Crawling out of the Trough of Disillusionment

If your job has something to do with technology, chances are that you know the "Gartner Hype Cycle" used to map the course of new technologies from humble beginnings through a Peak of Inflated Expectations, through the Trough of Disillusionment, up the Slope of Enlightenment to a Plateau of Productivity. Some technologies die on the way and never make it into productivity.

It occurs to me that my work on Release from the OGL Vault is kind of following that course. Some time ago, I dropped into the "Trough of Disillusionment" (sounds like a really good title for an adventure, actually) and need to climb out of it, lest Release from the OGL Vault should die before it reaches a "Plateau of Publication."

How did I end up in the trough? Let us count the ways ...

1. Lack of Time I used to work in the early morning, being blessed (or cursed, this cuts both ways) with a body clock waking me up around 5am. So even on work days, I would have an hour or so to spare before the day started, chipping a way bit by bit at smaller tasks, leaving bigger tasks for the weekends. It seems that sometime around May something has messed up my body clock, changing my sleep pattern such that I don't have that extra hour any more. I could shift writing to the evenings, but I am very much a morning person: writing in the morning is fun, writing in the evening is a chore.

2. Reality Sets In Even though I very much tried to always think of the writing and designing as a hobby that is a source of fun: of course, one cannot help speculating about how nice it would be if the final published product also became successful in terms of sales. I must admit to secretly entertaining inflated expectations (even only half acknowledged to myself) during the first "rush of adrenalin" while feverishly working on the first pages of the adventure. Surly, everybody would find the idea of an adventure about the OGL debacle just grand, eager to rip the finished adventure out of my hand? Meanwhile the reality that, while there is a good chance that Release from the OGL Vault might be a tad more successful than my first foray into adventure publishing, in all likelihood, the adventure will make a ripple rather than a splash. That realization is healthy, of course, but it does not help in swinging my decision towards doing more writing during the weekends rather than, say, going for riding my bike or a walk in the mountains.

3. Will I Ever Be Done? The history of Release from the OGL Vault so far is a series of miscalculations, how quickly I could get things done. At first, I wanted to be ready to publish when "Keys from the Golden Vault" came out (hence the somewhat unwieldy title of my adventure). The next projected date was around Easter (reasoning, that this would be fitting, because I have hidden quite a lot of easter eggs in my text.) Then, briefly, around the end of my Pentecost vacations, before settling on the half-year anniversary of "CCD&D's independence from WotC" on July 27th.

   All these dates have passed. Now I hope (a little bit), that I might be finished sometime in September on account on some weeks of vacations in August ... but I fear this might just be the next deadline I will miss.

   Fact is, I have chosen a rather large project ... or allowed my project to get larger and larger. Last time I counted, I had close to 70 pages of content, with probably another 10 or so to go, which maybe is simply too much for a novice like me.

4. The Cons of Engaging on Social Media Writing a blog (this blob, to be precise) or engaging, say, on Mastodon does bring joy, but can also be frustrating. Of course, my rational mind tells me that it is completely ridiculous to expect massive amounts of subscribers to this blog or massive amounts of followers on Mastodon. But again, there is some irrational hope for a louder echo on shouting into the digital world which then is disappointed somehow when that does not happen. Also, blogging (and the fairly extensive developer's diary, I have been keeping privately, only parts of which have made it into the blog) takes time: some of the more substantial blog posts I did (e.g., on adding guide rails, representing NPCs, or layout) took most of the time I had available for writing during a given weekend ... time I maybe should have rather invested into getting on with my project.

Crawl Out I Must!

I have spent far too much time and thoughts on Release from the OGL Vault to stop now and not publish something, in some way. I need to see this through, even if it ends up selling not a single copy (hell, I will by a single one myself, if I must.) So here is what I plan to do as next step: until the end of my summer vacations, I want to finish a Pentée City Gazetteer as a document that could stand alone also without the adventure. Part of the reason that Release from the OGL Vault is such a huge project is that it comprises not only the adventure itself, but also a description of the City of Pentée with (at time of writing) 18 locations and 30 NPCs. That surely can be a document all by itself. I don't know whether I will publish it as such, but it will be good to have something finished.

So, that's the plan for August: finish the Pentée City Gazetteer and use the joy and satisfaction I will hopefully gain by doing so as a booster for taking on the rest of Release from the OGL Vault!