On Momentum, and Blogs, and Community (oh...my...)

Hey there! I suppose I should give an update, especially because you all are very patient with me when I simply disappear for months at a time. I'm still deep (deep, deep) into my doctoral program in Educational Leadership. I have finished all of my course work, and I'm now on to the dissertation phase. I have written (and revised about ten times) the draft of my proposal. It weighs in at 185 pages right now, and includes about 80 references in the bibliography. It is called "How Veteran Teachers Understand and Leverage Grit: A Case Study". So, I have been reading and writing. A LOT. I just haven't done any of it in the world of gaming.

I've also been applying for and interviewing for jobs. I've been a high school ELA teacher for eighteen years now, but I'm working towards school administration, so I've applied for about 40 positions as either principal or assistant principal , and have interviewed for a dozen. I've been a finalist a few times, but have yet to land an administrative position. To be honest, it's been a pretty mentally exhausting few years, and I have not had the time or the mental energy to put into gaming.

However, my wife has been encouraging me to get back into it, and every once in a while (like the last few weeks) I get a flurry of activity with people contacting me about gaming stuff. I designed Tales of the Splintered Realm last year as a way to re-connect with gaming, and to do so in a way that is manageable. Then, everything kicked into the next gear and I got really moving on my dissertation, so gaming moved to the furthest back burner. I'd like to correct that. I have written some great games that I really love (especially Sentinels of Echo City), and it makes sense for me to support them. So, I'm going to try and do that. Let me know how that goes...

I had a considerable setback last month where my laptop died, taking everything that I hadn't backed up in several months to the grave. Then I realized that Google+ is going away, and taking a whole lot of community stuff with it. I realized today that every comment posted to my blog for the last five years is gone... so it's a bit... um. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

That said, here's something of a plan going forward:

• This blog will remain my central hub. I like it here. So that's good.
• I'll be updating the rules for Tales of the Splintered Realm with any mechanical fixes or little things I find that I want to clean up.
• I'm going to make getting a few supplements for that game a priority. I'd like to get a monster book, a treasure book, and at least two character expansion books (all about 8 pages long, so no great shakes for any of those) out in the next little bit. The game desperately needs some rounding out.
• I've wanted to publish a regular newsletter for Sentinels of Echo City that resembles the old Marvel Phile updates in Dragon Magazine. That's in the works.
• I've set up a new community on MeWe. It will be evolving over the next few days and weeks. Stop by there and say hello if you are so inclined.