My students don’t like this one. They don’t like the word “work.” I can’t blame them. If I thought work meant J-O-B or homework or school work or worksheets, then yes, work would be a dirty word.
But work, for the artist, is not dirty. It’s what Bradbury says: “Work. Don’t think. Relax.” His work is not day-job work. His work is art work. Making stuff. Telling stories. Spinning yarns.
I’m pretty sure this is what Sr. Corita meant too. Work is not drudgery or something someone coerces you to do. Work is the work of your hand and heart. But if we’re going to be artists, we need to do the work.
Many of us (myself included) grow up with the thought that work should be a kind of agony, that it’s something we wouldn’t do unless forced to (by society, by parents, by teachers, etc.). The work we see around us is paycheck work. Working for the weekend. It’s work born out of necessity. Survival.
But those who grew up seeing their elders do meaningful work–not necessarily their jobs, but other work, work of hand and heart–those lucky ones grew up with a healthier relationship to work. They saw the projects in the garage workshop, the gardens, the easel and paintbrush, the typewriter, the music stand, the chisel, the carving knife.
So yeah, my students only know work as the forced drudgery of school. They know it as the thing that puts food on the table. But they don’t necessarily know it as the hours upon hours gone by in the studio making art.
“If you work” means that there is another option: not-work. Those who engage in not-work, who avoid the paintbrush and easel, who shun the typewriter, who never take out the music stand, will not be led to anything. You must first work. And The Rules promise that IF you work, “it will lead to something.”
Want something? Do the work. It’s that simple.
And keep doing the work. That’s the second part of Rule 7. The people who are doing the work all the time are the ones who “catch on to things.” What we’ll catch onto isn’t said, but that’s probably because it depends on the work we do.
My students see “all of the work all the time” and cower. What about rest? Relaxation? Fun times?
Of course, for the artist (who is a lover), the work IS fun times. If the work is coerced, if it’s drudgery, then we’re not talking about art work.
But I also don’t think “all of the work all the time” means we’re always in the studio. It means when we ARE in the studio, we’re doing our work. We’re not frozen or fearful. “If you work” means you can not-work, so it’s the ones who’ve silenced the inner critic who are then able to do all of the work all the time. They understand that the ONLY rule is work. Just work. Put a word down. Draw a line. Splash paint. Strum or hum or sing one note. Don’t hesitate. As Bradbury says, “Don’t think.” Just work.
Rule 7 is the greatest rule (like the greatest commandment). All other rules seem to flow from it. Maybe that’s why it’s so big on the page of the original Art Department rules. Its central position, its largeness is a reminder that without this rule, there’s nothing. With this rule, there’s something. Do enough somethings and you’ll “catch on to things.” In my mind, I see a hand reaching out and catching fireflies or falling stars. The ones who work catch these stars, catch them and hold them. The more they work, the more stars light up the sky.
There’s always the choice to not-work. To not be led anywhere. To not catch these blazing lights.
But the rule doesn’t say “make good work,” “make masterpieces,” “make successful things.” It doesn’t say only the ones who make good work catch on to things.
It’s the ones “who do all of the work all the time who catch on to things.” The only rule.
Work. Make. Do.
Forget good or bad or otherwise. There ain’t nothing in the rules about that. In fact, thinking about quality is what stops one from working. It’s the source of the block. It’s the reason for not-work.
Instead, put pencil to paper, hand to clay. It’s hard to write that first word, make that first line, play that first note. But remember: “If you work it will lead to something.”
Keep working and eventually, well, you catch on. You see the things. The stars, the fireflies. Don’t stop to worry or fret. Keep working. Catch those glowing lights.
We’re not talking about jobs or school work or some kind of drudgery. We’re talking about art work, the work of heart and hand. If we want to catch on to things, there’s only one thing to do.
Peter Elbow’s strategy by way of the This Might Work podcast: Set a timer for forty-five minutes and free-write the entire time, then spend the next fifteen minutes reading what you just wrote and writing a summary that distills everything into one sentence. This sentence becomes the prompt/starting point for your next forty-five minute free-writing session, etc. Continue the process twice more, then on the third time through, what you’re writing is a kind of clean-up or final draft of the piece. And voila, your piece is done! (Without all the frustration of staring at the blank page and not knowing what to write.)
