Some of you have likely noticed that the URL interpunctgames.com redirects to this blog — mostly by clicking a link on one of my online bios and discovering yourself here.

I do have plans. I also need to file a DBA with my local county and get a business license from the local city and some other odds and ends (including actually making a separate web site) and I don’t currently have the luxury of gobs and gobs of free time given the 40 hours a week I spend in other gainful employment.

The non-existence of that separate site seemed like something worth noting, though, so I’ve noted it.

Plans (for 2024)¹ including getting on a regular publishing schedule and providing actual downloads (free on itch.io) on my way toward longer-format products and uniting some of the currently unrelated bits-and-thoughts I have floating inside my head into something larger and more coherent.

More information, or at least some hints, about the 2024 schedule and the over-all plan behind it will be coming later this fall². If you can recall some of my sporadic blog posts from earlier this year I’m working on fantasy maps, among other things, and trying to figure out appropriate map scales and templates. That’s part of it, and will probably be the bigger part, but hopefully I can also drag my undiagnosed lump of brain matter away from hyperfocusing on just that and can also move along other, currently slower moving parts of the project too.

Thanks for reading, and for not kicking me out of your RSS feeds.³

In other housekeeping here on the blog: I’m not sure if this means more regular updates here as well as on the new site. I certainly enjoy sharing my progress and process, and I could certainly be a lot more systematic in how (and how often) I share. We shall see. Watch this space, I guess.

¹ I had similar plans for 2023. and 2022. and, um… yeah ok fine it’s been a while.

² Just a reminder that we just started fall/autumn and ‘later this fall’ is technically any time before 21 December.

³ should I not have mention that? no… wait… don’t do it now…

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 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.

This past Tuesday was New Year’s Day and that means we’re not even quite a week yet into 2019 and there are no doubt at least a few resolutions made that are not being kept.

At least, not yet. Don’t give up hope just because it’s been a rough week.

If this blog post were an essay or pamphlet of a vintage, say, around 1790, the title would be something like “A Year’s Resolution, in Three Parts, and a Proposal for a Scaled Back Annual Commitment, ~or~ A Month of Sundays” (I used the shorter title above). So I guess I need to get to those three parts first, and then the proposal.

One thing about a New Year’s Resolution is that mostly, we expect too much of ourselves, and we discount the effort some things will take. If you have a nebulous goal, like, “I’m going to eat better!” or “I’m going to lose weight!” you’ve basically just signed on for mindfully keeping a commitment every waking minute of every day ¹. One stressful day, or a day where you don’t have the time or energy, and you’ll find yourself with a take-out or delivery container [or pint of ice cream] and an excuse; after enough excuses stack up you’ll be back on your usual habits and routines and you’ll actually feel better about giving up.

If your goal is to daily [Do The Thing], make it a small ask. Take the stairs, not the elevator: small, concrete, measurable, often a substitute for other worse behavior, and not more than 15 extra minutes out of your day. If you have a nebulous goal like ‘eating better’, you could make it something small & but actionable like, “I will eat one extra serving of vegetables with every meal.” (Baby carrots, either with breakfast or as a snack between breakfast & lunch, is a good way to get that first one in. Vegetable omelets are good too, if you have time to cook breakfast; most leftover non-salad veg from dinner the night before can be put in an omelet the morning after and usually works).

Health-based resolutions are most common (and sell a lot of gym memberships every January) but creative or project-based resolutions can be fun targets that encourage you to stretch your limits a bit. But if your goal is too big, too broad, or a daily [do the thing] you might find yourself in six to eight weeks eating metaphorical pizza amid the ruins of your 2019 Resolution failure. Possibly also with actual pizza.

Let me drop a section break and restart the article with part two.

##

New Year’s Resolutions could, possibly be traced back to certain practices of ancient Babylon or ancient Rome (…if you believe Wikipedia, and in this case actually no, I don’t) but the idea of making changes for the New Year probably dates back, informally, to a point when we first had numbered years and calendars to track them with.

Odds are good the annual “resolution” as such is more modern, perhaps taking a bit from historical paying of debts before New Year’s Day (in ancient Babylon or more-recent-but-still-going-pretty-far-back China), lenten sacrifices and other religious annual practices of reflection, atonement, and forgiveness, and the Aristotelian idea of temperance, virtue, and self-governance as rediscovered by Europe in the 1200s and then refocused through the lens of the Reformation? At any rate, we have proof of Samuel Pepys making resolutions for 1662 and 1664, “solemn vows”, and gaining cultural traction and wider acceptance by the early 1800s. The idea of a New Year’s resolution as a secular, personal thing as opposed to solemn vows made to God or god probably date to Kant, or the Transcendentalists who followed him — not that I can point to a single essay saying as much, but the timelines match and then the Victorians get a hold of it and a lot of “things we’ve always done” and our collective holiday traditions only date back to like, 1840.

