Making the Leap

Hello dear blog readers, it’s been a while. Believe it or not, the coronavirus has not been the biggest news item for me this week. On Monday, I was laid off from my job at Disruptor Beam. I’ve been putting off posting about it, not because it’s sad, or shameful, but simply because I’m a little overwhelmed by the changes it’s precipitating. You see, I’m making more than lemonade from these lemons — I’m going full on Lemongrab and making myself a kingdom of lemon sweets.

I won’t get into the details of what went down at Disruptor Beam — you can read the news articles if you like — suffice it to say that I’ve been planning for the worst for a while now. In fact, it turns out I’ll only have this one week of true unemployment, as next week I’ll be starting work as a contractor under the TrickyFast banner. TrickyFast is run by an old friend from my days at 38 Studios, and specializes in providing short and long term contract resources for game development. I’ll be starting one such contract very soon, which should keep me busy for the next few months.

Contracting is not something I ever considered in my career before. I liked the assurance of a full time salaried position, and enjoyed participating in the long term growth of a company. Now though, I realize I want the flexibility that contracting offers. I want more time between gigs to spend on what I really enjoy, and to see if I can’t coax that into becoming more of a major contributor to my working life.

I am speaking, of course, of roleplaying games. I put my toe in the water when we started Wandering DMs. I splashed my feet about publishing my first adventure on DMs Guild. I dunked my head under running the actual play stream Ten Dead Rats. Now it’s time to see what the deep end looks like.

I’m planning on taking breaks between contracts, several weeks at a time when I can, to focus on publishing more content. I’m actively working on putting together my next published adventure now. And I’ve transformed my game room to look like this:

It’s early days yet, and probably too soon to announce anything official, but I’m super excited and more than just a little nervous. I expect though that in the coming months I’ll have a lot more to say on this blog about new and exciting projects. I just had to convince myself to write this post first. So here it is. Get ready.