I’ll admit, I use Elbow’s free-writing strategy in shorter bursts (his recommendation is to start with ten or fifteen minutes), but I’ve never tried this longer, more intense version. I want to try it, and yet…
I think what holds me back is that I don’t trust it. I worry that after three sessions of forty-five minute free-writing, I won’t be any closer to a finished piece than if I’d just gone about struggling to write the piece in my “normal” way. Yes, I might get over the hump of not-starting–free-writing does indeed lower the bar for starting–but what if those forty-five minute sessions don’t result in anything but a mess?
Of course, that’s what the fifteen-minute rereading and summarizing is meant to address; it’s designed to help you refine your ideas so you’re getting a sharper and sharper definition of your thesis each time you start another free-writing session. But still, I’m skeptical. What if I can’t summarizing my free-writing into a tidy sentence? What if I can’t even identify a particular central idea or motif? What if I hit upon one neat idea in all that free-writing, but it’s not enough to build on for another forty-five minutes?
All these doubts are precisely what Elbow’s method is designed to overcome. He’s anticipated all these worries and questions, pointing out that by simply following the method and free-writing, we’ll get to something new, to insights and ideas we could never have gotten to if we’d done it the “traditional” way. The skepticism about his method is precisely why it’s needed. By simply starting–by free-writing without worrying or thinking–we get to places we didn’t know we could go.
But we have to trust the process enough to actually begin it.
I can see how this might work with non-fiction, but I’m honestly flummoxed with how this might work with fiction (strangely, I can totally see this working with poetry). It’s in the realm of fiction that I’m most curious to try Elbow’s method and also the most reluctant. You mean I’m going to write all those words and not end up using them in the final chapter or scene?
And yet… what wondrous stories and scenes might emerge if I did try this method? Where might my fiction go if I could trust in this free-writing process and iterate a scene without judgment until finally striking upon something surprising or new that I never could have come up with in my “normal” method of composition?
If I could spend four hours writing one chapter, but in the end, have a chapter that is original, polished, and somewhat “effortless,” wouldn’t I take it? By the numbers, a 2,000-word chapter should roughly take me two hours, so Elbow’s method is technically less efficient, but in fact, I often can’t write a 2,000-word chapter on command because I’m frozen by Critical Voice and it ends up taking me several days to get over the blocks and fears. What Elbow’s method removes is the fear. I’m going to write for forty-five minutes even if most of what comes out is pretty terrible. But I’ll be writing, and by writing, I’ll be thinking and creating and unlocking things my conscious mind couldn’t get to on its own. It’s a way of circumventing Critical Voice. If, after four hours, I knew I would have a great chapter, without all the self-recriminations of Critical Voice and the usual writer’s blocks that stop me, wouldn’t those extra two hours be worth it? Especially if they are fun? If there’s no worry or self-doubt? If it’s just spilling words onto the page with “gusto”?
Getting over the doubt is probably why this method is so effective. Once the writer overcomes their doubt about the process, lets the process take over, lets the words flow, then things happen. Words build upon words, and before one knows it, an idea takes shape, a story forms, a something appears where once there was nothing.
Can I overcome my doubt and take that first step? Can I set the timer for forty-five minutes and trust?
There’s nothing stopping me, really. What’s forty-five minutes in the grand scheme of things? Surely I can find forty-five minutes in which to free-write, and then, if I can find those minutes, I can find fifteen more to read what I wrote and write one sentence that distills it down to the most interesting idea. Surely, if I can do it once, I can do it a second time, and a third. Maybe not consecutively, but over the course of a day or two? And by the end, I’ll have something interesting, won’t I? Something I didn’t have before.
I love DCC’s funnel adventures, and in my continuing quest to make DCC more streamlined, combat faster, etc., I delved a little more deeply into using Spellburn & Battlescars for the DCC funnels.
First, I made my own zero-level character sheets that mimic the “fancy” zero-level sheet from DCC, but with the three stats of S&B (Body, Mind, Luck), no alignment, and slots for equipment.
Then I rolled up the three stats using S&B’s rules (2d6+3, lowest score goes to Luck), hit protection 1d6, and then I used the DCC rules for Lucky Sign and Occupation.
