The Inevitable New Year’s Post

Everybody does one of these, and a few people even read them.

To be honest, I’m not really putting this down here for readers, so much as for my own records — I’ve done something like this since I started blogging, and I like to go back and read them in later years, to see where I was, headspace-wise, in any particular year. So, without further ado:

2011 was one of those clichéd “roller-coaster” years — Low lows and high highs. At the beginning of the year, things were bad. Hella bad, as the hip kids say (or maybe not– being neither hip, nor a kid, I can’t be entirely sure).

The Borders closure gut-punched Adamant’s print revenues. HARD. I found myself struggling, in an ever-deepening hole. In desperation, I launched an “app-pricing” policy — every digital product from Adamant priced at $1.99. Long story short — it didn’t work. Slightly longer story: the RPG market is, I believe, not at the scale where that can work as intended. We peaked pretty quickly, and the sales cannibalized our traditional March sale. The realization that I hadn’t accounted for an increased release schedule in my initial estimations of apparent success meant that any gains were entirely illusory, and I’d left a ton of money on the table. The hole got deeper.

I’ll be very honest: I was very close to packing it in; closing up Adamant for good and getting some make-work job (tool booth or gas station attendant) for income while making the jump into fiction.

Half a year later, the situation was drastically different — a Hail Mary pass in the form of a Kickstarter for FAR WEST succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. Over 45 days our fortunes reversed, not only financially (although obviously that was a huge part of it), but emotionally as well (as sappy as that sounds). Over 700 people demonstrated their faith in us and their belief in the FAR WEST concept — and believe me when I say that after the lows of the first half of the year, that outpouring of support was perhaps even more valuable to me than the money.

Looking back at my plans a year ago, I’m disappointed that I didn’t launch the fiction or digital comics efforts that I’d announced as my goal for 2011. Those efforts were pretty much a victim of the “lost year” that stretched from mid 2010 until mid 2011. Yet when I look back at what has been accomplished this year, and almost all of it in the last six months, that does reduce the disappointment a touch. The launch of the FAR WEST property, the success of the Kickstarter and the splash we were able to make at the StoryWorld Conference, the signing of the BUCKAROO BANZAI license, the reception of the INSURGENT CREATIVE blog series– it’s been a pretty good year in the end.

Aside from continuing those accomplishments and delivering on them, my plan for 2012 is definitely to make up for lost time and get the fiction line started… and I think that I’ve learned my lesson about multiple resolutions, so that will be my only new goal for the year!

Beyond that, the biggest thing I need to try to keep in mind in 2012 is that I’m lucky enough to create for a living — people pay me for the things that I dream up. I don’t answer to any boss, I can’t be outsourced or laid off, and my future plans are my own to decide. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of stress — things fall behind schedule, the work piles up, and a thousand minor irritations masquerade as major problems. My biggest resolution of 2012 will be:

Take a deep breath, look around, and realize that my life is pretty damn great.

Happy New Year.

Made on a Mac

The internet is filled with remembrance of Steve Jobs since the announcement of his death from pancreatic cancer yesterday. I posted on Twitter when I heard, but despite my intention not to join the flood of content about Jobs today, I found myself dwelling over the past 24 hours on just how much my life was affected by his work. It felt somehow churlish not to recognize it publicly.

That graphic up there: “Made on a Mac.” That’s pretty much my career.

My first home computer was a used Apple II — where, between bouts of Bilestoad, I did my first non-longhand writing. I went on from there to an Apple IIc, bought second-hand from a friend in 1990. More writing, and moving into graphic design and art. In the early-t0-mid-90s, I dabbled in Amiga and then in Windows-based PC — as I moved out onto the burgeoning internet and into the birth of the world wide web (whose code was written by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXTcube, created by the company that Steve Jobs launched when he left Apple). Yet even through this dabbling, I continued to use Macs — at school, and with friends.

It was a Mac that provided the desktop publishing tools that allowed Aaron Rosenberg, Matt Harrop and I to produce our first RPG, Periphery, clustered around the Mac in Aaron’s bedroom. In the late 90s, I used Pagemaker (a program I had learned on the Mac) on my Windows machine to do graphic design and layout for other games — Hong Kong Action Theatre!, for example. The program was the same, but I never really liked the not-quite-right feeling of its use on my PC.

In 2000, I returned to Apple — and haven’t left since. Synister Creative Systems was run on Macs — G4 PowerMac with dual monitors as the graphic design desktop , and a blueberry iBook for me, able to be used in-office or remotely. Jobs was back at Apple, and the iMac and iBook were the first products in his new vision for the company. A vision that, as the Colorado Springs Gazette said today, liberated the creative class.

I am a part of that creative class. I create on products spearheaded by Jobs, that are consumed on products either spearheaded by Jobs or products emulating those he spearheaded. I reach my audience directly, via a world-wide network that was created on a product spearheaded by Jobs.

I owe the man a debt that is staggering in its scope. My life, my career, my calling — all of it:

Made on a Mac.

Hey, Kids, Look: Content!

I have been piss-poor about regular updates on this thing. Spending all of my “hey, lookit this nifty thing” energy over on Twitter.

But this month, we launched the FAR WEST website, and have been updating that sucker with daily content. So I figured if I could do it there, I could do it here. (The fact that when I set up Google Analytics for the FAR WEST site I also set it up for this blog and saw the god-awful traffic stats has absolutely nothing to do with it. No sir.)

Yesterday was my 42nd Birthday. Yeesh. Looking back, I find my earliest blog entry about my birthday was this one from my 34th, back in 2003. Where, I note, the first thing I talk about is that I haven’t been updating the blog much. So it’s good that I’ve maintained a certain level of consistency.


Loot-wise, the birthday was pretty good. Highlights include a copy of L.A. Noire for the PS3 that I need to carve out some time for ASAP; the brand-spanking new reboot novel for James Bond, Carte Blanche by Jeffrey Deaver; and one of the nifty items scene over on the right: A ball microphone with a shockmount ring. So perhaps some podcasting and other audio productions are in my future….

Laura says that getting the mike for me felt a bit like buying a housewife a vacuum cleaner as a present: “Here, honey: DO MORE WORK.”

In a nearly-perfect segué, speaking of microphones/audio productions, James Bond and Noir — we have the following bit of incredible brilliance: The BBC archive of a 1958 radio broadcast of a conversation between Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler, where they talk about crime, writing thrillers, and more. Absolute gold, especially for writers, and well worth the 24 minute listen.

Last week on Twitter, I said that I wanted to blog more, and asked folks what they’d like to see from me. Got a few responses there, but I figured I’d repeat the question for the commenters here. Fire away, and I’ll see you again tomorrow.