Carpe Blogiem: 2020 – A Year In Review

Here are how things went for me in 2020:

The Good (What I did well or that went well)

• GURPS Realm Management (aka “SNO-51”) finished the playtest and went to production. It’s still there and very much out of my hands. Hopefully we’ll see it this year.
• The five adventures I wrote with J. Edward Tremlett were finished, submitted, and went to editing and revising. Doug revised the last book substantially to conform with more his idea of how it should work as not just an adventure (it did that) but as a setting piece (it kind of did that).
• I wrote “Marl Ankh-3” (a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy: Denizens title) and turned it in and several months later got back comments. I’m still going through those and will turn them in somewhere around March 2021.
• I wrote a book on magic items for Doug I’m calling “Nibelung”. Finished it, turned it in, and Doug turned around comments. We’re not sure where to go from here so it’s sitting on the back burner. I still call it a win because I’m happy with the material I wrote in it.
• My Patreon continues to provide more than three-quarters of my income. I’m sitting at 84 patrons right now and I continued to try and figure out how to grow my base more. I’m still trying to consider what to do whether it’s write a bunch of stuff, modify material from the Vault that was for Pyramid, or something else. If you have ideas, I’m listening.
• I still have two other GURPS supplements that I’ve outlined and queried on and given tacit permission to write (as soon as I’m contracted for one of them at least).
• Grammar studies were put on the backburner a lot of months, but I continue to memorize the rules of the English language – slow going, but still going it is.
• I wrote three new books with Steve Jackson Games: GURPS Horror: Beyond the Pale (with J. Edward Tremlett), GURPS Monster Hunters Encounters 1, and How to Be A GURPS GM: Ritual Path Magic. All of these were part of the GURPS 2020 PDF Challenge Kickstarter.
• I wrote four articles  with Steve Jackson Games for their Pyramid Scheme kickstarter which brought back Pyramid magazine in its fourth incarnation.
• I created a wuxia fantasy campaign called “Ten Thousand Jade Petals” as of this writing there are almost 30 combined sessions between two teams (most of them B-Team) with plenty to go. It’s fun and the players are enjoying themselves. I gained a new player and my other half also joined B-Team (six total players now) which has been great.
• I was interviewed on Roleplay Rescue by Che Webster. It was great and I definitely want to come back again and maybe talk about campaign design.

The Bad (What I could have done better or had no control over)

• The first book of a fiction series I wanted to write never materialized despite a good outline.
• I still didn’t publish anything in the fiction market in 2020. I missed my 2020 goal and went about another year without publishing anything. Sigh.
• My mother came home at the end of 2020 to put the house in order after a whole saga of crap that happened. (If you want to read about it, I have been tweeting about it here.)
• COVID-19. Enough said.
• Posting remained at 1-2 entries per week with some weeks seeing 2-3. I’d like to get to posting daily if possible, but that’s not a small amount of work.
• Mental Health: It has sucked. Between the political situation, COVID-19, my own personal crap, and other random garbage it’s just been a bad year for me.
• Physical Health: My weight continues fluxing badly (swinging 5% to 15% in either direction). My A1C was good. I got a CGM (Continuous Glucose Monitor) and that has helped a LOT.

The Ugly (I don’t know how to categorize this or too early to tell)