Solstice Greetings and the End of 2020

 

This year freakin' sucked. It's traditional to do a blogpost at the end of the year to discuss what has happened over the last twelve months, and to be honest, it's going to be hard. 

It started badly, losing my beloved cat Marla in January. She really was the most important thing in our lives, and losing her so suddenly hit me really hard, and I'm still not (and probably never will be) over it. 

Then we had a bad case of the flu, I blacked out, and just a month after we'd recovered from that, the rest of the world went to hell as the pandemic swept across the globe. With governments lead by floppy-haired pillocks who wouldn't know common sense if it smacked them in the face, it got out of control. As I write this, the strain in the UK has mutated into an even more contagious disease that threatens to dominate the country. The rest of the world has put us in isolation and our green and pleasant land has become the next Children of Men. 

While we try to survive the last days of 2020, looking back there were some good moments. They were few, but they were there. My wife launched her awesome Etsy shop, where her hand-crafted and upcycled goth coolness has been really busy in the build up to Halloween and Christmas. 

Lockdown (1 and 2, with a 3rd on the horizon) meant I got to stay home and hide. In between therapy sessions for my worry and stress, I managed to finish off a massive project that'll possibly be announced sometime close to the Doctor Who New Year Special - Revolution of the Daleks (hmmm, I wonder what it could be?). 

I also managed to finish off an adventure for EN's Awfully Cheerful Engine, which will hopefully launch next year.

And, thanks to Stoo and 300+ Kickstarter backers, WILD has been funded and will see print around Easter next year too! Just have to finish off those extra bits that were unlocked as stretch goals. Thank you to everyone who backed it or shared it!

We just have to hope there's a next year. The way this year has treated us, there's still the chance of a zombie apocalypse or rogue asteroid to really finish of a really crappy year.

So, I'm signing off for the rest of the year. I'm hiding in my bunker (when I'm not stuck at the dayjob). 

Stay safe everyone. 

Holding Pattern, Disengage Again

Last year I wrote the obligatory "Hey, it's a new year" blogpost looking back at the previous year and everything I'd hope to do in the coming year of 2019. It came up on my Facebook feed today saying "You wrote this post last year" and I opened it, reread it, and thought - "Wow, it's almost like nothing happened..."

So this year, I present last year's New Year post again - with a few modifications in red so you can see any differences. 

To quote Talking Heads - "Same as it ever was..."

I was going to call this blogpost something like "It's the end of the year as we know it" or something suitably New Year-y, but it's been an odd one and it's probably best to just get on with the new one...

The last year has felt like one big holding pattern. Circling, endlessly, waiting for something exciting to happen. For that phone call. That email. For someone to come along and say "Hey, I like your ideas. You need to work on that, rather than wasting your days in retail. Here's a handful of cash. Make your dreams a reality."

Of course, it never really happens like that. You have to reach out and grab opportunity by the gronk-nuks.

I had my share of waiting last year. That holding pattern of self doubt. Convinced that after my last professional writing stint that I'd never get a publishing contract again. Convinced that all of my ideas are nonsense.

But I mustn't give up. I can't give up. There have been times last year when I seriously thought I should just pack in the writing and resign myself to my fate - one of retail, customer service and the hell I deserve for my past mistakes. But I can't do that. I've been trying to get into game writing since the late 1980s, got my first published game product on the shelves in 2002, won awards for game design and writing. It's what I want to do. Or something like it.

With Dragonmeet looming at the end of last year, I decided that I needed to sell myself. I needed to prove to someone, as well as myself, that I could do it and that my own project was worth taking a chance on. So I decided I'd produce a small sample - a pitch document, just as we had with Doctor Who over ten years ago - to show my wares and my ideas.

I produced a forty page book - half of it a "pitch" summarising the concepts and ideas of WILD, the RPG I've been working on for years. The other half a sample of one of the chapters, to give a feel for the text, and how I'd envisioned it being laid out.

With the excellent service of a digital printer (www.inkylittlefingers.co.uk) this book was printed, in black and white, with a hardback, full colour cover.

The printed "pitch" document for WILD - 20x20cm, with a very rough illustration on the cover

The printers did a fantastic job of it, with even the images they flagged on the document (the tiny jpgs of the covers of some of the books I'd worked on) coming out brilliantly...

The "Pitch" half of the document summarises who I am, and the concepts of the game.

But seeing the actual pages I'd been working on, with the ink-splat designs I'd had in mind, was brilliant. Great inspiration to keep going and to keep working on my dream project...

Playing with the text, little details like repeated lines, ink splats and blurs. This is what I had in mind...

Awesome. And despite me sending the files off to the printers with just ten days to Dragonmeet, they delivered with days to spare. Three whole copies of the WILD pitch. THREE. Talk about limited edition!

