Early Update Bad News & What I've Been Up To
about 7 years ago
– Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 10:34:59 PM
I'll be afk come April 1st, so I wanted to shoot out the end of the month update now.
The Big Bad News is my layout artist fell through after failing to deliver on a bunch of promises, and now I have to find a new one. I'm out some money but more pressingly I'm out wasted time and my production pipeline is borked. This sucks. Also, I'm behind in responding to a bunch of communication (mostly through Kickstarter) so thank you for bearing with me if you've messaged but I haven't written back (I promise I'll respond to each and every message).
Anyway Here's What I've Been Working On:
- Looking for a layout artist
- Taxes (just today submitted all the necessary documentation to my accountant for 2016)
- Writing the Campaign Setting Guide (I enjoyed getting two solid four hour sessions on some recent flights I took for business travel).
- Writing the Player's Guide
What I'm Going to Be Working On:
- Finding a Layout Artist
- The Campaign Setting Guide
- The Player's Guide
On a personal note, I haven't been super pleased with myself. I feel guilty for not publishing the Corruption Supplement, Blood & Body, and Intrigue & Alchemy Along the Red River supplement (although I delayed these to ensure I had the best possible chance of publishing the Player's Guide & Campaign Setting Guide according to my first proposed schedule). I feel guilty about not being perfect at responding to queries (which are, to a fault, polite and totally reasonable). I've been dragging my feet on submitting the tax info out of fear that I've messed up some fundamental calculation and I'll owe this huge bill that effect everything.
This is part of the creative process, or at least it's part of mine; things going wrong, feeling a bit lost and a bit disheartened. I know from experience the only way past is through.
In any event, I just want to say thank you to all you lovely backers. For as much as I'm cruel to myself, for as much as I mentally punish myself for when things go wrong (thinking I should have all of this figured out, thinking I should have perfect armor against surprise) all my backers, all of you have been nothing but polite, complimentary, and encouraging.
I'm going to get Salt in Wounds done, more or less on time. I'm going to do my utmost to communicate openly and honestly throughout the whole production process. I enjoy this work, enjoy the problem solving, enjoy the creativity, enjoying growing as a writer-publisher-designer. For the last few months I've been having trouble keeping sight of that, but ya'll have helped keep me motivated to keep trudging through until I once again get that runner's high from working through my creative marathon.
State of the Project March 2017
about 7 years ago
– Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 10:45:01 PM
Some Stuff I Did:
-Several meetings with layout artist, approved final
template design concept
-Collected all interior art for ‘Corruption of the Tarrasque’
-Uploaded the ‘Corruption of the Tarrasque’ PF version in
playtest folder
-Uploaded Alchemical Ghoul 5e subrace to playtest folder
-Wrote Several pages of Fiction
-Collected, next draft, and organize all relevant blog posts
into the relevant documents
-Wrote 5 pages of the Campaign Setting Guide
Some Stuff Coming up in the Immediate Future:
-Distribute Completed Corruption of the Tarasque Supplement
-Submit all tax documents & receipts to Accountant
-Backerkit Finalization
-Shift focus to completing Campaign Setting Guide first
State of the Project: March 2017
TLDR: We’re ahead of schedule in some ways (ie the stretch
goal pdfs), a little behind schedule in other ways (Corruption of the Tarrasque
was hypothetically scheduled for End of January and will be coming out early
March), and I’m in a good place on every level to finish every part of the
project more or less on time. I’m shifting focus to delivering the Campaign Setting
guide as soon as possible, the Player’s Guide after that, and every other PDF
thereafter.
I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about how the project
is going, how I’m doing, what I’ve learned, and what I’m thinking about.
A recent Commenter asked ‘And now the $60,000 question… are
you on track for your timeline?’ It’s an eminently fair question and perhaps
the most important question. For all that Kickstarter *isn’t* a presale, for
all that delays (and even the occasional complete melt-downs that make people
abandon this model entirely) are baked the expectations, there is a central
concept at the core of this relationship between you and me: I want to make
something, you give me money to make the thing, I make the thing like I said I
would (and ‘how long I’m going to take’ is a big part of how I said I would do
the thing).
As I mentioned on the tldr, on one level I’m a little behind
(about a month or so) of the rough timeline I proposed during the campaign.
That said, I’m more ahead on some later projects with farther out delivery
dates. But I realized that I’ve been trying to juggle too much, trying to be
perfectly efficient with the production timeline (having, at every moment, an
assignment for every member of my team, a tidy-neat flow from first draft to
second draft, to art orders to editing to layout and publishing). Ultimately, I
felt like I needed to have a perfect map of every bottleneck and be skilled enough
at managing and shifting gears enough that the flow of production would run
smoothly all the way through. That meant that I tried to keep up on working on
five different products at the same time, in addition to all the backend stuff
that’s important.
Add to that, in my dayjob, I’m getting a raise, a bonus, and
a bunch of new job duties including some that will see me travelling around the
country. This isn’t bad, it’s great; but if I’m not careful it’s something that
can make me worry that as I level I will ultimately fail people who believe in
me. With that I’m still a married father of a two year old with a rich,
complicated life that I’m trying to honor.
In a lot of ways, it’s very easy to make myself unhappy with
my writing, or with my life in general. I’m the sort of guy who forever feels a
grinding voice in the back of my head repeating, ‘More. Better. Faster.’ I’ve
been writing for a long while, and over time I figured out ways to ensure that
I was taking care of myself, ensure that creating wasn’t making me miserable;
make me feel like I was essentially failing. But I forgot some of those lesson,
abandoned some tools that work for me s when I got ‘called up to the majors’
(as, the amount of attention and money flowing into my life via this project
catapults me up over 95% of the Third Party RPG publishers).
