It's been a very long, hectic week. I'm getting exceedingly eager for the prospect of my temporary job at my local closing Joann store to end, which is a very bittersweet sentence. 

But the thing I'm most excited for in the coming days is the Tennessee Renaissance Festival, which I've been attending yearly since 1999 (with 2020 and 2021 being missed due to Covid). Needless to say, it's a highlight of my year and has become a very big part of my life.

This year is going to be very different. A dream is coming true.

I'll be WORKING THERE.

I wish I could say it was because The Chain Nerd was going to have a booth, but we're nowhere near ready for that. However, I'm not going to be official Festival staff, though I did plan to attend auditions. 

Until I got in touch with a vendor who was looking for help. Last year, a small new company called Roll Your Destiny set up a booth. They boasted an interactive quest for a modest fee, one with full lore, puzzles, and a reward at the end.

My best friend and I jumped at the opportunity, enjoyed the HELL out of ourselves, and originally thought that was it.

But it was the owner of RYD who was looking for help. I swear, it was like a puzzle just falling into place, totally solved. We were exactly what RYD needed: actors, writers, total gamer nerds, and ones who had very strong knowledge of this particular festival AND had our own garb. We wanted an in into Festival setup and behind-the-scenes, money (I mean seriously) and a chance to really help a small business we believe in. This year, we get to MAKE the magic for others. We're the quest givers, the loremasters, and the ones maintaining the fantasy.

I could not be more excited.

It's not like some high-production value acting. No, this is a side story to the festival itself. The quests (we'll have a main quest and a separate side quest to offer) take you all over the grounds, to people you might not have normally interacted with. It will make you the hero of your own story, the puzzle-solver, the savior of... well... you'll have to come to the festival and undertake the quest yourself to find out.

RYD was so much fun, and somehow, I've managed to get on the other side of the curtain. Let me be your quest giver and bring you into a story you get to live!

​See you in May! Hopefully.

I've realized I don't really talk about my favorite books or what I read much, so I thought this would be a good week to do so. I think favorite books will be a longer post some other time, but for now, here's what I've read recently or am reading now.

First off, I do want to talk briefly about how I consume books. The combination of age, time scarcity, physical restlessness, worsening vision, and mental focus changing have made me almost entirely an audiobook consumer. This has happened gradually over the last 13 years or so, but it's pretty solid now that I consume audiobooks more often than written fiction beyond short stories.

Anyway, recent and current reads:

• Sunrise on the Reaping - Susanne Collins - The latest Hunger Games novel, a series I'm a massive fan of, both the books and movies. This book did not disappoint in the slightest. I was caught up from start to finish. Prequels have always been a huge draw for me, since I'm always very interested in HOW things happen rather than WHAT actually happens, if that makes sense. Explanations and context, I suppose.
• Morning Star - Pierce Brown - This is the third book in Brown's Red Rising trilogy, after Red Rising and Golden Son. Futuristic dystopian class warfare with a remarkably strong and vibrant Roman Empire/mythology influence. This has been a re-listen, but it's been probably 5 or more years since I did one, and it's always great to reunite with old friends.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl (full series) - Matt Dinniman - This series is currently up to book 7, This Inevitable Ruin, which was released late last year and in audio back in February. The entire series is literary RPG, with it being the telling of Earth's destruction being televised as a dungeon-crawling game show using surviving humans as the players. It's irreverent, hilarious, emotional, and damn inspiring. If you're not sensitive to violence, language, all that stuff, I absolutely recommend this series.
  

I have a bunch of books in my to-read list, naturally, including the Percy Jackson series, Number the Stars, The Shadow of What Was Lost, All Systems Red, and Fourth Wing just to start. I also have done fairly recent relistens to The Blackwater Saga, and I listened to The Martian and Project Hail Mary last year and plan to listen again soon.

In short, read, my friends. Consume literature. It's there waiting for you.

