Day: July 8, 2022

I really hoped to go to GenCon this year. The annual event takes place this year from August 4-7 in Indianapolis. I hoped to go in order to get connected to some new publishing houses and really start pushing hard forward in this RPG writing career. I need to do this, because getting locked in on one game is dangerous, especially if that game is potentially going in a direction I am not completely right with. When it goes the other direction the choices are to continue finding your voice in that new place, move on, adapt to be part of the voice of that new direction, or fight hard in the other direction and try to force the ship back towards the course you feel is right. I’m not doing that last one. I think I am moving in the direction of finding my voice in the new, but all of it leaves me feeling like I need to also find my voice somewhere new. Moreover, I need to expand.

I’ve been writing shadowrun for Twenty years. That is a remarkable long time to be doing anything at one level and not truly growing from it. I believe writing is about growth, and while I’ve grown the amount of writing I have done in this genre, I have failed to elevate the genre in any significant way. Still, I’m enjoying putting out really good stuff (when I put out really good stuff) and I find myself feeling grumpy when I skip a book and it changes how things work in the game for a decade.

All of this is to say that I (again) need balance. In this case it means growing outside of the boundaries of the game while learning to cement my own natural voice inside of it. This is key. It is good to have your own projects and I have a bunch of those floating around in my head (and occasionally on paper). It is time to dig some of that out and get to work.

But first: More Shadowrun.

Stray Thought: When you commit to being a writer, designer, musician, actor–heck anyone who creates and puts their creations out there–you’re making a commitment to an audience that includes one often forgotten piece. You are in essence saying: I’m going to keep creating as long as you keep consuming. There are many reasons for this dynamic. We can get into the financial aspects of it in another blog, but I think it all boils down to that balance between consumer and creator. I think we are nourishing ourselves by nourishing the consumer. We get right by making them feel what we feel. We get high off the contact with our creations.

I still go into bookstores looking for that moment of ‘yessir’ when I see my work on the shelves. Honestly, it has nothing to do with them seeing my name (though me seeing my name is pretty fantastic). It is more about knowing that what I made is being consumed and (occasionally) enjoyed and at least talked about. Even as my novel slips into the 7,000s in Amazon Cyberpunk best sellers, even as people drop reviews that are sometimes good and sometimes bad, I know I created content that made people think for just a moment. I suppose youtube creators get this high a lot (though they don’t spend a lot of time creating each individual piece of content).

If writers are vampires it is the readers upon which we feast. We need them to stay alive.