Dragonmeet was cool. Busy and exciting. Huge as well. So much bigger than last time I'd gone. I'd only been there a matter of minutes before Dom from Cubicle 7 dragged me off to a secluded location to record a podcast for "Wibbly Wobbly Dicey Wicey" - a Podcast dedicated to Doctor Who roleplaying. That was great fun - I'll post a link to the podcast when it is published.

I showed the pitch off, and hopefully there will be some news about the future of WILD soon. But I don't want to jinx it. I'm just going to keep plugging away at it. Writing the pitch document has revealed some areas I want to rewrite and redesign, which I'll start work on in the next few days.

[2020] After that, there was a huge silence. Nothing. Nada. Last year's Dragonmeet I went again with a cool WILD T-shirt and hoped it would spark some sort of interest from the big publishers I talked to the previous year, in a "Hey, remember me, we talked about that game last year?" but nothing...

With no major publishers interested it looks like WILD may be going the smaller, indie route in 2020. I just need to get back to it. 

After Dragonmeet it was a most definite return to the holding pattern - unable to work on anything except the dayjob and madness that is working in retail over the festive period. With just a couple of days before the kids go back to school, things will return to a slower, calmer pace and I can reassign some energies to working on the writing, and what I want to get done this year.

Most blogposts posted to the interwebs on the first of a year is all about the writer expressing their hopes and dreams for the coming year.

I hope to write more - get more written for WILD, unless something bigger and cooler comes along that would actually pay...

I hope to escape the day job - but I know this is unlikely. Gotta pay those bills!

[2020] - 2019 saw a couple of big job interviews that would have meant I could finally escape the hellscape of retail, but while it looked hopeful for a while, even they fell by the wayside. I'm going to be stuck in retail until I die aren't I? 

I hope to escape the city - I'm a country boy at heart.

With that, I'll close the blog with a track from my wife's favourite band of the last year. [2020] and this year. She's barely listened to anything else, but "Leave the City" still remains incredibly apt...

May 2020 bring you everything you hope. May it be kind to you, bring you prosperity and good health, and bring your dreams to life.

Stay multi-classy!

Holding Pattern... DISENGAGE!

I was going to call this blogpost something like "It's the end of the year as we know it" or something suitably New Year-y, but it's been an odd one and it's probably best to just get on with the new one...

The last year has felt like one big holding pattern. Circling, endlessly, waiting for something exciting to happen. For that phone call. That email. For someone to come along and say "Hey, I like your ideas. You need to work on that, rather than wasting your days in retail. Here's a handful of cash. Make your dreams a reality."

Of course, it never really happens like that. You have to reach out and grab opportunity by the gronk-nuks.

I had my share of waiting last year. That holding pattern of self doubt. Convinced that after my last professional writing stint that I'd never get a publishing contract again. Convinced that all of my ideas are nonsense.

But I mustn't give up. I can't give up. There have been times last year when I seriously thought I should just pack in the writing and resign myself to my fate - one of retail, customer service and the hell I deserve for my past mistakes. But I can't do that. I've been trying to get into game writing since the late 1980s, got my first published game product on the shelves in 2002, won awards for game design and writing. It's what I want to do. Or something like it.

With Dragonmeet looming at the end of last year, I decided that I needed to sell myself. I needed to prove to someone, as well as myself, that I could do it and that my own project was worth taking a chance on. So I decided I'd produce a small sample - a pitch document, just as we had with Doctor Who over ten years ago - to show my wares and my ideas.

I produced a forty page book - half of it a "pitch" summarising the concepts and ideas of WILD, the RPG I've been working on for years. The other half a sample of one of the chapters, to give a feel for the text, and how I'd envisioned it being laid out.

With the excellent service of a digital printer (www.inkylittlefingers.co.uk) this book was printed, in black and white, with a hardback, full colour cover.

The printed "pitch" document for WILD - 20x20cm, with a very rough illustration on the cover

The printers did a fantastic job of it, with even the images they flagged on the document (the tiny jpgs of the covers of some of the books I'd worked on) coming out brilliantly...

The "Pitch" half of the document summarises who I am, and the concepts of the game.

But seeing the actual pages I'd been working on, with the ink-splat designs I'd had in mind, was brilliant. Great inspiration to keep going and to keep working on my dream project...

Playing with the text, little details like repeated lines, ink splats and blurs. This is what I had in mind...

Awesome. And despite me sending the files off to the printers with just ten days to Dragonmeet, they delivered with days to spare. Three whole copies of the WILD pitch. THREE. Talk about limited edition!