I'm in a very odd position right now. The physicality of my current job is no longer new and so draining, and it's rapidly coming to a point it will be dropping off my radar. At the same time, I'm gearing up for another new temporary gig that I'm very much looking forward to (See you guys at the TN Renaissance Festival in May!)

I am, at my core, a creature of routine. Yet I'm also in need of adventure and unexpected stimulation. I can potentially welcome disruptions to the routine, but not always. It's weird, but then again, so are most people. There are plenty of others out there who are the same way.

Being me, the nature of my current life situation right now has me feeling ever so slightly but constantly off balance. I don't have a regular work schedule right now, so I don't get to plan my days like I would really like to to accommodate the weird ways my brain works. This is, really, good for me, as much as it makes me grumble. For a long time, I was able to whip out a few sentences of writing at the drop of a hat. I could pick up and put down projects when I only had a few minutes to do so. From about 2017 on, though, I really got myself into a sort of... routine rut, I guess. My job and life schedule made it possible for me to carve large chunks of time to devote to creative endeavors.

I have a tendency to weigh everything in my life as a worth/transaction sort of deal. Is it worth the time to set up for this activity if I only get to do it for a few minutes? Do I want to bother getting out my paints if I only have 30 minutes to actually paint? Will I feel like it was worth getting settled in to write even though I only have time to edit one paragraph or write 2 sentences?

I have to keep telling myself that the answer is YES. It is emphatically yes.

​At my core, I am and always have been a creator. It's so hard to talk myself out of thinking I need to maximize my time, or that it's not worth the effort to put myself in the mindset to actually do the creating.

It's time to reclaim what I've let atrophy. It's absolutely worth the effort to crank out one sentence, one line of that drawing, a couple stitches of that project, or whatever it is you're picking at.

The point is not to maximize the creation in hopes of money. It should be for the passion of the creating itself. The making. At least for me, I need to remember how I used to be able to click over into a creative mindset at the drop of a hat when I had a moment. Those big time investments have great value, but so do the little ones.

Even just glancing at a current work-in-progress for a bit can help. It puts it back at the forefront of the mind, lets it stay fresh in perspective.

I didn't start this post with a real goal in mind, but I think I found one. This week, my goal is to at least write a sentence a day. Those days I don't have earmarked for writing, I still need to pull up my writing files and pick at something, just to keep the brainjuices flowing.

I'm cross-posting this little intro between my free blog post and my paid Patreon post, because it pretty much sums everything up.

It's been a rough few weeks with the new job taking up a lot of time (obviously), but it's also been good in it's exercise. I've been getting in more steps and doing low weight/high rep lifting thanks to stocking things. Alas, the time and energy it takes has been leaving me pretty fatigued mentally and physically at the end of the day, so I'm afraid I haven't had the time to write that I want to. I have to keep reminding myself this job is temporary. Even if I stay working at the store until it closes, it's only a few more weeks, and then I get my time back. Until the next thing, anyway.

CURRENT PROJECTS March 31 2025

• Dungeons & Dragons campaign 1: Bard Campaign - Session #6 fully planned. No progress, as we haven't played yet.​
• D&D campaign 2: Tootskies Campaign - Session 0.5 is ready to play, and we should be playing April 9!
• D&D Single Adventure - This is new to the list. I'm at a point where I'm ready to act on a new endeavor. I've played D&D since college, and oddly enough, I've only ever played fully homebrewed adventures. I've made my own for my parties ever since I started DMing. In fact, it wasn't until late 2024 that I ever actually held an official adventure module in my hands. I'll probably start small, but it's on my radar. Hopefully, I can make the first basic adventure happen in April.
  
• Criminal from Birth sequel - I had really hoped to have more done on this in March, but the day job ate into a lot of it. Second Draft Status: 13 of 37 chapters edited. (5 since last update)
• Magic Items book - Outline Status: Roughly 60-65% through with planning, maybe? No progress this month.

I had this post created last week and apparently it never posted here. Did on Patreon, free to the public, but... well, here it is late. 

