Monday, 6 January 2020

State of the Press 2020

Its the beginning of a new year, and decade, so time to reveal how things currently stand with Utherwald Press. There are some changes ahead, though I'm going to have to be a little personal here in order to give context and explain my decisions behind the changes. Though I will also be setting out my goals for what I want to achieve this year, something which I am hopeful I will achieve.


Less Is More

OK, lets start with the change.

From this point forward I'll be reducing my post rate on the blog down to once a month.

Part of this stems from a burnout and part of it stems from more personal reasons, both kinda overlap with one another. I feel that the writing of my blog posts have suffered over the past few months, some of this has been down to bit of a burnout as I've increasingly struggled to think of stuff to write and accordingly my posts have suffered.

There have also been changes to my personal circumstances in the past few months, less than ideal changes. Others already know alot of the details, though I'm only going to briefly summarize here; Recently gained the tenancy of where I live from a relative, this has brought a sudden increase in my monthly outgoings and has resulted in having to claim state benefits to help cover the rent and bills (with all the 'joy' that entails).

Never been flushed with cash, even working a 36+ hours a week retail job, and so my available funds for Utherwald related projects have effectively dwindled to nothing. So this is a less than ideal situation I find myself in, thankfully I do have a plan to improve things; I've currently started doing a bookkeeping course in an attempt to change careers and get a job with better hours and pay. If I can do this it'll mean more time and thus funds to put towards getting my various RPG stuff done.

So the burnout couple with needing to get this course done has resulted in me deciding to cut down on the blog posts. This would give me plenty of time to work on the course and hopefully get it down quicker, additionally it may help me improve the quality of my posts as I'll have more time to think them over and work on them.

Hopefully that gives people a clear idea of what is currently happening and why I've decided to make changes.

Goals

Right at the start of the blog post I mentioned there are some goals planned for this year, I have a couple.

My main goal is to finish getting Frozen Skies updated for SWADE and thus a new version released, lack of funds here means this one is going to be delayed and I'm in two minds in trying to crowd fund what I need. That said, things are set up ready for when I've finished the updates and rewrites in addition to having the cash needed to get it done....just very dependent on that last bit.

My second, more modest, goal is getting the blog updated and rethinking my approach to both Social Media and Patreon.

So thank you all for your support and I wish everyone good fortunes in the year/decade ahead!