The Marshmallow Ranch Gazette (Patreon)

Volume 5, Issue 5 -- Tuesday, January 28th, 2020

Howdy, patrons!

Here we are, in the last week of January! How are you folks doing with your New Year's Resolutions (if you made them)? I've made good progress on some of mine. On others, well, as you can see things haven't turned out quite like I'd hoped. 

I'm still "recovering" from FC 2020 in a lot of ways; last weekend I had the good fortune to introduce a friend of mine to Dungeons and Dragons -- and that ended up taking most of my creative energy. So even though I pushed for it, I just couldn't get Ep. 3 of "Crushing The Competition" out of the door in time. Really sorry about that.

I've set a personal goal to at LEAST make sure I don't miss an episode two weeks in a row, and that at some point (the sooner, the better), a "bonus" episode will be released free of charge to make up for the lapse. I'm pushing to make that happen as soon as possible, but the old writing wheels are a little slow to get started. I've yet to figure out how to grease them, but I'm working on it! 

The D&D session went off well, though. My friend was a little shy about his character (a bugbear bard) and sort of hung back while more experienced players drove the story. I had designed the session to be a fairly simple dungeon crawl in order to acquaint myself with the combat system (it's my first time running D&D 5th edition) and provide an easy introduction for my friend. The idea was to introduce him to the "beats" of an adventure, clearly marked: the call to the quest, the collection of gear, the chatting with NPCs for information, the eventual dive into the dungeon. I think it mostly worked all right, but what I could have done better is made sure there was a decision point specifically for my friend's character at every step to make sure they were involved. 

We didn't finish the entire dungeon in one session -- because unless you've got 12 hours to kill, how is that even possible?? But he's hooked enough that he definitely wants to come back for a second session, and my more experienced gaming friends had all fallen in love with THEIR characters, too. All in all, a pretty great game!

Meanwhile, I'm still struggling with a few things for CTC. How did Ralph's encounter with his boss come off? Does it feel like a natural escalation for the setting, or does the horse's retribution come out of nowhere? And does this scene do what it needs to do -- make Ralph a flawed but sympathetic character? 

I don't know, but all I can do is move forward. The snep will have to lick his wounds just like the rest of us, and we'll get to see him do that on Friday. I've gotten into a good swing with meditation, so next month I'll be turning my focus and energy to building the writing habit. There aren't too many disruptions to the routine that month (though there IS Valentine's Day :D :D ) so I can knuckle down and really figure out how to make this happen.

If you folks have any tips or advice on how to build a successfully consistent writing habit, please let me know about it in the comments! Otherwise, I'll see you on Friday…

-Jakebe