Hey Folks,

Just a quick "hello" message until I get the stickies finished and up. Chris Lehrich just told me that all the members of this new group got an email saying that I'd added you, which I wasn't expecting. I was going to send out a personal email letting you know what was up, but hopefully this will work until then.

Push is the new name of the roleplaying journal project (formerly dubbed "Magic Missile"), which most of you have heard about through emails from me. The name change is part of the effort to save the name of my now-defunct RPGnet column (also called "Push"), to emphasize the journal's focus on progressive roleplaying solutions, and to avoid any possible issues with Wizards about their intellectual property (not that I think that's very likely).

This forum, which was bequeathed to us on behalf of Clinton and Ron, is for submitting articles and other pieces, subjecting them to peer editing, revising them (if necessary), and ultimately trying to create a cohesive feel for each issue. Eero has already written up a first draft of his article on roleplaying's Anglo-American influence in Finland and his decision to translate Paul Czege's My Life with Master into Finnish. It's a damn good article, but has some rough places that need ironing, so hopefully Eero will post it soon and we can begin to make it better.

Anyway, the stickies should be up in the next couple of days, which will outline the submissions process, how I imagine peer editing will happen, what I'm looking for as the final, capital-e "Editor," and legal stuff like rights and compensation and whatnot. This will be a completely "indie" journal in the sense that authors will retain all rights to their work. I'm just asking for limited electronic rights (to edit and publish your work as part of the journal) and even-more-limited print rights (to print copies for contributors and reviewers). If we end up getting print runs made and distributed, I'll come back and negotiate a new deal with all contributors.

In any case, wait for the stickies. They'll do much more to explain than this short post. If you have immediate questions, just ask me. If you want to be taken off the board, I can do that too. But you're on here because I think you're all roleplaying geniuses and would appreciate your help in the peer editing process, even if you can't submit anything at this time.

Toodles.

I do have a few questions that I think should be answered publicly

First, and this needs an answer pretty soon -- many of you already know the answer to it, I suspect, but I don't --

We have this special forum. Can anyone read it? Is it limited readership? Is it just limited postership, as it were? What's the deal?

A further point. Some articles may be rather long. Do you really want them in BBCode on this forum, or do you have a website somewhere where we can post article drafts for analysis? I would think that would be best, so long as people can state publicly that it's time to get rid of an old draft, and so long as you, the administrator and editor, periodically say, "Okay, guys, stop keeping 87 drafts here on my server." But that's just a suggestion.

Finally, if we are going to put things up somewhere for careful perusal and reading, I suggest that we need a consistent computer format. Word seems pretty standard, or RTF, though it sucks very hard. PDF is nice, but large and clunky to manipulate. John probably still thinks LaTex is god, but he's a freak. Regardless, we need something consistent so that we can all read and comment on things in a consistent and coherent way. I strongly recommend against a BBCode online reading thing, because it makes comments difficult to put next to the appropriate text; you can't say, "On page 18, you say such-and-such."

You web and HTML gurus probably have great ideas about this, but I know nothing about it. I'm used to print text only.

---

One last thing. If this is going to be an irregular online journal, I suspect that it will be read as broken into columns and articles. So long as columns are irregular too, that's not a problem. But if you're still thinking this is eventually going to drift toward a Player's Guide, or The Story So Far or whatever, we need that clearly in mind as we go forward.

Sounds productive and fun, though!

Ah, Chris, you are always my editorial conscience. Some of this is sticky-material, but for those of you who want to get started:

First, the forum is, as far as I know, limited to just the people I invite to it. Everyone else isn't even aware that it exists. So new contributors get added and old contributors can choose to either stay on and peer edit or get taken off the board.

Second, I would suggest that everyone post their articles here on the board or, if they are sufficiently long, somewhere else in either RTF of TXT format (preferrably TXT unless you have some sort of weird formatting). I can post stuff for people who don't have webspace. Just email them to me. Still, I feel like I'm okay reading long articles here, and if you don't have much text formatting (italics, bold, whatever), converting to BBCode is not really necessary. You just Save As plain text, copy, and paste. If people have issues with formats, we should probably start a new thread to discuss.

When commenting on long articles, can't people just quote the questionable sentences or the first couple sentences of a questionable paragraph? Then the author can simply search for that bit of text if it's not obvious which parts the commenter is talking about. This is what I'm imagining. Maybe naive.

As far as "columns vs. articles" go, this is what I'd say as "big-e" Editor. Don't even think about columns. Yes, think of each article seperately. Not what you're going to say in the next article, which might never happen because you get caught in a snowstorm in Michigan and eaten by rabid wolverines. I don't ever want to be put in a position where I'm waiting for somebody's next column installment. No good. Every article is self contained. Every issue is self contained. After all, what if you get struck by a monumental idea but it doesn't really fit the established format/content of you column. You're screwed. So forget columns. Write something focused about one specific issue. Then, next month/quarter, write another one. Like that.

On the "eventual publication of some sort of anthology or Players' Guide to Roleplaying": cool idea (and, originally, what I was hoping this journal would lead to). In practice? I don't know. I don't think every article should be required to be "significant enough" (whatever that means) to be part of some later work that might not ever happen. I feel like that's trying to run a 3-legged race when 2 legs will work just as well. No need to cripple or overburden us with thoughts of "what will be." If 25% of the material in each journal installment is work saving, compiling, and printing up in some "The Best of Push" or "Push's Guide to Progressive Gaming" or whatever, is cool. Honestly, I think 50% might be, without us even trying. If, however, people are interested in writing material with the intention of one day compiling it into something larger, I'll be glad to talk about that with them when we discuss their idea for an article.

Oh, yeah. I should probably say this up front as well: this isn't Daedalus. Matt's got a great zine going, but he does things his way and I do things my way. I'm not going to automatically accept anything you decide to write, even if it's really good. If you have something already written, I'll be glad to look at it and say whether Push is interested, but I'd prefer it if people run their basic concept by me (or, better, throw it out for the group to bounce around) before sitting down and writing 15+ pages. The buck stops here, folks. I'm mean now so I can be nice later. I don't want to have to tell you that Push isn't going to publish your 35 page masterpiece, no matter how much you revise it. I want to smile and tell you how much it rocks. Just to make that clear.

Anybody else got anything they're dying to know right now?