Writing babble: It all starts with a little... and then it gets out of hand.

I didn't do any resolutions this year or anything. Maybe one: work on avoiding burnout by not committing myself to running a lot of D&D games. 

But in the absence of resolutions, I did commit to a writing project. Very small, very simple: Every week, I get given a prompt from a writing book and then I write about it. So far the longest I've spent on a prompt is forty-five minutes. So it's really not a big thing and it's challenging and fun.

If I manage to avoid the burn, I was thinking that I might do nanowrimo this year. And so comes the problem I always have: what to write about.

This question was quickly answered by a friend. I got excited, and inspired, and started making notes. I could already imagine the endless planning notes I would make in the months leading up to November. I would have a blast doing it. I was excited.

And then it all went to pot.

Why? Well... because the story didn't want to wait until November. It wanted to be written as soon as possible. And so instead of my usual fun and games with notes and highlighters and post-its, I now have Scrivener open and a thousand words in less than an hour.

Damnit. 😆

Babble: D&D and a reflection on the year without (too much) burnout

 In October, I wrote a blog post about my tracking of hours I spend preparing for DM-ing D&D. I'd like to share the final tally in this post and babble a bit about 2023.

In many ways, 2023 was a shit show. So many things went wrong in life at and away from the D&D table. But there has been some highlights too: The successful conclusion of my longest-running Dragon Heist campaign, 43 sessions in my South African TNO campaign, and the fact that I may have skirted burnout but didn't actually hit it.

I think what helped was that I was more cognisant of the time I'm actually spending preparing, playing and running games. I logged as much as I thought was sensible, so not everything, but mostly everything. It showed me when I naturally slumped and shouldn't be hard on myself for not doing more. It showed me the times I have energy and made me excited to capitalise on it.

So while the year was awful, my experiment in being mindful about how much time I'm dedicating to this game I like was a success.

Of 142 hours spent prepping/working on D&D-related things, I spent a total of 123 hours prepping my homebrew in 2023. Adding my time DM-ing to that 142 and I spent 228 hours prepping and running D&D games. This is not all the time I've spent on the game - I've played in other people's games too (and yes, I logged that as well) - but this is the time where I was basically being creative. It tallies up to about 10 full days, though I don't find that final stat particularly interesting.