It’s the start of a new year! By tradition, that means all sites, blogs, outlets, bulletin boards, music playlists, and whatnot are obligated to summarize the previous year. And around here is no exception. Lately I’ve been keeping most “behind the scenes” content exclusive to my Patreon page as a small way to express gratitude to supporters. Mulling it over a bit, I’ve decided to keep the majority of my year-end review public, to keep tradition with prior years. There’s a few subjects I’m going to leave backer-only—stuff like spurious content ideas or projects I don’t yet want to announce publicly as “this 100% is going to happen.”

And of course, December’s monthly wrap-up is over on Patreon as usual.

If you’ve not read through one of these before, welcome! Take a seat, make something tasty to drink. 2023 has been an interesting year for me, so I suspect I’ll be long-winded. I enjoy writing these blogs because they give me a chance to think, reflect, and try to center myself for the new year. No, not a New Year’s resolution moment. I don’t do those. Just setting aside time and space for renewal.

2023 was significant because this was the year I decided to try transitioning to writing full-time. Doing so has been my fantasy for some time—to varying degrees of realistic—and after a frankly shit year in 2022, this change was the first cardboard piece out of the box as I try to reassemble my own puzzle.

Writing about my own head is challenging. I tend to disappear into my own thoughts when I try. Am I overthinking this? Am I just whining? Is this even remotely interesting? I feel the effort’s worthwhile because it’s very easy for us, collectively, to pass over mental health in silence. While I loathe the notion of engaging in “performative” presentation of mental illness, I suspect that’s mostly self-doubt talking.

Last year functionally ended with me having a mental breakdown which led to resigning multiple jobs. It took a fair bit of 2023 until I realized that, and that I was struggling to even find those puzzle pieces (much less put them together). My experience has shifted pretty widely in the quantity of stress, depression, and anxiety I’ve felt over the last 12 months. I’ve learned I have ADHD, and well, that explains a lot about my writing habits. Early in the year I didn’t feel very stressed, but I struggled a lot with routine and focus. The last four-ish months I’ve felt increasingly stressed, but medication has (for the most part) helped manage my ability to focus. Well, apart from the stress-anxiety element gnawing on my attention span.

At this moment, I’m better off than this time last year. I’ve been up and down a lot more than usual over a year. I kind of hate it, to be honest, the roller coaster. I’m used to feeling pretty emotionally consistent, and that just plain isn’t my experience anymore. There’s a way to go before my head’s back to something I’d perceive as “normal.”

The logic of going full-time was that between an established freelance client and my RuneQuest creative work I could cobble together enough of an income to explore further freelance and creative venues (such as more freelance work and selling short fiction). Living in the Midwest, my bills are cheap enough that this felt… let’s go with “plausible.” My goal wasn’t to achieve my usual income from previous years, but instead somewhere around half that.

Wordcount

Alright, let’s get on to the fun writing stuff! This year I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of my words written, more or less, each day. According to the chart, I’ve written about 372,000 words in 2023. (That’s not including this article, which I’m writing at the end of December, and I’ll probably have some other scattered words.) For context, 370,000 words is about 1,480 pages of a trade paperback.

Some of the gaps are from taking time off during holidays. The gaps earlier in the year are typically due to weeks when I had to focus more on editing, proofreading, graphic design, or layout. Each task I do as part of the production process cuts into my time and ability to sit down and just write.

Through a wordcount, work hours, and finances sheets, my goal was to track what I do in hopes of keeping myself honest with myself. It’s not a perfect system and I can’t help but wonder if it aggravates my anxiety. Yet, I do feel satisfaction when I hit a wordcount or working hours goal.

In general, my goal this year has been to get about 6 hours of work done during an 8-10 hour period, 6 days per week. My logic in this goal is that if I was working 9-5 in an office, there’s no way I’d have 6 productive hours. There’s always some nonsense which gets in the way, like meetings, correspondence, or even just lunch. I’ve tried to record hours not just when I was at my desk, but hours I was actually working on something productive. I found it surprising that I struggled to hit that 36 hours per week consistently. In hindsight, a lot of my early struggles connect to ADHD. Depression has been a hindrance recently, but when my brain’s working I’m pretty capable of getting stuff done. Which feels wonderful. Being able to complete tasks is deeply satisfying for me.