These took some modifications, since many of the Lucky Sign rolls include bonuses to saving throws or stats or attack rolls or whatever, none of which works for the Into the Odd-style system of S&B. For some of the Lucky Signs, it makes sense to simply increase a stat by one (or hp or whatever).
For other Lucky Signs (like ones related to specific DCC mechanics that aren’t found in Spellburn & Battlescars), it probably takes some creativity on the part of the judge and players to see how they could work, but it’s doable. The great thing about these Into the Odd-style games is that they won’t break if you start homebrewing.
After the Lucky Sign, I rolled on the DCC Occupations chart and used the weapon and item as the starting equipment (some items I classified as “small items” that didn’t count against my inventory). After that I rolled 1D6 for gold, rolled for one random item on the equipment chart, and let my PCs do a little extra shopping if they wanted.
Finally I thought up a name, wrote it on the top of the sheet, and the character was complete. This process was even faster than the DCC character creation at zero level (which is already pretty darn fast!).
To test my new zero-levels, I decided to run a quick solo funnel using Portal Under the Stars, the funnel included with the quick start and core book.
Since Spellburn & Battlescars (like Cairn and other ItO-style games) only has three stats (Body, Mind, and Luck), I figured that when a DCC module asks for Intelligence checks, I would either simply tell the players the information (per Cairn’s philosophy that players need lots of information to make informed choices), or I would have them make a Mind check (if failure is interesting or risky).
For the first challenge in Portal, the characters saw the stars shining on the floor, and because they would have no way of knowing that the changing constellations would magically open the door in two-hour’s time, I did have them each roll a Mind check, thinking that if they failed they might try to break down the door which would (of course) lead to a magical attack and possible injury or death (this is a funnel, after all). However, my woodcutter character was able to make his check and see that the constellations would eventually change and shine on the door, so they waited and the door opened.
In the next room, there were the four statues with spears, but instead of making attack rolls, in S&B you just roll for damage, so if I played the module as written, my first player through the door would take 4d8 damage.
I ruled that this was too much of a “gotcha,” so instead, I allowed the players to act before the spears if they passed Body checks. The woodcutter was going to dive out of the way, and the trapper was going to press herself against the hallway wall to avoid the spears. Sadly, they both failed their saves, so the spears hit. Two went to Philomena Skunk, my trapper, and two went to Jimminy Bark the woodcutter. In S&B, if more than one attack is aimed at a single target, only the highest die hits. Philomena got hit and her hit protection went to zero exactly, earning her a roll on the Scars table (a chance to increase one of her stats! Luck! Yay!). Jimminy also got hit but still had hit protection. (To keep this game in the spirit of the DCC funnel and high body count, if a PC takes Body damage and fails the save, then critical damage = death.)
After that, since neither had taken critical damage, they took a short rest and recovered their hit protection. At first I thought this might be too overpowered for a funnel: Wouldn’t these characters end up surviving to the end instead of being mowed down in grisly, gruesome, and hilarious fashion, which is the intention of the funnel?
However I was soon disabused of this worry because in the next room the statue that throws flames at whomever tries to leave the room totally took out Jimminy as he opened the door to the left, got hit with a fireball, and failed his critical damage roll. The funnel was doing its job of killing characters.
Philomena was able to run out the door before being hit by the fireball, but in the next room she encountered the giant snake, Ssisssuraaaaggg, and even though she got in a few hits, the beast was simply too strong. One person against a giant snake is not going to last very long (of course, in a “real” funnel, I would have at least four zero-levels and other players at the table with me). Philomena did take Body damage in the first round but made her saving throw, so she was able to fight again, but then she took Body damage a second time and failed her saving throw (with only 3 points of Body, it was gonna be tough to survive).
If this were a normal funnel and there were multiple zero-level PCs, then most likely a few more PCs would have died, but the party would have been able to take out the snake eventually, especially if they were all attacking it at once. That would have given them advantage and the highest attack roll would succeed.
I was making up the stats for the giant snake on the fly, but I think if I were actually running the funnel I would spend a little bit more time thinking about how many hip protection points it had and its armor and its Body score, etc. The snake was probably too overpowered as written for S&B, and I didn’t make the necessary adjustments in this little practice funnel. Or maybe if the party had been bigger, the casualties would’ve been in keeping with the spirit of the funnel.
