Wheneverly

Imagine this email was sent a week ago

A few days ago I heard the word “wheneverly” for the first time and immediately made it a core part of my personality. So much of what I’ve done over the past few years has been on a ‘schedule’ that can only be described as “wheneverly”. Adventure Tourism, the podcast with three very good new episodes that I haven’t managed to edit and release since recording them eighteen months ago? Wheneverly. Adventures for A Dungeon Game? Wheneverly. This newsletter? As it turns out, wheneverly.

I love the idea of working to a fixed schedule. Routine comforts me. I like knowing what I’m meant to be doing and when I’m meant to be doing it. But I also live with a neurological condition that makes me exist in a perpetual now. Trying to make sense of the past or, god forbid, the future (if it exists, which I doubt) is like trying to read small print written on the bottom of a bowl that happens to be filled with soup. Or porridge. Or another substance not renowned for its transparent qualities. I don’t know, I’ve lost track of this simile.

Anyway. This is what happens. I set myself a routine like “send an email newsletter on the first Tuesday of the month” and then I do it for three months and feel fucking great about it. And then I miss a month. And I think, shit. Goddamnit. Foiled again by my lack of temporal relativity.

And then the guilt sinks in - thanks, Catholic upbringing - and I don’t do it because I feel like people are going to be mad at me for not *checks notes* emailing them to say “please buy a book”, and the next thing I know eighteen months have passed. Eighteen months that feel, to me, like a week. (If you’ve spent any time talking to me in person you’ll know that I often refer to things that happened “the other day” when what I mean is “it was 2007”.)

Anyway. Wheneverly. I’m trying to learn to embrace the chaos a little bit, and to lighten up a little bit. The world will keep spinning if I don’t release a podcast episode. I know that, because I haven’t released the episode yet and the world is, I’m reliably formed, still going around like that metal top at the end of Chris Nolan’s last just okay film. And that’s quite freeing.

Here’s some stuff I thought was cool, or that I managed to actually do, or that I have coming up.

• The UK Games Expo happens this weekend. I’m once again sharing a table with the Stockholm Kartel gang in Hall 3. We’ll be at 3A-171. I’ll have at least one new adventure to sell, and hopefully two if DHL turn up with my books in the next 24 hours. Here’s a photo of the one I will definitely have with me.

• Dice Souls is text complete, at long last. I’m working on art and layout for it now and as soon as I know how much printing the book is going to cost, I’ll be able to tell people about the eventual release of the physical edition.

• Surveys for Blood In The Margins are out. The books have arrived, and I’m very pleased with them. I can’t wait to actually put them in people’s hands.

• I’ve amalgamated all of my blogs into one blog, like a normal person. You can find it here.

• I really enjoyed this compilation of brooding ambient sort-of-dungeon-synth.

• I went through a brief phase of wanting to read stories about wizards doing wizard shit, and absolutely adored Our Dead Selves Lie Like Footsteps In Our Wake by Jeff Isacksen.

As always, here’s a photo of my cat, who has spent the last four nights sleeping on my bed with me and generally being adorable.