2021: Goals and Progress Update

Introduction

First of all, I just want to say it took me quite a while to write this blog post because I had to fix the website, first. My creative energy is pretty drained after all that, but I'm still going to power through it. I prefer to keep work at work, but it just wasn't possible today.

Anyway...

It's been a bit since my last update, and I'd love to promise that I'm going to be updating more frequently, but I unfortunately don't have the luxury of making that promise. I'm going to do my best, but I always do my best, and look where that's gotten us. Four months between updates, that's where.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that during the last four months I was busy and made very little progress. I worked hard to get my house cleaned up, I wrapped up my D&D Campaign with a grand, epic finale that involved the return of almost every guest we'd ever had (it was fantastic), and I worked with a realtor to get my house listed. None of these are things I can really share publicly or write posts about, though I'd be more than happy to write a post about my house and that whole process, once it's officially sold.

However, while I didn't make any great strides in terms of writing, game development, or music production (the three core things that this site is dedicated to), I did make progress toward making progress... okay, this is convoluted. Essentially, I now have less on my plate. My house is set to be officially sold by the end of this month (fingers crossed it all goes through without a hitch); I've sold, donated, or trashed most of my belongings (with some being moved into a storage unit), and the amount of stress weighing on me has greatly diminished. I'm still playing D&D, but I've decreased that to shorter sessions once every two weeks (rather than 10-12 hour sessions every Saturday, which was crazy for my players and me). Life is good; there's less on my plate. Once the house is sold, there will be next to nothing on my plate, save a few things...

So that's what this blog post will cover: what's left for me to do and how will it affect my creative projects going forward?

My To-Do List

Get Married

My word, I want to be married. Thankfully, so does my fiancée! What's standing in the way is how incredibly difficult it is to get married when you are citizens of different countries, let alone when there's a pandemic and one of you isn't even permitted to leave their home country. This pandemic has been insane and it has greatly put a damper on our plans to be married. However, with a lot of hope and hard work, it might well happen by early next year. So, getting married to my fiancée and ensuring that the two of us are together (without being separated to this degree again) is pretty high on my to-do list.

Making this happen is going to require a lot of legal help, tons of paperwork, and about a dozen different methods of identification (I assume). The forms are crazy, and no amount of perusing Reddit has been able to make me confident we can do it on our own, so we're hiring an immigration attorney to help us through the process. We want to make sure this is done correctly and efficiently. This isn't a simple checkbox of "do you want to be married", which means that the marriage itself and what it takes to get there is weighing pretty heavily on me (and on her).

Keep Working at Zoom

The time I've spent at Zoom has been a pretty wild ride. I started just before the pandemic, and we were among the first to go fully remote. I had about two weeks of in-person experience at Zoom before starting my first fully remote job, which I've been loving ever since. Zoom has been working hard to get its infrastructure set up so that it can max the immense demand it has, now, and I've been able to witness much of that. I watched the support staff explode, watched our procedures change on an almost daily basis, and sat in on every bi-weekly meeting I could to hear about upcoming events.

It's been far more intense than I ever expected, but I'm confident about my future with this company—more so than I have been at any other place. You know all of those "Your Job Sucks" articles (a series I do intend to keep up)? Yeah, it's almost like Zoom read all of those and took them to heart. This place is fantastic. I know that this may change as the company continues to grow—it can be hard to maintain a positive job culture while you're expanding—but at least for right now, I have hope.

Write Keeping Secrets from Friends

Those of you who read my post last year likely know that I've finally started getting serious about my How I Ruined My Life rewrite. I've been talking about it for ages—I have repeatedly disparaged the name of my first actual novel, yet never done anything about it because the concept of a rewrite was just too much. Well, I can happily say that the rewrite is fully in the works. I've finished about a third of the outline, which is a large chunk (outlines are hard for me), and have the story itself mapped out. I know what went wrong with the original and I am confident that I can get it right, this time.

