TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE Mar/01 - Tracking My UnProgress
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and - lol, I'm never gonna stop worrying.
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2021 -- beyond.
How am I tracking?
Tracking my progress with a Bullet Journal helps me stay on track, this much I know. It gives me much needed focus when I sit down each night, and as I plan into the week ahead. I know if I’m working on a script, or a story, or if I’m reading enough, or staying on top of my exercise.
I track my success, but sometimes my success isn’t a milestone that can be itemised.
This year, I felt like my productivity had been slipping - I wasn’t writing as much as I thought I could/should. So I’ve started listing written works completed each month on a single tracker. I’m tallying up completed scripts, and 300 flash fic stories for the Patreon, and then other things [like essays, D&D stuff, etc].
Closing out Feb meant ruling off on another month and I saw here that I didn’t complete a single script. In a whole month, I didn’t write one damn script. It was a real kick into the brain, so I took the moment while I was rattled to try to think it through as to why I had failed so miserably. Here’s what I came up with for my thoughts on February and my no script completion.
Okay, I didn’t write a script. I gotta be honest. It’s not like I wrote 19 pages and didn’t finish, I just barely did any scripting this month.
But 3 minis are already written. I’m at the end of a lot of work that was completed, and some of it needed an edit or a polish. That’s time.
And I plotted an OGN. A whole 64 page plan was put together after doing another pass on the story. This one has been cooking for a long time, so it was a huge effort to get those 64 pages in the plan to finally come together.
I also mapped out a pitch. I have a new idea, THE BLUEPRINT PROJECT, and I’ve been asking myself questions about the characters and the story and just trying to tighten it all up. This process requires a lot of stillness, patience, and deep thought. I can’t do it while writing something else, I can usually do it while sitting with a pencil in my hand and in my notebook. Or while showering.
Then there’s the small matter of me writing 5,000+ words of annotations. This was a little side project, something I’d use to get my fingers working at the start of the night in the office, but let it be said things like this add up, and should also be celebrated.
Not to mention the back bone of February, where I went back to ducking work. I met my new class, on a new year level, and taught every single day for the month. I got to know these kids and figure out how I can best work with them. I marked their first work so I could annotate it and let it guide me in what to teach next. This is a “full time job” for a reason.
I also made a site for a story writing competition I am going to try to run at school. I am very excited about this.
And I started the D&D club at school. It has well over 30 kids, and I needed to create character sheets, and reconfigure how I wanted to explain the game to them at the start of a new year.
I collected whole school data, and made reporting plans for every class, and solved a handful of IT problems in my school every week.
All while having time for my wife and kids. Or, at least, trying to.
I also exercised 15 mornings, and went for about 10 walks. I gardened a little. Mostly got 6 hour sleep every night.
So if I didn’t write a complete script, well, I know it’s not because of lack of doing things and getting stuff done. It’s just because life is a busy beast, and taming it every day is the victory, I think. And thinking all of this genuinely made me feel better.
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Creator Interviews
I never read great creator interviews anymore. Just off the wall stuff, where the talk veers about. I mean, I don’t trawl social media enough, so I don’t read a lot of anything online anymore, I don’t visit websites like I used to a decade ago, but I recently realised I hadn’t read a really great comic creator interview in a long time.
I’m thinking like a long and sprawling thing that takes in life, and art, and time, and food, and gives you a sense of who that person is.
I was tidying my office recently and fell into the BKV interview in The Comics Journal, and it made me wish for more chats where the interviewer and the creator just chew some shit over. I don’t want a press release, I want to know what Matt Rosenberg thinks about the current state of Disney cartoon movies, or what Kelly Thompson is dying to eat once the pandemic dies down.
I guess what I’m after is a little honesty. A lotta heart. Something really from the person.
If you know of anything, please, link me up.
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ASD&D.
I downloaded the character sheets I made for my school club and made them available online - you can scope them out for free on my site.
Hopefully they help a few people out, or give someone a little creative spark.
This afternoon was the first session of DMing for the kids, and having them play. You know it’s going well when multiple kids nearby cannot concentrate because they are enthralled by your story. The kids had a blast, and mostly pushed themselves to find creative and character based solutions to problems. Today’s session is mostly just them finding out how the sheet works, and me not putting them under too much pressure. Their next session will put them into the thick of some serious problems.
I’m running the Dwarven Excavation from the Essentials Kit, but with a few changes to make it more trap/interactive. The whole thing was a great way to spend an afternoon.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
MASTER & APPRENTICE on Kickstarter - this comic is awesome, and Daniel A. Becker is an exceptionally good dude. Get right the hell in on this!
GORILLA WARFARE: TALKING APES FOR 5e on Kickstarter - my mate Big Tim Stiles has created a zine with some D&D stuff for talking ape side quests and it looks awesome. Really makes me wanna get in on this ZineQuest business over there. Shall have to start planning.
THE TESSELLATION #1 on Kickstarter - this comic looks unreal, and gorgeous, and Mike Phillips is a good mate of mine, so it hit the trifecta for me to back it.
THE APPARITION on Kickstarter - check out this comic from Kieran Jack, it looks awesome.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
MIXED-ISH - started watching this, after enjoying BLACKAF, and it’s good. I love the way this show uses the 80s to inform the video tape pausing convention in the narrative to explain moments. It’s insightful and funny, and I am always down for when those two mix.
Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
I always thought writing was my therapy, which quickly became “writing is my only therapy.”
I neglected how good it feels to talk, and be honest.
Laughter is definitely the third point to this mental health triangle [for me].
I wonder if people have different points to theirs? Or different shapes? Nearly 40 and still this shit fascinates me. I hope I don’t ever shut down and not want to figure more shit out in life.
71 here, and that shit still fascinated me, too.