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?