NaNoWriMo

Indeed

Hello Gentle Readers. It's been a while. As usual, I don't really have a good excuse for my long absence, so I'll just jump right into it. Today we're going to play a little catch-up, and I'm going to get back on the horse Monday with some honest to God 'blogging. So, what's been going on at Journeyman HQ you ask? A fair amount, actually. I'm still working on AEGIS vs. SPIDER, for which I've found the perfect musical accompaniment, but slowly as that project has taken a back seat to some other, more pressing projects. 

Tuesday Filler: GTFO

Thanks for all your hard work! By the way, get the hell out...

So, a year ago today, I got laid the fuck off from Palladium Books. With one little phone call on a Monday Morning, I lost everything I'd wanted. I'd lost a job, I'd lost Robotech, and I'd lost my rudder. After a bit of heavy drinking and some beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth, I said "Fuck this" and set about forging a new direction for myself as a freelancer in the contracting and increasingly niche Trad Games industry. It hasn't been easy. It hasn't always been fun. It's been slower than I'd like. I've made some progress, though. Shall we see what the passing of a year has brought us Gentle Readers?

Mr. Mom

This isn't fiction, it's a goddamned documentary

So, last September when I got laid the hell off from Palladium, I'll admit I felt a little bleak. I hadn't lost a job since before The Wife and I were married way back in '02, when I got fired from selling Harleys because I liked motorcycles too much. Anyway, as I stood there in my hallway staring at my phone trying to process what had just happened, my brain shifted on down into survival gear. Well, to be honest, first it shifted into "crawl into a bottle of Wild Turkey and listen to a lot of Hank Williams" mode. Then, as I struggled through the five stages of grief and helped an Austin Nichols exec make a boat payment, and after I dealt with, "Fuck, I'm a freelancer again!", I had a little epiphany. I had a baby on the way, I was a writer, I work from home, I'm good at multi-tasking and staying work focused, I keep long hours, I'm not necessarily opposed to bodily functions...I was going to be Mr. Mom!

Vitrual Gaming: Wherein Jason Phones It In Again.

 "Fatherhood, I'm doin' it right!"

Hey look! It's a whole new week, and you know what that means gentle readers. It means back to the salt mines for yours truly. Well, maybe not salt mines exactly, but it does mean that I need to get back to work after taking a week off to help care for my new daughter, who you see up there with dad. So now, with roughly seven hours of sleep under my belt since last Sunday, I'm back in the saddle. Speaking of babby, I'd like to tell you a little story about how I phoned it in to my regular Thursday game last week.

Finding Your Focus: How to Actually Work When Working At Home

 

 Maybe I should have apprenticed at the Consulate...

Okay, Caine up there is about to burn the shit out of himself in some masochistic, quasi-Kung Fu ritual that looks awesome in a 30 second television intro but might be of dubious historical accuracy. Accurate or not, Caine's suffering is a pretty decent analogy for attempting to be a professional writer working from home. While you're probably not carrying a flesh searing fifty-pound iron tub of red-hot coals around all day with your forearms, or maybe you are, I don't know how you do things in your house, what you are doing is attempting to make a go of concentrating on making art in an environment specifically engineered to keep you distracted, your home. So today I'm going to talk a little about finding your focus and working from home.