Yesterday — for almost the entire day — my notes read, in total:

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Thurs 26 Jan.

Long day.

There was an edit, much later in the day, to add:

Not getting better, really.

We’re all going to have days like that. I didn’t expect one so soon after making certain promises (to myself) but that’s how the pendulum swings sometimes. I also have a draft that I will finish up and post, more likely to be tomorrow’s post than something that you’ll see this evening, but again, that’s how it swings sometimes. Creativity isn’t a faucet, and sometimes the boring thing will have to do, and I have to make it work in the machinery even though I know that part will be the first thing to ‘break’ and then I’ll have to scramble and make an emergency fix but that’s one of the ways the process works. Sometimes.

And enthusiasm ebbs and flows. Yesterday, obviously, the tide was out. It’s also a bit of a crunch time at work, as I shared on twitter

"Note to all staff: requests for miracles should be sent to Rome, preferably with 2-3 weeks lead time, and not to the local 'facilities dept', which I'll remind you is just one guy, at 7am on the morning of."

— m · blind (@mdotblind) January 26, 2023

Edit, 4:50pm 27 Jan 2023, to add: Apparently it’s just as well that my half-a-draft yesterday never made it to post because recent news changes a lot of what I was going to say. No real spoilers here but it was going to be D&D related and this new bit is, a lot.

I am in the habit of writing notes to myself, occasionally long ones. Initially, it was just a draft email in Outlook [not a client I like but required for work] and would be short notes along the lines of “buy butter and eggs” or “attack and dethrone god” – things to remember to do on the way home from work. But over time I moved from just bulletpointing notes to talking my way through projects like building a new computer or buying a new condo or remodeling the kitchen in the new condo, and on top of links to articles and pullquotes and tracking prices and all the rest, I would drop back into a conversational tone and write whatever my additional thoughts were.

“We can probably skimp on the processor since we’re planning on putting an absolutely ridiculous amount of RAM in this rig and also the graphics card. Well, by skimp I mean get a 65W tdp part, but still something with at least 8 cores.”

I have unfortunately adopted “We” as a pronoun. In context it makes perfect sense – these are notes to myself and so this is present me talking to future me, or at some point later when I review the notes, it is present me listening to past me, and in either case “we” are perfectly fine with this form of address.¹ My literary executor will probably think I went nuts in 2015 and will burn every metaphorical page in a metaphorical fireplace.²

The habit grew stronger in 2020 and I switched from emails to Google Docs and the notes became much more, ah… present [?] in my life? I was jotting down short story ideas before they ran away from me, alongside notes for the longer project and board game ideas and resurrected the long dormant RPG notes and (when I’m not distracted by twitter) I found myself writing more. A lot more. The archived notes file from 2021 is over 200 pages long. The file from last year is 483.

Now that Twitter is actively trying to make itself un-useful and I’m not getting the same sort of nice-distracting-side-screen vibe from the app on my phone, I find myself needing another distraction to fill out agonizingly long 8 hour shifts exploring new avocational resources to keep my mind alert, sharp and productive for my employer’s benefit.

What I will miss, maybe, is engagement. Comments are closed on this version of the blog, a decision I made several years ago, and I don’t anticipate ever enabling the feature. Diligent folks who just had to make their feelings known about a blog post could scour the page and eventually find my Twitter handle, which seemed like an acceptable compromise to me. I suppose, when I am fully done with Twitter I’ll need to update that link.³

When I am the only intended audience, writing is easy. The conversational tone I usually take makes sense, the long asides (so many asides)⁴ don’t really distract from my points because I always remember what the point was. I don’t have to find the right words to describe a state of mind or an emotional reaction because, well, it’s me. When I go back and re-read the notes, I know where my mind was at⁵ and I remember why I talked around a thing that evaded exact definition in that moment. Transferring this writing habit to the blog means we’ll encounter a few speed bumps and maybe the occasional detour, but I have a new (new-ish) daily writing habit and I might as well flex it.

This blog activity will not be replacing my habit of writing little⁶ notes-to-myself and you won’t be seeing any version of those notes here. That Google Doc is a different thing that lives in a different space, both physically and in my thinking about it. But if I can adapt that voice and tone, the one I’ve found so easy to use when talking Me-to-Me, I can maybe take what has become a mid-morning ritual and get some additional mileage out of it.

