New year, same me

Plus a new Wretched & Alone game to be excited about

There’s snow on the ground outside and somehow it’s 2025 and it’s the middle of January already. I’m not sure how that happened. But with a new year comes a renewed sense of purpose. This newsletter is back up and running, in a new format that’s a bit less formal and a bit more like something I can enjoy writing. It’s also going to include cat photos, as a tax for jumping into your inbox unannounced.

My relationship with linear time has always been fraught. Very probably this is yet another symptom of the many things ‘wrong’ with my brain. I exist in a constant state of Now, where both the past and the future are nothing but amorphous shapes looming out of a dismal fog that presses in on the edges of the present. 2024 feels like it slipped away from me without my noticing - but then I’m not sure how that’s different to any other year. How does one notice the passage of time? I don’t know.

2025 is a milestone year for me, because 2020 was an important year for me and that’s how anniversaries work. In February of 2020, back when people still got excited about ZineQuest, I successfully Kickstarted a little game called Under The Floorboards. This felt like a big deal to me at the time, and it still does. That Kickstarter got me out of debt for the first time in over a decade. Then I fell prey to a common trap that gets a lot of people running crowdfunders for the first time - I charged shipping during the campaign, and I promised stretch goals that increased the size and weight of the book. Back into debt I went. Oops.

While I was finishing up that book I realised that I’d never dealt with printing and fulfilling a physical product on that scale before, and so I quickly wrote a new game over a couple of days with the intention of printing 25 copies and figuring out the logistics of it all. That game was The Wretched, and the Kickstarter for the second printing later in the year was life-changing for me.

I’ve done a few crowdfunders since then, with mixed results. Down In Yongardy is still hanging over my head like a lead weight, though that’s on track to actually move into fulfillment now (there will be an update on that campaign later this week or early next week). And after a couple of years of very deliberately not going back to the crowdfunding well and trying to make it work financially on my own terms, I’m finally dipping my toe back in.

It seems fitting that, in the 5th anniversary year of The Wretched, I’m finally writing another Wretched & Alone game. Blood In The Margins is launcing on Backerkit in March as part of Pocketopia. It’s a W&A game of murder and dark academia, a reverse murder mystery in which you journal about your attempts to cover up the murder of a friend in the elite academy that you call home. That link will take you to the pre-launch page and I’d really appreciate you giving it a follow. I’m very excited about it, and I’ve written a post over on Patreon about some of the early development of it. Here’s a banner I made for it.

I read a lot last year, and I blogged about most of it. At the end of December I wrote a post looking back on my year of reading and trying to pick some favourites. Today I plan to record a TikTok on the same topic, and I expect that the five books I pick will be different to the five I listed in that post because that’s just how my brain works. I’m currently reading War and Peace and having a great time with it.

Musically I’m currently obsessed with the new Ethel Cain record. It’s very much my soundtrack to January and I don’t want to hear about anything else.

As promised, here’s Lucky, who is very invested in preventing me from finishing this email.