This is the time of the year when the veils of reality are meant to thin. The days darken. The nights grow colder. The sun shines in your eyes during the evening commute and dusk comes annoyingly early. Ghosts of your past draw close and gaze at your from across the boundaries—a fine and, dare I say, possibly ideal time to reckon with the past and future.
Tarot Card—the Two of Wands; expanding worldviews.
I don’t have a good memory, and so, in order to keep my bearings, I’m constantly listing off what was done and making new lists of what to do next. Here’s a summary of how my creative life has evolved in the past year.
Life gave me time to write for a few months, and I started a new routine of daily writing. It worked out better than I could have hoped!
Then, things went back to normal. I struggled to keep up the momentum, but it was still working out.
But, I got an opportunity to put more of my time to money-earning, and I took it. I had to put creative projects in the deep freeze.
Now, I’m back to my “normal” schedule and ready to make plans for the future.
My three-month experiment of writing was a success, but I also learned that if I don’t set aside dedicated time to write, I’m not going to be able to keep it going. So, I’m making a new plan. I’ve figured out a way to get a good 6-8 hours of creative time every week. This time, I’m ready to run the experiment for a fill year. Let’s see how it goes!
Writing day at All City Coffee, Seattle Georgetown Neighborhood. Hallowe’en cat sticker by Jake Richmond. Check out his web comic.
Season by season
Certain ancient traditions divide the year into a wheel of eight seasons, and I find that a helpful way for me to focus my creative year. The season from Hallowe’en to the Solstice/Christmas season is a great time to harvest past successes, to preserve good ideas, and wrap them up for the future. Accordingly, I’m pulling two old ideas that deserve a fresh start.
But first, I’m still going to send all my Adventurer-level+ patrons a physical postcard four times a year (if you want to know more about my Patreon reward levels, check out my Patreon page).
It used to be my habit to create something physically sharable to send to patrons on a quarterly basis. I’m bringing that back. It’s not always going to be a big fancy deal, but I do want to create something I can share 3-4 times a year. This might an adventure, a cool game, an awesome map, or something weirder. I’m bringing that tradition back. I’ll also be sharing my process and what I create on my Substack.
For my first physical project, I’m also reviving something that I had to put aside a while ago, my coloring book project. Yes, I’m making a coloring book. It’s actually going to be cool. My goal for the next 7ish weeks is to get that in a publishable form and, hopefully, share POD copies at cost (or better) with my Patreon supporters.
This picture is going to be in a coloring book.
And yes, Isotope is still being worked on. More on that in my next “Regular Coffee” accountability post.
So, here’s what it looks like:
Eight creative seasons, each about seven weeks long.
Even seasons are for developing new ideas and sending out postcards to my Patrons.
Odd seasons are for making ideas tangible and publishing them to Patrons and beyond.
It sounds like that needs a nice, neat diagram to lay it all out. Guess I’ll get on that right away.
Conclusions
This is another experiment, or maybe an evolution! Who knows how it will go.
Hey, did you know that I’ve got a whole library of past Patreon creations that are available to everyone?
The Unusual Encounters
Here’s a little book of weird encounter ideas for Dungeon Crawling adventure games that I did several years ago. I just opened it up for free to non-patrons. Check it out!
I LOVE that coloring book picture!!