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.

##

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.

100 days of summer begins, by my reckoning, tomorrow – “Summer” in the U.S. is considered by most^{[citation needed]} to be the roughly 100 days from Memorial Day to Labor Day, which are the last Monday in May and First Monday in September respectively. Typically 14 full weeks plus a Monday—99 days—which every last one of us^{[citation needed]} will pad out to 101 by including the Friday & Saturday of the upcoming 3 day holiday weekend, which is how most of us (who don’t work retail or hospitality) celebrate these things.

So actually 101 Days of Summer – 101 and a half if you take off early on Friday like a lot of us might have already done.

In 2020 it’ll actually be 108 days of summer, because of the calendar, which just so happens to line up & give us 15 weeks of summer whenever Memorial Day lands on the 25th – this happens on average one-year-in-seven but not every seventh year, because of leap days; the interval is every 5-6 years (usually 6) except when it sometimes takes 11 years off. Enjoy the summers of 2020 & 2026 I guess is what I’m saying.

For a little more on that check out https://www.popsci.com/article/technology/next-summer-already-better-summer

“100 days of summer” is an expression^{[?] [citation needed]} common enough that I seem to remember hearing it well before 500 Days of Summer riffed off the common[?] idiom for its title in 2009. But maybe it isn’t as common as I think, or maybe my brain misfired after the movie came out and it’s just a back-formation that makes its own kind of sense because what we call “Summer” in the vacation-planning but not astronomical or meterological sense just happens to be 100 [ok: 101] days.

I was also planning a “100 Days of Summer” diary/planner – sort of a smaller, pocketable extension of my Weekend Planner idea – but didn’t manage to make anything I liked, let alone would consider selling, in time for Summer 2019. Which starts tomorrow.

I guess I’ll file that idea away for now, maybe to be picked up again when I have time off in the Fall, though I suppose for 2020 I should just go ahead and title it “108 Days of Summer” to be accurate.

Outside of things like students’ assigned summer reading, for most of us Summer isn’t considered a time for big undertakings, but 100 is a big round number and Summer is the sunny, beautiful time of year most of us (at my latitude) spend completely indoors, all the time, with the air conditioning on – so maybe 101 Days of Summer would be a good time to line up a lot of little daily things that would add up into a new skill or a sizable chunk of some kind of project.

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.

##

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

Dineus
Free City, minor trade port
Location: eastern coast of Altis, on the north-east ‘corner’
population: rank 5 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Dionysus, Greek god of wine, and numerous places named after him.
Model: nothing specific? This may end up being my starting point (Or, in a gaming frame: if not the starting town for the party, then the first ‘big’ city and base camp for the campaign after a couple of sessions) so I left myself a lot of wiggle.
Flavor Text:

Led by their fiercely independent Count and a like minded council, the free traders of Dineus are holding their own, refusing to join any power group in the region and just as contemptuous of the Capel Merchant League as they are of the Prince in Pontis.

Dineus is a logical acquisition for the Capel, but serious diplomatic missteps have closed that door, perhaps forever. The Count here felt personally insulted by the behavior of the first Capel House Master, in an act that was witnessed by all the council and most of the other city elite, as the house master not only treated the Count like a butler at dinner (without realizing who it was he insulted) but finishing up his short evening by grabbing the Count’s daughter and ‘whispering’ some very foul suggestions to her on his way out. The man missed being killed by the count by a very slim margin, but rumor says that the Capel finished up the job later when the true extent of his bungling was found out. An unofficial state of war exists, with the count covertly supporting several privateers in Nectene as his own devious revenge, preying only on the ships owned by Admiral Varin and other members of the Capel executive council.

Scala
Pontesian Holding
Location: a peninsula in the Tigal Sea, near the southeastern tip of Altis
Population: rank 3 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Scylla, monster of the Odyssey. There’s also the one opera house, in Milan..
Model: Caribbean free ports c. 1700 CE
Flavor Text:

Scala is held by Pontis in one of the most restrictive trade agreements ever drafted. While Demos is also held by a similar ‘treaty’, the Merchants of the Dem have found loopholes to exploit. Scala, on the other hand, is becoming a dead city. The port is closed, many citizens have left, most leaving for Pontis itself. (Many individuals there have worked their way up into areas of minor but vital importance — on the waterfront, clerks in merchant houses and in the government, soldiers and even officers in both the guard and navy…)

Those left behind are ‘just’ fishermen and the so-called dregs. There are a few keeping the old traditions, but most of the “fishing fleet” are just pirates now, casting nets for bounty other than fish

With the main port closed, nearly all ships land on the islands east and west of the city. Some of these ‘pirate coves’ are looking more and more like actual ports, with their own warehouses and banks, space permitting of course. Some are little more than strips of beach you can anchor a (smaller) ship on. But at least three can claim to be more than just an anchorage; Scala is a ‘ghost town’ but manages because she’s surrounded & enlivened by pirates.

