This is the last blog post before May 2025, and man, May is going to be insane. On the day-job front-- I've talked about this before-- I'll be working weekends at the Roll Your Destiny booth at the TN Renaissance Festival. During the week, I'll still be picking up some hours at my local Jo-Ann store until it closes (which is supposed to happen later in May, but I haven't heard an official date yet). 

But wait! There's more! I've also lined up another part-time job at a local business, starting at some point in May. It's a local climbing gym, so I'll be starting another physical job, which I'm actually really excited about. It's also nice to know that I won't be completely adrift once Jo-Ann closes. But it's going to be more crazy activity and time management in May.

Outside that, I'm still working on maintaining/advancing my gig projects. I've put out some auditions and applications for voice work and some content writing gigs, I'm still streaming on Twitch (currently bling playing Super Metroid for SNES), and I'm working towards my anticipated plan of offering pro-Game/Dungeon Master services locally this fall, once The Chain Nerd convention season is over. 

It's been 2.5 months now since I started this journey, and I'm not insane yet. I'm still afloat, but it's hard. It really is. Everything is still moving forward though, so I'm okay. 

May, bring it ON.

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.