Imbolc 2019

Imbolc was actually a couple of days ago, but today is the day when I’m looking at what I accomplished not only since Yule, but since Imbolc clear back in 2018. Back then I was wrapping up the Year of Endless, the first year of this blog in which I committed to post an article a day, every day, no matter what. Having not stumbled across the chapter-by-chapter book review format, this was way harder.

Early on in the year I was heavily focused on writing and completing outstanding projects. I began pushing my professional GMing service in an attempt to provide a creative fund for things like book covers and editing, and then that wound up surprisingly successful and taking up a huge portion of my free time. I never did make it to a million words because it was easier to take the games I prepped for my professional GMing and clean them up for commercial release than to write novels entirely from scratch. I was even able to release a professional quality adventure.

All of this has kept me very busy while still leaving me in a constant state of anxiety as to whether or not this is going anywhere. My professional GMing has built up a respectable income, but that income gets eaten almost as soon as it comes in fueling the illustrations for these adventures that may or may not ever turn a profit. People liked the idea of Petals and Thorns and backed it in the first Kickstarter, but I won’t know until the next Kickstarter if they like Petals and Thorns itself. How many of the people who bought the original will turn up for the sequel?

This particularly makes me nervous because of how totally everything else has been put on hold to make this happen. It’s not just that I tried something and it might not work, it’s that I haven’t been able to put any significant effort into improving my video editing, or into trying to break into writing professionally, or into finishing up my remaining outstanding projects. Most of 2018 was dedicated to tabletop RPGs, and I won’t know until my Kickstarter concludes sometime in late March or early April if that was a good idea.

Last year’s theme was the Year of Burning, the idea initially being that I was going to invest a lot of effort into making my writing profitable, which then abruptly pivoted to making tabletop RPGs profitable when that started taking off. I haven’t settled on what to call it, but 2019 is going to be either the year when this succeeds or else the year when it crashes.