I posted this to my Patreon this morning, and it’s not the normal kind of post I write here on Substack, but it feels appropriate to post it here for some reason. I’ve been quiet for a few months and am going to continue to be quiet until I’ve caught up on all the things I caught up on, and this may help to explain why that quiet is going to stretch on for a little longer than I planned.
Exactly two weeks ago I woke up to multiple missed calls from my mum. When I called her back I learned that my father had died at the age of 68. He'd been on holiday and had to run for a flight, and the stress and exertion (plus a lifetime of low level alcoholism) had resulted in a massive heart attack that killed him. This, incidentally, is what also killed his father - my grandfather - in his 60s.
I wasn't close to my dad. In fact, that's an understatement. We were very much estranged. I last saw him on Halloween 2022 at my brother's wedding, but before that it had been over a decade since we spoke. He wasn't a nice man, and the way he behaved during my childhood and early teens drove a wedge between us that I've never had any interest in healing. I certainly didn't respect him, and I don't think I loved him. My relationship with him ended a very, very long time ago - over 20 years, at this point - and whatever grieving I needed to do was done then. When I was told of his death I didn't particularly feel anything, and I haven't shed any tears or been particularly sad about it. My life doesn't change in any way as a result of this.
And yet. Yet. Every time I've come to do work over the past week or two I've felt very strange about it.
My introduction to roleplaying games came in the early 90s, when I used to go and watch my dad and his friends play D&D. They had a big model of the dungeon they were exploring that his DM (a man called Henry, who was lovely and died far too young) had built. I didn't really understand what was going on but I'd often sit and play with spare minis while they went about their campaign.
In 1994, for my 8th birthday, my dad bought me the AD&D First Quest box set. He ran a couple of the adventures in it for me and my younger brother, and then we went and raided his D&D books and started our own campaign. On weekends we'd go into Wigan town centre to either the small model airplane shop that had two cramped shelves of RPG books (where I bought many of the brown 2e Players Option books, and a bunch of the Grimtooth's Traps zines) or to The Wiend Books, a sprawling second hand bookshop that spread across the upper floor of an entire row of shops and was like a labyrinth formed of teetering towers of books. They had a ton of D&D books buried in their SF&F section, including a full set of back issues of Dragon and Dungeon magazines that I used to spend hours pouring through.
That First Quest box was very much the birth of a lifelong obsession, and as much as I don't like to give the old man any credit for anything it's fair to say that I wouldn't be doing the job I do today without him introducing me to D&D. And that, it turns out, is making it very difficult for me to work recently.
I'm not grieving him in any meaningful way. His body has been cremated and is going to be repatriated in a week or two, and I'll be going to the memorial service not to say goodbye to him but to show support for my brothers, who are younger than me and were closer to him (mainly because they didn't really see the side of him that I saw as a kid, and I can't begrudge them that). But my work, my job, is inextricably linked to my dad, and writing games has proved to be tough in the wake of his death.
This obviously can't and won't last forever. I have deadlines to meet and bills to pay and there's only so much grace people will extend you. And, frankly, I don't want to drop any balls as a result of this. The man meant very little to me and I spent a large chunk of my late teens and early 20s actively hating him and being angry at him. I managed to put all that behind me, and I absolutely will not allow his final act to be helping me fuck up my business in the way that he fucked up so many of his own endeavours over the years. But for now I'm sort of frozen, tinkering with projects that aren't my deadlines and won't pay the bills, not helped by the fact that I've also been off my ADHD meds for over a month because I can't afford them right now and so my brain is grabbing hold of anything new and exciting it can find rather than allowing me to work on the important stuff.
I'm not sure why I'm writing this, or why I'm posting it to Patreon, other than that this place is meant to be somewhere where you get an insight into my work and how things happen behind the scenes and this does, in fact, feel relevant. I'm also not sure how to end this post, so I'm simply going to let it end here. Sometimes things just end without any satisfying conclusion, and part of life is learning to be okay with that.