Spinning Plates: The Last 6 Months, the Next 6 Months
One of the scene images for the Witch-Hunters actual play. (Photoshop + MidJourney)
Long‑form work moves at the pace of architecture, but it has to stand in a market built for thirty‑second scrolls. A novel, a feature‑length podcast, a campaign log taller than most novellas—each asks for patience the algorithm no longer grants. Bridging that gap is the daily puzzle for me, as it is my natural form no matter what I’ve done to try to adapt, crafting hopefully for deep readers and listeners while the feed keeps whispering, "shorter, sooner, repeat.”
Modern Mythology podcast: pairs actual‑play sessions with post‑game talks about how rules shape tone, pacing, and player agency. We just wrapped a 2-part Trinity Aeon adventure, and are lining up the next block of recordings. Unlike my other podcasts at present, this is recorded live and mostly unscripted. I edit out long pauses and little cul-de-sacs, but by and large when we say “actual-play”, we mean it.
Between sessions, I’m outlining “Style vs System,” an article (or possibly a series) that charts how different tabletop mechanics encourage—or throttle—certain narrative habits. Research has a way of snowballing, so I’m steering it toward a concise, designer‑friendly read rather than a door‑stop thesis. Expect the first installment to land once the summer production queue levels out.
The Witch-Hunters RPG: The streets of Rostova are alive again. Our weekly campaign, now firmly in its second season, clocks two-three hours a session with a five‑player core. Audio lives on a hard drive for future editing, but the written recaps have taken on a life of their own: roughly 10 k words each, full prose, drifting well past “brief” territory. Besides chronicling plot, those write‑ups capture mood, city lore, player improvisations, and additional lore I didn’t have the opportunity to work into the flow of the live game. If the momentum keeps, I’ll stitch them together into a reference guide—or maybe a straight‑up novel—once the season closes.
BLACKOUT 2054 novel: A currently untitled “cyberpunk novel” based on a 2020-21 Fallen Cycle campaign based in Hong Kong. Two‑thirds of the manuscript sits cooling until late summer, giving me distance before the final push. Projected length is about 175 k words, which would make it the heftiest Fallen Cycle entry yet. The story spans an alternate‑history Earth where climate debt, memory fraud, and fracturing AI systems bleed into everyday life. When I reopen the file in August or September, the plan is a front‑to‑back structural pass, then a sprint through the last act before the year flips.
The Fallen Cycle Mythos Podcast: The “Spring Tree” arc will wrap Tales From When I Had a Face within the next few months. While that winds down, early production ramps on Party at the World’s End—the next book in the pipeline for audio serialization. Aiming for a late‑2025 launch, I’m coordinating with several musicians so the score evolves alongside the narrative’s tonal shift towards psychedelia and madness. The goal: keep long‑time listeners grounded while letting the music telegraph the story’s pivot toward bigger, stranger stakes.
Narrative Machines: Season 1 tackled myth and politics; Season 2 will lean into systems theory, emergent behavior, and the cultural fog around so‑called AI. Draft scripts exist, but production is on ice while higher‑urgency work clears the lane. Realistically, I’ll revisit recording once the autumn schedule thins out, aiming for a spring‑2026 release.
Illustrating a story collab project that we hope to have ready to release by the fall. It's going to be quite a sprint to get it there but I'm hopeful, as I've already put in quite a lot of scribbling and generating work to develop style and break out the individual scenes into respective full-page illustrations.
TFR: I still love the concept, but original music projects often draw the least engagement for the most labour. Even with generative tools lowering the technical bar, time and attention remain the real currencies. For now, the animatic stays on ice; I’ll revisit if my mental bandwidth, or an outside collaborator, suddenly materialises.
Getting the network better organized: I need to migrate our mail list to a new service and do a bunch of other things of this sort so we can actually grow an audience rather than continually plateau at the "steady trickle" level. I really need to clone myself, ideally a version that is better at short-form and promotions. All this in prep for developing new crowdfunding campaigns for 2026-.
Those are the things I've been working on for the past 6 months, and what I'll be working on for at least the next 6 months. After that... we'll see.Every project aims to prove that immersive storytelling still commands attention, even in a thirty‑second world, and your support helps push the signal through the noise. Follow on social, share episodes, review books—small gestures keep these longform experiments alive daily.