August narrowly had the greatest amount of working hours, while September had the highest wordcount by a pretty serious margin. This is right around when I began medication, and October is around when I started experiencing more non-ADHD mental health symptoms. Currently, my long-term goal is to get my “typical” monthly wordcount to resemble last September. That’s not just a “nice to have”—I fully believe that’s what’s required if I’m going to remain writing full-time.

Breaking Down the Words

So what does that very large number of words indicate?

First, I’ve written more than ever in my life by, like, a lot. My 2022 review doesn’t share a wordcount, but in 2021 I wrote about 200,000 words, and about 150,000 in 2020. So in 2023 I’ve not-quite doubled my prior best year, which I’m quite pleased by. On the one hand I’ve moved from about half-time to full-time, but on the other my brain simply has not been working very well this year. I reckon the two even out, and that I ought not grouse.

From the total, it’s easiest for me to quantify my blog posts since WordPress gives me the number directly: 68,000 words. I’ve completed 19 projects for my primary freelance client, which vary widely in length. I can’t be arsed to go back through all the files and figure out the wordcount. That said, 10,000 words per project is probably a plausible estimate. I feel that about half my writing going toward that client, intuitively, is correct.

The Queen’s Star is about 11,000 words, and Treasures of Glorantha 2 has about 30,000 words of my writing. All those projects brings us to around 300,000–320,000 words. The remaining 50,000-ish words tracks with my mental list of fripperies.

What’s Working?

Thinking back over the year, I was pleasantly surprised by how many words I dedicated to the blog. I set a loose goal of producing an article every week, and I accomplished that goal. Sometimes by a pretty narrow margin, sometimes without an article in advance for Patreon—but there’s 52 posts for 52 weeks. That’s a win.

When I set about writing weekly articles, I didn’t really think of it as a core piece of my writing practice. That’s grown to be the case quite organically, especially over the last six months. This has been a period where my “creative time” has consisted of editing and production, with less time spent writing creative works. The article has become something fun. Not quite relaxing, but a consistent opportunity to just write. Pretty much all of these are first drafts. Punctuality can be a bit stressful, but otherwise creating an article each week is largely free of the more onerous tasks spent to polish my work to a professional standard.

I’ve been finding similar pleasure in my freelance work. This is a fairly recent development. During the first half of this year, freelance was difficult because of my challenges focusing. Once I started receiving support for my struggles with attentiveness, the contract work shifted from frustrating to engaging. It’s still not deeply interesting—and, clearly, I can’t publicly discuss the work in detail—but writing these projects has become emotionally satisfying. They aren’t creatively fulfilling, but I like feeling productive and, well, competent.

In connection with my personal articles, I’ve had some success with freelance articles this year. The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has bought four pieces from me. Two are out, and two more are scheduled for 2024. I’ve also sold a few pieces to EN5IDER. This is a digital magazine for Dungeons & Dragons 5E produced by EN Publishing (the folks behind the EN World tabletop gaming news site and forums). While I haven’t quite managed to convert this into more freelance work, selling these articles is genuine progress toward a career in which I’m writing not just anything, but text I’m actually interested in creating.

Speaking of creative work, by a long mile my most satisfying project this year was The Queen’s Star. This adventure went exactly as I wanted: I outlined it, I wrote it, I edited it, I laid it out, did art direction, then finished graphic design and proofread it. The adventure probably reflected a total of a month’s labor spread out across three months. Beginning as a nibble-project while writing freelance, the later stages were pretty much full weeks set aside for the work.

The Queen’s Star was satisfying because in contrast with basically everything else I’ve tried to create this year, the project went according to plan. It didn’t bloat out of my control, I didn’t leave it hanging for months and months. I just did the work.

I’m also quite pleased because The Queen’s Star was well-received. In particular, I was relieved that the increased price didn’t raise eyebrows. Based on the investment of time and art, $10 is honestly the price I need to set for something the size of The Queen’s Star or The Throat of Winter to be sort of viable at Jonstown Compendium sales volume. At the time of writing, my revenue from the work is close to a professional rate—for the writing alone. Which honestly, is pretty good! The income strategy in publishing is to have a revenue “tail” in which sales spread out over years, not weeks. (As an aside, a great example is Treasures of Glorantha 1; I published that in 2020 but its sales remain pretty solid.)

Ultimately I see The Queen’s Star‘s performance as validating my hope that work on the Jonstown Compendium can meaningfully contribute to my “pays the bills” income.

What Isn’t Working?

My difficulties pretty much boil down to three challenges:

• Attentiveness to a project
• Juggling different types of work
• Juggling different project tasks

These challenges are somewhat entangled. Let’s try to tease them apart.

