Imbolc lies on February 1st, and it’s the New Year according to the pagan calendar that I build my life around, not because I’m actually pagan, but because the holidays are very evenly spaced which means I can use them to measure progress towards goals. Imbolc is February 1st (or 2nd, the internet can’t seem to agree), Ostara is March 22nd, Beltane is May 1st, and so on. February 1st is also close-ish to the date when I first wrote the first post for this blog, clear back in early 2017, so it serves as the new year because hey, that happens to be just about the anniversary of the project that wound up being the umbrella under which all other projects have since been collected.
So February 1st, 2017, to January 31st, 2018, is what I called “the Year of Endless,” because I was doing the CGP Grey yearly theme thing that he just recently released a video about so I can direct people to that instead of telling them to listen to like fifty hours of his Cortex podcast in order to get the idea. That was the year (ish) I posted one blog post per day every day for a full year. Then in 2018 (and change), it was the Year of Burning, which, having built a foundation and some good habits, I spent trying to get some real income off of my creative pursuits, the idea being not so much to be making $X by the end of the year but just to spend the year actively building towards that. Initially I was aiming for novels with YouTube videos as a backup plan, but that was the year my professional GMing really took off, so I did that instead. In 2019 (and change), I decided I was going to try and ride that tabletop RPG star and see how far it would take me, something which I toyed with calling “the Year of Ascension,” but that’s a name I never really liked because it precluded the possibility of failure – which is what actually happened. By the end of April, the answer was obviously “not very far,” and I spent the entire rest of the year trying to extricate myself from the Kickstarter obligations that project – successful enough to require me to deliver, unsuccessful enough to clearly not be the way forward – had saddled me with. And this highlights why “the Year of Ascension” was a bad theme. It wasn’t really under my control how much I ascended. I could try, but whether or not it worked was up to inscrutable fate and deadly destiny, and when it didn’t work, that left me kind of floundering for most of the year.
Side note, the Year of Endless isn’t a great example of a yearly theme because it has a definite failstate and is much more similar to the New Year’s resolutions that CGP Grey wants people to not do, but I found it worked well because the specific thing I was trying to do was to produce things reliably on a schedule. If I were just trying to produce more creative output in general, nailing myself to a schedule would’ve been unwise, but that was never my problem. My problem was wandering away from projects half-finished and playing video games for six weeks until something else caught my eye and I’d go try to do that instead. Even then, the Year of Endless was pretty flexible. A blog can host almost any kind of content, and what I posted varied massively over the course of the year. What started out as a specific project whose daily milestones were posted to a blog transitioned to a general effort to finish all unfinished projects and finally ended up as just me posting whatever, as it came to me, just to maintain an active demesne as a creator.
Back on topic, Heroes of Ramshorn’s Pathfinder conversion is in formatting now, so my end of that obligation has finally been completed, and the Year of Whatever The Hell That Was is basically wrapped up. Professional GMing remains a steady source of income to be used on whatever but it isn’t going to blossom into a fulltime salary for the foreseeable future, so it’s time to start looking into other possibilities. This year I’m going to go back to those things I drifted away from back when my professional GMing started taking off, novels and videos and such, looking for something else that can work. I’ve talked about this before and I’ve made some progress in that direction, but now I’m formally dedicating the next year to it with the same kind of “success or bust” attitude that I had towards tabletop RPGs in 2019, with one major difference: Both success and bust are defined as success, at least for purposes of the theme, because themes shouldn’t be fail-able. My goal here is that by the end of the year (meaning, by January 31st of 2021), I’ll have invested enough effort into new ventures to be reasonably certain that they either are or are not a good use of my time going forward. Maybe I’ll get to the end of the year and find that the quest led to nothing, that all of the ideas I have now are ultimately not a good use of my time, and then I’ll have to figure out what to do next, but either way, I’ll have gained knowledge.
Chamomile Has A Blog 