One major aspect of my life that I neglected to mention in my round-up for the last year/decade was how much time I now spend playing role-playing games with my friends.

Since my neighbor taught me to play basic Dungeons & Dragons in first grade, I’ve been hooked on RPGs. Here and there in my life, I’ve gone long stretches without playing, and truthfully, I never felt completely myself in those periods. I got a lot of writing done, but writing fiction never quite satisfied me like Dungeon Mastering a great game with great people. It’s like writing, but with immediate feedback! It’s impossible to beat telling thrilling stories with great friends, and recently, I found my way back into the hobby in a big way.

(Quick aside – I’m not mentioning the names of my fifteen players to protect their privacy, but they should all know that I love them very much and enjoy torturing them monthly).

Two years ago, I launched my first online D&D game via the Roll20 service and video conferencing software (we currently use Whereby.com for that and it works mostly well). I recruited fellow fathers who I thought would understand the trials and tribulations of having kids muck up your schedule. I figured scheduling would be difficult, as it’s always been the biggest challenge with in-person tabletop games. As it turns out, if you start your games in the evenings and nobody has to leave their home, scheduling is much easier! Our “Tomb of Dads” group (so called because we started with the Tomb of Annihilation adventure) is well into our second campaign now. This new campaign is based on ideas I developed from our trip to France in 2018, and involves a fallen, forgotten empire in ruins and a new, strong Catholic-like church/empire.

With that group going so well, I thought hey, I want to get another group going, and it’d be a good idea if it wasn’t a total sausage fest. For that one, I pulled together a group of friends from college, including my wife and another female classmate. We recently wrapped up that first campaign about stopping a planes-eating giant machine and have been playing some one-shots in Tales From the Loop while we think about what campaign we want to play next. We’re absolutely adoring Tales as a great 80s-themed “kids on bikes” style game with weird high tech mysteries, all based on and inspired by the fantastic artwork of Simon Stålenhag. Simon is one of my favorite artists working today.

In 2019, I started a third group, with this one made up mostly of friends from the writing community. We decided to play the Dragon Heist module, and it has provided the ongoing framework for an campaign now that we’ve completed it. That crew takes owning the Trollskull Tavern very seriously and so far, all of their adventures seem to revolve around the tavern and tavern-related activities.

Each group is very different from the others in terms of personalities and play styles, so I really get to stretch my planning and plotting skills for them. Some take the “game” part more seriously, and some take the “role-play” part more seriously. I’m always looking forward to each session, and having so many means I can experiment with various ideas about how I can improve my GMing skills.

In between games, I experiment with new characters voices, new narrative techniques, and I’ve started tinkering with the rules to try to get the game more the way I want it to play. One change for me is that I’ve learned to let go of worrying about “game balance” and to feel comfortable in my own ability to work around whatever weird thing the players want to play. If the PCs want powerful characters, they have powerful enemies. No big deal, really. I used to worry about throwing off game balance all the time, but I’ve grown a lot more confident with so many opportunities to play. I used to be a “No” DM, but now I see myself more of a “Yes, and” DM.

Finally, late in the year, this Forever-DM got the opportunity to play in a regular game of Invisible Sun with a bunch of the Monte Cook Games folks in Kansas City. It’s refreshing to get to play again, and I love observing other GMs so I can steal their ideas for how to run a great game. I should probably look for more opportunities to play so I can continue to get more ideas for growth!

As far as feelings of contentment go, I think all this game time has contributed to my feelings of a full, rich life. I look forward to a lot more of it in 2020, and I’ll probably be blogging regularly as I work out my thoughts about how to keep improving my skills in this area. It’s a hobby, but one that I really enjoy being somewhat good at. Later, I will also blog about all my 3D printing efforts aimed at building a really lush tabletop experience.

So what about you? Are you getting to roll those bones regularly? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

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I end the 2010s in my early 40s with a newfound gratitude and contentment for my life. Sometimes that gratitude slips, yes. I learned recently that gratitude and contentment isn’t something you feel passively as a result of doing other things; it’s something that you must actively pursue. That was an important lesson for me. I wasn’t going to be satisfied with my life and what I had unless I wanted to be satisfied, and my twenties and thirties, I did not want to be satisfied. I was hungry for recognition, to be seen. By who? For what? Who the hell knows. It was an emptiness that only grew as I achieved some of what I thought I wanted, and found that it wasn’t fulfilling in the way that I had hoped.