The first is simplest, and discovering my ADHD was a quite helpful step toward explaining it. As those who’ve known or followed my work for a while may know, I tend to latch onto a new project and beaver away at it for a while, then latch onto another project and do the same. The end result is that nothing is completed, but I enjoy myself a good bit. When writing was a hobby this wasn’t much trouble. Annoying, yes, but it didn’t increase my stress.

The second is a new challenge: allocating my time to different work projects. For example, shifting from a freelance project to a creative project. I’ve been aiming at roughly a 50/50 allocation of my time. Another factor is that I struggle to “pivot” cleanly from one type of task to the next. If I’m planning to spend a day on a freelance project, I struggle to pivot unexpectedly to a creative project if I’m waiting on materials. The end result is that my difficulty using the 50/50 time allocation to complete and publish creative projects has increased my feeling of financial stress.

The third is a familiar experience, but newly becoming a difficulty. I’ve started noticing a loose correlation between when I’m feeling poorly, and when my “creative time” is spent on non-writing tasks. For example, editing, proofreading, art direction, all that stuff. Some of these tasks I do find quite enjoyable (like art direction and layout). Others, mainly editing, range from “annoying” to “I’d rather floss with sandpaper.” As a hobbyist nibbling on the different tasks was fairly easy. I’m actually quite pleased with how my skills have grown in those areas. At the same time, though, I now feel stressed if I spend a week doing graphic design instead of writing. I perceive writing as my “income-generating” work, and I just don’t experience production tasks in the same way.

These three challenges lead to the “mental fripperies” I mentioned previously. Projects, impetuses, ideas that I chased far enough down the rabbit hole to have spent actual hours and brainpower on them. The most significant is Eden Fallen, a BRP game using the ORC License I was working on earlier this year. My co-writer and I put a fair piece of energy into creating the setting and first rules iteration, but when playtests fell through all our momentum pretty much died. And you can’t really put out a complete game without actually playtesting it first.

Well, you can. But you shouldn’t.

Projects Complete & Incomplete

Now that we’ve spent some time with my working process, let’s look a bit more closely at the results.

RuneQuest

As usual since the 2019 launch of the Jonstown Compendium, the lion’s share of my creative energies have been pointed at RuneQuest. I feel frustrated that I didn’t get more out this year. At the same time, 2023 was a pretty significant year for my RuneQuest work.

Most importantly, I completed To Hunt a God! This long-overdue book was a weight off my shoulders. As I’ve mentioned over the, well, years that I spent working on it, the 2021 “finale” to Monster of the Month morphed into a sort of over-the-top love letter to RuneQuest, the Jonstown Compendium community, and, honestly, my family.

Back in 2022, we grandkids received a gift from my grandmother to help us each pursue various ambitions. For me, this meant I could commission two gorgeous illustrations for my work-in-progress: the Wise Beast trickster spirit, and Vasana crossing into the Underworld. She fell ill and passed away before I could show her the book.

I have complicated feelings about To Hunt a God. It’s the biggest work I’ve published, and I honestly don’t know if I’ll match it anytime soon. It spiraled out of my control, but those excesses—for example the “Encounters” chapter—are also some of the best content I’ve ever written. I have, to date, found exactly two ninja’d typos in the 140-page book, but it also has structural warts I never really figured out how to resolve. I know the book’s beautiful, and I suspect it’s also good. I mean, people have said lovely, lovely things about it. And the playtest was some of the most fun I’ve had playing RuneQuest. Yet I don’t think I’ll ever shake off that little voice whispering that I dropped the ball somewhere along the way.

As mentioned above, I also wrote another location-based adventure, The Queen’s Star. I think I covered my experiences with this well while discussing my writing process. In general, I think it’s realistic to make more adventures of this length and style. The challenge is more in wrangling my brain than in the adventures themselves.

Finally, the bulk of my creative energy over the last six-ish months has been devoted to finally getting Treasures of Glorantha 2 out and into your hands. As I’ve mentioned on social media, this process has been far messier than I ever expected. There’s really no one to blame but moi. I haven’t done anything terribly new and different with the production process for Treasures 2. I just opted for chaos instead of structure.