For those of you who remember, and added the RSS feed to your readers-of-choice way back in the day, I used to work retail for Barnes & Noble. Back then I would blog about the things that frustrated me at work, and since the industry was in transition [2008-2013] there was a lot to mine for content. So you might have followed the blog back in the day for the bookselling insights, or for my opinions on Comics & Manga, or for the occasional bits of analysis⁷. The current iteration of the blog isn’t like that – you might read through the new front page to get an idea of what I felt was blog-worthy, the past couple of years. Going forward, I’m not sure where this (new) new writing impulse will take me or what topics we’ll cover or discover. But if you’re game, and can put up with my annoying new habit of using “we” when I write, well: let’s find out.

¹ I live alone and have for over 12 years now and I think that may also have something to do with it.

² At least one very presumptive assumption there but we’ll leave it for dramatic effect.

³ I’ve made appropriate alternate accounts at a number of suggested socials but I haven’t found where I’m ‘landing’ quite yet.

⁴ My brain is multi-core and apparently is always running multiple threads. See, for example, the use of footnotes in stupid personal blog posts.

⁵ …Usually.

⁶ noted earlier, 483 pages in 2022.

⁷ That version of the blog is a bit of a mess because of mildly incompatible software and broken links but still ‘lives’ at archive.rocketbomber.com. And I apologize for crashing into your feed this morning via a long-forgotten RSS – but I hope you’ll stick with me for a bit longer anyway. :)

I’m not a poet – strike that, we can all be poets. But I am not a professional poet and my skills in writing verse are both under-exercised and a little rusty. But I wanted to take a little poetic license anyway and paint a mental picture for you, of a glorious fall afternoon full of color and crisp weather and quiet walks across fallen leaves in a park, or perhaps along a woodland trail.

And a glorious fall afternoon full of sunlight gives way to evening, and the slanting sunlight angling lower and lower in the sky, and a beautiful sharp, spiky sunset, until just a single glowing ember sends out a last light-house beam as it slips under that horizon. Good night and good luck.

…and that’s the feeling I’m getting being on a certain social network these days. The Titanic musicians playing our way out. We few, we lucky few, one last time unto that breach.

But the thing about sunsets: there is always a sunrise (historically and statistically speaking) so this isn’t the end, this is just a really bad day to be a Twitter employee and is one more reminder that we should probably know where the exits are, even if today is not that day. And it never hurts to have a back-up plan, maybe a space you already keep on a domain you already own.

A nice place to land when it all goes to heck. A good place to watch that final sunset.

I have bitten off more than I can chew. In fact, what I have bitten is chewing back and may be bigger than me.

The Unnamed 2022 Project is still an on-going, living breathing beast of a thing. But (yeah there’s a qualifier) — I haven’t risen to the self-imposed challenge and I’m about to blow past my first self-imposed deadline. I would have preferred to announce today that the first “drop” of 2022 was ready and that you’d be able to download PDFs of this first content pack for free (or pay-what-you-want, if you felt like tipping) from at least two digital stores including… um… Gumroad.¹

There isn’t a release this week. So let’s talk about what I *have* been doing for these last 16 weeks—including a selected sampling of the diversions and dead-ends encountered so far—and where the 2022 Project is at.

I have a name, and a website, and that website is running a Wikipedia-like software implementation², which will be the home of the always-free parts of what I’m working on. The working title for the project was “System15” [riffing on the xkcd comic, Standards] and is now called Plinth·RPG

https://plinthrpg.com/

Plinth·RPG, properly, is the game: a rules-light tabletop fantasy storytelling RPG that I’m still working on. When I’m finally done with the mechanics of it and have wrung it through several additional future drafts, it’ll probably be at least 16 pages³ but not more than 64, with art, and available as a slickly formatted PDF⁴. Since the objective is to write a rules-light game, the overwhelming majority of the content (the rest of plinthrpg.com) will be a whole new fantasy setting, more or less as I write it. That’s one reason, though not the only reason, that I went with wiki software rather than a blog format for the Plinth site.

That fantasy world will probably need its own name at some point. Though I’m fine with moving forward under the really-is-that-what-you’re-calling-it, the-name-just-seems-generic-to-the-point-of-obfuscation brand of “Plinth” in that Plinth has at least two things going for it: no one else is using it, or anything close to it, and also (as you might have noticed) I registered the dot-com.

Today is, was, my first deadline, as I noted in the last blog post. This announcement, and the reveal of the still-skeletal website, was not what I intended to release.

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My goal for the Untitled 2022 Project was to prepare and release a “content drop” every six weeks: digital files available for download and containing, well, something like an old school D&D adventure – some maps, some descriptions, a few notable NPCs and perhaps a new faction (to add to my collection), and if appropriate, some monsters or creatures or critters to go along with.

