I meant to add, thank you for mentioning this Jeff as (unless DriveThru serves up personalized FYF emails) I have not seen it in such an email presumably because they think I already know about my own thing!  So if you hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have known that it had appeared there.  Of course, following a week of holiday down in Falmouth and *faaaar* too lovely a view to get much work done (!) I'm so far behind on emails, it's possible there's one lurking somewhere that I've missed but I've just tried a search.  I did manage, you may be pleased to hear some 2500 words on one Traveller project and the same again on another.  So I suppose that's not too shabby.  I'd just hoped for more.

For anyone that's interested in the 'meta' information of such things, as I might perhaps normally have sent something like TTGBDJ straight to Jeff for Freelance Traveller, here's what happened:

OneBookShelf sent an email a while back inviting participation in a Halloween promotion.

I'm not terribly 'into' Halloween and nearly ignored it but obviously something niggled in the back of my brain.

IF I were to do something, what would it look like?  Aiming for both 'horror' but too far from the 'uplifting' I might normally aim for.

I thought maybe something character based would work and I thought back to a recent read (finally!) of _Dracula_ to see what the original looked like.

Hence Jos'fine Jarker, based fairly obviously IMO on Jonathan Harker.

(Oh, and for the avoidance of any doubt although I wasn't explicit, named and imagined after a Nigerian friend of mine from way back.)

It seemed obvious to link it back to the Jump Remora, make them a bit more nasty, and take the opportunity to add (partial, at least) stat block for them.

And I definitely wanted to keep the whole thing to one page (and written in an afternoon) rather than 'go to town'.  Perhaps inspired by Michael Brown's excellence in one page.

Trying to contribute it to OBS, I then ran into the problem I think I muttered about on TML.

I think the promo is really geared up for things you've already been selling and could now offer, briefly, for free.

They didn't seem to be able to cope with something that had been written for the promo and was only likely to be free.

Getting in touch with them revealed two things: my liaison person had moved on and I had a new one; the new one suggested posting it nearer the deadline time and he'd fit it into the promo.

I made it a 'to do' but the beginning of the new academic year is ordinarily a very busy time for me and even more so this year.  Although I remembered a few times when I couldn't do anything about it, I managed to fail to do anything about it when I was at a computer with a moment or two spare.

When I did get in touch with OBS a couple of weeks back, I was far too late.

Hence I simply posted it as an ordinary freebie.  Where it's already done nearly as well after a few days as most other MHP things after some years - which only goes to show that money is everything!  (And it has had one 3/5 rating which without any comment leaves me wondering what people want from one page that's free!?)  (Of course, it does make me look at it again to see what I could improve in future).

Perhaps feeling guilty [1] that I didn't send it to FT, I then did find in a cobwebby corner of my brain a little (very little!) something [2] to send to Jeff as well.  But rather too late in the day for an issue I'm presuming will come out on Halloween I'm sure.

Anyway, we drove 7 hours yesterday (only 220 miles!  traffic was awful the whole way [3]) so I'm utterly shattered and I'm going back to bed...

tc

[1] And before I get a (well-deserved) lecture from Jeff, 'guilty' is probably the wrong word, but you know what I mean...  ;-)

[2] Which itself was inspired very serendipitiously: Mother-in-law has just moved house so by chance I ended up in a bookshop I rarely visit.  Feeling stressed by masks and people and just being 'out' for the first time in ages, I didn't stop long - which for me in a bookshop is remarkable but perhaps indicative of current mental health - but just as I was leaving picked up a freebie book catalogue which I nearly missed.  Skimming through it there wasn't much of interest (to me) and I put in a wastepaper basket.  A day or two later had a moment when I wanted to escape work and sit in the sun of the conservatory which is a rarity at this time of year.  Rather inexplicably I grabbed the catalogue from the bin and browsed through it once again.  For some reason a children's book page caught my eye and wheels started turning and levers clicking...

[3] It's often bad in one or two places that can be painful along the route.  But yesterday it was everywhere.  My suspicion is that with large chunks of Wales and northern England now in fairly restrictive lockdowns everyone was taking their half-term holiday in the one bit of (south) England that's still 'open'.  Indeed, we were passing a couple on a walk two days ago just as they bumped into friends walking the other direction.  My abiding memory is of the friends greeting them and saying "we were supposed to be in Wales this week".  And my other data point for my theory is that I went for a dip in the harbour that our flat in its little development overlooked.  (14 degree water?! (57F)  Meh... not a problem!)  Out from the balcony of another apartment popped a work colleague to say hello!  (I also later heard another University colleague was also in town for the same week).