I had hoped to return to some of my half-complete RuneQuest material this year, and almost entirely failed to do so. The most significant project, of course, is the Esrolian city of Sylthi, but this also includes stuff I’ve mentioned in the past such as the cult Melikaphkaz: O-God of Traps or the Dragon’s Rift dungeon complex. Working on Treasures 2, I’ve found I struggle to get back into the creative flow of an older project. In contrast, new ideas verge on being irresistible catnip.

Article Highlights

As mentioned above, I successfully published an article every week this year. One cool aspect of this consistency has been seeing my view counts increase over time. The number of views I get is heavily correlated with producing RuneQuest content. My reviews for Cults of RuneQuest and Jonstown Compendium products definitely attract more attention. Lately, I’ve been trying to step sideways into more “articles proper” rather than only reviews. I’ve found that my article about the Old Gods, or my short Gloranthan fiction, has been a fun way to try expanding what I do, and also increase discussion about RuneQuest.

Criticism is tough, and I try my best to be constructive—or failing that, at least sincere. I honestly oscillate back and forth on whether I should bother. My critiques show good metrics, but I don’t like the idea that my writing generates hate-clicks rather than genuine interest. I feel my opinion is meaningful because of my creative credentials; as an author, I’ve put myself out there in a way some reviewers or critics don’t. I’m gratified that a number of people do appreciate the criticism I publish. I’m relieved that most discussions I provoke remain fairly polite (even when I hadn’t believed my thoughts controversial). I deeply believe critique is so, so important to the health of a game and the game’s community. Criticism I’ve received from RuneQuest colleagues was essential to shaping and improving my craft. Yet lately, every time I touch the keyboard I find myself leery of writing another review.

Huh, a confrontation-averse critic—how’s that for an oxymoron?

This is also why I’ve been trying to avoid sequestering myself too deeply into RuneQuest content. I like lots of things, so dammit, I want to write about lots of things! RuneQuest gets a lot of my time because it’s the focus of a majority of my creative work, and also because I really do just plain enjoy writing about it. I wouldn’t spend so much time on something which bored me, after all. But taking time throughout the year to write about The One Ring 2E‘s new adventures or fiddle publicly with some fantasy worldbuilding has also been a delight.

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Speaking of reviews, take some time to catch up on your Jonstown Compendium reviews! Ratings and reviews are the most important feedback we get as creators. They help us identify what customers like and don’t like. Think of it this way: the more reviews you leave, the higher the quality of future publications!

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Fiction

There’s two main fiction topics I want to touch on: Stillness, and short stories.

Stillness is a short novel I wrote in the setting which gave this site its name, Akhelas. It’s written with intent for serialized publication, at the pace of about a chapter per week. This novel was also the thesis project for the Masters program in creative writing I finished this year. Editing the material was probably the most difficult creative work I did this year. That said, I’ve had pretty positive feedback from my local writing group on shared chapters, and feel I ought to start publishing Stillness soon.

Conceived loosely like a television series, the complete section is “episode one” and has around 20 chapters. I have a pretty solid synopsis for “episode two,” and a disturbingly incoherent rant describing a possible “episode three” plot (wrote it in a hyperfixation binge and haven’t yet checked to see if it’s actually any good).

Following the model of serialized stories I’ve followed and enjoyed, my thinking is to publish weekly chapters on sites such as Wattpad or Royal Road. Then offer free and paid chapters in advance through Patreon to encourage readers to subscribe. Once the “season” of Stillness is complete, move to publication as an ebook and Print on Demand. Or maybe with an ebook each “episode” as they finish, followed by a hardcover omnibus for the “season.” The idea of this structure is to have a buffer of chapters ready for upload allowing a continuous release pace, with structured gaps between “episodes” to expand the number of buffer chapters.

One of my goals, moving to full-time, was to explore selling short fiction as a way to supplement my income. I started out the year with one complete story and a few outlines, then just sort of… I don’t know, forgot that goal? Short fiction was one of my 2023 goals, but didn’t play out as part of my actual strategy. Ironically, my limited success with nonfiction articles for SFWA does fit the “role” of this type of work.

I do quite like that one story, at least. It’s set in Akhelas, and is kind of like when Bilbo meets Smaug, except that the dragon eats him. It’s a fun gross little thing, and was fun practice writing from a nonhuman perspective.

Miscellany

The most significant failed project this year which doesn’t really fit in above was Eden Fallen. As mentioned above, when playtesting fell apart due to scheduling conflicts, my writing partner and I’s motivation to keep plugging forward basically plummeted.