All in all I think my modifications to S&B, including the incorporation of the DCC Occupations and items as well as the Lucky Sign roles all ended up working just fine. This is what I like about into ItO-style games: They are easily hackable, and hacks don’t break the game.
If my PC had survived the fight with the snake she would have probably taken up the horn and received the Invoke Patron spell. Using the spell mechanics for S&B, she could try to cast it, spending as many dice as she has inventory slots available (up to five). I practiced this just to see how it would work, and she used all five of her inventory slots to roll five dice. She did roll a misfire (rolling doubles on the dice), and using the table in S&B, I got a result that her grimoire burned up. This was irrelevant (she didn’t have a grimoire), so I had the misfire burn up something random on her inventory instead.
Her spell result for Invoke Patron was pretty high, rolling a 21 (she took four slots of exhaustion as a result). I wasn’t sure which patron to use so I just looked on the entry for Sezrekan, and her result would have given her a +5 on her next spell casting. Since this was a funnel, she didn’t have a scroll or a grimoire to cast any spells with (yet), but if she were to find one, a +5 bonus would be pretty handy.
All in all, the spell-casting mechanics can be modified to use with the DCC spell charts. I’m still not a huge fan of looking up spell results in the DCC core book because that takes time, but it does open up more opportunities for more spells and more DCC flavor to a game of S&B.
This little experiment has really whetted my appetite to try a full-length funnel using the Spellburn & Battlescars rules. Not only is making a zero-level PC super-fast and super-easy, but it still retains the flavor and fun of the DCC RPG funnels. Of course the dirty little secret is that any DCC RPG module can be used with any set of rules; just modify the monster stats and a few other things and you’re ready to go.
What I like about S&B as a DCC hack is that S&B is easy to mod in general and also fits the flavor of DCC in ways that other OSR games might not. You can dial-up the power level if you want, making PCs a little hardier and able to withstand some of the crazy stuff that comes with a DCC module. And in S&B, magic is something that any player can use; it’s not tied to a specific class, which suits DCC better than even the original DCC rules (which restricts magic to wizards, clerics, and sometimes thieves when they read scrolls).
If we’re looking at Appendix N literature, often the heroes are not magic-wielding types, but there are instances in which warriors, thieves, and adventurers of all sorts end up finding magical books or scrolls and reading the spells. Also, think of a warrior-wizard like Elric. In S&B, you can definitely have a character like that. In some ways, S&B hues closer to the pulp literature than even DCC does.
It would be interesting to see how Spellburn and Battlescars really stands up to a true funnel, with a group of players around the table each controlling four zeroes. I think it would work, and I am itching to try.
I really love the aesthetic and attitude of Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, and I don’t even mind the general d20 system and game mechanics, but when I think of my ideal system, I’m much closer to the rules-lite side of things: Cairn, Into the Odd, Mausritter, Mythic Bastionland, etc.
I like DCC’s mechanics, but I don’t love them. Too much time looking things up in charts (and yes, I have the Crawler Companion on my phone, but even that takes several seconds to look things up). Too many stats that don’t end up meaning much. Roll-to-hit combat that means when it’s a player’s turn, they may end up missing, and then they have to wait for the next round to see if they can maybe try to succeed at hitting again, and too many misses in a row becomes frustrating for the player, and combat becomes a slog of misses and misses and misses. Roll-for-damage combat is the way to go. Faster, more intense, and nobody’s sitting in frustration because they’re not really involved in the action.
Part of this was spurred by a recent Questing Beast video about three-round combats, a hack that’s meant to speed up and make combat more meaningful. I’m not sold on it, frankly, but it got me thinking about my biggest pet peeve in D&D-like RPGs: the roll-to-hit mechanic. Having just been a player in a 5e game, it was beyond frustrating to keep missing with my spells during combat, and to then miss with my weapons during melee. It made the experience frustrating and not very tense.
(Why not tense? If the baddies are whoopin’ on us and we can’t seem to hit them, then shouldn’t that be hella tense? Surprisingly, no. It wasn’t tense at all. Tense is a ratcheting up of tension, but this combat wasn’t ratcheting up anything, it was just bandits hitting us and us missing them, but because we had just enough healing magic and a bottleneck so only one of them could attack at a time, we didn’t feel particularly in danger. Maybe if our rolls had continued to suck and we’d lost a few PCs, then tension would be there, but we avoided that outcome by eventually rolling successfully.)
