We’re all a bit separated right now, but that doesn’t stop us from GAMING! Today we’re joined by Guest Geek Jamie to talk about remote tabletop gaming from text gaming to Roll20, how it impacted OUR games, and the pitfalls that people might not be aware of.

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Static animation taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6C0Dp8l1vA

Much thanks to WebDM, DungeonDudes and all the great D&D Youtubers for inspiring us!

First in a series! I hope you enjoy it. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

-The Gneech

Episode 21: Something Funny About Smashwords

The show’s coming up on its one-year anniversary already! O.o Holy carp!

-The Gneech

This week I punted on a story that just wasn’t going anywhere; I hate doing that, and I especially hate doing it when the editor for whom I was doing the story seemed so keen to have it, but it was frankly not my best work and I suspect he would have had to reject in the end anyway. Better in the long run at this stage to let it go so both he and I can devote the mental resources to something else.

This, combined with the gear-grinding on Arclight Adventures, has led me to reflect on just what it is I want to accomplish with my creative endeavors, why it is that I do them — and why I seem to have been having difficulty with them lately. And I think I’ve discovered at least one psychological factor that’s been holding me back, i.e., “fear of commitment.”

Y’see, Suburban Jungle and NeverNever consumed so much of my life for so long, that there is a part of me that’s frankly afraid to get that wrapped up in something again. I loved doing my comics, don’t get me wrong, but there were plenty of times when it could also be a draining, demoralizing, downright painful experience, and part of me is shying away from that.

Another issue has been my own underlying motivation for doing the work, and here I have not been pleased with what I saw in the mental mirror. Y’see, for both NN and SJ, my motivation was that I loved the work — I was making those comics because I wanted them to exist, I thought they were good and worthy things that would make the world a better place by being in it. This has been less true of my more recent projects. In fact, at the end of the day, what has been motivating me lately has been ego.

I don’t want the entirety of my creative output to be “ten years of webcomics and done.” I don’t want the history of pop culture to say of The Gneech: “Known, by those few who do, as the guy who did The Suburban Jungle.” I want to leave a bigger footprint.

A natural feeling, perhaps, but a terrible reason to be doing any major undertaking. Somebody recently described me in my LiveJournal as “dedicated to my own epicness” — said as a joke, yeah, but it still had the sting of truth to it. I should be thinking about the work itself, and the readers out there who will hopefully get something out it, not about what it will do for my prestige and/or fragile egg of a sense of self-worth.

So … what to do about it? Well, for starters, I’m blowing away all of my current “projects” (which have been more placeholders than actual work anyway), except for the Short Story Geeks Podcast, because I have made a commitment to my fellow podcasters on that one and I intend to honor that. But for everything else, as of this blog entry, I’m no longer “working on X” for a half-dozen half-formed ideas.

Second, I’m going to look at each of the things I have been working on with a critical eye and determine which, if any, are actually worth doing on their own merits, rather than because I think it’d be “good for my career,” so to speak. If a project can actually justify its own existence, then I will add it to my to-do list, even if the due date is “sometime after 2015,” but if not, it’s going into the proverbial sock drawer indefinitely.

I do know of at least one project which will move up in the priority list, a YA collaboration with Mrs. Gneech, actually, which we’ve been talking about on-and-off for several years now. We recently sat down and hashed out a lot of things about it, to the point where I think we have a pretty good vision for what it should be like. It’s not something that really builds on anything I’ve done before (except in the vague sense of having some fantasy elements), nor really is likely to have immediate appeal to my established audience, but it is something about which I can confidently say its existence would be a +1 for the world. :)

As for what other projects will be added back in, I couldn’t tell you at this stage. If you have one you’d like to advocate for, I’d love to hear it!

-The Gneech

Episode five is up! We respond to listener e-mail, take on the subjects of authorial focus and what it actually means to “kill your darlings,” and check out some stories ranging from the faintly-silly to poetically sublime.

Unfortunately, there are some issues with the sound; I was trying out a new headset, and the results were not all I’d hoped for. I tried to even it out as much as I could, but even with Levelator the gain was just all over the place. Back to my old headset next time!

The good news is, the show is much shorter this week. ;)

-The Gneech

The proof for Volume One is on the way and should be here Friday; the printer has the files for Volume Two and I expect the proof for that will also be ordered sometime today. Volume Three is going to be the sticking point now, as I still need to both write the bonus story, and do some extra art for it. Best case scenario: that gets done tonight and tomorrow. More likely scenario: that gets done by degrees between now and, say, Sunday. But I am now quite confident that the books will be ready to go for AnthroCon.

I love focusing on a project like this, but I can’t sustain it indefinitely. Having the hard deadline of AC is a blessing in that regard: by the end of June, it’ll be done one way or the other and I can breathe again.

Not that I won’t still have plenty to do then … I have taken on commissions for the first time in umpty-ump years and will need to be diligent on getting those out in a fairly timely fashion. Short Story Geeks is still trucking along at a good clip and I want to keep up the momentum there — and of course, I have both writing and art projects that I’ve committed to in the upcoming year, so I’ve got to stay on top of those.

But I like this — having discrete, “finish-able” projects is a nice change from the never-ending treadmill of “need another strip for tomorrow, need another strip for tomorrow” that characterizes doing a comic. It also allows me to spread my wings a bit, instead of being locked into doing the same thing all the time from now until forever.

I do miss the reliable, almost-instantaneous feedback and audience engagement of the comics, and if I could figure out some way to retain that part of it, I certainly would. But the two worlds seem to be more-or-less exclusive.

-The Gneech