Hey all! The past couple of months have been odd in newsletter land, between the Realms of Pugmire Kickstarter and my move to the UK. But things are settling down. Kind of. Maybe.
On the one hand, a lot of the bits that needed to get resolved over the past few months are resolved. We’re all in London now, we’ve moved into our new flat in the borough of Hackney, our old house is sold, and we’ve got a lot of furniture bought and assembled. Things are still in a state of flux, but the offices of Pugsteady UK are generally up and running!
This is the first week where things are settled enough to where I can think about my new workflow. All of February was basically trying to find snatches of time and mental energy to get critical things done, and it’s only now-ish that I’m able to look at my schedule and figure out how to best use my time.
It seems I should be able to pick up where I left off, but there are lots of subtle logistical challenges. One of the more obvious is time zones: right now all of my clients are based in the US still, so all of them are five to eight hours behind me. That means I wake up to a lot of emails from the previous night, and all my meetings and recordings have generally shifted to the afternoon and evening. So things are relatively quiet until about noon my time, when my clients start waking up. This means I get more work done in the morning, but it also means I don’t have clear “office hours” right now.
On top of that, Darby really likes this part of London. For the past few months I could walk her for about ten or fifteen minutes and then we’d go back home, but now I’m lucky if I can cut her off after half a hour. She has so much to explore and sniff, which is great for her! But it means I have to plan for larger chunks of my day being eaten up by walkies.
There are other concerns, but you get the idea. What I thought would be a relatively simple adjustment is turning out to be more complicated than I expected, and as such the past couple of months have mainly been treading water instead of making significant progress. But I’m getting there!
News Roundup
Let’s see what news I can scrape out of my leaking brains today….
The Realms of Pugmire Kickstarter was a success! We got over twice our goal, and got more than 1,000 backers! Obviously funding is a great milestone, but 1,000 backers is another big one. Most print runs start at 1,000 copies minimum, so having 1,000 backers means we can comfortably expect at least that many copies will sell (not everyone is backing for a physical book, but others will probably pre-order later). So a big THANK YOU to everyone who backed it and helped to promote it!
But I’m not resting on my laurels! As announced on the Onyx Path Monday Meeting blog, I’ve already started work on the (tentatively titled) Tome of Enemies for Pugmire. As Rich says: That’s something for Realms that Eddy has been pulling together for a bit and might just be the first “monster manual” or as we like to say around here: “creature collection” for either edition of Pugmire! I’m looking forward to all the monster illustrations we’ll need for that book!
Not all of my promotional stuff was for Pugmire, however. I also did a special episode of “Monster Movie Fun Time Go” about They Came From Beneath the Sea! One of the hosts, Precious D, was actually the narrator for the audiobook version of my book Watson is Not an Idiot!
My Media
My media has been pretty scattershot lately, as I sort out the new options available to me. For example, I started rewatching the 2005 reboot of Doctor Who on HBO Max in the US, and continued using the BBC iPlayer (I’m now up to Series 3). I also discovered that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix here, so I’ve been rewatching that in batches as well. Plus there are all new shows to learn about!
That said, I’ve been playing a fair bit of Marvel’s Midnight Suns on my Steam Deck. It’s the perfect game for the Steam Deck, honestly, and absolutely the right blend of XCom and Fire Emblem: Three Houses for me, along with a healthy dose of fairly obscure Marvel comics lore. I tried it out on a free weekend on Steam, and by Sunday I had bought it because I knew I would keep playing. I guess advertising works!
Speaking of Marvel comics, I’ve been playing around with building a custom reading order for myself. I call it “Latveria’s War with the Richard Family,” and it’s basically every issue of the Fantastic Four that features Doctor Doom or someone pretending to be Doom, but then adding in any issues of comics featuring Doom or said doppelgangers in other comics that are needed to make sense of Doom’s timeline. I have some rough notes for it so far, but I may have to renew my subscription to Marvel Unlimited and do some research to pull it all together. It’s the kind of fun puzzle that helps keep me distracted from culture shock and bureaucracy.
And with that, I’d better get back to work before the Doombots catch me slacking. See you next month!