An Interesting Conversation About Schedules

The View From the Path

One of the reasons that I love writing the weekly Monday Meeting Notes blog http://theonyxpath.com/category/news/monday-meeting/ is the real dialogue that is possible in the comments. This week, there was a great comment expressing concern for the way some books are listed in the updates section of the blog with the same notation week after week. Here was my response to that:

If no new stage of progress is reported by the Dev to Rose, then we have only that info to give you. Different Devs have very different working methods- some have very tight first draft rounds, some dive in and work on the second drafts more. Others create incredibly in-depth outlines and then give the writers the freedom to exert their creativity. As the hub of all this, we at Onyx Central Command try and allow every Dev the room to create their approved projects in the way they need to in order to create the highest quality product. Sometimes we get projects that seem to drift along, and we need to adjust, but we always err on the side of the angels and allow creative room first.

This was basically a “here’s why” response which focuses on the specific logistics of one stage of a given book’s progress, because it was a single book stuck in a stage for awhile that sparked the comment, but talks a bit more about Onyx Path‘s overall philosophy of working with the Developers of all the various game lines we are engaged in publishing. What that sparked was an excellent dialogue between myself and the original poster, Hawthorn, about Onyx Path‘s priorities and goals: