A Difficult Letter To Write - Damian the DM

Hey Damian. Haven't seen any new episodes in a while. How have things been going?

Well Adventurers, it has finally happened… For the first time in Adventures in Erylia’s history, someone has reached out to me about it being a while since anything new has come out…

I received this message around mid-day yesterday, left it on read for a while, and spent some time in my head. It’s not a question I am proud to have gotten. Though, as bittersweet as it is, I couldn’t help but smile to myself that someone cares enough about the show to ask what’s going on. So this letter to the community is to shed some light on what has been going on, some good, and some not so good.

February Fifteenth.  That is the last time something new went into the Adventures in Erylia feed. I took a planned break there. I knew I wanted to take a month or so off from editing to sort of recharge. That month went by, and I started to work on the next project, remastering episode 1 of the Erylian Epic. It was a rough start. I had lost the momentum that I had built up and that first episode was a doozey to work on. And I have worked on it, though not nearly as quickly as I had intended. The original episode clocked in at 2 hour and 15 minutes long. At this point, I have finished the first pass of the remaster where I cut the episode down even further, removing extended pauses, things that get too off topic, and basically the stuff that I would remove now that I didn’t back in 2017. The episode length is now 1 hour and 25 minutes. I don’t even know how, but I have cut nearly 1 more hour of audio from this since it’s initial release. I have started to work on the music, background, and sound effects pass. I’m only 10 minutes in right now, but I’ve only been at this stage for a couple weeks now.

So that is where the actual next release is at, work wise. I’m not going to promise when it will be out, because I don’t want to make a promise and fail to follow through, but once I finish typing this up, I will continue to work on things. And while the start of this goes over the troubles I had in remastering this episode over the last few months, it doesn’t really explain what has been going on to push things back so much.

The short version is, I took on too much.

During my break I had an opportunity come up that I was very excited for. If you have followed me outside of the podcast in the last few months, you probably know what this is already. Since I wasn’t editing, I started to put more time into making maps. And it ended up not just being for myself. I was reached out to by an indie TTRPG publisher that wanted me to work on maps for their books, new and old. I took that opportunity and ran. In the past few months I have worked on nearly a dozen maps for them, but it came at a cost that I was refusing to admit to myself, the podcast. In my excitement to be working on this and to be getting paid to work on maps that were going to be published, I began to prioritize working on that over working on the show. For various reasons, I felt more of an obligation to work on their projects and not my own. I also struggle to say no, so when things began to snowball, I just dug in more instead of pulling back. As much as it sucks for me to admit, I am going to have to change that and pull back. When I sit down to work at the computer, I can’t feel like doing things other than working on maps is holding things up or letting people down. Maybe someday, my work, life, hobby, passion balance will level out enough that I can take on more, but I think for the time being, something has to give, and while I enjoy making maps, the podcast is my passion project.

There are some other things that have lead to this issue that aren’t quite as stressful. Most notably is that since the vaccine has been rolled out in our area and my wife and I have had our shots for months, it has given us more freedom to do things again. Getting caught back up with people we haven’t seen in almost a year has really eaten up some of those extra hours I would find to work on other things like the show. And with summer being here, the weather being nicer, and our son being old enough to really wanna do things outdoors, we have been spending a lot of time outside.

So what’s the plan right now? To take back some control and put the podcast first (hobby wise, that is) again. It’s been a few months since I wrote a newsletter, but I’ve got some happy things to share, so make sure to look around (or check in the Discord) for one at the beginning of next month. Tonight, I’m gonna put in a good couple hours on this remaster. This weekend, the cast is actually getting together to finally record again. It will be a Q&A/Origin Story recording, so if you’ve got some questions for us, comment them below, send an email, or message me on Discord.

Thank you for sticking with us through this past year.

~Damian the DM

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