To be totally honest, I don't have a lot to go on about this week. I am working a new part-time job, which is naturally eating into a lot of my creative time. This week was particularly unproductive because the job is a moderately physical one (stocking primarily, but some cashiering) so I was coming home after work physically exhausted and needing to refresh myself however possible. That meant a lot of rest. 

Fortunately, the human body is ridiculously adaptable, and just like with any new fitness/workout/physical regimen, reaching a new normal is surprisingly rapid. I'm very thankful for my massage gun. Luckily, I'm only stocking two days this week, so I should be less worn out so much, leading to spending my evenings doing the creative. I was able to pick at things some this week.

Even better, this job is definitely not permanent. The location where I'm working is closing in the next two months or so, which is just buying me time to get more creative feelers out and try to find some freelance writing or voice work to help pay the bills. Until then, the physical retail job it is. 

At least I'm getting in exercise. Long-term low-impact walking and some lifting, so cardio and strength endurance. Low weight - high repetition. I call it a win.​

Shakespeare famously uses a five-act structure. While I don't feel like my life is actually following the acknowledged actual form of building conflict and resolution that the five-act structure uses, I cannot help but feel like the last few months have been the beginning of my third act. Let me explain:

Act 1 for me, I would say is birth to my school years, and I'll honestly include college in that, so call it ages 0-23 or so. I think it's something of a self-explanatory act for many of us: childhood, puberty, teen years, and into young adulthood.

My Act 2, appears to have been about that age 23-40. A short act, but rather than learning to be a person, it was learning to be an adult. In those years, I went from being a recent college graduate waiting tables to a bank teller, to a call center employee (various jobs there), to a music publishing administrator. There were other notable events, such as the births of my nephews and godchildren, buying my house, and a few devastating relationships. On a more personal level, this was when I podcasted, did NaNoWriMo a few times, and published all my novels from Empeddigo to Assassin's Kin. It's also the period of time when I finally got the two gender-affirming surgeries that changed my life.

The nature of life blurs the lines between these "life acts." I could argue two real starting points for my Act 3, which is just getting started.

The first place I could point it would be about a year ago, when I first decided to pursue a neurodivergence diagnosis. Long story short, it was in June of 2024 when I was formally diagnosed as autistic. That diagnosis has and still is putting so much of my life into perspective. Behaviors I have that baffle or annoy me suddenly make sense, and by making sense, are more easily tolerated, forgiven, or even embraced. I am learning to better advocate for myself and to communicate why something is a struggle, without feeling like a fool or failure for not understanding why something like a simple phone call is so hard. 

The second place I could point to as the start of Act 3 is far more recent. A bit of context: I just had my 6th anniversary at my job in November 2024. The company gives two weeks of holiday break at the end of the year, which is generous and always greatly appreciated. I relished the time away, knowing it would be January 6th before I returned to work.

On January 1, I was finally able to acknowledge I was deeply in depression. Not for the first time, and I'm not unsafe. I won't go into my personal depression battle history, but I was able to recognize it and admit it then. I returned to work after the holidays feeling as if I'd had no time away. 

Long story short, I eventually realized that job itself was the primary source of the depression. For two of the last six years in the job, I'd been unhappy, to the point of actually searching for new employment. Hundreds of applications and not a single interview. Hell, I probably only got rejections 5% of the time, if that. More than anything, the applications were met with ghosting. But I digress. I was unhappy but treading water.

Treading water was no longer an option. After a lot of thought, I realized I had to take a risk:

I had to quit without having a safety net to catch me. For my mental and emotional health, I had to leave the job. I hadn't written decently in years, though it did sort of start coming back in the latter half of 2024.

So I did. I put in my notice, and I left that job. I started looking for new work, but in different places. And I started getting responses. Rejections, mostly, but that's better than ghosting. That's when I realized why:

For two years, I was applying for jobs similar to what I'd been doing in music publishing.

That wasn't where I needed to be. 

I'm a creator. I write, I craft, I speak. 

I make.

That's what I need to be doing with my life.