Anyway, all these things made me think about ways to hack DCC to make it mechanically more like Cairn and other ItO-style games, while maintaining the unpredictability of magic and some of the Sword & Sorcery/Appendix N flavor of DCC.
I had a few brainstorms right before bed and stayed up till 1:00 a.m. thinking about them, then the next day I spent a couple of hours trying to hack together Cairn and DCC (“Cairn Crawl Classics”?). I simplified the stats (STR, DEX, WILL, LUCK), switched to a roll-under system, and for spells, created a new mechanic called “press your luck” where a luck save could bump a spell up to the next “entry” on the spell chart but a failure meant misfire and possible corruption. I also figured that characters could still spellburn to move a spell up to the next “entry.” This would allow players to succeed on their spell with a successful WILL save, but still give the spells their various levels of power.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the other classes (Warrior, Thief, the demihumans), so I played around with both Deed Die/Luck Die mechanics as well as offering advantage/disadvantage for various class-related things.
In the end, I “playtested” it by making a Warrior, Thief, Wizard, and Cleric and “running” them through the Abbot in the Woods module from the core book (written by Harley Stroh).
The playtest was a bit meh. The PCs were either overpowered or utterly unable to overcome certain situations. Combat was faster, for sure, but the module itself wasn’t very combat-heavy, so it meant that some of the other changes I had made overpowered the thief (advantage on thief-skill checks was way too much), and the Cleric Turn Unholy spell was simply too strong (I eliminated the HD-tiers and it was just Will SV=success at lowest result, “Turn 1 enemy;” but with “pressing your luck” and a little spellburn, the Cleric was easily able to dispatch two ghosts). It turned the game from one in which clever play, interaction with the fictional world, and teamwork makes a difference into one in which players “press buttons” on their character sheets to overcome obstacles.
Back to the drawing board. Except, I decided to do a quick search to see if anyone else had tried hacking DCC with Cairn, and low and behold, someone had indeed done such a thing: it’s called Spellburn and Battlescars.
Well, well, well. This game did several similar things to my own attempt, but instead of my “press your luck” mechanic for increasing spell results, S&B went with a GLOG-influenced “power” mechanic where a player can increase the power of the spell by spending equipment slots and adding more d6s to the dice pool. This was brilliant! I could easily take a DCC spell, set the first success result (normally 12-13 for Level 1 spells) as 1-6, and then each successive entry on the spell chart would go up by 6: 12-13 becomes 1-6, 14-17 becomes 7-12, 18-20 becomes 13-18, etc. Players who want a result that’s normally a 21 in DCC, would need to roll a 19 total, so they might spend 4 slots and roll 4 dice hoping for the sum to be high enough. (Of course, per S&B’s rules, this increases the likelihood of some corruption happening, because if you roll doubles you have to roll on the mishap table, but even here, I could use the corruption tables from DCC and the spell could still have this more explosive result for the player.)
(And yes, I know I wanted to avoid all the “looking up on charts” hassle from DCC, but I figure, these spell results can be shortened/adapted for use in S&B, and the corruption table could be something I homebrew, maybe modifying what’s in DCC with what’s included in S&B. I would have all this on my GM screen instead of flipping through the massive DCC book, and that alone would be a time saver. But no matter what, S&B generally simplifies combat and makes magic and fighting successful for players because there’s no more roll-to-hit mechanic.)
S&B also solved the problem with making each class unique by having a list of abilities that players can unlock as they complete tasks related to their archetypes. The game doesn’t have levels per se, but it does have players keep track of what they’ve accomplished in the game world, and if it’s related to their archetype, they get to try for improved skills, hp, and more special abilities. Simple mechanics, story-focused but still retains the flavor of “classic” character classes from DCC, this was much better than my advantage/disadvantage and Deed Die/Luck Die/etc. stuff. PCs are not too overpowered but also not too squishy either.
The one thing I’m not sure about is the cost of equipment in S&B; some items seem wildly overpriced. But that’s easily tweaked, and frankly, with only ten item slots, PCs can’t be buying a lot of stuff anyway unless they hire retainers to carry equipment. The game seems less interested in inventory management than games like Cairn, partly because the archetypes are a bit more powerful and problems can be solved more readily through combat (which is true in DCC too).