My current hope is to be finished with the outline by the end of next week, and then I'll dedicate each week to one chapter of the rough draft. With the chapter count I currently estimate for my outline, this will put me at a finished first draft before Christmas! The thought of finishing something again is exciting to me, but I'm trying to be reasonable about the limitations on my time, particularly due to my job.

In the meantime, my other novels (Cult of Orleans, Beneath Magenta Rain, Imperfect) will be on the backburner.

Release a Free Short Story Version of The Ansleigh Arc

Here I am again, talking about the Ansleigh Arc. The last book I finished, and I finished it at the end of 2018. It received an honorable mention in the worldwide Writers of the Future competition, my second one to date. I was (and am) proud of it, yet it's still not seen the light of day. The reason is, ultimately, that I am lazy. The formatting and technical work that goes into pushing out an eBook—even a free one—is just overwhelming, though I know it only takes a day or two. It's not fun, so I've been putting it off day in and day out. However, I am really going to set aside some time to push it out. Probably over Valentine's Day weekend, I think. It's something akin to a love story, anyway, so that'd be a good release time.

The good news (for me) is that I don't plan to put any money into marketing for the story; I won't be charging for it and I'm not looking to get much attention on it, so there's no point. Getting the story out to the public should simply be a matter of formatting the eBook, slapping my crappy cover art on there, and releasing it. No marketing, no book tours, no nothing. I'm just putting it on the Internet and whoever finds it finds it. This makes it less daunting than other projects, for which I have to start marketing planning before I even outline the book.

Put in Work with Rhetrosoft

I have actually already been doing this, it's just been behind the scenes. Rhetrosoft, the game development company (that TLBainterOfficial is technically a subsidiary of) I run with my brother, has been slowly rolling forward as he and I work to further our understanding of game design. My hope is that I will post more blog posts here and on the Rhetrosoft website (which I also plan to redo in the near future, because it's terrible and outdated), this year. I have actually been doing a lot of work at Rhetrosoft, particularly around sound design in video games. I've learned how to use a ton of new software and we've even developed a vast internal wiki for our first official game, which we are aspiring to demo some time next year!

I have every intention of making progress with Rhetrosoft publicly available in the coming months. If nothing else, I'll feel obligated to post my work, which will make me feel obligated to actually work. I need to really focus during my free time, regardless of how little there actually is.

Write the Aduna Campaign Setting Guide

My D&D Campaign, as I mentioned, is set in a completely homebrewed world. I spent days upon days developing it from the beginning, creating a vast world filled with a rich history. It seemed like a waste to only have that homebrew world for my small party of friends (particularly when the setting is rife with stories waiting to be told--enough for far more than just two or three campaigns), so I have been working to create a complete campaign setting guide, including campaign modules, historical guides, etc.! This is likely going to be an ongoing project that I will continue to add to, and I've even considered writing short stories set in the universe of Aduna, though my personal writing has strayed far from fantasy in recent years.

This is something I will continue to work on as my D&D Campaign rages on. The campaign is a lot of fun for me and my friends, but it has the added benefit of fueling my creative energy and encouraging me to keep on writing the setting guide(s). I'm not sure when I'll have something that I can release, but my hope is that I'll have a public book or two in about a year.

Conclusion

For my conclusion... well... that's all, folks. I promise I'm trying my best. I genuinely hope 2021 is better for me, creatively. I will try to let fewer things weigh me down, stress me out, or limit my creative energy. It's time to buckle down and work hard for the future I want.

Actually, it was time to buckle down several years ago, but I'm a procrastinator.

P.S. Site Update!

To encourage myself to write more often, I've been working on streamlining the website. You probably noticed that things are missing that used to be here and that old blog posts (what I'm calling legacy posts) are missing images and other things. I'm going to leave the old posts as they are so you can still go back and read them. New posts will look much better!

Stay tuned for more improvements to the website.