So this is what Act 3 looks like. I'm still here, currently working a part-time job that I don't like, but that at least puts some money in my pocket. But more importantly, I'm spending my time MAKING again. I'm working on books and stories. I'm getting voice demos together to audition for voice acting gigs. I'm crafting a lot more than I have in the last few years, whipping out chainmail again. 

I'm scared, honestly. But more importantly, I am HAPPY. In my job of the last 6 years, I've been financially comfortable... but spiritually broken. 

Act 3 has turned that around completely. I hope my savings last me long enough to start supporting myself through a combination of grunt jobs and freelance work. I hope that by the time this year is out, I might be scraping by with the occasional voice gig, patrons, a new book?!, and maybe even professional Dungeon/Game Master work. 

My life has always been meant to entertain and inspire. A lot of my Act 2 tried to do that, but I let the world trample me a bit, and I basically went into hibernation as an act of self-preservation. In Act 3, I'm throwing myself at it harder.

Other people can do it, so can I.

Act 3 is just getting started, and I feel so much more powerful than I ever have. I'm more afraid than I've ever been, but even that pales against my determination and drive right now. I've always been ambitious, but now I am not holding back for fear of failure. No more being safe.

No more scared, over-cautious, self-shrinking here. I have just as much ability and right as anyone to have both success and happiness. 

I really hope you come along for the ride, because I'm going to be seeing and doing some amazing things. Please come with me.

So, the latest right now is that I'm still in foundations mode, trying to figure out what direction this new phase of my life is taken. As much as I would like to continue the old structure I had, sharing my short fiction and things here, that's no longer feasible for me. 

I want to really make a true stab at creating primarily. I know it's going to be hard, trying, and not particularly lucrative. 

More than anything, I want to stop regretting how my writing hasn't gone as far as I hoped. So much of that is because I was playing things too safe. 

No more.

I've started a Patreon (patreon.com/afgrappin) for my fiction, one that might in the long run also contain D&D content, but that's one of many things to be determined.

For now, the Patreon is up with two possible support tiers, a $5 and $25 monthly option. These will definitely evolve as my content and interaction proceed. I've got to start somewhere, and this is where.

Some of the Patreon ideas I'm considering, at least for building content now:

• Post stories that I haven't previously posted.
  • These will be older stories, exercises and such. There isn't a lot of backlog that I haven't already made public, but there are some. The first of these is already up on Patreon.
• Some sort of weekly writing exercise/prompt/challenge.
  • Eventually, I hope to have this be guided by patrons, with some sort of a poll/comment collection of suggestions on what to work up for the next week.
• Current project updates- this one's pretty obvious. It makes sense to post chapters of current WIPs (works in progress) for my patrons. 

So that's where you'll want to keep your eyes. I'll likely try to copy blog posts to the Patreon feed for free members, so you can get it all in a one-stop shop. If you have the means and desire to support, thank you. I can't wait to see what all this grows into.

And if there's something you want to see me write/post about, let me know!

It's pretty easy to see where a lot of my writing upkeep fell off my own radar. I've mentioned before that finishing The Deadly Studies project turned out to be a blessing and a curse. I set myself goals and accomplished them, despite the project turning out about 33% bigger than I originally planned. It ended up taking an extra year and a half of concentrated effort I hadn't initially planned on.

I think that is what burned me out so bad once it was finished. I strained for quite a while to plan, write, edit, and release the series. Mostly just didn't want it to be like so many other projects of mine: 80% finished and then abandoned. So I pushed, I completed, I burned out. When 2021 came around and I hadn't done more than a tiny bit of token writing, I was mostly okay with it. I knew I needed to recover from the Studies. When 2022 hit and I still hadn't written, I got scared. Most of 2023 was me reconciling with maybe not ever being able to write again.

In early 2024, an idea hit me hard. The juices started flowing again, but like a long-closed faucet, it was rusty and slow to really gain any pressure. I did begin to plan a new novel... which is currently in that 80% completed and now abandoned maybe status. 

