catalyst or any of the other freelancers when I say any of this. It's all my impressions. Unlike, say, Rusty, who can crank out a remarkably functional 3000 word piece in an appallingly short amount of time, I'm slow. It takes a lot of my time to put out something like
Another Rainy Night because I'm also dealing with getting my kids fed, spending time with my wife and the aforementioned kids, doing my day job, and trying to maintain a social life with friends. I have other avocations as well that get neglected. This doesn't work out well for all concerned sometimes; I don't remember the last time I picked up my camera for more than just some quick shots of the kids, for instance, so one of my arts is sacrificing itself for another.
Writing is a lonely, time-consuming business. ARN, for instance, was written on a laptop, in my truck, with drive-thru food, on a lot of lunch breaks. I try to do 1000 words a day; on a good day, that can be done in an hour. Bad days, it takes longer. That's just fingers-on-keyboard time; research is something else again. I didn't have to do a lot for ARN, but there was some (I'm not that familiar with Denver, and I'm afraid that it shows in places in that story). But for, say, Martin de Vries in
Street Legends, there was a lot more (and I still managed to bollix it up in places), and research time is time spent away from my wife and my kids and my friends. You do this, you better have family and friends that love and understand you, because you're likely to be alienating them a lot of the time when you're actively pursuing a story.
Take a look at the dedication to Rusty's novella,
Neat. (If you haven't read it, by the way, you owe it to yourself to correct that situation. I don't push that because Rusty's my friend, or because it's SR and I should push SR; I push it because it's really damn good.) That last line, "To my wife, for letting me write," are phenomenally true; in the case of most writers, it should read, "To my wife, for letting me write and staying married to me anyway."
So yeah, the thing had better be fun, or it's not worth doing. I don't get paid enough for me to just write if I'm not enjoying things. That's one of the reasons my output is so sparse; it's not worth it to me to pitch something if it's not something I really care about.
Man, that was long-winded. Did I answer your questions?