New Year, New Opportunities

Hello and Happy New Year!

To say that last year was full to the brim with work would be an understatement. With working full time at the University, doing a PhD part-time, and still finding time to write and complete a number of game-writing projects, I was... well, more than busy. I frequently ended up like Berkeley Breathed's 'Bill the Cat' here below.

So with the New Year upon us and no real change in my situation, I decided to look at opportunities for change. One of the big ones that people will/might notice is that I am taking a step back from social media. In 2015, I found it far too easy to let myself get drawn into Facebook, Twitter, etc., and pulled away from my work, so I'm retreating from front-line social media. I'll still be visible online, but the plan is to engage once a month rather than once every 30 minutes. Yes, it had become that bad at times. This should, I hope, mean more work getting done, and more consistently.

So that's change No.1. The next change is in the division of labour. Full-time work remains full-time work and part-time PhD remains part-time PhD. There's not a lot I can do about those two, but the one that I can affect is the writing for role-playing games. Unfortunately, I'm going to be stepping back from writing for RPGs or games of all sorts over the next year. This is quite simply to allow me to have enough time to get the full draft of my PhD completed by the end of the summer. That's the plan. I really enjoy writing for games, but it does take a large amount of time to do it well.

The View from My Window (such as it is...)

So change No.2 is a step back from game-writing. The good news is that a lot of the projects that I've been working on for the past year and a bit will be coming out in print over the next year, so I'll still be 'present' in the gaming world, but more as a ghost of game-writing past. There are a number of projects I'm really excited to come out in 2016 not the least of which 2 (or maybe 3) scenarios with Chaosium. All of which I'm super, super excited about! But I'm getting ahead of myself. So changes...

Change No.3 comes in the form of an opportunity to discuss my work with yet another published author. I am already very, very fortunate to be able to work with Beatrice Colin (who you might know from 'The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite / The Glimmer Palace' (2008) or 'The Songwriter' (2010)) as my PhD supervisor. In 2016, I will also have a chance to work with Jenni Fagan, who wrote 'The Panopticon' (2012) and 'Sunlight Pilgrims' (2015). I'm really looking forward to this opportunity as I am extremely keen to finish the full draft of my novel in 2016.

At the moment, I am trying to immerse myself as much as I can into the atmosphere and feel of 1920s Glasgow (where my novel is set). It is an interesting time and I'm enjoying discovering it through newspapers, articles, a couple of good books, and the few decent film records that exist. Of course, this isn't the first time that I've had to research 1920s Scotland (for 'Shadows Over Scotland', but it is the first time that I've really narrowed down my exploration to one city and its people. More on this in future posts, no doubt.

For now, Happy New Year all!