Getting what I wanted didn’t bring contentment! What the hell? At first I thought maybe that meant I just didn’t know what I really wanted, so I spent some time trying to figure out what it was that I wanted, changed things up. Still I didn’t feel satisfied.

Feeling truly satisfied only came when I learned to feel a deeper appreciation for that which I already had. Acquiring new possessions and accomplishments weren’t the things that gave me that feeling I was craving; it was just actively practicing appreciation for my friends, family, and place in life. Looking at things with clear eyes, and realizing how wonderfully I had it–that did the trick. I wish I could have come to this realization earlier in my life, because feeling contentment like this would have saved me a lot of anxiety and stress earlier. But I just wasn’t ready.

The other thing that happened in the past decade is that I became a father. For most of my life, it wasn’t ever something I seriously considered. I think that overpopulation is a big threat to the ecosystems of the planet, and so since I was a teenager, I believed I would not have kids so as not to contribute to the problem. It was only through considering how great of a mother Sarah would be that I started to see how much I would miss out on if we didn’t have a child. We talked and talked about it and finally decided that we were likely ready for it, and our whole worlds changed. I honestly can hardly remember what my day-to-day life was like without the kid. And having Matty in my life has brought no small amount of contentment, love, and joy. So much joy, I never even expected!

I think my favorite thing about being a Dad is experiencing his joy through him. Watching him encounter and fall in love with things makes my heart ache with love for him and the world.

All that said, I know I’m not the best Dad. I have too much of a disciplinarian streak that comes from my own upbringing (I hear my own father’s words coming out of my mouth more than I would like), but I try to have patience and provide him everything he needs. I don’t work hard enough to be a role model for him, and I want to do better. I’m confident that I will learn to do better with time. He’s our first kid, and we’re his first parents. Nobody has a road map in this situation, really.

Next, I turn to the appreciation I have in my professional life. I’ve spent a decade building Clockpunk Studios out of thin air, but I didn’t do it alone–not even close. So many friends lended me their work and their recommendations even when I probably didn’t deserve it. My early clients are like extended family to me. When J.A. Pitts passed away unexpectedly this year, it was like losing a sibling. He and Jay Lake were two of the first writers to hire me to build them sites. Over the decade, I’ve welcomed nearly a hundred different clients into the fold at Clockpunk, and I hope to welcome a few hundred more. A decade in, and I feel like I’m just getting started, and finally comfortable in what I do.

I should mention that I don’t think I would have survived the decade at Clockpunk without the assistance of several people who have worked for me or with me in some capacity. Molly Tanzer stuck it out with me even after her writing career started to take off, and put up with my constant fears and anxieties in the early days. Orrin Grey came on board next and did a fantastic job writing some of the best blog content we’ve posted and I hope to get him back soon for that. Now I have Jenn Reese working as a regular designer, and she is saving my life, you guys. Her work is so beautiful and warm and I never get tired of seeing what she’s going to do next for our clients.

These people all mean the world to me, and I’m so grateful that they are my friends. Also, heading into 2020, Sarah will be doing more and more work for Clockpunk as an admin assistant. We are concocting all sorts of interesting ideas on what she can do to help our clients.

In its first decade, Clockpunk has grown so much. I am starting 2020 with projects booked all the way until May, which is the farthest I believe I’ve ever been booked out in a January. Again? Nothing but gratitude for this. I can’t even express how much.

As a writer, well, not to end on a sour note, but the break continues. That said, I started the decade only just beginning to make sales and end it having sold stories to nearly every major market I had set my eyes upon. I will admit that I put a single little writing goal on my goals for 2020. Maybe to write just one little story, just to grease the wheels and see what happens. Who knows! I’m excited to discover what happens in 2020 for me in that regard.

I still have a lot of personal growth to do, but it is very satisfying to look back on a decade’s worth of growth, and yes even a few accomplishments. I don’t feel like I’m done; in fact, I feel like I’ve just about finished stretching and am now ready for the real jogging to begin. The only thing I can be certain of right now is that no matter what happens, I will continue doing my best to practice gratitude for what I have. I am not a religious person, but I stand here, looking out at 2020 stretching ahead, and I feel so very blessed.