The good news is that a pretty hefty chunk of the setting is defined. I still like the concept, and it’s got lots of solid weirdness. The “generation ship dystopia” was very fruitful for us in the simple worldbuilding process of drawing increasingly odd consequences from the circumstances of the setting.

The bad news is that part of my creative interest in Eden Fallen was exploring ways to iterate on BRP, now that BRUGE has made the system public-access. I feel there isn’t much point to using this type of license to just copy-paste the relevant parts of BRUGE and write a setting chapter.

There is some world where Eden Fallen comes out as basically that type of book. It’d need less playtesting, since the game mechanics wouldn’t essentially differ from a finished engine. But while the setting is “defined,” it’s certainly not in a publishable state. So if we picked Eden Fallen back up to actually write out the setting in detail, it’d still require a good bit of work.

Workflow

I need to scale back my creative work.

As stated before, my goal in 2023 was aiming for a 50/50 blend of creative and freelance work. Due to my difficulties picking one creative project and writing it to completion, this proportion has to change. My needs are consistency, stability, and freedom. Getting my head persistently into a place I can do the freelance work is key to consistency and stability. This will, hopefully, help me be more financially stable, and experience less consequent stress.

A greater focus on the freelance work will, also hopefully, provide a foundation for continued freedom to work when I choose to work. And that’s really one aspect of this ongoing transition which I’ve really enjoyed. I can’t take advantage of that freedom too often because of my personal need for routine. But not needing to deal with people, external schedules, chaos, even sleeping habits, are all aspects of my life I really like.

Continued progress toward personal stability will, I believe, in the long run help me to do more fun, creative work.

That said, what creative projects do I want to aim at for 2024?

To the surprise, I imagine, of exactly zero readers, priority Numero Uno has got to be finishing off Treasures of Glorantha 2. It’s very close to the finish line. I still have a good bit of work to complete. That said, I do have a new release window in mind which I believe is plausible.

The website will probably also remain a priority, since I’m enjoying it. I still don’t think I’m going to commit to “yes absolutely there will be an article every week,” but writing here weekly does seem to be working. (Though no, dear God no, they will not be this long.)

I want to spend more of my time writing, and I want to publish more often.

Something I’ve pondered over 2023 was my Monster of the Month series. There was elements of that series which worked, and elements which did not. It ate a ton of my creative time. However, a pretty significant reason was scope bloat. I’m not sure if the core concept is business-viable for RuneQuest (unlike EN5IDER, which does a similar idea for a larger game). Creatively, though, the basic “make a short game article” is realistic. After all, that’s what I’ve been doing for this site!

Thus, I will (probably) begin trying to consistently make short game stuff as The Akhelas Archive. I’m not promising this will be monthly—who would do such a crazy thing?—but taking ideas from the scribble journal and producing short versions should hopefully somewhat let the pressure off my creative valves.

At the moment, I’m not sure if The Akhelas Archive might be RuneQuest-specific, or instead RuneQuest-compatible content for BRP released under the ORC license. Under ORC, I’d have more business freedom, but on the Jonstown Compendium I’d have the creative freedom to continue exploring Glorantha. Of course, with the former I’d need to develop my own templates and whatnot which Chaosium provides for Jonstown Compendium creators.

Honestly, both options seem pretty enticing. Who knows what I’ll end up doing? At the moment, not me!

I also want “publish more” to mean more RuneQuest. After Treasures 2 is wrapped up, I think I need to take a more structured approach to each project. I’ve known for a while that prewriting and outlining is an important part of successfully finishing a longform text. I think I need to, consciously, apply that to how I approach projects. To some extent this is because I spent time this year researching formal project management practices for a freelance gig. I don’t need to go that over-the-top. Taking a more structured approach to scheduling my creative time ideally will increase my satisfaction with my work because I’m finishing more stuff. I want more The Queen’s Star, less Treasures 2.

“Publish more” also means reducing the time I spend on production. That doesn’t mean I won’t proofread—I have such an obsessive compulsion against typos that I don’t think I can physically force myself to not proofread an actual adventure or book—but less editing, more straightforward graphic design, and less art. Or, outsourcing those elements to fellow creators. One of the brilliant things about the Jonstown Compendium is the community.

I think I should also rethink how my workday and my workweek fit into this flow. Not sure how, yet.

And on that open-ended and slightly vague note, I think we’ll end it. This has already run far longer than I intended—even intending it to be plenty long—so an abrupt ending seems apropos.

Regular content about whatever’s in my head—probably RuneQuest—resumes next week!

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