This was a good first impulse and is still a decent idea. I never got anywhere close, though, because I rapidly careened off that course on onto a different track.

My idea for a simple adventure map was sabotaged when I asked, “Well if I’m making a map anyway why not make it part of the world we’re building?” and that led me down a rabbit hole of medieval and renaissance travel modes and travel times and appropriate map scale and wait, how many kilometers is the Earth’s equator again and what about the distance to the poles, and say has anyone done a world map projection that works with hex maps⁵, and now I have a lot of notes and some fun things sketched — but I’m not really closer to that first Pack drop and I still don’t have a format or template that I can iterate on and drop things into.

[Image caption: you can maybe see how things like this became a distraction]

So I don’t have the neat, initial adventure model that I thought I would have ready at this point. I’m not at the finish line; I am only just now getting ready to run this thing and enter the starting gate. It sucks, and it’s not where I want to be, not where I planned to be, but I know whose fault it is⁶ and all I can do is keep going.

My next self-imposed deadline is six weeks from now, Week 12 of 2022, and Friday 25 March;
I’m already anticipating that I’ll miss that deadline too.

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One of the blacksmiths I follow on YouTube⁷ has a neat saying that I’m going to borrow for this, “Need a tool, make a tool”. The concise version is memorable and I can’t improve on it, but I’ll expand on it just a bit so you know what I mean by it: If you know what you need for your end goal but you can’t find the exactly right tool to get there, go ahead and make the tool (or tools) first. Which he literally does in many of his early videos, making hammers, tongs, drifts, dies, all kinds of tools.

For what I’m working on, I need a couple of tools first. I need to get up to speed on Scribus and build the PDF template. Of course, it’ll probably be a two-column layout that looks like every other RPG rulebook but even just saying that assumes a lot – font choices for headers, body text, tables, sidebars—oh yeah we’ll need to figure out formatting for tables and sidebars, and we’ll also need allowances for spot art. The goal is to have something that looks familiar to the target audience but in the ‘house style’⁸ that stands out a little bit from everything else. I haven’t done layout since 1990 and that was on the school Macs and I’ll be honest, I don’t even remember what the program was called, and many intervening years of banging my head against CSS hasn’t honed those skills any. But once those decisions are made, the template is a tool, and I can just (hopefully) drop the words into it.

The other tool I need is for maps, and surprisingly, the best tool that’s available may just be Clip Studio Paint. But that’s more software for me to learn and another template to build. I don’t know that I’ll be able to do both in twelve weeks, let alone six.

But that’s fine. And I have two tools that already online and working: The new Plinth·RPG wiki, and this blog. I can keep the lines of communication open, certainly, for anyone who is following me on this weird new adventure, and I can describe the process of learning how to build new tools and also the tools themselves, if they’d be of use to anyone.

That’s where I’m at. It’s a new starting line. And I’ve got a six week sprint ahead of me.

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¹ if you’re not on twitter or not following enough artists & content creators on twitter you missed the drama: The CEO of Gumroad (a smaller but once a decently well regarded e-commerce platform where you could sell, among other things, PDFs and digital files) was caught out trying to mint his own batch of NFTs. Twitter, at least the twitter I’m following, was collectively not amused. Ko-Fi and Itch.io have been the most commonly recommended alternatives.

² for those who must know, either to suit their own similar needs or just to be nosy: DokuWiki, https://www.dokuwiki.org/, which is available under the GNU General Public License (so: free) and which was both easy to install and easy to get started with

³ If I’m a good editor and manage to reign in all my usual bad impulses, like including footnotes for everything, then I might be able to keep things down to a taut, efficient 16 pages. I anticipate it’ll be more like 32.

⁴ and maybe also print-on-demand, if I barrel past the upper page limit I just set and project bloat inevitably sets in and the whole thing is closer to book size than not.

⁵ the answer is yes, but figuring out how many times it was answered yes and the ins-and-outs of each is a whole week shot, I tell you.

⁶ I’m going to blame ADHD of course

⁷ Yes there is more than one. Alec Steele in this case, and I’ll just note that’s a fantastic name for a blacksmith

⁸ Graphic design is my passion

⁹ I’m not sure why I started leaning so heavily on footnotes for jokes and asides but I think it’s too late to stop now. And that probably means I’ll have to include some sort of allowance for footnotes in the PDF template, dammit.

I’m building a world.

This isn’t that unusual. In fact, it’s so common there’s a longstanding joke about “world builder’s disease”, where creators and authors of many different sorts become a little bit obsessed with all the pesky little details of a fantasy or sci-fi setting and distracted from actually writing characters and story. Or, in the case of someone working in and around RPGs, becomes so occupied with lore and backstory and possibilities they lose sight of players, and the game.