All in all, I’m glad I tried my hand at homebrewing my own “Cairn Crawl Classics,” but I think if I want to play DCC with faster, more streamlined rules, I’ll use S&B to do it. Frankly, I’m so excited by a faster, rules-lite DCC, that I kinda want to play a one-shot with S&B characters and a DCC module. I imagine it could be incredibly fun, fast, and still feel very “DCC,” just without some of those sluggish mechanics.
(One last thing for those of you thinking, “What about the funnel?!” Because S&B includes “Backgrounds,” players could still play zero-level PCs in a funnel, using the equipment included as part of their PCs’ backgrounds, and then, if they complete something related to one of the archetypes (they most definitely will in a funnel, unless they die), they could “level up” to that archetype, get the archetype equipment and special ability, and be ready for “level one” modules. I could even see them answering the “Origin Question” on the character sheet with an answer from their funnel adventure, making the funnel and character creation even more story-focused than it is in the original DCC game. And not only that, you could easily use DCC occupations instead of S&B’s backgrounds, so gongfarmers could still be a thing!)
Since October, I’ve further modified my writing goals. Norse City Limits has been put on hold (as mentioned in October), as have all my other fiction writing projects. I’m focusing solely on Shards of Stole Breath (the middle-reader dragon book I’m writing for my children).
This decision came about because I was sick of juggling so many projects and feeling like I never made progress on the “big ones” (aka the novels). My children won’t be young forever, and they won’t necessarily like dragons forever, so I figured finishing Shards was the top priority.
I once considered myself a “promiscuous writer” in the same way I’m a promiscuous reader (i.e.: I read multiple books at a time, flitting from one to the next as the mood suits me). But this kind of flitting in my writing has led to shorter things getting completed while longer things would fall by the wayside. I like writing short stories, but it started to feel as if my short stories were giving me cover to avoid working on the longer, more complex novels.
So in October, I put my goals related to NCL, Ysbaddaden on hold while my Shards of Stolen Breath goal was pushed to the top. However, what’s new here in June is that I’m also putting all my short story-related goals on hold too. Non-fiction, Substack, blogging, etc. are different enough to not compete with Shards, but until I finish Shards, I’m looking to hold off on any other fiction goals at the moment.
Okay, now, on to the goals!
Shards of Stolen Breath (middle grade novel): I guess my idea of writing books in “seasons” (stolen from Stephen King) hasn’t quite worked out. Winter has turned into spring has turned now into summer and Shards is still a work-in-progress. I’m about 30k words into the thing, and while I originally thought it would be around 60k, I’m not putting any definitive number on length just yet. If I start thinking it’s a 60k book, I’ll start shaping the story to fit that length instead of letting the story be the length it wants to be. I’m also revising several of these middle chapters because I had a better idea of who some new characters are and what will happen when they try to restore the dragons’ magic.
Blog every day: Not even close. Until this week, I haven’t blogged since April. This is partly due to putting more focus on my fiction and Substack, but blogging uses such different writing “muscles” that I could still do it more frequently than I have. My idea of delving into my writing notebooks and “stealing” stuff to put on the blog is probably how I’ll get more blogging done.
Send out a Substack newsletter every two weeks: Nope. BUT… I have been more consistent with sending out a Substack each month, especially since I’m doing my Dolmenwood book club. This is where the “fail to succeed” comes into play. I have a goal (perhaps too ambitious) of sending out a Substack every two weeks, and while I’ve failed at said goal, I’m trying to achieve it, which means I’m sending out a Substack every month, give or take. I want to continue striving for every two weeks, but for now, I’m proud of this year’s Substack efforts.
Play more role-playing games with my kids, my husband, family, and friends: I am rocking this one! At least when it comes to family and friends. I’ve been playing at game stores consistently for several months, at least three times per month, and on Sundays, I’ve started GMing a Dolmenwood game for my husband, brother, and cousin. The one area where I’m not making progress is playing with my kids. Now that it’s summer, I think I’ll get some games out and cajole them to join me, especially on rainy days. For the kids: Mausritter, Hero Kids, and maybe some Cairn 2e.