I digress. Current thoughts is to make first blog post of the month the current project status report. Partly to remind me of all the juggling balls I have in the air. So without further ado:

CURRENT PROJECTS MARCH 3 2025

• Dungeons & Dragons campaign 1: Bard Campaign - Session #6 fully planned. I have 2 options for Session #7 fully planned, depending on how #6 ends, with the possibility of a 3rd option if needed (not likely). Loads of worldbuilding done, and I have a good general sense of where this campaign is going for the short term.​
• D&D campaign 2: Tootskies Campaign - This one's new and very experimental. This campaign is really one of my big excuses to learn D&D 5e and familiarize myself with DMing virtually. I know what the planned endgame for the campaign is, but getting from here to there will be interesting. Currently working on session 0.5.
• Criminal from Birth sequel - This is my biggest personal project right now. Criminal came out in 2018. I actually wrote the sequel's first draft in, I believe, 2019, WHILE WORKING ON DEADLY STUDIES. What the hell was wrong with me? Anyway, I did finish the draft, but it got set aside to finish the Studies, and then fell by the wayside when the burnout hit. It was only when talking to my best friend a few weeks ago about writing that I remembered it. Found the files, dusted them off, and, well, it's really coming along. And wow do I see the changes in my maturity and writing ability this long break gave. Second Draft Status: 8 of 37 chapters edited.
• Magic Items book - This is the project idea that came barreling into my head early last year. Still outlining this book, but my outlines are pretty detailed, to the point I consider them more like a .5 draft. Haven't worked on it for a while, not sure if it's viable at the point I have it. Not sure if I'm happy with the first 2/3 of what I have. Outline Status: Roughly 60-65% through with planning, maybe?

It's been a long time. Five and a half years since my last post here. The world has changed dramatically since I updated this website, and along with it, I have changed drastically. So much for the better.

Confession
Since the last of the Deadly Studies books released in late 2019, and the second collection in early 2020, I have been extremely burned out on a creative front. While I felt accomplished and continue to hold a lot of price in the written works I produced in the 2010s, looking back on that decade has been very bittersweet to me. For more than a couple years since then, I've been overcome with a sense of loss and grief for what I couldn't manage to do anymore. Putting down words grew hard, then impossible. 

Simply put, I burned myself out pretty hard on putting out the Deadly Studies. What was originally planned as a 7-novella plot turned into 10, and my desire to complete the series with books releasing every 6 months until it was finished was a tall order. While I did meet that criteria, and I remain pleased with the work I put out, it was a massive bite to chew, and it took a long time to digest afterwards.

So I honestly spent most of 2022 and 2022 finally forgiving myself. I made peace with the fact that the words might not ever return. 

Imagine my surprise when they came back.

The Future
I turned 40 last summer. To my surprise, I don't feel that age. Months of introspection, more than a little pain, and more sunshine than I deserve had put me in the mindset to make a new Act 3 for my life. And writing is coming back into it. 

I couldn't be more pleased by that. Despite the current horrific political climate we find ourselves in, the future is so bright that I can't look at it head on. And if even in some small way, I can contribute to that light, then goddammit, I am more than willing to throw my candle into the blaze of humanity.

However, I do know my own tendency to bite off more than I can chew (see that confession) so I'm taking things slow. For now, I hope to add more to this website. My initial plan is weekly updates. Might be a simple observation, might be a bit of prose. Probably, things will include a monthly project update. Because I am writing again. Expect to see projects come onto and fall off the radar as they're explored and cast aside as needed.

Expect to see more than just novels. I'm trying to refine and upgrade my skills as a Game/Dungeon Master in ttrpgs, particularly Dungeons & Dragons. Some of my writing work these days is in homebrewing campaigns... but I have mid-to-long-term hopes of eventually developing and releasing my own one-off adventure content. 

In short, I'm trying to stop letting life get in the way of my truest passion: creating. Thanks for coming along for the ride and for being here now that I'm back!