I have problems with goals. Setting them is easy, but actually accomplishing them? Hard.
Part of it is the Aphantasia. Supposedly, some people can visualize outcomes and sort of manifest them into being, like some sort of witch. That’s not something I can do. The future is an opaque mystery to me. But as I was listening to a Comic Lab episode (only 700 episodes to go before I’m current and I can stop bingeing…), they talked about having 2-year, 5-year and 10-year goals. And as I listened, maybe it was something they directly they said, maybe it was something I just came up with as I was listening, but I realized that of course, trying to say what you’ll do in 10 years is impossible, but that’s not the point. It’s to state an idea that you want to work toward. And when you find yourself with a choice, you can compare the paths with where you want to be at those distant shores of 2, 5, and 10 years, and see which brings you closer.
A good question to ask instead of “where you see yourself in 5 years?” is “If you keep doing what you’re doing now, what does 5 years from now look like?” or “What do you wish you had started doing 5 years ago?” Those particular bits of introspection scare me, especially with the low success I’ve had on goals so far this week. But let’s look at my ideas for the future.
2-Year Goals
I have 2 big goals for 2 years ahead. First, big strides towards health. I don’t need to have specific weight goals, but I want to keep up my collecting of checks, and the general improvements that are sure to come. I’m doing this on faith a lot, actually. I know, conceivable, that it takes a while for things to kick in, before the weight loss begins. I’ve had one weigh-in that had a downward trend. All of the others have been on par or a bit up. I probably need to spend a month doing some serious dieting. But I’ve been avoiding pulling that trigger.
The second is more direct of a goal but has a bit less of a clear path: I want to be ready to live on my own again. This is entirely a finances thing. I have my dream job at the moment, and as awesome as that is, it’s not quite enough for me to progress. So side gigs, like creating things for Patreon is my current path. I’m also doing a bit of investing, but its slow going. I wish my plans here were less abstract. Reviewing it every once in a while would probably help. idk
5-Year Goals
I have 2 goals in this category.
First, I want to finish a few comic projects that I started. A Little Geeky Underneath is still in its first big arc that I left unfinished. I enjoy those characters a lot. I might want to pull back from what I have done and see about revamping it. Not sure. But I don’t like how it’s abandoned and I’d love to finish it up. Not the whole complete story, but there’s a certain place where Book 1 would end. I’d love to get it there.
Rachael in Gameland is the other comic I want to “Finish”. There’s potential for a lot of arcs, so I doubt I actually would get to the end in 5 years, but at my current rate, I’m not going to get anywhere close.
I have some other small short stories I’d like to do. I mentioned some of those last week. But a story I don’t really plan to go back to is Change is Good, which was my first comic. I learned a lot from it, but I don’t really have a story, just some kooky characters. Maybe I’ll give it another go some time, but it’s not on my list of goals.
the second item on my 5-year plan is that I want to publish and RPG book. I don’t really know what book that is. It seems like it might be a setting book, except that I don’t think I’m good at making settings. I feel the publish a book, you need to have a lot of stuff figured out before you go to print and I make up so much stuff at the table. A lot of it is better than what has gone on before.
I have two campaigns that could be a book. Ravonn’s tower and Hanjuku. The first has issues with being published, as a lot of the dungeons that are in it secretly grow over time. (If any of my table reads this, well, you probably suspected it anyway, right?) Anyway, that mechanic means that while I can set some stuff up, there’s still a lot that needs to be done by the game master. Which, is probably honestly true for any campaign? So maybe it’s a thing that people might be okay with. That what is discovered at my table will become the secrets that others can uncover. And that’s a little exciting, and means I should probably be paying more attention to doing the book work.
The second campaign is my martial arts cultivator campaign. I did love that world and I would have no problem going back to it, but it needed to hit a hiatus partly due to how noisy our place space was, but also so much of the campaign had changed that it wasn’t really the same anymore. And I want to take the lessons I learned by the end of that campaign and fold them into the beginning. As well as include some of the thoughts that I’ve learned from Ravonn’s Tower. And some cool cultivator stories that I’ve read since that recontextualize a lot of what it means to be a cultivator for me. Unfortunately, those key ideas come from someone else’s book, so that’s a bit of an issue. I’m also not sure if I would keep D&D as the system for it. It worked okay, but the further the game got along, the less it was working for the feel I wanted to do.
it’s possible that I could write just a rules document, and not tie it to a setting. But a lot of the rules I’ve been writing have been directly tied to the setting and campaign style that I’ve been running. I think separating the campaign and the setting and the rules doesn’t yield the best results. Although it is the most generically helpful. I don’t know. I don’t feel that anyone would buy my generic rule set.
Once upon a Time, I had thought about writing a bunch about other games. I’ve certainly written articles for planet mercenary, e20, a little bit of seventh sea, but I never really stuck to those games.
I’ve come up with an interesting idea for a campaign that a co-worker and I were talking about on Saturday. And while that might run on 5th edition, it would need to be its own book, I think. I’m less sure it needs to be a role-playing game; it might be better as a board game. I don’t know. I have a lot of thoughts I’m less sure of.
Another item on my 5-year goal list goes back to comics. I want to be a guest cartoonist for one of the weeks that CD Rudd takes off. There’s a lot of things I’d want to be better about before I work up the nerve to offer. But it’s on the list for 5 years out.
10-Year Goals
This is so impossibly far in the distance, but I do have some things written down.
First, I want to publish a non-fiction book. I have 2, maybe 3 in mind. The first is “The Power of Complaining”, which is one of the most powerful things I’ve realized in my life. I think this would be a neat book and I keep having experiences that validate the idea. The second idea is about Cognitive Fluency, a neat idea I coined which has a lot of neat psychological concepts about languages, games, and other things. I’ve not done enough research to see if there’s a real phrase for it. It’s a big project.
The 3rd concept is essentially a weight-loss book, the sort of thing I wish I had. I need to start seeing results of my own first, though. I might have a 4th concept for a book about gaming, entropy, gamer types, and things like that. It was a huge idea I was obsessed with when I started at PFG, but I’ve not touched it in a while.
The second big 10-year goal is that I want to have my own store. There’s a lot of work still to happen, but I’ve dreamed of having a used bookstore for ages, and everything I’ve been learning at my current job is helping refine my understanding of what I would need to do for my little bit of everything store. Which means I should have $50k saved by then. A figure I totally don’t have, but the idea of having an additional $5k saved by the end of each year sounds more doable.
Fin
So those are my big plans for the future. Are they accomplishable? No idea. But they’re the lights I want to head towards for now. We’ll see what the future holds. But my feet feel a path beneath them, and I have nothing to do but stride forward. We’ll see where we end up.
Ciao