Exquisite Corpses v2 is slowed but still coming…

A friend sent me an email asking ‘why are you redoing Exquisite Corpses?’ and I thought I would reproduce my answer here, since if he is wondering why, others may be wondering why too (Hopefully I’m not revealing anything here that Jim LotFP does not want to be general knowledge, but as far as I know, all of this has been scattered through several posts on LotFP anyway)

(if it matters, the pic at right is not from my book — I just thought it was cool).

Anyway, message reproduced below:

…The publisher wants to print ‘Exquisite Corpses’ with perforated tabs
rather than ‘cut-em-yourself’ pages and the printer has restrictions on numbers
of pages, etc., for these special print jobs. So the base number of monsters
(40) was chosen because of the number of signatures in a print run (multiples of
32 or 8 are our options— so we added 32+8=40!)To make the book possible as a
commercial product, we have had to make certain changes… which will also
(hopefully) make it more appealing to the users. Instead of having lots of info
scattered through the text AND the illustrations so the user has to flip back
and forth, the current idea from Jim (which I think is a winner) is to have it
all in one place — on the illustration itself and the facing page. So if you
lay the book down flat and flip the tabs so you have a lizard head, woman’s body
and bird’s feet, hopefully we can cram all the info you need to know to run with
that critter with options on that two page spread. That’s the idea, anyway…
and that’s the part I am struggling with.It’s been a long series of me emailing
the guy (Jim) who is publishing it back and forth to arrive at this point. In
the process one of us might come up with an idea and email it to the other, then
I would mull it over and Jim would go to his printer and talk about it, come
back to me and say, “I don’t think that’s going to work but how about this,”
etc., rinse and repeat. So v2 of Exquisite Corpses is going to be very different
than v1 in execution, although concept is the same — hopefully v2 will be more
user friendly.It was originally hoped it would be ready for Gencon, but there
were a lot of changes and I had a ‘crisis of confidence’ in some of my artistic
decisions and needed more time on them, so finally Jim said, “Take your time;
don’t worry about deadlines, let’s just try to make it as good as possible.” In
the meanwhile I’ve had my other comissions and some ‘life stuff’ to worry about,
so E.C.v2 has moved to the back burner, although I am trying to remember to stir
the pot occassionally so it doesn’t burn or spoil. In other news, last night I
finished 4 more drawings for (blank).

Thanks for the interest — I miss playing with you guys… please have
someone write a session report!