Dragonmeet was cool. Busy and exciting. Huge as well. So much bigger than last time I'd gone. I'd only been there a matter of minutes before Dom from Cubicle 7 dragged me off to a secluded location to record a podcast for "Wibbly Wobbly Dicey Wicey" - a Podcast dedicated to Doctor Who roleplaying. That was great fun - I'll post a link to the podcast when it is published.

I showed the pitch off, and hopefully there will be some news about the future of WILD soon. But I don't want to jinx it. I'm just going to keep plugging away at it. Writing the pitch document has revealed some areas I want to rewrite and redesign, which I'll start work on in the next few days.

After Dragonmeet it was a most definite return to the holding pattern - unable to work on anything except the dayjob and madness that is working in retail over the festive period. With just a couple of days before the kids go back to school, things will return to a slower, calmer pace and I can reassign some energies to working on the writing, and what I want to get done this year.

Most blogposts posted to the interwebs on the first of a year is all about the writer expressing their hopes and dreams for the coming year.

I hope to write more - get more written for WILD, unless something bigger and cooler comes along that would actually pay...

I hope to escape the day job - but I know this is unlikely. Gotta pay those bills!

I hope to escape the city - I'm a country boy at heart.

With that, I'll close the blog with a track from my wife's favourite band of the last year.

May 2019 bring you everything you hope. May it be kind to you, bring you prosperity and good health, and bring your dreams to life.

Stay multi-classy!

'Twas the Blogpost before Christmas...

Old pic of Me & Debs in the Hogwarts Great Hall (probably three years ago)...

This is probably going to be the last blogpost until the new year, so I just wanted to wish you all the very best for Festivemas, and let's hope that 2019 is a better one.

Christmas is a painful time for me. Nineteen years of working in retail has driven any glimmer of festive cheer away, and has reduced it to a state where I look forward to Boxing Day - knowing that it is over for another year.

We have zero money this year as well, so watching people spending, and spending, and spending is great for the dayjob's business, but not so great on my mental wellbeing. Every transaction I run through the till is reminding me that I can't afford to buy anything for those dear to me.

But it's not just the money. The week before Christmas sees what would have been my dad's birthday as well, and Christmas day itself will again involve a lot of driving. Something I hate to do with a passion. Probably a side effect from my mental state, but I find the idea of driving so completely unsettling now - I'm so paranoid about other drivers, damaging the hire car, and of course, having to hire a car that I can't really afford anyway. Weird... I used to drive so much, and used to enjoy it. I don't know what happened...

So. This year, I'm sorry we're not getting everyone the gifts we'd like to give you, but know we're thinking of you.

In the new year I'll return to the blog and fill you in on all the game design developments and my hopes for 2019.

I hope you have a great Festive season. Enjoy, be with friends and family. Be safe. And until next year, stay multi-classy...

Insert Witty New Year Title Here

It's that time again, when a new year clicks over and change in the calendar makes us feel like we should be changing too. When the pressure to improve, to cleanse, to change our lives looms over us.

Last year we attended a talk, or rather a stage show that was part lecture. In Ruby Wax's "Sane New World" tour I talked about in an earlier blog post, she discussed the part of the brain that's always trying to push us, to get that Dopamine hit of chasing for more, doing more, achieving. Hell, it's like your brain is programmed by video game designers and you keep wanting that little bleep-bloop of an achievement.

And at the change of the calendar, the turn of the year, the reminder of the lack of achievement in the previous year, makes us want to do more in the next.

Looking back on the previous year, I spent a lot of time procrastinating. Wasn't an easy year. Priorities changed, and stuff happened. I spent most of the year feeling unmotivated, uninspired, and limping from week to week.

RPGaDAY2015 happened, which seemed to be a moderate success. It spread across the world, got people talking about tabletop roleplaying, and sharing some of their likes and stories with others. I managed to recruit the help of some amazing and awesome people who joined in with their own videos that I edited into mine, so that the audience wasn't bored by looking at my ugly-mug for a whole month.

The involvement of these fantastic gamers and designers from around the world made the whole thing worthwhile, and I hope it showed just how cool our hobby can be. Of course there were the expected negative reactions - a daily disliker on the videos who just seemed to click "dislike" as soon as the videos went live without really watching them, and people who took the positivity of the campaign and twisted it to add new categories like "worst game". Kinda defeats the purpose.

RPGaDAY2015 left me burned out, and I limped towards NaNoWriMo in November, getting to 10k of my target 50k, before I was sidetracked by another project. Hopefully, this other project will lead to something incredibly cool and it'll all be worth it, but nothing's concrete yet.

In the middle of that, the wonders of working a dayjob in retail, especially the chaos of the festive period...

Wow, that was all a bit miserable wasn't it?

I can see why people want to do something new and different for the new year.

