Hello all! It’s been a bit since I posted as we come out of the holidays and I try feverishly to catch up on projects which inevitably trailed behind while I took my break.
Such is my life.
That break, frankly, was because I came pretty close to another breakdown just before the holidays. This time, it was more tied to stress than depression, but Lord knows all that stuff is entwined like a festering rat king. Pulling the emergency brake and forcing myself to stop doing “productive things” didn’t reverse the damage, but it did prevent me from getting worse.
I don’t particularly have the energy or inclination to do a deep-dive into the Brain Stuff today, so we’ll go with the skinny version. The primary stressor is finances as I keep trying to juggle the ol’ freelance + creative + incoherent screeching as sources of income. To that end, I devoted much of 2024 to focusing on paying work.
I believe the lack of creative time spiraled me back down into burnout. I was in that space, pretty badly, back at the start of 2023 when I escaped my prior profession in the mental health field try playing with words full-time. (Yes, yes, the irony is abundant, and all of us who work in the field are aware of it.) Basically, the last two years have just been a constant cycle of “Austin has figured out his bullshit ↔ Austin is back on his bullshit.” Some of this is due to actively trying to get myself into a better place, and some of it is due to smacking myself headfirst against walls of which I wasn’t cognizant.
Creating stuff makes me happy, and when I’m happy I’m more productive. That spiraling ramp goes both ways—when I feel pressured to do “boring, paying work” it reduces the financial stressors, but my mental health declines.
What’s the plan, then? Oh, I don’t know. Keep trying to juggle, basically, while trying to avoid feeling overwhelmed by various real and self-imposed obligations.
I like doing deep-dives into what I’ve been up to and what I hope to accomplish (like in my last Year in Review). That ain’t happening this year. Sorry! Right now I want to just discuss the general state of my work. Last year’s article was a 5,000-word behemoth that I just don’t have the capacity to indulge right now.
RuneQuest
In 2024, I published one new RuneQuest book: the (perhaps long-awaited?) Treasures of Glorantha 2: Relics of the Second Age.
I love this book. As a whole piece, I think it’s the most beautiful I’ve published. It has my fingerprints all over. In particular, I’m pleased by the graphic design—while it’s not my strongest skill, I believe this book’s design is both attractive and distinctive for the Jonstown Compendium.
I also hoped to release a second book in 2024: Howl of the Wild Hunt: Adventures Anthology for RuneQuest. This anthology collects three old adventures which haven’t seen a release in Print on Demand (The Throat of Winter, Clash with the Quacken, The Queen’s Star) together with a new adventure set in the Clearwine Necropolis. The tag “Coming Eventually” in my preview earlier this year, clearly, was prescient.
Howl has lingered in a nearly-complete state for pretty much the last 6 months. I’ve reached out to a Jonstown Compendium colleague to provide layout, and they’ve done an amazing job. Right now, they’re still waiting on feedback from me about the layout. The new adventure still needs art, too, once the art’s page locations are finalized. The delay is me, which is also why I’m playing coy about who is collaborating. The RuneQuest community is wonderfully patient, but if anyone wants to be snippy about delays they should be snippy with the person responsible—that is, with me.
I love creating beautiful books. Overall, though, I’m reaching a point where you’re very likely to start seeing low-art or text-only works from me on the Jonstown Compendium. I can navigate the tasks and obligations of the production process when everything non-creative in my life is stable. When life is uncertain, though, they’re the ball which gets dropped first while I’m juggling.
Hammering out a new manuscript is deeply, deeply satisfying. It’s 100% my favorite part of being a writer. The happiest I’ve been in the last few years is the months I spent designing and writing The Queen’s Star and Howl of the Wild Hunt. Getting stuff “out there” and then doing the next thing seems more compatible with my mandatory juggling than trying to complete lush, full-color projects.
That doesn’t mean remastering to full presentation would never happen. But if I go this route, any text-only releases would not be “works in progress.” They’d be considered complete.
I’m considering this because of the pile of mostly-finished and half-finished texts I have laying around. For example, a pretty-complete manuscript for Melikaphkaz: The O-God of Traps including a new longform cult and a stack of RuneQuest traps has been lounging around my house since freaking 2020. Likewise, while playing my ongoing Wolf Pirate Circumnavigation campaign for RuneQuest, I’ve written somewhere around 15,000–20,000 words about jungles in Teshnos. Or even just adapting my notes into something as simple as a Wolf Pirate adventurer background.
I’m disappointed in how little I wound up publishing in 2024. I’d like that to change in 2025, but I honestly don’t know if I can make that happen.
Fiction
The main backlog work of fiction remains Stillness, a novel set in my personal setting, Akhelas. I’d like to release this as an online serial, eventually. My weekly articles which touch on the worldbuilding of Akhelas have helped me clear up some personal ambiguities, and I’ve received useful feedback over the last year from friends in a local writing group. Stillness needs an edit to tighten the worldbuilding and use of magic, but overall the story and prose function as intended. I do also have the next few sections of the serial roughly outlined. I’ve struggled to find the space within which to devote my handful of good hours each day to this project.
I tried for a few months to write a short story each month, but the time I’d use for that has pretty much entirely been consumed by writing the site’s weekly articles. Nonetheless, I do currently have three stories I’m cycling through magazine submissions. None of them feel particularly promising anymore, but it’s still possible they might lead somewhere.
The most promising fiction trajectory I have is discussions about an outline for the interactive novels publisher Choice of Games. We’ll see if the project continues, but the ball has just recently bounced back into my court to revise the outline based on the editor’s feedback. The concept is basically an alt-history story tied into the Arthurian legends. (Yes, I submitted that pitch while King Arthur was still in my noggin after reading Pendragon 6E.)
