I accepted (obviously, or this would be a pretty dull post) mainly because I miss doing those types of write ups. They're helpful for me as well, to digest and understand the situation from a bird's-eye view. After I made sure that I would have access to the information I would need, I created a Google doc where I dumped any highlights from the past couple of weeks, then began to piece them together in my notes and figure out what was important and what wasn't. After I had a good understanding of what the big questions were (in this case it was simply explaining our recent mini-deployment) I was able to construct a non-narrative post about it. Typically I like to thread things together in a narrative structure so that one thing leads to the next in a way that explains the overall contract along with its high and low points.
As I mentioned, the really big question mark people had was why we went to Pertineere recently for about a month. It was good to be able to lay out the reasons, which were mainly to get some practice in an area that had potential for escalation, practice hitting moons, and generally stay sharp. All this was happening while contract offers were on the table and being discussed, and as you probably know, a bored mercenary is not a happy one. So this deployment offered us things to stay busy with while more important, paid work was being negotiated.
For the most part, the Pert deployment was successful. We had a few bad moments where we lost two black ops battleships and a bunch of stealth bombers to a Vargur (video below) and a bunch of dreads to a bait Nidhoggur. Those really bad moments aside, we spent three weeks dropping capitals left and right successfully with no incidents and hopefully some painful lessons were learned, never to be repeated again.
For now, we've returned home and will be preparing for another contract that's recently been negotiated. And as for me, I've had a really hard time getting the willpower to undock and fly. I've lost my job recently and have just not had the fortitude to deal with EVE most of the time. Hopefully both of those issues change soon.
