2023. Sounds fake, doesn’t it? When I was a kid, “2000” was the placeholder unimaginable far off future, and back then “future” meant flying cars and space travel.
My main goal for the new year remains “find steady employment in game writing and narrative design,” but while I’m getting more contract and freelance work in the industry, I don’t have a clear path to full-time employment aside from continuing to apply everywhere. Between freelance gigs is a pretty broad country, so I’ll be continuing my solo efforts – both to develop my portfolio, and maybe earn a little extra income on the side.
So – barring freelance gigs or sudden employment – here’s my structured productivity for 2023.
Daily Routine
Pomodoro hasn’t let me down yet, so I’ll be sticking three two-hour productivity blocks – which might be three different projects, or multiple blocks devoted to the same project, depending on deadlines. For the most part these will be games, but I might throw in a novel or podcast project if I’m feeling saucy.
This may include marketing, which for me, takes three forms.
Marketing
First of all, there’s blogging here. Devlogs, mostly. Release notifications. A soft sell, if that. This is basically what I’ll be doing on social media – mostly Mastodon these days – just postin’ good and good postin’. I do a lot of research so there’ll probably be random blogging about whatever topics I found interesting.
Secondly I’ve got a mailing list, relaunched for 2023. You should sign up for it, I’ll send you the first books in my Galvanic Century steampunk mystery and Shadow Decade cyberpunk thriller series. I really want to send that out more consistently – weekly – as a sort of recap/digest of everything I produced that week, along with a general “hows it going” vibe.
Third there’s the Patreon, which is more in-depth than the mailing list, and includes previews, early releases, that kind of thing. Want to get better about my consistency there, too.
Hobbies
After work I and on weekends I work on my many many hobbies – which also double as marketing as they give me blog topics and stuff to post about elsewhere, building a lower-key audience interested in topics tied to my professional output.
Comic Books
Loved comics as a kid, fell out of collecting as an adult because… well… I lived out of a suitcase and didn’t have the space for it. Or the income, honestly. Now, with a subscription to Marvel Unlimited being ten bucks a month, I can read whatever whenever. As such, I’ve been catching up, going so far as to head back to the silver age of comics and read through – almost to the 1990s at this point.
This has spawned several projects. Currently:
- Baby Got Back Issues – a YouTube channel where I make videos chronicling Marvel’s fictional in-universe history.
- Let’s Read Marvel – a blog series I’ll be posting here where I break down issues as I read them. Look for the first post in the new year.
Baby Got Back Issues has a patreon to help offset the cost of the Marvel Unlimited subscription; if it gets to the next milestone (currently and stubbornly a dollar short) I’ll spring for DC Infinite and start covering those comics, too.
Video Games
I’ve been playing video games since the days of the Atari VCS and Colecovision. As with comics, during my twenties I was living out of a suitcase and in my 30s I was practically homeless, so aside from the odd PC title that’d run on my old laptop there’s a good decade and a half where I couldn’t really afford anything. I’m making up for lost time playing old games released between 2000 and 2010, along with older titles I missed as a kid.
- Retrogame Roulette is a game of the month club that’s run out of a discord channel. Every month we pick a game, play it, and talk about it.
- Alongside that I’ll be giving other titles quicker play-throughs and blogging about it here.
