Howdy y'all

Hello my friends,

I haven't posted for a long time, for reasons that are not interesting. Today I am taking a sick day, so why not break habit and take stock?

First of all, classicaljunkie and I will be going to Origins this year. Will we be seing any of you there?

Business: As I've written before, Appleseed has wanted to grow as a business, almost since I founded it more than three years ago. This year I decided to let it play out and see what happens. In April I met with lovely and generous dictator555 for business advice, and made the beginnings of a plan. I would take on more of a management role in Appleseed, delegating more client work to my subcontractors, and spending more of my own time in business development and professional growth.

Under the continued guidance of the lovely and far too patient classicaljunkie, I've been working eight-hour days since then, between management and billable hacking. I didn't expect this, at the start, but in retrospect it seems correct. Changing course is expensive, and it feels right that it'll take extra effort for a while. If I am still bound to working this hard five days a week a few months from now, I may wish to re-examine my decisions, but I'm all right with it for now.

One concern is that I haven't really started bizdev yet. But for good reason: later in April I learned of a work opportunity via an acquaintance on Twitter, a short-term gig involving mobile web development and HTML5. I was very hungry for more professional experience in these topics, and since the timing had the quality of a planetary alignment, I jumped on it. And so that spoke for my next few weeks! I only this morning put the resulting check in the bank, and perhaps more importantly have scored a new client who loves what I did and is eager to give us more work.

The whole adventure was absolutely worth the time and effort, but in the meantime Appleseed still has a static website that says "Copyright 2008" on it. I shut the blog off ages ago because I hadn't been posting to it enough, and turned of our poorly-tuned AdWords campaign as well. All this must change if I'm serious about business development, and it'll take a lot of work.

I would still like to move more into a product-based business, somehow. This has been a dream for a long, long time. I still want to make and sell games! Another potential partnership opportunity has popped up in this field, the latest since "Project X" died on the IP-rights-negotiation table two years ago. This one takes place on a platform far more relevant to the games I like than the Xbox. Yes, stop the presses, jmac is all excited about another computery game project. Well, yes. I'm going to keep doing this over and over until I finally do it right, and then I'll do it some more.

And, yes, I've been blogging at the Gameshelf a lot, albeit in fits and starts. I always love writing, but I just can't seem to make a regular habit of it. No, that's not quite right: I've been writing daily for months, but I'm starting to believe that I can only have at most a single target at a time. I'll write a lot of Gameshelf posts until I need to switch to writing a lot of business mail for several days, during which I write no blog posts. And very lately I've started to lay the groundwork for my next work of interactive fiction, and that fills up my one slot very neatly, too.

Could it be that I'm just more attuned for project-based work than the continual attention that daily blog updates demand? So long as I actually keep shipping, that's not really something to get sad about...