While I want to be excited and say that I was offered a position as a system administrator, there has been an unexpected side effect. While I had a significant amount of time on my hands to update and improve the artwork for Savalon, now that I’m working a full time job this project has had to go under the floorboards, where it’s still-beating heart will drive me to madness.
That meme still makes me chuckle. But the reality is that working full time is a bit of a mental drain and it can take an hour or so for me to mentally reset enough to get into a creative mode. With the amount of work that remains for Savalon to be ready for sale, I feel that it might not be hitting the shelves as quickly as I had hoped.
The main thing I struggle with is what most writers/content creators struggle with: how to get feedback for a project or game prior to it hitting the shelves. I’ve been in a couple of situations where people have been quite receptive to reading my novel or playing my game, but when I actually meet with them, they start asking for hundreds of dollars for their time. I wish I was joking about the dollar amounts, but I’m not.
It baffles me only because I’m not asking people to edit my novel for clarity or to write up new rules or come up with a huge list of suggestions for a project I did. I literally just want people to say “It’s good” or “It sucks” with a short list of what worked well and what didn’t. I get that a lot of people live by Rule #13: Anything worth doing is worth doing for money, but this just feels different.
So when the playtest group that I had for Savalon fell through, it just kind of made my heart sink. After the third group asked for a cash payment just to read the book, let alone actually play it, I realized that maybe I should let the project sit for a while and come back to it later.
This post may sound melancholy but I promise, I’m not. I’m happy about the new job and believe me, marketing yourself to the point where you can get hired takes a huge amount of effort. It’s taking a pretty big load off my mind, and I know in a few weeks or month I’ll be back to posting here non-stop with new artwork, updates, and so on.
Have a great week, everyone!