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Ordinarily, this time of year, I’d be focused primarily on evaluating my goals and how I did on them. I’ll still probably do that, but I thought I’d start my end of year thinking with a positive list of a few of the things I felt I have learned this year.

1. 50% of what I thought was my “personality” was actually anxiety. Now that I take proper medication for it, I realize that I am not the person I thought I was. I’m still learning how to be without anxiety, but on the whole, it’s a net positive.
2. The holidays are far more fun when viewed through the eyes of children. We have a tendency as adults to get wrapped up on all the obligations and stress of the holiday. Watching my five year old navigate the holidays of the year and seeing how much joy they bring him has given me tremendous joy as well.
3. I can be handy with tools or crafty, despite my inherent clumsiness. I just need to be patient with myself when I drop the thing for the twentieth time. In 2019, I took up 3D printing and painting game terrain and figures with gusto, and I’ve slowly improved through the year. The trick with it, as it is in so many things, is patience. I don’t think I could have learned more patience if it hadn’t been for item #1 on this list, though.
4. I can still be a creative person even if I’m not writing. For years, my creative output has been tied up almost entirely in my writing, and when the writing spigot shut off a few years ago, I was worried about what it meant. I am still not writing but the difference is, I’m not worried about it. I’m making physical objects and running three different Dungeons & Dragons groups. I’m plenty creative. If the urge to write returns, I will write. But I am the same person whether I am writing or not.
5. How to be confident in what I know. I’ve been a freelance web designer/developer for over ten years now, and I am finally becoming confident in myself and my skills. Maybe it’s the 10,000 hours thing, maybe it’s just old age. Either way, I trust myself to figure things out given enough time and focus.
6. By default, our concepts of beauty are linked with our concepts of youth, and that’s something we learn to change with time. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found myself examining my reactions to so-called beauty and often find myself wondering “is that person beautiful, or are they just young?” Physical beauty is such a fleeting thing, and I’m starting to find my eyes opening to deeper beauties than that.
7. People as a whole aren’t terribly bright, or even well-meaning. This is probably the one thing on the list you might take as a negative, but I think I’ve spent a good part of my life being naive about the intelligence of most people. Also, I assumed most people, given the circumstances, would do the right thing. The last three years politically have demonstrated for me that they will not. I feel a little more realistic about how I expect people as a whole to behave. This is not to say that I think I’m especially smart. I think I’ve learned that we’re all prone to a lot more manipulation than we ever thought.
8. The new Gutenberg editor in WordPress is pretty great. I resisted the change because of backwards-compatibility issues, but ultimately, I think it’s been a big step forward for the ecosystem, and I’m glad my fears have been proven wrong. I love working with it now.
9. I may be technically middle class, but I come from working class culture, and this has broad implications for how I relate to people and my comfort levels around others. But I’m also more educated now, and it sometimes leaves me feeling like I don’t have a cultural comfort zone anymore. Not working class. Not middle class. But thanks to a discussion on Facebook, I’ve learned that I am not alone in this feeling at all.
10. What I do for a living is not fundamentally any different from any contractor who works with plumbing or electricity. The specifics of the technology may be different, but the generalities are shared.
11. Sometimes it feels better to give things away than it does to keep them. I wasn’t really raised with a spirit of charity – I think it’s a solidly middle class behavior/idea, to donate and volunteer – when you’re poor, you help the other poor folks around you directly as best you can, but the idea of making donations of money isn’t something you really do, at least not to my memory. But in 2019, I spent a lot of time paring down my belongings, often giving away a lot of things to others, and it felt good. When it came time for the holidays and people asked me what I wanted, I told them that I wanted donations made in my name to Heifer International. Instead of me getting some junk I could have bought for myself, a family is getting two new goats. It’s maybe my favorite gift I’ve ever received, to be honest.

How about you? What did you learn in 2019? I focused mostly on personal discovery in this list, mostly because I didn’t have the time today to properly source all the external things I learned. But feel free in the comments to share all sorts of things you learned. Share the learning as we close out the year.