In th past few months, there have been weeks where I spent
my available time only doing logistics work, forgetting that -whatever else I
am or am doing- I *need* to be writing as part of balancing myself
psychologically; it’s why I started writing and know I’ll never quit, because I
can’t. And if I try to quit, or if I get distracted and stop without realizing
it I just don’t feel quite right.
It was easy to feel like (it will be simple to continue to chastise
myself) I needed to be working all the time, and I subtly dreaded having
updates where there weren’t enough todos checked off. At best, this sapped my
reserves and at worst it tempted me to focus on the ‘simpler’ quantifiable work
where I’d have ‘something to show’ instead of the harder, more vital work (that
often has larger gaps before something is ‘checked off’).
In general, I’ve recognized that this project is more money,
more complexity, and more interest than I’m used to working with. In response
to that, I’ve been trying to relearn how to work; to remove my inefficiencies and
my unprofessionalisms. I’ve applied a lot of different overlays and structures
to try and become more efficient. In a lot of ways, this has borne fruit. And
also, in some ways it’s gotten in the way of the work.
I try to to avoid being precious about it, try and approach
writing and creating in the same way that a contractor approaches building; that
is, this is a job that is unemotional, cut and dry commercial activity. There
is certainly that aspect to it; the ‘show up every day and work eight hours on
this according to the plan you made’ (except it’s not nor has it ever been eight
hours). And yet, for all that I avoid speaking about it, so much of the
creative process is a mystery; so much of why I and how I create is a tangled
mesh of buried irrational influences the comprehension of which is beyond me. Despite
my own best efforts, I can not drive out all the ‘silly’ aspects of my relationship
with my own art making… but for the past few months I’ve been trying to do just
that. Recognizing that I was succumbing to that quintessential trap of making ‘letting
the perfect be the enemy of the good’ I’ve been learning to disentangle the
ways I can and should do better, more organized and quantifiable approach to my
creativity vs the things that don’t seem to make sense but are -ultimately-
part of my process.
And then there’s all the things I messed up on because I didn’t
appreciate the time commitments I was getting myself into. Missing pdfs have taken
a bit of time to sort out, even at 98% accuracy for a distribution of 1000
means that I’ll become embroiled in 20 ongoing conversations where I try to research
to figure out what went wrong (which, if you’re missing pdfs, have questions,
or anything please let me know). And that’s only one portion of the beaurocratic
duties that are involved in an undertaking like this.
The worst thing I did however -especially where my emotional
health was concerned- was assembling an overlarge team of writers/designers/artists.
I did this because I wanted to be inclusive and -also- figured that by having a
bunch of individuals I would retain redundancies, be able to make the work I
needed done more modular so no one person would be overwhelmed. What I didn’t
appreciate is how much time even a simple business managerial relationship can
take, how -in their excitement- the designers, writers, and artists would want
and ask for work, updates, guidance, to pitch ideas and so on. And how, when I
failed to have something for them to do, or when I let the conversation lag, I’d
feel so guilty; convincing myself that I was failing these people and failing
to properly honor their passion and professionalism.
This is all to say that since the close of the Kickstarter,
I’ve had resurgent anxiety and fear creep back into my life in frustrating ways.
I’m happy to report that it fundamentally didn’t get in the way of my producing
the work, but I think that -left unchecked- it would only have gotten worse,
ultimately hurt me or the project in ways that frighten me. And so I’m happy to
identify this, and talk about this now.
I was reluctant to write this and share it with all of you
because I didn’t want you to fret that I was ‘failing’ that this was some sort
of lead up to me not delivering your rewards. I’ve been reluctant to talk to
friends because I didn’t want it to seem like I was complaining about this most
enormous of gifts -your financial support for my creative life- and because I
deluded myself thinking that ‘nobody could understand’ the unique intersection
of my challenges. And, sure, nobody I know is exactly where I am at the moment,
but everyone knows what it feels like to fear failing people, to get stressed
trying to juggle a rich life. It’s been nice to start *really* talking to my friends
again, just like it’s been nice to write all this out.
For all that creators have to figure out logistics and make
budgets and plans, I think the most vital work they have to do is take care of
themselves emotionally and psychologically; and this is work that only they
themselves can do. This is probably especially true when they ‘succeed,’ when
they ‘go up a level’ and will be tempted to abandon the tools they’ve honed
because the expectation that they ‘need to be different now.’ Or at least, that’s
been a big part of my experience these past months.
And through it all, you’ve been amazing. Every communication
with every backer has been kind, full of encouragement and praise and it means
so much to me this outpouring of support.
My biggest takeaway from all this is as follows:
-I can’t work all the time (not that I ever was, just that I
felt like I should).
-This is going to be hard, and require a lot of learning.
And that’s exactly as it should be.
-I need to talk about my life, even (and most especially)
those things that are most difficult for me to talk about.
-I need to focus on completing the most important thing
first.
What that means I’m going to stop fiddling with the module
and the other supplements, bring up the Campaign Setting guide front and
center. When I have time, I’m working on *that* until it’s done, and when that’s
finished I’m working on the Player Guide (I’ll still throw what else I have
into the playtest folder). I want you all to be able to start your Salt in
Wounds games proper as soon as possible, so all the fun extras and other stuff
comes after I get the core work done (not to mention, by setting down the city
details in concrete, it will be that much easier to avoid duplicating/redoing
work as I change my mind/details).
In any event, thanks for backing, thanks for reading, and I’m
happy to get back to it.