Eventually some power in the region will have to rein in this activity but their base is small (for now) and the losses acceptable (for now). Also, piracy is largely accepted in the region – within limits; there is a tradition of licensed “privateers” in both times of war and the occasional undeclared but vigorous “trade dispute”. (Privateers typically both pay for a license and share the spoils. Some even get commissions in whichever city’s navy. But this, desperate, piracy is new.)

Demos
Pontesian Holding
Location: close to the Southeastern tip of the island of Altis, on a strait between the Sea of Circhos and the Sea of Tigal
Population: rank 4 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Greek, for ‘population’
Model: Trucking company
Flavor Text:

Two seaports of Altis on the Sea of Tigal, Demos and Scala, have been pulled into the Pontesian sphere of influence, though not necessarily of their own choice. Both Demos and Scala are east of Pontis, closer to the north coast cities on the Somaris mainland, and potentially competitors to the vast east-to-west sea trade flowing to the Old Capital.

Pontis got there first, however, and—after several naval actions and two short wars that concreted the commercial consensus—forced these seaports to close, to enhance the trade coming to her own port. Currently, Pontis pays both Demos and Scala to keep their harbors closed and warehouses empty. (Though the amount paid is barely sufficient to keep these ports ‘closed’) (and of course, things that are ‘illegal’ are not necessarily impossible; trade in the Sea of Tigal is getting, as they say, interesting)

The payments aren’t quite enough to cover the loss of trade—but given a choice between military or economic warfare—the Dem have chosen the path that doesn’t involve fleets and invading soldiers. The enterprising merchants of Demos, restricted by treaty from trading by ship, instead run teams of wagons to ply the roads. This novel approach is actually working and the Teamsters of the Dem may soon corner the market on the agricultural trade on the island. …And on nearby islands, oddly enough: exploiting a loophole in the treaty originally intended to only cover private coaches of the nobility, wagons are loaded whole onto barges and not unloaded dockside, but only inland.

The Dem are in negotiations to bring in the barges elsewhere—technically in compliance with Pontis but enabling a resumption, at least in part, of their past trade. An agreement between the teamsters and the port city of Siritha may not be too far away. For now, fear of a Pontesian reaction has kept anything official from being set down, though un-officially: there is a whole lot of barge traffic headed east

Avensis
Pontesian Ally
Location: On the southern coast of the island of Rauvos close to its southeastern tip, on the north shores of the Amphithael
Population: rank 4 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Aventicum, (modern Avenches) roman post in what is now Switzerland.
Model: Any ‘second city’ content to be such. Quiet. Peaceful. Certainly free of any old god cults lurking unseen in the background requiring regular sacrifices of curious but clueless outsiders.
Flavor Text:

Avensis is ruled by a prince, like its close ally Pontis, and in fact the two princes claim some kinship, though three generations removed the family tie isn’t so much to hold them. The prince and his advisors are content with the alliance however, and happily follow the lead of his “cousin” in foreign and military matters. The alliance does provide Avensis with much of its trade, however. While off the direct sea route from Pontis to the Old Capital, Avensis is a friendly (& tax free, for ships from Pontis) port of call for smaller vessels who need to hug the coasts. And even for more sturdy craft that could take the direct path, a friendly port mid-week on the voyage is usually worth taking an extra day or two.

It is likely that without these ties Avensis would fall back, somewhat happily, into a quiet mostly ignored existence. It has been said that the main products of Avensis are noble old families [old families] and comfortable estates.

Pontis
Principality, with a loose hegemony over 3 client cities.
Location: On the island of Altis, commanding an excellent bay on the Sea of Tigal, just east of a strait leading into the larger Amphithael
Population: rank 8 (of 10)
Name Derived From: Greek word for ‘sea’, Latin word for ‘bridge’
Model: Kinda Venice, kinda Athens.
Flavor Text:

Pontis is the closest thing to a major power the region can boast of, not because of its area of influence (the Capel Merchants League would get the nod here) or because of its military power or population, or even the magic Academy that operates here. Pontis is, quite simply, the largest port and most important trade city between the north coast cities on the Somaris mainland and the Old Capital. Everything, from commodities to finished goods to contraband makes its way through the warehouses and wharves (or back alleys and black markets) of Pontis.

Pontis has only one major ally: Avensis, ruled by the cousin of the Prince of Pontis, though Avensis is hardly a help militarily (it isn’t even on the same island). Two other seaports along the strategic trade route, Demos and Scala, have been pulled into the Pontesian sphere of influence, though these are not allies, being subject to involuntary ‘trade agreements’. Pontis essentially pays these cities to keep their harbors closed and warehouses empty, outside of small fishing fleets. The enterprising merchants of Demos, restricted from trading by ship, are a common sight on the roads of Altis, with several guilds running long trains of wagons (and hiring mercenaries, both for protection and ‘Protection’). The Teamsters of the Dem may soon corner the market on the agricultural trade of the island, which might give them the leverage they need to renegotiate their relationship with Pontis. Scala is mounting a different resistance, pushing the limits of what a “small” fishing boat is and resorting to (or perhaps, gleefully embracing) piracy.

