Is there anybody… out there?

Yes, I’m still alive. Sadly the blog has not been, but I’m hoping to correct this in the coming days. Details below the cut, but to keep it brief…

tl;dr: Remaining Delfies entries to be released at once in abridged form ASAP, scheduled articles going away, various labelled articles becoming less important. Attempting at least a post once a week on no particular schedule or theme, as if this was a blog or something strange like that.

The first half of this year basically saw me biting off way more than I could chew. I was feeling pretty good about the general improvements in my life come the end of 2017, so I ended up really pushing a handful of projects all at once. Writing reviews for two websites, trying to maintain this blog at a premium clip, and a handful of other things both serious and non-committal. I liked the sensation of having too much stuff to do and being so busy yet being able to handle everything. Alas, in the end, I wasn’t able to handle everything and ended up overworking myself.

Mostly, this is due to health. I’ve had chronic fatigue and sleep deprivation for pretty much my entire life due to a very frustrating condition, but for the first time ever I was starting to see successful treatment. Problem was, I jumped the gun a bit on trying to “make up for lost time”. Eventually the treatment levelled out and put me at a place that was better than previously, but still far from standard human levels of functionality and wakefulness. Suddenly all that making up for lost time was… well, a bit too much at once.

In addition to that, I ended up getting permanent work in January which has kept me busy on a fairly set schedule. It’s not quite full time, but it’s about as much as I can manage without getting overworked and burnt out, and it’s still been extremely draining on me.

What ended up happening was that I had limited time with which to pursue these projects when my head was clear and functioning. The problem, then, is that this was also the only time I really had to myself in order to unwind and play the games I wanted to write about. Something had to give, and in the end it was the writing that I cut out.

I hadn’t intended to cut off all writing projects and simply scale things back, but… well, anytime I thought I would officially cancel or withdraw from a project, I’d just start to feel bad and say to myself “I have such cool things to write though!” So I’d sit on it, feeling like I couldn’t start new projects or wipe the slate clean until this stuff was finished, buuut then not actually finishing.

Late backlog reports would stack up, and the next Delfies articles were staring at me. I was getting messages for reviews I still owed and which I do want to do, but it just got to be too much. So it all went aside and I just tried to keep my head down, go about my job, and stay sane and functional.

For the most part, I did! Only issue is that as more and more time away from writing anything has passed, I ended up getting more anxious with myself and depressed about how I felt I was going nowhere. Writing is such a big deal to me, even if it’s just this kind of post where I’m typing words about video games and such randomly, and that absence was really starting to undermine my health. As the months have continued to tick away, I’ve finally decided that enough is enough.

So, I’m back. Hopefully. My time is still somewhat limited and my health still far from perfect, but I’m going to at least make an attempt on having some kind of written words up on this place. In order to do that though, there’ll have to be a couple of changes.

First things first: I suck at deadlines. This much is readily obvious. I can generally accomplish some of them, but they cause me a lot of undue stress, and if the deadline passes I continue to feel obligated to complete the projects. That just creates a further backlog of unfinished articles and such, and that compounds the process increasingly. As such, that’ll probably have to go.

The Monday night Backlog Reports were not especially high demand, but given the amount of games I was playing, there were times when it was a significantly larger undertaking than I expected. Furthermore, I also tend to be busy on Monday nights now with a regularly scheduled Gloomhaven game (which I want to write about and probably will end up doing so in the future). Be that as it may, I still felt obligated and guilty if they weren’t completed on time, so I’m going to discontinue them as they are for the time being.

My limited timeframe means I tend to be a lot more focused on just a single game at a time now. I rarely have a “timesink” game like an MMO or Heroes of the Storm active these days (the latter has seen maybe a dozen games in the last six weeks at best), and instead I’ve just been tackling one game at a time almost to the exclusion of others. This actually allows me to do more in-depth articles on what I’m playing and how I feel about those things, so that’s probably what I’m going to do from here on out.

Since deadlines and I don’t get along though, there won’t be things like deadlines or a segment label, ala “Right Click to Zoom”. I’ve just got too much happening right now to want to warrant that, so I’m thinking of this less as a series of projects and instead… just a blog. Just a plain old blog in which I, Delfeir, can blab endlessly about video games or whatever else takes my mind.

I’ll try to post regularly, but I’m not going to uphold myself to a schedule. I might end up posting once a week, might be once a fortnight, might be three times a night. Depends on when inspiration strikes and the mood takes me, I suppose! So stay tuned. I’ll be linking these articles in all the usual places when they go up, so if you’re in the loop enough to be reading this update now anyway, you’ll probably know about ’em before long to begin with.

As for my other projects… that’s a big harder to deal with. Switch Indie Reviews is still chugging along as a website, and the writers there are good people that I enjoy chatting with. I would like to continue putting reviews up there for them, but I’m not sure how often I’ll be able to do so. Still, I’ll keep people updated whether I do or don’t write more stuff there and will probably chat to the editor about stuff soon (assuming he isn’t reading this now, in which case it’ll probably be sooner).

You should still check them out whether they’re my reviews or not, though!

Finally, that leaves the outstanding Delfies. Well, it’s kinda rough to do a best of list for the year that’s passed when it’s almost been six months, but… I still want to finish that project in some fashion. The main reason for that is because the games in that list are worthy of reporting on, and I really want to talk about them, which is why I made that series in the first place.

I’m going to have to compromise for that one, though. While I may still end up talking more in-depth on those subjects in future posts, I’m just going to be releasing an “abridged” article with a couple paragraphs on each of the remaining seven titles all at once. No schedule on that (obviously), but I hope to have that up soon. Like, actually soon. For real this time. We’ll see.

I think that about covers it, otherwise. There’s a couple other things I’ve been trying to find a schedule for, which includes a couple of podcasts to chat about games with some friends, but finding the time is tricky. I’ll keep you updated if anything comes of those; I’d like to make that work just so I have some means of sharing my words in more than just raw text. I’m also working on an original fiction piece for the first time in a while, so I’ll probably share that as I make headway with it.

Thanks to those who have inquired and followed my writing through this time. If you’ve made it to the end and still want more to be entertained by, here’s a plug to my journalist “mentor” Red Angel’s latest video. You should definitely support her because she’s rad and deserves it.

Until next time folks.