Poor Unloved Blog Thing

Oh my poor unloved blog thing - how I have missed you!

Its been ages since I have updated this thing, which might be taken as a sign in and of itself of some sort of massive activity elsewhere - but nothing could be further from the truth! In fact it's because I have been caught in the horrific decision and productivity paralysis that has dogged me periodically for years now.

The problem, as always, is time - with a side salad of extreme mental creativity and extreme knackeredness. Combine all of these with an apparent inability to focus and you get a horrid frustrating maelstrom of nothingness.

Take, for example, gaming? I have 101 ideas for games to run but no group to run them with, as my regular group is booked for the foreseeable future. I have got the last session of Smallville to run but that has lost a bit of steam with the three month hiatus. I have managed to negotiate a solution to said hiatus as well - thats very cool but its not a guaranteed outlet for that sort of creativity. I have considered getting another group but frankly thats a crap shoot I'm not sure I can be bothered with. There has been a payoff though, in that I have for once done something approaching prep for my convention games and that might well see me produce more resources for said games and have more one-shots available when needed. Hurrah.

And then there is the game design thing. Oh good grief. I have about six different mental balls juggling in the air and everytime I seem to get some sort of traction on one, another sparkles and draws my attention. The current list of sparkles are:

1. A revision of Duty & Honour/Beat to Quarters: The games are four years old now and showing their age. There are so many things that I look at and see how I could change and refine them, and add value to the book with extra stuff too. If I did this, it would probably be a joint 'Empire!' book as well, which makes things even more complicated.

2. Empire! In Space: This is probably the project that has the most legs, with some of the ground work having been done with my Gaunt's Ghosts game at Furnace last year and the ship-to-ship rules getting a gentle thumbs up at Continuum. The main issue here for me, is that the game doesn't have an implied setting, you know like History!, so I want to create one to build the game around ... and I really have to not just mirror Honor Harrington. That's a job.

3. Epoch - I have three quarters of a game done. Its a little portable booklet game which started as a 2-on-1 game, morphed into a 1-on-1 game and might well have to become a mixture of both. This has had a little alpha-alpha and I'm going to try a little more internal this week and get something sorted.

4. The OSR adventure - what? Well, I've been asked to write an OSR adventure. I already have some of it done but it really needs to be hammered into shape. I like the idea of this a lot, as I rarely get to write adventures and I think its quite a cool thing. Still, its another thing to do.

5. Modular Fantasy - it just will not go away! I'll bark on about this more, but there is something about this that keeps coming back, time and time again. I'm not sure what to do with it.

So from this scrum, something has to emerge as a front runner. It would seem logical that it should be one of the ones that I have in a more advanced stage of finishing. Ah logic, you wonderfully elusive beast.

Remember what I said about knackeredness? Well that has an impact as well - when its easier to do nothing than something, it can be very seductive. VERY seductive. Distractions don't help - especially that massive 800lb gorilla of 'work' which is a constant presence. Who would have thought that being a teacher could be such an all-encompassing profession ... oh yeah, teachers! Something is going to have to be done there - using my time at work more effectively to cut down the amount of slippage into my homelife is my #1 priority.

Its just all a bit of a mess really and something that I need to get sorted in my head sooner rather than later. Any suggestions from time/energy management gurus always welcome!