Pontis, as a large trade and cultural center, is home to one of the major schools of magic, naturally.

Any sort of daily writing can feel like a chore. For many writers, it’s a weight we take up willingly, but it’s still a weight.

There’s a cartoon I can’t find at the moment (at least not via Google Image Search) that shows Sisyphus of myth doing the thing, and at the top of his hill is a guy at a small desk with a typewriter. The boulder slips away, as of course it does, but there’s a conversation,
“Still pushing that rock?” the writer asks.
“Yep,” Sisyphus replies, “Still writing that novel?”
Which concisely sums it up, neatly encapsulating the feeling that writing is an endless, thankless, hellish task.

If you’re a journalist, this is the job: push it up the hill, and then start over. The assignment is open-ended; you can win a Pulitzer and that’s nice and all but doesn’t change the fact that you have to fill 50-odd pages of newsprint (or feed the starving web algorithms) every day. If you don’t, someone else will. If you don’t like it, go write a book or something.

Bloggers aren’t journalists, and we’re typically not paid [?] [I don’t think this has changed since 2014; if you have an update hmu] so the deadlines are different and the stakes are smaller. But it’s built into the etymology of the word: “web logs” are—or were—Logs: diaries & journals. They could just as easily be weekly or monthly or fortnightly or some other regular schedule but if there isn’t a regular schedule, readers sort of… wander. It’s not that they don’t like you, or that they’ve forgotten you, but you key into something fundamental when you can give your readers that consistent daily hit. Preferably at the same time every day, and they will never say so (ok some will) but they mean every day unless you’re dead and even so, some will lament you weren’t keeping a buffer. Or didn’t have the ending pre-written.

This bleeds over to twitch streamers now, and to YouTube channels, who have the same expectations that they’ll be on every day no breaks no vacations. And occasionally to specific hosts on YouTube; it’s fine that the channel chugs along and produces content But Where’s Tom’s Wacky Thursday WTF-Fest! Did you fire Tom? BOYCOTT. “I mean, Tom’s back now but his show just doesn’t seem the same since he took two weeks off last June for his brother’s wedding and father’s funeral”

Even if you personally have a passion for the material, reader expectations can become a weight.

10 years ago, when the previous version of my personal blog launched [now at archive.rocketbomber.com] I was publishing “bestseller charts” for manga on a weekly basis. When I started I loved the challenge of it – of figuring out how to get the data out of the barest scraps of info off of public-facing sales sites and attempting to find the underlying numbers, even if the best I could manage was comparative and not, you know, actual hard sales data. I stopped when Borders went out of business and other online retailers basically conceded the game to Amazon. But before the whole thing fell apart I was spending about 4 hours a week (and $99 a month for a host to run my web scrapers on VMs) to produce… drumroll please… basically a top 10 list. More often than not, a top 10 list not much different from what you’d find in the NYT books section on Sundays, or with a click on Amazon.

It was a weight. I carried it for a couple of years because I like the subject matter (manga and comics) and because I liked the mental puzzle part of it. But unless something changed, it wasn’t a weight I could carry without help—and when the change hit, it wasn’t to help me but to make it all seem kind of useless. I’d pushed that rock up Sisyphus’s hill and discovered why it always slips away from him.

Even when I had *loads* of time, I couldn’t always manage daily updates. When I was unemployed, the job of finding a new job typically took up about 4 hours of my day. There was time to write. (I did write, doing some link-blogging and writing a few music essays.) But even with time, I couldn’t always pick up that weight. When you’re feeling down and worthless, you can’t always put on the Happy Face to write about something you love, or even muster the energy for the srs bzns posts that don’t need your enthusiasm but still need you to, ah, write.

Even when you are employed and relatively happy and there’s food in the pantry and the rent is paid and all outstanding bills are 3 to 4 weeks out: it can be hard to pick up that weight. Here’s a new game, here’s a funny video, here’s Twitter. Distractions abound. Go for a walk. Do a little more research on that one thing. Lunch with a friend. Hell, clean the house.

When you’re avoiding the tyranny of the empty page, you can get so much cleaning done. I’ve cleaned a bathroom and recaulked a shower enclosure rather than re-open the working-document-slash-gaping-wound of a draft.

##

Why now?

I’m not sure, entirely.

I mean, the blog has always been here, I pay the hosting to keep it going. I even tidied up a bit, moved things around, installed a newer version of the CMS, and made everything ready to blog again…

And left it to sit for a year.

Midlife crisis, maybe? Attempting to reclaim my youth with a brand new red corvette convertible or harley, except I’m an online nerd so instead of rustling my thinning hair on the open road, I pop the top on a new blog platform and take it for a spin?

Whatever the motivation, I feel a little better and pretty much rested and so, I’m looking at the top of that hill. I intimately know this weight, and yet, I take up the weight. I start pushing that rock.