I’ve got a bad case of world builder’s disease. Not terminal, but I’ve suffered for decades. And the project I’m starting *isn’t* about fixing that—because I’m not sure that world building is the problem to be fixed.

If I do have a problem, it’s that I’m easily distracted—and sometimes that distraction isn’t the internet (I know, right?), I’ll get sidetracked by another idea: A new rabbit hole to run down, a character idea that needs to be chased down and properly sorted, a road ‘less travelled by’ encountered in a yellow wood, that sort of thing. To date, I haven’t found a way to avoid the distractions, and I haven’t been disciplined enough to ignore them.

What slowly dawned on me is going to sound like a stupid idea: I had a suspicion that what I really needed was something *bigger*, big enough to accommodate the ideas and the distractions both. A super-large idea container that I could just start binning things into.¹

So I’m building a world.

I have notes. Lots of notes. Lots of disconnected ideas and story beats and fragments of mythology.² The whole thing could use some structure. And of course I mean literal structure, in that there will be maps, and a wiki.

But by ‘structure’, I also mean deadlines. For inspiration I look at how Dickens and many others wrote their novels: a bit at a time and serialized in magazines before it was all wrapped up (and edited) into a book. Many of us are already familiar with how motivating an actual deadline can be. I don’t know if the self-imposed deadlines will loom quite so menacingly over a beleaguered author’s very soul, but I have a calendar set up for 2022 and we will discover that together.

I’ve been working at this big project in fits and starts all through 2021, and going back into 2020 a bit.³ So parts of this project are already set up, but the ribbon cutting and grand opening will be the first deadline, six weeks into 2022, 11 February. My big goal for the new year, the overall goal of the project, is to publish an installment every six weeks.

I’m still trying to decide both what publish means and what the actual product will be for these ‘installments’, but I’m leaning towards a package of materials for folks who enjoy fantasy role-playing games.⁴ A set of maps and some background and some characters, a setting or adventure suitable for a gaming session, along with some notable NPCs and a new faction and a new town or city, another small corner of a slowly unfolding world.

While I’m working on each Drop [working term, I’ll come up with a better name later] I’ll be adding all that along with the other details and proper names of things to the custom wiki. If I get distracted by something shiny, I’ll add that to the wiki too. And between now and February, as I figure out the actual scope and scale of the 2022 project, I’ll be blogging here, talking my way through my process, telling you the tools I’m using—and learning—and sharing whatever the hell this is, both the process and the project.

Sharing is the best part of what we do online, ideally anyway.

And in the interest of sharing, I’d like all of this to be free. (Mostly free) (and some large part of it always will be free.)

I will be giving away what I can⁵, and we’ll work out the financing later. At some point I anticipate that my project will need art, lots and lots of it, and for that I’m going to need an art budget. Though I do like money, and find it has many uses, this is not a project I plan to make money on. (I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an outside chance that I’ll build something worthwhile through this — and worth putting a price tag on — but wherever that place is, we’re not there yet.)

This is the point in the article where I try to wrap things up, and end with something trite like, “So Join Me on This Epic Expedition to a New World! I have a lot of ideas, and hope for the future, and though I don’t know quite where we’re headed I look forward to where this Grand Adventure (And Experiment!) will take us!”

At the moment I can’t think of anything better to end on, and far be it from me to make an unexpected break with tradition.

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¹ “Bin” is probably the wrong verb to use here but let’s go with binning for now.

² In addition to the notes I’ve specifically made since this started, I also have older stuff that I might, might, recycle into the new World as well, but I’m not sure how many of those past worlds could find a new home here and which should really stand alone and apart (and are best forgotten). There is a difference between a large encompassing world with many influences, and just putting every failed draft into a blender and hitting frappé.

³ Pandemic. Y’all know. And the long slow crawl up this on-ramp is also why I feel like deadlines might help. A new start, a new year, an actual schedule. Motivation.

⁴ The distance between RPG and Fiction is a short one. Not even a brisk walk down the garden path, more like standing on different parts of the lawn, batting things back and forth over a net. So I hope my decision to favor RPGs over Fiction doesn’t disappoint. Hopefully the flexibility of the format allows me to be even more creative.

⁵ And releasing as much as I can under a Creative Commons license. Share Alike or just straight-up free to use.

⁶ Worldbuilding might not be a problem that has to be fixed but the jury is still out on my reliance on emdashes, parentheticals, and endnotes.