Well, there was no March Sitrep, as you may have noticed. For that I apologize.
I want to take a few moments to talk a bit about why, and how things are going here at Dollarton Proxima.
What hit the fan
My day job isn’t writing, sadly. I work for a large freight company and my day to day is to be the local security and safety manager, among other things. The more astute of you may understand exactly where this message is going. In mid-March, I had to help organize and get pretty much my entire local workforce to pivot from working in the office to working at home. This, plus a pile of other things (such as working to source and secure PPE, set up enhanced cleaning regimes for the parts of our operation that couldn’t be done from home, and keeping everyone informed and safe) pretty much smothered a lot of my productivity.
I had a bunch of things already prepped/staged, and a couple of things that just needed some editing, and those I was able to push out. And I did do a little bit of writing just so I didn’t go totally insane. But pretty much every major project I was working on that wasn’t directly work related all went out the airlock. Which I admit sucked.
Chief among those was the whole April Blogging A-Z challenge. I had hoped to get a bit of a head start, but I foolishly waited right till April and I did’t get ahead of the game, and after a few days I fell behind. And work kicked up a few more things and well, farther and farther behind I fell. Which is a shame. I got a lot out of it, and I have a few more interesting ideas that I’m hoping to explore.
I got about 1/3 of the rest of the posts actually plotted out. I suspect that I’ll be getting at least some of those written up and pushed out over the summer. Even had a few nice ideas for some side stories, and I’d be a fool to throw those aside. Some of those post ideas will become additional one-off side stories through the main campaign, while others might become little serial stories on their own out here on the website.
It’s not all bad
Fortunately though, the last two months haven’t all been bad news. I’ve gotten a few artist commissions out and done, and one of my earlier artists messaged me that she’s back in the art business! Which is great. I really enjoyed working with her, and so I’m more than happy to be tossing her some well earned money. Hoping to be getting some new bits from her soon, and posting them up here when they’re done. I’m actually hoping to have a few things posted up here sometime in May.
I’ve also had the pleasure of having some good conversations on the Starfire Discord server. We’re getting more people coming by, and I think we’re getting close enough to actually having a critical mass on the server to have some sustained conversation going. And that’s great because that’s when the place will start to transition away from being a place to being a community.
What I’m looking forward to
May is looking to be a bit better of a month in general. Everyone’s gotten used now to the whole thing about working from home, and a lot of the initial panic around the whole COVID-19 situation seems to have stabilized. Oh, things are still stupid in a lot of ways, but it’s becoming a regular, dependable kind of stupid now. Which is great.
So now that we’re about 1/4 through the year, let’s take a look at those 6 goals I had set up:
1. Push the turn processing up to get everyone lined up and done 140
Made some good progress here. Only need another 5-8 turns and it’ll be there.
2. Set up and run the 3rd Battle of Elysium to a conclusion
I had initially planned on running the 3rd Battle of Elysium in April, but that’s out the airlock, obviously. I’m going to try for May, but honestly I think it’ll probably be June if anything. I might actually do some of the battle in stages (the initial small craft strikes for example) and do that via tabletop simulator instead of on paper on a table. I certainly don’t have a spare table at home anymore (that’s where my home office is now), but we’ll see.
3. Do a full overhaul and update of my map (as seen on Fleet Management Mk2) so it’s all on one well-organized map WITH space to expand
Nothing really done here on this yet (will be the next thing after turn processing is caught up).
4. Finish the writing work for Scenario Book 1 – The First Contact War
Nothing really done here either. It’s mainly been on a slow burn mentally.
5. Go do a second pass on the artwork for Scenario Book 1, incorporating new details and design concepts over the past year
6. Start fishing in my contacts to find someone who can do proofreading for Scenario Book 1.
Nothing done on the above two either.
So, not an entirely auspicious start to the year so far, but given everything that’s happened so far, not too bad either. Here’s to Q2 being better!
Dollarton Proxima Shipyards 