Good & Bad
Eventful past few days:
Bad: I had to flake on a freelance assignment. I wrote an email to Chaosium, informing them that I cannot continue with my work on Cults of Law and Chaos. There are many reasons, not the least of which is the day job, and my disgust with the quality of the material I had written to date (I found that writing about someone else’s canonized material, using someone else’s rules system, felt like plagarism). The upshot is that there was no way that I keep going with a project that was already way too late. I told them that I would take public responsibility in whatever form they wished, and that if they decided to re-assign the book, I would provide my work to the new author as source material. I just don’t want it to appear under my name.
I hate letting people down, especially folks as nice as Charlie and Dustin. Even worse, though, is the realization that freelancing on projects of this size is pretty much over for me. The day job simply takes too much out of me…I can’t write to someone else’s deadline any longer, because I can’t consitantly count on being able to write “X” number of words per week. The amount of time that I have, from week to week, is way too variable now. So, it feels like a door closing. I’ve been freelancing since 1995, and now, unless I set my own deadline, write a product completely on spec, and submit it that way, that part of my life is over.
Good: Just because I can’t write for anyone else doesn’t mean that I can’t write for myself…setting my own deadlines and adjusting them when I have to. In other words: I’m not dead yet.