Resolutions are fine, strive to be a better human, yada yada yada, but this isn’t ancient wisdom handed down on papyrus from the first civilizations. More self-help 1960s & 70s, less 1690s or even 700s.

So Don’t Feel Bad™ when inevitably all your resolutions fail in an epic pizza binge on Friday 15 February ².

The main takeaway here is that you’re not breaking a vow to Janus and breaching the ancient compact when you fail with a resolution, as about 88% of us will, and that there’s nothing particular about the New Year (and its 1st day) or the calendar year except as a convenient framework.

We can select different frameworks.

##

There’s actually a whole very long List of Timed Artistic Challenges, including a few you’ve heard of like Inktober and NaNoWriMo, and others for every month and some year-round or year-long ‘organized’ challenges besides. A New Year’s Resolution might be considered the first of these, or at least related as a type. Granted, resolutions predate NaNoWriMo [1999] but now we have a model and a vocabulary for this sort of thing (including but not limited to ‘timed artistic challenge’) and we can see how certain types of New Year’s Resolution (like any other year-long project) are a timed artistic challenge in all but name.

The various WriMo’s and -embers and -obers all have a certain cadence and set of rules: where creatives & others who want to try the ‘challenge’ take a month (30 or 31 days) and Do The Thing — and occasionally, post and share it. There’s an ad hoc community that can form, either organically on social media as everyone posts using the same hashtags, or in official and unofficial forums. The Doing Of The Thing is enough for some people, and the excuse/opportunity of the timed challenge plus their internal motivation is enough. But for most of us, we need the social-support-slash-peer-pressure to convince ourselves to stretch, to go just a bit past what we think our limits are. An opportunity to try something new or to tackle something in a new way. So the community is the more important part, even past the challenge ³.

But the big honking thing in the room with these timed artistic challenges is The Daily Grind: the daily grind is kind of the point — but could also be very off-putting for people who can’t sacrifice that much time OR maybe could but not for a full month OR for those who think they can hack it and will try, but for whom burnout around day 7 or 8 is a real and often encountered thing.

A month of the daily grind is one thing. If we were to stare down a whole year of a daily grind, we’d be forgiven if we just gave up on, say, the 5th of January which happens to be a Saturday and order a Fail Pizza ⁴ and get wrapped up in other things happening because damn, there’s a lot of distraction out there. The Resolution dies on Saturday with pepperoni.

##

And so: the proposal.

There’s an English idiom, “a month of Sundays”, often used to imply a really, really long time or something that happened a long time ago. But if you do the math, it’s only 30 or 31 weeks and that actually fits quite comfortably in a year with a fair buffer on either side.

If you were planning on doing something for ‘a month of Sundays’ in 2019 you could start now(-ish, Sunday 6 January, though most of us just missed that mark so 13 January) and finish up on 4 or 11 August

…Or pick any start week between now and Sunday 2 June and still be able to start and finish a project of 30 or 31 weeks in 2019.

You could use any of the List of Timed Artistic Challenges, already framed for a month, and instead post/finish/finalize one block each week, instead of a daily dash to a scramble finish and a mess it takes weeks to recover from.

The benefit of doing a creative challenge this way is that instead of a daily grind, you only have to post once a week. On a Sunday, so after most of us have Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning — even if we did the ‘bad’ thing and put off doing any creative work during our ‘pays the bills’ work week. And many of the challenges are annualized anyway, “Hey friends let’s break and bust everything and do this impossible thing in a month — but not every month, ha, who’d do that. We’ll do it this one month out of the year”

If the thing is so impossible to do that we’d never manage outside of that flat-run-whole-month-heroic effort, why, it might take A Month Of Sundays to do otherwise. [insert a self-satisfied winking meme here]

That’s it: A neat catchphrase, a recycled idea, and a framework you might be able to hang your project on. I’m not curing cancer here. But if you either made a resolution you’ve already slipped on — or only had half an idea for a project, if only you had the time, let me give you a gift of time.

A month of Sundays.

Let’s go.

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¹ If your resolution is to quit smoking: Do that! Some days will be rough, and none of this advice applies, but go for it. If you have a really rough day, might I recommend a pint of ice cream instead of nicotine? I mean, it’s not a perfect solution but we can address the extra 15 pounds in 2020.

² Epic Pizza Binge is my new holiday/tradition, to be celebrated annually on the Friday after 14 February because why not.

³ See, it’s the end of the post, so I can reference the whole post in the footnotes and not just the bit with the number on it. If *someone* who isn’t me because I’m not doing it, wanted to do a Month of Sundays 2019 as a Thing, I’d recommend 3 March to 29 September (that’s 31 Sundays) just to kind of work around some of the end-of-year stuff, including NaNoWriMo and also because it gives folks 7 or 8 weeks into 2019 as a runway to ramp into the “year-long” project before the 3 March/first Sunday in March launch date.

⁴ sorry for relying so heavily on pizza-as-metaphor; as I write this, I think I’m just hungry