A year gone by…

Wow… that’s been quite a year.

2008 marked my first full year as a RPG blogger.

It was also a year filled with amazing achievements and some humbling realizations.

I intially wanted to review last year’s objectives but after  agonizing over that post for 2 days I decided to drop it and take another tack.

Last year has seen the peek and the steepiest dive of my 18 months old blogging ‘career’.

A peek in that I was consecrated as one of the top RPG bloggers on the net. When I saw the number of comments on some of my posts explode and when bloggers and game designers at Gen Con told me  ‘Hey, I know who you are’ when I introduced myself.

It does not get much better than that.

More than that, I think I initially secured a place as a community leader to a certain extent.  I got Wizards of the Coast to notice what I had to say, I got to create a few little things like TwitRPG, the Inter-Review format for RPG reviews, I got a little consulting GM gig on the side and I even goit a contract to write a D&D adventure, without anything more to prove my skills than my Blog’s content!

Among all these awesome achievements also resides the RPGBloggers Network… a success so grand that it exploded past our capacities to handle it in mere months.  The untapped potential of this community is staggering and I have a few ideas, along with my partners, to take it to the next level in the coming year.

I have a bigger future online.  It’s calling to me I know.  Ignoring it is getting harder…

Which partly explains that I also took the steepest dive of my short-lived career.  When the Gen Con creative juice ran out, I came face to face with a ton of cool project I had started AND a day job that was screaming more and more for my undivided attention.

My mind started to melt and I went into turtling mode.

That lead to a severe case of blogging burnout that shakes me to this day.

I now understand more where this burnout comes from and I’m starting to see the path to address it.

In the meantime, I’ve learned a new blogging lesson…

All writers know that writing consistently readable prose is hard.  While I’m blessed with a gift that makes writing somewhat easier for me, I learned a hard lesson in the last few days as I started flirting with my laptop’s keyboard again:

When you break your writing rhythm, when you stop churning pages after pages of text like you used to, getting back into it is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do.  Heck, I’m not sure I can (or should) try.

Many people have called me insane for churning out on average more than one post a day for more than a year (this is post #536)… I have now joined that rank!  🙂

Anyhoo,  I’m still here.  Maybe not as Chatty, maybe not as present on other people’s blogs.  However, I’ll go to hell and back before I stop doing the thing that brings me such pleasure and motivation!

I’ve lots of post ideas bubbling up.  Tropes, reviews, GMing tips and whatnot.

I am the Chatty DM.  I’m a Gamer, I’m a Writer and while I may be a bit insane, all this together made me how I am.

I’m proud to have achieved so much in so little time and I’m eternally thankful that you gals and guys are still hanging around reading.

Here’s to an interesting year! May the next one be as eventful and varied!  Tomorrow I’ll post my 2009 objectives and then we’ll go back to our scheduled programming.