Wiki, March 28, 2011

I didn't even do one of these posts last Monday.

I confess ... the Wiki does not fit my world-designing nature.  I was supposed to work on spells.  I was supposed to work on describing my combat system.  I did my best to guilt myself into working on these things.  For three weeks I wrote here on the blog that I was going to work on these things, with the expectation that if I said it in the public sphere, that would ramp up my guilt to the point where I would work on spells and the combat system.

It didn't work.  It just didn't.  My headspace was someplace else, I found myself bored by both prospects, I was tired after a long, spectacular weekend and really, I wanted to work on other things.  So I did.  I worked on things that did not translate to the Wiki, I worked on things that had nothing whatsoever to do with D&D (I have, in fact, other projects) and I hid.

So here it is a new week, and I'll come clean.  I haven't worked on any of the things I said I would.  As it happens, I am nearly always working on D&D or something related to it, but I work on various projects, switching from project to project as I feel in the mood.  Sometimes, I will leave a given project for up to a year, or even two, to work on other things.  Steadily the various aspects of my world build up.

But the Wiki has been making me feel for a couple of months like a ball and chain.  Gotta put up something the people will like, I keep thinking.  Gotta astound them.  That is how magazine writing works - every month you trouble yourself to think of interesting visual or tantalizing gimmicks that will blast people off their seats and make them talk about the magazine.  And having been in publishing for as long as I have, its a habit to think that way.

Unfortunately, it's different when there's no money involved.  I could go on guilting myself if this was my occupation.  But my occupation right now is in other projects, and they tend to sap my energy like little vampires.  And all I've had to give the wiki has been, really, the dregs.

By stages I have been stepping back.  I started posting something every day.  Then, accumulating material to post something every weekend.  And now, four and a half months after starting, I'm having to say fuck a schedule.  I'm going to post, or not post, as I feel.  This is a dangerous thing.  It tends to lead people to never post.  And then the Wiki just becomes another bloated dead thing on the Internet that hasn't been updated in the last three years.  Interesting, sure, but the same old stuff.  "How long's it been since I was there?  Eight months?  I wonder if it's got anything new yet ... nope.  Oh well."

The Wiki is at least as important to me as this blog.  It is just as important for me to post material there, as it is to post material here.  And I've been keeping this blog going for almost three years, still writing posts as long as those I did at the start.  Three years and I haven't run out of words yet.  I think, with the right attitude, the Wiki will still have new material three years from now.  But as the old material piles up, the new material will fall like drops on the ocean.  That is the way of things.

I did spend time posting this last week.  I added material that was fairly easy to pull together, which may or may not be of interest to anyone.  I began a 'Commodities' page, listing off my trade references for banking and trade markets, as well as mining references for antimony ore, chromium ore, copper ore, native gold and gold ore and iron ore.  I'll continue adding other tables in this group until I get sick of it ... and move back onto some other project.

Something I really have to do is to go about the pages that have been created and add text.  This is a goal for me these next six months.