Create some RPG modules for Norse City Limits and Merlin’s Last MagicDolmenwood: I’m amending this goal partly due to some ideas I’ve had since starting my Dolmenwood book club on Substack. I realize that with all this reading I’m doing related to the game and its inspirations, that I kinda want to start making content for the game itself. Perhaps a “Goblin Market” module, or something inspired by “Mrs. Mabb”? I haven’t really done much with this goal other than think about it, but if I’m going to dip my toe into making RPG stuff, Dolmenwood feels like the right way to go.
Make a “Saturday Morning” zine series and publish an issue every month: Not yet. Have sketched out some ideas for what each issue might be about, but other than that, I’ve not worked on this goal.
Make other zines: Not yet, but I did do some brainstorming about possibilities. I want to get my kids involved as well, particularly as illustrators. A family-made zine, if you will. This has me quite excited, but the ideas are all embryonic at this stage and need more fleshing out, thought, experimentation, discussion, etc.
Read more books with my kids (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Half-Magic, James and the Giant Peach, the Hobbit, the Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, Last Battle, more Little House books, How to Train Your Dragon series, Harry Potter): Yes!!! We finished NIMH, Silver Chair, Horse and His Boy, Magician’s Nephew, The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, and we’re about to begin Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This has been going very well, and in addition to the above mentioned books, we’re currently reading The Phantom Tollbooth, Skunk and Badger, and The Castle of Llyr. At some point, I hope to return to The Hobbit as well.
Start naalbinding again (finish the hat I started for my son and make another one for my other son): No, and I’m sad about it. I see my little bag on its hook that has the yarn and naalbinding needles, and I always pass it by. I’m worried that I’ve forgotten how to do it. I think I’ll need to start a little beginners loop and get the hang of it again before I jump back into my son’s winter hat. Maybe by this coming winter I’ll be able to finish it…
Practice my cartooning/comics drawing (for the zines): A little. We bought a box of blank greeting cards so we could make cards for people instead of buying them, and I’ve done two homemade cards using cutesy little creatures I copied out of this book: How to Draw Cute Woodland Friends. I also created two possible characters to be my zine mascots: a pillbug named Pillburt and a preying mantis named Manty.
Start a podcast: Nope. Haven’t really thought or worked on it either. I feel like I’m in such a “finish Shards” mode that starting a big project like this feels impossible. Maybe that’s the wrong attitude. Maybe I need to keep pushing on this so that I build momentum. Small daily actions build to big things. I need to remember that (for this podcast goal but also for my fiction writing and everything else).
Write essays, poems, and fiction that will serve as models for my students next school year: No, and I think what I need to do is not write these ahead of time but write them alongside my students. So, for now, I’ll not be working on these, but when school resumes in the fall, I’ll get back to writing more model texts and drafting in the classroom, in front of my students, so they can see how a writer does it. Both the good and the bad, the ease and the struggle.
This list of goals is much less ambitious than in previous iterations (only 12 items this time), but I’m okay with that. I still stand by having big(ish) goals and “failing to succeed,” but I also realize that when it comes to fiction especially, the number of goals was more a procrastination technique than a productivity one.
Jane Yolen, one of my GOATs, just passed away at 87, and I’m reminded of why she’s such an inspiration: She wrote every possible kind of genre and type, from picture books to novels to non-fiction to poetry, and she wrote with incredible gusto. She was beyond prolific.
I always admire the really prolific ones. Yolen, Bradbury, Sanderson.
But I’m not prolific. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to write at the same volume as my heroes. In the obit I read of Yolen yesterday, she was quoted as saying that there are often two types of writers, the mule team drivers and the horse and buggy writers. The mule teamers can handle several projects at once, whereas the buggy writers finish one thing then move on to the next.
I want to be a mule team driver, but I think I might be a horse and buggy person. Yolen wasn’t critical of the horse and buggy writer, she was simply describing these two types. Sanderson, from what I can tell, is more of a horse and buggy guy, finishing one thing at a time and then switching gears to work on something completely different after each project is completed.
I think I need to experiment with this and see if I’m right about my type. If I can finish Shards this year, and if I can keep going without getting blocked or too bogged down, then perhaps I am better suited to the horse and buggy style. After I finish Shards, maybe that’s when I go back to one of my unfinished short stories. Then, when that’s finished, move on to maybe Ysbadadden. Etc., etc.
But if I stall out, if I find myself struggling and not writing at all, then perhaps I need to reconsider that I may be a mule teamer after all. I’ll know more at the next goal update.
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