Sometimes, you can’t do squat.

Like me. In the spring, I burned out. I’d planned to break the quarter-million-words mark, even hoping to reach half-a-million. I’d managed 235 000 the year before, in basically six months, I was writing at speed, planning a Kickstarter for my series, bright future ahead. And then, BAM!

Burnout. (more…)

In the end, it is those long, lonely hours when there is nothing in the universe except you and your writing instrument that will determine how successful a writer you will be.
– Ben Bova

I’m tired. My head hurts, I’d like to talk away from the computer.

I don’t.

This here, right now, is where I decide my career, what I’ll be doing in ten years time. The seconds tick away, the Bollywood music plays in my headphones. My hands clatter on the keyboard. That is the sound of my future. That is the way that I create what I want to be.

There is no one stopping me. There is no one stopping you. Time? Money? Stress? Those are excuses. You can excuse yourself. You can excuse yourself from all your dreams. Just make sure to take a good look at them for tomorrow they’ll be gone. Not because you can’t fulfill them anymore, but because you chose to ignore them. You chose the way that didn’t lead towards your dreams and so you walked away from them. I know. I’ve been there. (more…)

I’m ahead on my work. Not ahead-ahead but ahead of what I’ve ever accomplished since starting to keep track. I’m 166% up on my best yearly fiction word count. I’m at 104% of my best yearly number of submissions and at 84% of my best total yearly word count and it’s only May.

I’m going to break all my records this year.

Except that if I keep going like I am, I’m not going to. (more…)

I’ve come to a realization. You see, for a long, long time (like, most of my life) I thought that it would be great to get paid to play games. Would there be a better life than being a game reviewer? Just play and play games all day and then jot down some sarcastic notes and rake in the dollars.

Then I realized that there wasn’t much of a market for people who play a game once and then write down how much it sucks. Being a game reviewer, at least a good game reviewer, includes playing the game over and over again even if it does suck. Especially if it sucks.

But by this time I had become enamored with the realization that of how much smarter, better, brighter and generally more of a good guy I was than all other game designers put together. If they’d just listen to me the games would be so much greater than they were now. (more…)

Someone once told me, “When your hobby becomes your work, it’s time to find a new hobby.”  This couldn’t be more right.  And I couldn’t have been more wrong to ignore it.

– Thomas Henshell

When you turn a hobby into a career you’ll note that some things come with the territory, things you may not want to have there. Pressures. Must dos. And suddenly you don’t have a hobby anymore, you have a job…

Read at your own peril and don’t let it kill your dreams: Thomas Henshell by way of Gamasutra