So, what's ahead, and how can things improve?

--

I had a weird moment of clarity a few months ago. It was weird. The nominations for the Origins awards, and the ENnies, are always ones I look forward to, and in the past few years projects I've worked on have been nominated, which has been awesome. This year, I realised I hadn't actually done anything this year. In fact, I hadn't done anything for a long time. 

I've spent a few years now working on the WILD RPG, and while I love it, and love the setting, it doesn't seem to be progressing very fast. The game I started running of it revealed the bits I was missing in the rules, though it may be that I just need to get my head around a freer and more interpretive way of gaming. 

Then there was the moment that I managed to talk my way out of writing for Titansgrave, what a dumbass. "The next time someone asks if you're a God, you say YES!"

So this year, I going to write more. 

The first thing I'm going to do is stop playing video games on my ipad. I got hooked on Star Trek: Trexels, but I'm still playing the darn thing. 

If finished all the sectors and seem to be just waiting for the next update, I've generated so much Command, Research and Power that it's given up keeping track above a million...

...and the main crew (and usual landing party) are maxed out...

I should see this as a sign to stop wasting my time on it...

Second thing I need to do is stop wasting time on Facebook. After RPGaDAY2015 finished, I checked Facebook a little once a day, but didn't actually post anything for a month. I've managed cut back on my posting a lot now, and I just need to stop that horrible cycle of "I'm just clicking refresh to see if anyone's posted anything new". God, what did we do before the internet? I should read more, get back to reading books, both fiction and rulebooks.

Third thing I need to do is write.

Write more, and more often. Even if it's blog posts.

There are possible things on the horizon, but if they don't play out I need to finish WILD, finish the second draft of the novel (although it could be terrible), finish the first draft of the second novel, and get more involved.

I have other ideas for other things - I'd still like to do that "Roll Your Own Life" webseries, though maybe in a different way to that which I'd planned. I may still do a third year of RPGaDAY, but I may think differently as the year progresses. If I do a third year, it'll be less involved and I may just do the questions and take part, but not look at the responses, not look at the negativity.

I really enjoy doing the film reviewing and news stuff for a couple of sites, but the cool preview screenings and press conferences are a cost I cannot afford. Everything happens in London, a cost I can't fork out for except on extreme cases.

Also, 2015 saw me gaming again for the first time in ages. A Buffy-based fantasy game, WILD and then Star Wars: Edge of the Empire and X-Wing. Hopefully, 2016 will bring more.

Okay, that's me braindumping onto the blog. It was a bit chaotic and all over the place.

No matter what happens in 2016, I hope you all have a great year.

May you "Live Long and Prosper" and remember, the Force will be with you. Always.

- D

New Year's Task Resolutions 2014

Last year, on the first of January, I posted a list of resolutions that I was going to attempt for 2013. And I pretty much failed at all of them. Pretty rubbish, eh?

So, what did I plan?

1) Finish WILD.

Well, that didn't happen. I did make some progress with it, but not a great deal. I did, however, finish the rough versions of the TAROT cards that go with WILD that will be used for character creation and dream inspiration.

2) Finish Extinction for Eden.

That didn't happen either. I'm sorry. My head's just not in the right place for bleak-end-of-humanity type of stuff. It will be far, far better in the hands of someone who can make it the cool and gritty game it deserves to be.

3) Take part in NaNoWriMo again.

Well, I did start. I got about 2000 words into the follow up to the WILD novel I did the previous year when I was called upon to do updates, rewrites and revisions for the 50th Anniversary limited core book for Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space.

4) Get out of working in Retail.

Failed. Still there.

5) Draw.

I started the year with a plan to draw something every day, and that didn't really plan out. However, although the "daily drawing" fell through, I did get back into drawing by illustrating the 78 cards of the WILD TAROT. It was a weird experience trying to get back into the swing of drawing again after all these years. I don't know how successful I was, but it was good to get back to it.

My big problem is that I have this clear and definite vision of what I'd like WILD to look like. It's firmly fixed in my head, and I really don't think I have the talent to produce it how I'd like it to appear. But, then I could get someone to do it for me, but I'd probably drive them completely mad with my pedantic changes and alterations.

6) Do something with the video camera.

This has been almost entirely a time issue - where does it go? I did manage to upload a video of the Thor: The Dark World press conference.

Hopefully, I'll do more - experiment a bit. I'd still like to do some "unboxing" videos of RPGs and other cool stuff, but this is distracting me from actually working on WILD.

---

So what about this year? What do I hope to achieve in 2014?

1) Finish WILD.

2) Get out of retail.

3) WRITE!

What do you hope to accomplish in 2014?

Here's hoping everyone's 2014 is amazing. Until next time, stay multi-classy!