This week has been very hectic with work and school, so my progress this week has been of the micro variety. Which is fine, it all counts!
This week I simply added my adventure hooks into my Affinity project.
The colours are garish, I know. But that’s the way they are in the book. Once I add more items to these pages I think the green, red and yellows will look less stark.
Other progress I had this week, which won’t show up in a document, is my u-turn on social media. The thoughts (and pressures) of needing to disseminate these projects once they were complete had me thinking I needed to start laying the groundwork online. That groundwork looked like making accounts on X, Bluesky, Cohost, Tumblr, Instagram and Mastodon.
My plan was to reconnect with folks I ‘knew’ on TTRPG twitter (which I left two or so years ago). There’s some folks I genuinely like there and they are making things I genuinely find interesting and want to play/promote. However, my plan with social media wasn’t to connect with them and their works on a deep level. I just wanted to have a bunch of followers who would see my post when I write “this thing is out now and you can buy it”. And my hope was that if I re-post their shit saying that they would do the same to me.
But after a chat with my friend Matt, it became clear that this juice is not worth the squeeze. So now I’m back to working in a vacuum for the sake of the work itself. And I feel a lot more comfortable doing so.
I was only back on those social media feeds for a few weeks, but I could already feel it changing my brain in ways I didn’t like. I had the sudden urgency to show people I existed and to try and became a valued supporter of them (so that they would support me when I needed them). It’s all very gross and not a good space for me to be in.
I need to just focus on doing the work I find pleasing and sharing it with those who I actually care about. It would be nice to make Steam Thieves and have a few dozen very vocal supporters who can carry it forwards to the masses and get me paid, but I can’t let that be something that I’m actually working towards. Instead, my goal needs to be to finish a thing to a quality that I am pleased with… and then see what happens next.
I’m not going to get a pay out from this stuff. Pretending I will only serves to sideline any real progress I am trying to make here, both with my projects and with myself as a creator.