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Because Patreon’s deal is about to get much less friendly for creators, I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger on activating my own Patreon page, which I have been toying with for about two years now. I probably don’t have the fanbase necessary to earn pro-rates for writing fiction and releasing it there, but I consider it mostly another tool in the toolbox to building a career, rather than a replacement for that kinds of on-spec writing we SF/F short fiction writers do generally. I’m never going to get rich writing fiction, and that’s great! I can finally focus on writing exactly the off-kilter stuff that I really want.

The tiers are really just a first pass effort, so if you have suggestions, feel free to share them.

I guess this means I’m going to start writing again! If that sounds like a good thing, maybe consider joining up?

You can find my Patreon page here.

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This is going to be a very geeky post, not really about writing, but more about web design and WordPress more specifically. Feel free to skip it entirely.

So here we are: WordPress 5.0. I’ve made many testing Gutenberg posts, but this will be my first post in the new WordPress Editor out in live code. The experience is pleasant enough, I suppose. I wish I could say the same about the run up to the release.

The Gutenberg release has been incredibly frustrating to watch, especially because of my reliance on custom fields in the work I develop for clients.  Over the past few years, I’ve come to rely on Advanced Custom Fields for that work as a framework underlying my code, and the Gutenberg team appears to have gone ahead and shipped 5.0 with a bug that causes the name of every single registered ACF panel to appear on the Gutenberg screen, despite this being a known issue. They may fix it in a couple of weeks.  WordPress 5.0 never should have launched with such a glaring error.

There’s a lot to like about this new editor, but the editor is the heart and soul of WordPress, the piece that nearly every WordPress user touches when they interact with the software. What’s the sense in launching something that breaks in such a fundamental way on possibly millions of websites?  And let’s not forget the massive usability concerns for those with accessibility needs. From my standpoint, Gutenberg wasn’t ready. It was rushed, to meet some secret timeline that the rest of us were never given the logic behind.  The damage it has done could have been avoided.

It’s shaken my faith in a platform that I have come to rely upon for my very livelihood. Moving forward, I think I will be asking myself more often: “can this be done without WordPress?” Instead of asking: “can it be done with WordPress?”  And that’s a shame.  Because what the 5.0 release debacle has demonstrated to me is that if my needs and the needs of my clients don’t align with what Automattic and Matt Mullenweg have decided is good for them, then our needs will lose in the contest every single time. WordPress doesn’t seem to be the open source project that I thought it was.

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I don’t call what follows here reviews exactly – because I make a point of not talking about things unless I have good things to say about them. Consider them loose recommendations at best, but things I mention on this blog are things I think are worth checking out.

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

I don’t read a lot of second world fantasy novels lately–I mostly get my fix for this sort of thing by playing video games and tabletop RPGs. That said, the reviews of Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy caught my attention and I’ll be damned if I didn’t fall in love with his characters and his prose. It’s not often that a nerdy diplomat spy gets to be the hero of a book!  Also, I love that the series plays out over many years, and the changes that occur to the society are gradual.  So many books seems to remake the world in a matter of hours.  There’s a nice kinda Russian vibe to the culture, too, with names that reminded me of my time in the Crime and Punishment gulag in high school, but in a much more interesting way.

Foundryside launches a new series, and it has a very interesting magical system that in many ways resembles computer programming (but isn’t nearly as dry as the real thing). What’s more, and again, it has a cast of colorful, interesting characters that I am eager to follow through the next few books.  I really recommend Bennett’s fantasy work.

Get Shorty – Season One

I’m a low-key casual fan of Chris O’Dowd, and when I listened to his recent interview on Marc Maron’s WTF, I learned that he’s been starring in a television remake of the Elmore Leonard novel/film.  I got my hands on it (you can buy all the episodes on Amazon, as the show itself airs on something called Epix which I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of before) and I was pleasantly surprised at how different the story was from the original film (I must confess my knowledge of Elmore Leonard books is very limited).

O’Dowd making the leap from It Crowd and Moonboy to this seems like a stretch, but he manages to deliver a cold menace at times that really impressed me.  There’s more depth to him than I necessarily expected, which is always a pleasure to discover. He’s still funny, too, however, and I think his fans would not be disappointed with this show, which is current airing its second season.

