It’s November 1st, and I’m exhausted. October was a rollercoaster of a month, for both my emotions and stress levels.
I don’t think I’ve talked about this before, but crowdfunding campaigns are always a stressful time, even if you have someone managing the day-to-day logistics for you. I haven’t been involved with a crowdfunding campaign yet that I didn’t believe in — I wouldn’t be involved with them if I thought they weren’t worthy of being funded — but you never know how the community is going to react to it. Some I’ve been involved with fund at the 11th hour, but even those that fund very quickly still invite a lot of intense scrutiny over the course of that month. If anything, the more successful a campaign is, the more intense the discussion around it, and the more its flaws (real or imagined) are magnified.
And the Curseborne campaign was more intense than most.
I think the last time I was this emotionally invested and stressed out by a crowdfunding campaign was the original Pugmire Kickstarter back in 2016. There’s a huge and incredibly talented team behind Curseborne, of which I am but a part, but I’ve also been working on this in some form or fashion for almost exactly six years, so there’s a lot of my blood, sweat, and tears in this game.
Last night I was on a Twitch stream as we watched the final half hour of the campaign. I was excited, as were everyone else on the stream, and I had a great time talking about the game and watching the numbers go up. And the numbers are great! From the Kickstarter:
3,017 backers pledged $196,908 to help bring this project to life.
While a small part of me wanted to break the $200,000 barrier, I’m pleased we got really close to that goal. After we crossed the finish line, though, my brain just shut off. I managed to say a few things at the end, but we all kind of agreed to wrap up the stream a few minutes early. (It didn’t help that I had woken up with a migraine that day.)
To change topics for a moment, regular convention attendees know about the post-convention crash (called “con drop” in my circles, but I’m sure it has other names). Once the convention is over, there’s a physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion that comes with it. Even if I pace yourself well and take care of myself (and I try to, especially as I get older), I’m still wiped out afterwards, to the point where I try to take a day to recover before I go back to work if I can. Many of my friends and colleagues feel the same way.
I think crowdfunding campaigns are the same way. It’s all go go go go for four weeks, trying to find ways to promote it or talk it up or engage with concerns or adjust the material or come up with new stretch goals or have internal strategy meetings or or or. The whole team pulled together to keep each other sane and manage each other’s stress throughout the campaign, but it was still a hell of a lot of hard work. Then it’s over, and you still have a lot of work in front of you, but everything in your body just wants to take a moment to breathe.
That’s where I’m at. I’m glad I’ve done this enough that I recognize the symptoms and have prepared for the moment, but I also think a lot of creatives don’t realize this and struggle to take a moment to celebrate the success and clear their heads. It’s important to take a step back and go “wow, we accomplished something” and feel that satisfaction. The work will still be there after you take that break.
So that’s where I’m at. As the last two newsletters showed, I’ve had a lot going on (and don’t worry, there’s still more news to come this month, too), so I’m planning for my November to be a bit quieter. We’ll see how that turns out.
Unrelated to Curseborne, I have some good news and some bad news.
The Good News
My first work on Cyberpunk RED is out! It’s called Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn, which is an entire campaign of connected adventures around the destruction of the iconic bar The Forlorn Hope, and it’s eventual resurrection.
As I mentioned before, I had the privilege of writing the first adventure: “The Angel’s Share.” It’s a fun bait-and-switch where the players head off following one story, only to have a second one ambush them. Here’s an excerpt from the opening:
"The angel's share." It's what distillers call the amount of spirits lost to evaporation from the barrel as the whiskey ages. Every way of life has a cost for doing business, which Marianne Freeman understands. Maybe better than most. She's the bartender and manager of The Forlorn Hope and den mother to many a young edgerunner. She's tough as nails and doesn't put up with anyone's bullshit, but she's a rare flicker of light in the dark streets of Night City.
Now Marianne needs a favor from you. Nothing major — an easy task for a group of experienced troubleshooters like yourselves — but it needs to be done. Just the angel's share of dirty business to keep The Forlorn Hope open. And what's a small favor for a friend?
Plus, you have an opportunity to beat the shit out of Nazi gangers, and who doesn’t love that?
The Bad News
After much debate, I’ve shut down my Pugsteady Patreon. For those that don’t know, I started this up earlier in the year as a way to sell Realms of Pugmire fiction directly to fans. A few people were kind enough to sign up to give me money, but two big factors have ultimately led to the unfortunate decision to close it.
The first is that I grossly overestimated how much time I could carve out of my workload to devote to fiction. At the start of the year I had a good plan that seemed to work, but as time moved on I got busier and busier, and it became harder and harder to devote time and mental energy to writing fiction. That wasn’t a deal breaker in and of itself, however, as I had set the Patreon to charge per delivery, instead of per month, so I could skip the occasional month and not feel guilty. Except “the occasional month” became three or four months at a stretch.
The second, and the nail in the coffin, is that Patreon got into a fight with Apple, and is now forcing everyone to switch to a subscription model, because Apple doesn’t like ad hoc charges. At the moment people can’t use the Apple version of the app to pay for “per delivery” Patreons, and I had hoped that maybe I could simply keep that model and just tell people they have to use the website to back it. However, I was told I have a year to switch models, and I simply can’t deliver content consistently enough to feel justified in charging people for that.
I let the current backers know months ago this was going to happen, and just today I’ve unpublished the page. I had one story I was working on earlier this year, but I got the emails of all the backers, and I’ll be sending them the final version of that story once I finish it, for free, as a thank you for supporting me during this experiment.
My Media
Recently I had a hankering to reread the Larry Hama run on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero. I think that’s partially because he technically ended his run (again) with issue #300 at IDW last year, only to start it up again with Image Comics at issue #301, and I realized I hadn’t read the last fifty or so issues of that run. Plus I hadn’t read the original issues since the lockdowns (when I bought them digitally between DriveThruComics and IDW’s website when they still offered DRM-free PDFs), so I thought it was worth going through from the beginning.
It’s such a bizarre concept. It’s a toy tie-in comic that has not only shaped the toy line it’s ostensibly advertising for, but has managed to survive not one but two companies with explicit continuity connections across all three iterations (at least, I’m told the Skybound version is a direct continuation, as I haven’t gotten there myself). It’s written by a military veteran, and frequently drawn by military vets, but avoids excessive jingoism. Even though it’s still ultimately a comic about American military superiority, there are quite a few stories that deeply criticize the US military and government, which was surprising at the time (and indeed, today).
The first fifty issues are ones I love to revisit, because I remember chunks of that run growing up as a kid. In fact, the comic is the only G.I. Joe media I really even like, but it’s such a bizarre and amazing blend of military action, sci-fi weirdness, and soap opera. It’s the kind of comic that will have one storyline about the struggles of Vietnam vets reintegrating into society, another one about the civil war of an ancient clan of ninjas, and a third about a clone made from a hundred historical military leaders, all without skipping a beat. It’s bonkers and probably shouldn’t even exist.
Granted, by the time the comic gets close to the 90s, Hama’s struggling to cram in all the latest toys Hasbro is requiring him to feature, and the stories get a little bloated, but there are still some great subplots like Cobra Commander getting impersonated (anyone could be under that helmet!) and the Joe team being scapegoats for a politician’s bad decisions. It’s a genuinely good tie-in comic, and the shift between companies from issue #155 (at Marvel) to #156 (at IDW) manages to be both a huge change in the status quo and part of the ever-evolving epic. I’m hoping the shift from #300 to #301 is the same.
Anyhow, that’s all for this month. Time for me to take a short break. See you in December!