New Shadow of Old Night book

I hate these days where I have executive scheduled meetings all through lunch. I have one now (12:00-12:45) one at 12:30, one at 1:00, one at 2:00... maybe I can squeeze a quick lunch out at 3? (I'll snack while on mute with my camera turned off, actually, during at least one of these.) I need the break, though. Work has been, for the better part of the last twelve months, non-stop exhausting all of the time. Getting a decent lunch break—which isn't really as much about eating as it is about just taking a good, solid, at least hour-long break during the middle of the day—is pretty important to me, and I tend to feel very frustrated and tired on days when I can't get that. Most of that I blame on my director. He's one of the worst "bosses" I've ever worked for, and the layer in between him and me is not as good at protecting us from his BS as the one who hired me and who I worked for for about a year before she left. When she left, I literally had nobody between us for four months or so and then they reorganized, and a guy who was already here picked up this scope. He's OK. I think he's more reasonable and sensible, but he also gets riled up by the director, and doesn't shield us from the flow of BS. Anyway... vent over, I guess. While I'm on a call that I really shouldn't have to be on, but I need to be here quietly for political reasons of being seen to be supportive, I'm trying to make this post and not be too frustrated. 

Anyway, this is kind of a scattershot post, while I post about a bunch of crap in unrelated dot point style.

• I've made a new file for the actual Shadow of Old Night pdf book. I mostly wanted to focus on layout, (even though I don't use real layout software; it's just LibreOffice Doc). I'm mostly done, actually. I'll go another scan/read through it and see if there are any errors or slight corrections to make while I'm at it, but I'm mostly at the point of adding ancillary material, i.e., creating the covers, the table of contents, etc. I'm probably going to create those as separate pdfs, and then combine them in PDF24 as a single file. Anyway, I'm a little bit excited about the new look and feel of the game, but I'm still working on some issues of "trade dress" if you will; i.e., that's part of the reason I made the last post about all of the fonts, because I'm trying to decide how to create my cover and what I want it to look like. 
  
  
• I'll also add the image that I'll probably use for my cover art, although I may still wait until I can generate some more AI options just in case I can get a better one than this. It is more difficult sometimes than people think to get a prompt that actually gives you what you want, and it often takes many iterations. Of course, often the more you ask AI to edit existing images, the more the quality rapidly degrades. AI is great for "democratizing" the accessibility of professional quality (or nearly so, anyway) art to just Joe Blow dude with an internet connection, but it still isn't the same as actually having access to a real artist. As you can see, I've got plenty of room at the top of the image for the title, but I'm redesigning that too. Although that's just me deciding on a font, and stuff like that, nothing necessarily too radical. 
  
  
• Which is why I was playing around with fonts last night, hence that post I made. I think I've decided on changing the font, because I'm more excited right now about some other ones that I acquired more recently. I think it's going to be one of these two shown below, but I need to still determine the color and texture. The cover art is quite dark and cool, so I'm wondering if bright and warm—maybe a fiery red-orange or something like that, is the way to go, like the Raiders of the Lost Ark title... although that seems like that's not really tee vibe I'm going for on a game who's tagline or subtitle is fantasy + horror + madness. I do, however, have a nice rusty reddish texture/color image that I can use as the "fill" for the letters; maybe I'll go with that. I dunno. I'll play around and see what I get.
  
  
• I also finished the next book in the Paizo setting trawl recently and now I'm reading Horror Adventures, because it's October. At the rate I'm going I may not finish that before the month's over, but we'll see. It is perhaps not quite as useful as Occult Advenures because it doesn't have a bunch of new classes, but it has been, so far, easier to read, for whatever that's worth.