Monday, January 2, 2012

New Year, unclear

(Cross-posted at my Eyliarenn blog)

It's 2012. Great. This time last year I set myself a goal; viz to have a playtestable version (not necessarily complete, but workable) draft of my RPG worldbook completed and ready to present to a playtest group.  I also pllanned to have a good playtest group (not my own) lined up to try it out, put it through its paces, and report back to me what they liked and what they thought sucked.

Update: The worldbook is a long way from being ready to playtest, and I haven't lined up a group yet (which kind of makes sense, as I didn't want to contact any playtesters until I had a complete draft in sight of being finished - four to six weeks away probably).


A year can challenge priorities and remove opportunities (or offer new ones). I made my committment on the back of my wife's coming home from an extended stay in hospital and all the positive feelings for the future that generated. Since then I've survived two restructures at my day job, and had to commit a lot more time to that than I thought I would ever have to again, and my writing has suffered.  The first things to go werre the blogs and Twitter feed, then the actual worldbook prep, then the copious notes I generate in the quiet moments between what I was just doing and what I'm doing next. With the lost time my imagination and, to a degree, my will to push on, dissipated as well.

I've also been hatching plans for creating an online imprint. This has been in the back of my miund all along: I wanted to produce my projected Eyliarenn product line (the main book and about seven or eight supplements) electronically under my own company name before even contemplating a hard-copy release. In the absence of actually working toward that goal, I've been considering what else I could do at the business end. I have nebulous plans of expending the imprint to cover fiction and poetry releases as well as game-related materials. I'm also beginning work toward producing everything we release in multiple formats (ePub, Kindle) instead of just pdf. 

So I guess the year hasn't been a complete loss, but I can't helf but feel like I should have achieved some more tangible goals by now. But this is the time to look to the future, I guess, not the past.  So, here are - in no particular order - the targets I'm going to set for myself going into 2012:
  • Keep working toward a playtestable draft of my Eyliarenn worldbook
  • Get my ebook venture, Aridamely Press, up and running with one or two titles published by year's end
  • Stop devoting so much of my non-work time to work (sometimes a necessary evil, but not something to make a habit of).
  • Try to maintain more of a web-presence (blogs, Google+, Twitter).
So, here's to 2012.  Let's hope it lives up to its promise (and that I do the same).

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