A Return From Exile

What a time to exist.

Summer has been a mixed mistress. On one melty hand, we have the oppressive heat married to the stress allocated to the failure of technology. I have better grasp of a range of the cost of home appliance home repairs than I possessed back in the halcyon days of spring, and the wallet, it does burn with the summer blaze. On the other more audible appendages, we succeeded at a creative endeavor we had been working on for years, and found the joy of writing and crafting once more. A joy that has brought us back to here and advised our heart to revisit our prolix side.

Hello there.

Retreating from oblivion and stepping through our umbral veil, I want to get what’s not working out of the way, and then dive into the future.

To begin, right now we’re not streaming. This is a technological issue, as our hardware is currently being unruly. See the intro paragraph for the gremlin style curse befalling our household. I miss the streaming, but I’ve had the benefit of connected with communities filled with lovely people, some of which are not part of what I consider my streaming home turf. We’re not done with that side of things, just it’ll have to wait until we can repair the tech issues. For now, that’s a timetable of maybe October. Maybe later. We give no hard dates here until we’re certain.

August saw our return to the Dog Days of Podcasting. This is the yearly podcasting challenge developed by Kreg Steppe, and is a challenge to create and upload a month’s worth of podcasts during the month of August leading up to Dragon*Con. The challenge originated back in 2012, and that was the last time I completed it; that is, until 2022. This year, I completed all of my intended goals, creating a new NPC for almost every day of the month. I did take time to give myself a rest every five days, and I think that was a core reason I was able to push through in a manner that would have stumped me on the first or second weekend. I’m proud of the work, in terms of how much I made, the character concepts I explored, and that I was able to dip my toe back into podcasting. Part of me wants to do more, so we’ll see.

Speaking of podcasting, this week we’ll see a return to form of the Hiddennode. We’ve been hit or miss on the series since 2016. There’s only three episodes not tied to special projects like NaNoWriMo and Dog Days since the era of my bioptic vision came to a close, and it’s time to tidy the place up. I don’t plan on Hiddennode being an elaborate heavy production thing, but a revitalization to what made it a solid perching for me for over a decade. Which also means keeping more notes on media I’m consuming, things I’m doing, and being a better steward of my time. Much like the writing site, the podcast isn’t going to look pretty just yet. I’d rather get the projects started though, than wait for a perfect visual style. I understand one only gets a single first impression, but I’m focusing on those distant impressions rather than putting myself into a state of urgency when things are “perfect.”

Folding from there to writing, we are reimagining ourselves. I find myself wanting to pull away from grimdark. There’s value in that genre, and I’m still going to border the lands of dystopia and dark future, but I want the core of my stories to have a certain hope instilled in them. This means a few things, but most prominent is looking at my sci-fi setting again and finding out what it means to me now. That answer being the bright colors of my childhood entertainment and the draw I have of pulling out reimaginings of those legends for adult stories. But I don’t want to do “the power-rangers but what is they failed” anymore. I’d rather do “solo sentai in deep space does a found family” story. Sure, the old concept can still fit in there, but I don’t want the failure, the loss, the terror of the past to be the core anymore. I want characters to look forward to hope, with the challenges of the past serving as threads for their being, but not as their core identity. Hope, for a bright future, even if it’s a precious light that needs protection. That means revision to the setting, like rip it all down and start over revision. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working on that and tossing patrons a few example excerpts of what’s happening.

That’s going to be our Patreon goal for the next few weeks as we get the engine rolling again. Concepts, old stuff that won’t exist in a future project anymore, and more general updates. I want to make that space feel worth it, and I feel I haven’t been a good caretaker of it. I aim to change that. It’s going to become my home of accountability, and while not every detail will mark the feed, I intend to setup as much as I can to show where we are and what’s working and what’s troubling.

Time for some agenda notes:

I’m eager for the future. The invigorating feeling I have is touching on so many parts of my life. I miss this level of creative. I miss doing this much. I truly do. Just writing this post and seeing the word count on it jump higher and higher is giving me heart flutters. I can’t say for certain I’ll be perfect at what comes next. I know I need to brace myself for fallbacks, for stumbles, for health and other issues. Those WILL HAPPEN. There is no means of escape, but I can control how I return from those pauses. And I want to do better by them. I want to see my little corner of the net grow and entertain people with my unique sense of storytelling.

I feel worthy of it.

Now I have to prove it.