Alright – it’s that time of year again, everyone. The time where I look at the past year, evaluate my progress, and make goals for the upcoming year. Despite a number of setbacks, this blog has become a remarkably stable and consistent feature of my life. (I know it might not seem stable and consistent to you, dear readers, and I’m sorry about that.)
In the roughly 10 months that I’ve been writing this blog, I’ve published 37 posts – very nearly one per week! – and recorded 22 videos. For a first year, I think that’s actually quite a feat. The problem, of course, is that they have tended to come in bursts of activity instead of a consistent and regular schedule.
The most prolific series has been the Experimental Deckbuilding series, which has taken 3 fellowships through a full set of deck testing (well, almost full – we’re one quest short on Scions of Arnor, but I think that that one is pretty well complete) and resulted in 3 pretty good – if unorthodox – fellowships.
Unfortunately, the other series has stalled a little bit. Although I got the videos of quests up through the end of the Shadows of Mirkwood cycle, the narrative campaign is still stuck at Conflict at the Carrock.
That brings us to the New Year’s Goals for this blog. Experimental Deckbuilding is not going to go away – I have far too much fun with it to do that. But I do want to kind of refocus again, returning back to my roots, as it were. So, the first thing I am going to do this upcoming year is to devote a lot of attention to the Agents of the White Council narrative campaign.
I believe in setting realistic and attainable goals – if the goal is too ambitious, I find that I am easily overwhelmed if I seem to be losing ground and often stop trying altogether. So, to work around that unfortunate facet of my psychology, I’m going to set goals that I think are well within my reach. I’ll have two separate goals – one for each of the series I’m running.
For the Agents of the White Council campaign, my goal is this: By December 31st, 2019, I want to have finished the entire Dwarrowdelf cycle in the campaign, including the narrative writeups. I anticipate one post for the deckbuilding and quest analysis for each of the quests, and another for the writeup, so this should be something along the lines of 18 posts this upcoming year for the Dwarrodelf cycle, plus another 5 to finish the narratives for the Mirkwood cycle.
For the Experimental Deckbuilding series, my goal is to test one fellowship fully and completely per quarter. I expect two deckbuilding posts and at least one testing report post per fellowship, and possibly more. So I estimate between 12 and 16 posts in this series for the year.
Between the two, I’m committed to 39 posts for the year 2019. That’s a little bit slower that my average pace for this past year, but nothing says that I can’t move more quickly when the inspiration strikes. Hopefully, though, this will be a more sustainable pace in the long term.
I’ve also noticed that I can put out videos much faster than I can the writeups and blog posts that go along with them. I’m still working on ideas for what to do for the YouTube channel in between official videos to go with one of the blog series. I’ve got a couple of ideas in the works, but they need more polishing before they get an official announcement. I’m excited about them, though, and that’s a good sign.
Well, as New Year’s reflections go, that was not a long one, but I think I covered everything I needed to for this post. Coming up, we’ll see a post that covers what I intend to do for Khazad-dum, and some catch-up on the narrative writeups.
The new fellowship for the Experimental Deckbuilding series will follow later this month – it will probably be a companion deck for the Aid of Orthanc deck I put together last month.
Thanks for all of you, dear readers, and for your comments and words of support. Here’s to an even better 2019! Happy questing!