Also equally surprising is Ray Romano playing a down-on-his-luck, slightly sleazy film producer with hair that reminds me a lot of James Gunn. I do not consider myself a fan of Ray Romano’s previous work, so I was shocked by how great of an actor he is in this. His facial expressions often carry a scene. Don’t let previous impressions of him scare you away from this. He’s great.

The story revolves around Nevada-based gansters with ties to drug cartels getting involved in making films, and as a long time lover of all things Hollywood, it was the inside look at the production of a film that initially drew my interest. That said, the story delights in turning the screws on O’Dowd’s character, Miles Daly, as he tries to make a better life for himself, one worthy of his estranged wife and daughter.  This is very much modern episodic television that reads more as a 13-hour long movie than old school television. It’s perfect for your next binge, and I can’t wait to get my hands on season two (but I’m not getting Epix, sorry!).

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Happy Labor Day to all you hard-working stiffs out there.  This will be a quick blog post to let you know that I have a new story available in the latest issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

“We Mete Justice with Beak and Talon” arose out a challenge to myself to find a way to write a successful story in the second person plural perspective. I find that stories that experiment with point of view tend to sell well to traditional print magazines–the last attempt of an experiment, that time in single second person, was “Wet Fur” and that appeared in Asimov’s and later Escape Pod.  Both deal with animal perspectives, come to think.  How non-human intelligence works is something I apparently like to return to from time to time.

The story went through significant edits working with editor Charlie Finlay.  He was crucial in getting it into shape, and I really appreciate the time he took with it.  Special thanks to my good pal Gord Sellar for taking the time to read not only the original draft, but the revised one.

If you follow the link above, you can order copies of it in paper or find a means of purchasing it electronically. I hope if you like it, you’ll consider subscribing to F&SF.  For the last eighteen years, I have been sporadically submitting stories to F&SF.  It was the first place to start sending me personalized rejections, and for the longest time, their encouragement kept me writing at a time when I had little else to go off other than an over-inflated sense of self-importance.   John Joseph Adams was the assistant editor at the time, and any of you that are fans of my work know that he went on to publish the bulk of my work in his assorted anthologies and magazines.  Making this sale was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life, and it came with no small sense of satisfaction.

What’s next? Well… probably a novel loosely related to this world.  I need to finish up a couple more Dungeonspace stories too. I’m about 5,000 words into the next attempt.  Writing has been especially hard for me these last couple of years, but I’m find myself feeling the desire to build something with my mind and words again.  A novel about teens who shoot down Amazon drones for their material needs, to survive in a kind of post-collapse rural Kansas, has begun to take shape.  We’ll see if it’s something I can actually harvest or another dead-end, but there’s something there that I can’t stop thinking about lately.

Anyway, if you read this latest story and enjoy it, please drop me a note in the comments or online!

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I have been corresponding with my good friend (and astonishingly great writer) Gord Sellar lately about writing in general and my writing specifically. I’m still working through that mid-life crisis moment, although with the help of close friends and some thought, I’ve been developing a plan of attack. I hope that the end result will be much more of my work to read in professional venues, and less uncertainty as to my purpose in life.

In our conversations, which are long and winding and go on for pages and pages of emails, Gord hit on something that really stopped me in my tracks.  He has this idea that I write fiction that seemed to be based in a belief in human decency. My initial reaction to this was one of surprise, but I suppose I can happily own this descriptor if it’s true. I do believe, and have believed, in the basic decent-ness of people. I do believe that together we are capable of great things. Gord calls this quality “American.” I think perhaps not American as a whole, but maybe Midwestern? I think perhaps it is only modern politics that makes me flinch away from the description of “American” writer. I will never consider myself truly a part of Trump’s America. That is an America rooted in fear, and one that stands for values I stand against. I honestly hope that my writing never, ever reflects that vision of my country. I hope it will continue to stand for a belief that people do more good than harm, and that fearing the other harms us all.

So, yes; I do believe that most people are fundamentally good and kind on a base level, but I didn’t realize it appeared in my fiction. And that something of my deep values does show up in my work made me pleased; reading his comment made me feel more pride in my work than I have in a long time. I write about fun, joyous things mostly, and often I worry that there’s nothing deeper to take from my work beyond a little entertainment. But if by accident I am conveying some deeply held beliefs about the nature of humanity, well, then… gosh. That’s a whole new reason to go on writing, I think.

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