Hey all! Sorry this is a little late — I was sick all week, and that really puts a cramp into my workflow. Which I suppose ties into something I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Work-Life Balance (and why I suck at it)
What I thought would be a one-day illness turned into four days of a stomach bug. I definitely wasn’t up for working this week, and yet each day I did some work things because they were urgent and needed to get done. But that was me sitting on the couch, typing listlessly on a laptop for about half an hour each day before napping and watching OSW Review and Kamen Rider while snuggling with the dog.
Yesterday, my wife came to check on me and remarked that she was glad to see me actually taking time to recover (she didn’t quite realize that I was actually doing a little work each day). She pointed out that I am awful at taking time off when I need to. Granted, she’s just as bad, but the point stands: Aside from weekends and about two weeks at the end of the year (in which most of my colleagues and clients aren’t working anyway), I work pretty much every day.
Until 2020, most people assumed that because I worked from home for myself, I sat around all day playing games and generally not working. Since lockdowns a lot of people better understand how hard working from home can be, but it doesn’t change the fact that most freelancers I know will easily do 50-80 hours a week. I’ve steadily pushed my work-life balance down to something closer to 40, but I don’t really have a vacation policy for myself.
And while I recognize the importance of taking breaks and time off — I preach about it to other freelancers all the time — the reality is that time off usually means even more work when you get back. There isn’t someone who can cover your duties while you’re gone, and clients don’t stop needing work just because you’re taking time away. The good clients recognize that freelancers are human and remain flexible, but in truth the best time for me to take a break is when I’m between projects, and I can never adequately predict when that will be.
My next actual break won’t be due to illness, as I’m taking a long weekend to visit my mom next month, but the whole situation has me rethinking how I approach vacation time in my own career.
News Roundup!
While I was recovering, a lot of news items slid across my desk at the last minute, so in a way it’s a good thing I took a couple extra days! Here’s the latest.
The latest Pugmire supplement, Squeaks in the Deep, is now available in PDF and print-on-demand! This is a great sourcebook covering underground adventuring, playable rats and mice, and psychic powers. It’s already got five stars on DriveThruRPG, so check it out! And if you’re waiting for it to come to your local gaming store, it’s going off to the printer shortly, so you should be able to order it later in the year!
Speaking of upcoming books, another one I worked on, Blackbirds, is available for pre-order on Amazon! My name isn’t listed, but I contributed a chapter and a lot of editing and writing to the book. If you like gritty, grimdark fantasy, this is a game worth checking out!
My latest Extra Credits episode is up! This time I finally get to rant about canon, and the EC team politely offer alternatives.
Over the years people have asked me off and on for a curated reading list of the Sherlock Holmes canon. Well, I finally wrote one, and decided to post it online in case others are interested in it as well!
My Media
Since I was sick, I finally got to finish up (or nearly so — I have the movie left to go) my Blu-Ray set of Kamen Rider Zero-One. Like a lot of modern Kamen Rider it has a saggy middle arc that I struggled to get through, but the payoff was worth it. I’m hoping this sells well enough that it will encourage Shout! Factory to release more Kamen Rider series on Blu-Ray.
I’ve also gotten tired of people constantly telling me how great Brandon Sanderson is, so I started reading the first volume of the Mistborn Trilogy, The Final Empire. And damn it, it is really good. I usually bounce off so-called “doorstop” fantasy novels, because they’re often far too long and mistake infodumping for worldbuilding, but I was around page 100 before I realized I was sucked in. The ebook version of the entire trilogy is three thousand pages, so I’m probably going to balance this out with some of the other ebooks I’ve read recently, but still I think I’m becoming a fan.
Finally, I got an exciting Kickstarter in the mail yesterday: Season Four of Graphic Novel Adventures! These are interactive gamebooks, but instead of prose they use comic panels. I got in through their various Sherlock Holmes books (surprise surprise), but how they use visuals and comic panels to set up puzzles and directly narrative flow is actually really clever, and they’ve given me a ton of ideas. I’m looking forward to reading some non-Holmes books as well!
Okay, I should probably take a break and get another mug of tea, so I don’t push myself too hard. See you next month!