Project Update: A Collection of Puzzles
Oh, hey… what was that poster they used to have in the hangout room/lounge for The 432 (UBC’s science students’ humor publication, which I suspect is no more because nowadays the humorless social “science” students from the arts department would string you up for the sorta things the 432 wrote… yep, looks like there’s nothing beyond 2008)?
Ah yes, a South Park poster of Kenny on the toilet with a note saying “Please excuse me from being late, I have explosive diarrhea”… only someone had added the 432 editor’s name at the top.
Well, I don’t have the same excuse as Kenny, but… yeah, sorry. I was supposed to write a Wednesday blog and then I didn’t.
But hey, I’ve missed all you readers who probably exist only in my head, so let’s try to get back on track, shall we?
Looking at the previous lies and false promises schedule, I said the 4th Wednesday would possibly be more in-depth discussion of projects, so let’s get to the title, huh?
So… this came out of trying to figure out a good reader magnet, one that would connect all my characters, or at least a lot of them. But I didn’t have a story idea that wasn’t already slated for future graphic novel development, and I was being lazy so I didn’t want to come up with one (I’m still lazy but I did have an idea more recently for a short story or novella that will work for this purpose). And so I brainstormed a bunch of ideas and the one that jumped out at me was a short collection of puzzles related to my various characters. Fun, slightly goofy, and I figured quick to make (LOL…..)
I’ve often enjoyed those variety puzzle magazines, and decided on having a mishmash of puzzle types, so I flipped through my stack of puzzle mags and noted some favorite types and thought I would make my own.
I’ll also throw in 3 coloring pages I already had for reader magnets.
Now, I was starting on this a week and a half ago, but last Monday I sprained my ankle and as you can imagine that’s meant a lot of sitting on my ass… which meant I had time to make my puzzles (after finishing formatting the ebook of Bring Me the Royal Flip-Flops, which will be out in October alongside the paperback).
I’d started with the word searches, working on graph paper to plot them out.
Then, maze puzzles where an annoyed Ricky has to navigate to get his cheese (also on graph paper).
Then I plotted out 5 “minesweeper” kinda puzzles… On what type of paper? Yep, you got it.
I also made some of those criss-cross fill in puzzles, a few spot the difference types, and some of those word elimination puzzles where there’s a saying in a table and you eliminate unrelated words according to a set of rules until only the saying is left.
It won’t be a massive puzzle book, as it’ll have 24 puzzles and 3 coloring pages, but it’s something. Later this week I’ll need to get everything sorted out in InDesign and Photoshop to slap into InDesign and bundle it all together into a printable PDF with an answer key that will be a freebie for signing up for my newsletter. For now, it’ll be the only freebie, but once I get other reader magnets written, it’ll become a bonus freebie linked to at the end of my email onboarding sequence for new subscribers.
And if people seem to like it, well, maybe I’ll make bigger activity/puzzle books that I’ll offer for sale in the future. I can see it being a fun sorta low-pressure project to put out around Christmas, maybe… plus then instead of trying to come up with a bunch of puzzles in a week and a half, I can make one puzzle a week instead and then just gather them all up each November to get ready for a December release.
Or maybe people will hate it and I won’t bother. Dunno yet.
Some things I didn’t expect to learn:
- Proper NYT-style crosswords are a beast to make… props to anyone who can. I gave up after a couple hours because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around where to even start with one of those… and this despite having read blogs about the making of them!
- It’s probably much better to start with drawings designed for purpose for some puzzles (*cough*connect the dots*cough… hence why there won’t be any of these in this particular puzzle book) rather than try to retrofit existing drawings. So there are a couple types of graphics-based puzzles that will be in potential future puzzle books, not this one.
- It’s surprisingly difficult to make sure that your one correct path through the maze actually is the only one that really works.
- Nothing beats good old fashioned graph paper for planning purposes.
- Making puzzles is as Zen as doing them… except when things aren’t working.
So, that’s a big of an update and finally one of my Wednesday blogs done.
I will, of course, post here and elsewhere when the puzzle book is a live freebie, and also when Bring Me the Royal Flip-Flops is available for purchase.
And pinky swear I’ll try to write more often.
(Maybe even on Sundays to blather about stuff that has nothing to do with anything again… though that would probably stay over on my Substack.)
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