Freelance
Freelance work constitutes the bulk of my output in 2024. Some of it I can’t speak much about—ghostwriting and whatnot—while others I can. I’ll focus on the most interesting stuff.
One of my favorite accomplishments this past year has been writing for the videogame outlet DualShockers. It feels good to be actually writing about games, for a real outlet. Some of the material is basically simple list articles, but I’m quite proud of my reviews and a number of other articles. It’s substantially expanded my portfolio of published work. Getting back into the swing of writing for DualShockers consistently is one of my goals for getting the juggling balls back into the air.
I’ve also been contributing frequently to the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association’s blog, particularly on history and worldbuilding. My favorite article is probably “Perceiving the Wind,” which in particular might be interesting to the RuneQuest crowd since it discusses attempting to experience Orlanth in the winds and storms of the Midwest.
Coming up later this year, a board game I edited named Galileo Galilei will be released by the Czech publisher Pink Troubadour. To my knowledge, the game has been printed and is just in the shipping hell which troubles the whole games industry.
Presently, I’ve got a bit more editing work on my plate, including a Call of Cthulhu adventure for the Miskatonic Repository. A significant chunk of my income comes from writing for a single client in education. Both because they offer work I’m well-suited to do, and because they actually offer commensurate pay for the intellectual labor required. My personal challenge is that when they don’t have freelance work available, I’m often struggling to make ends meet. And then that translates into the juggling challenges as I pivot back and forth between meatier work and scraps in-between projects.
Blog
I wrote a LOT for Akhelas in 2024. Nearly 80,000 words of articles, and an article every week. I enjoy feeling productive when I’m working at that pace. I also struggle to feel confident that such a pace is sustainable.
At the moment, then, I’m shifting my goal to be a minimum of one article per month. Probably reviews; I think deep-dive critiques are some of my best work, and I think they’re the most interesting for y’all, too. I know for sure that my next review will be for a Jonstown Compendium book—the review copy has been sitting half-read as I cope with my not-quite-a-breakdown and try to catch myself back up. I promised the author a review and, dammit, I am going to follow through.
Whether or not I maintain the previous pace from here forward is hard to predict. I suspect it’ll go on a week-by-week basis, depending on my available energy. These articles do excite me, but often are also a lot of work for which I’m essentially getting paid $1 or $2 per hour. My plan with this reduced schedule is to always release an article a week early to backers on Patreon, instead of using that week as a “buffer.” But articles come when they come—at least for the immediate future—rather than consistently at noon on Fridays.
One thing also worth noting is that the consistency has been effective.
Publishing a weekly thing has pretty directly correlated with increased readership! While that’s not really a solution to my stressors, it’s something I ought to share and celebrate.
Thank you, everyone, for spending your time reading my words. I appreciate it.
Wordcount & the Coming Year
In 2024 I wrote 446,856 words.
GodDAMN that’s a lot of words.
As I mentioned before, something like 80,000 of those words were dedicated to the Akhelas site. I wrote around 130,000 words for my primary freelance client (though I’m not sure if I remembered to track every project on my sheet). Howl of the Wild Hunt comes out to somewhere around 30,000 words on its own.
That leaves about 200,000 words scattered across other freelance work and my creative work. I’d guesstimate the split is 50-50 between the two. On the one hand, I’m a wordy bitch when freewriting. On the other hand, I wrote a good bit for DualShockers and similar material in the latter half of 2024.
As the spreadsheet’s monthly totals indicate, I go through good and bad swells. Sometimes a low month is due to focusing on editing or production. I believe that’s February in 2024, finalizing the files for Treasures 2. But it’s also pretty easy to see a distinct down-turn in my productivity over the last few months.
That’s, well, one reason I keep a spreadsheet. Helps me keep track of words and mental health.
At the moment, I’m trying to bolster my mood by setting aside about an hour per day for creative screwing around. Not necessarily work on a specific project, not necessarily an ongoing goal, just … messing with ideas. Sometimes that’s fiddling with an Akhelas conlang. Other times that’s designing a Pendragon-esque battle for my Wolf Pirates RuneQuest campaign (we’re nearing Harrek’s conquest of the port city of Dombain). It isn’t a perfect fix—and I often have days where my feeling of “being obligated to work” overcomes my goal of doing creative work—but it does seem to have a positive impact on my ability to get things done.
I’m also looking around more actively at non-freelance work options. I love the freedom it currently affords me, but spending unpaid work hours looking for work is brutal. Maintaining that “hunting” mindset when I’m in the midst of a substantial project is a struggle, too. The simple truth is that while I’m pleased with how my income improved from 2023 to 2024, “stability” basically looks like double my current numbers. And just “work harder” at my current commitments contributes to the burnout spiral.
So while it’s not a particularly cheerful ending point, that’s basically how things are looking at Akhelas HQ at the end of 2024. Hoping to keep the lights on, hoping to keep things rolling as they have been, no clue if that will continue. Catching up on my old creative work would be nice, I suppose.
Well, here’s hoping the coming year is a bit brighter than the previous. Happy (belated) New Year!
Want to keep up-to-date on what Austin’s working on through Akhelas? Go ahead and sign up to the email list below. You’ll get a notification whenever a new post goes online. Interested in supporting his work? Back his Patreon for early articles, previews, behind-the-scenes data, and more. Or head over to DriveThruRPG to peruse his publications!
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