Too Many Projects, Not Enough Brain

Greetings from the edge,

I appear to have made a terrible mistake.

Now I’m writing about it; it’s not one specific mistake, you understand. More a series of small, perfectly reasonable decisions that have somehow combined into an enormous hydra made entirely out of unfinished projects, missed deadlines, and caffeine-powered late nights.

Cut one head off, and two Word documents appear.

So, I thought it might be worth doing a quick roundup of what the hell I have actually been doing.

The biggest development is The Crooked Quill Games.

This started, innocently enough, when I decided to write a Call of Cthulhu investigation.

One investigation.

Nice and simple.

Except that investigation grew into a trilogy; the trilogy started generating other ideas, and then I thought, ‘well, what about D&D?’ and somewhere along the way I apparently decided that what I really needed in my life was a small TTRPG publishing outfit.

So that is now a thing.

I’ve been working on the website, branding, logos, copy, and all of the other little jobs that appear when you decide to turn a folder full of deranged notes into something resembling an actual publishing project.

The first major release is The Blackwitch Incident project, which began as a fairly straightforward horror scenario involving a documentary crew following the police in a small village and has since become considerably less straightforward.

Because, of course, it did.

The plan is now three linked investigations, starting with the original police-station nightmare before moving into the immediate aftermath and, eventually, the consequences years later.

Because apparently writing one scenario would have been far too… sensible.

And anyone who knows me knows that in a word cloud of my traits, ‘sensible’ would be written in the smallest font, and in invisible ink.

Over here at Rambles & Whimsy, things are moving as well.

I recently finished another Crying Is a Free Action piece about turning worldbuilding into things players can actually interact with. I love worldbuilding as much as the next notebook-hoarding lunatic, but mountains of lore aren’t much use at the table unless somebody can threaten it, steal it, uncover it, blow it up, or accidentally marry it.

Over at The Chop Shop, my planned comparison of the book and film versions of The Exorcist has hit something of a problem: they are both extremely good and virtually identical.

There may still be an article hiding in there somewhere, but I’m increasingly convinced that several thousand words of “William Peter Blatty knew what he was doing” might not constitute cutting-edge horror criticism.

So that one is currently simmering.

Fiction has not escaped the chaos either.

I’m still playing around with Rare, my story about Lilly Green, a vegetarian chef who gets bitten early in a zombie outbreak and slowly develops an increasingly unfortunate relationship with the concept of meat.

It starts with cravings.

Then raw meat.

Then warm flesh.

Eventually, things become considerably less suitable for the specials board.

I’ve also decided, because I clearly had too much free time, to start reading more widely and actually taking proper notes rather than trusting my brain to retain useful information.

I started gently with Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

Because I looked at the shallow end and thought, Bollocks to that, because I’m obviously a masochist.

I’m putting together proper reference notes as I go, which has turned out to be surprisingly enjoyable. There is something deeply satisfying about taking an enormous subject and slowly reducing it to ideas that my squirrel brain can find again six months later.

Meanwhile, Rob the Computer Guy continues to keep me busy in the world where people occasionally pay me actual money.

There have been repairs, upgrades, assorted technological emergencies, and the usual collection of computers doing things their owners insisted they definitely weren’t doing yesterday.

Which, naturally, means I’m also still thinking about advertising, local leaflet drops, SEO, and generally trying to grow that side of things.

So, to summarize:

I’m writing fiction, writing articles, studying cosmology, fixing computers, building a tabletop publishing company, developing a Call of Cthulhu trilogy, and attempting to keep this website fed.

This may explain why my desk currently looks like someone detonated a stationery cupboard.

But here’s the strange thing.

I’m enjoying it.

There is an enormous amount going on, and occasionally I have to remind myself that not everything needs to be finished right fucking now, but things are moving.

Slowly, chaotically, and occasionally sideways, but moving.

And I think I’ll take that.

See you in the margins,