A few things I got out of forcing myself to write a bad, short blogpost on a deadline and publish it last-minute

The platform you're reading this on right now – leaflet.pub – is running a " weekly pub club " over the summer. Like many, I've been wanting to write more for quite some time now, and so I took that chance and created this publication for the occasion. The idea is to publish something weekly. That's basically it.

I take this to mean every calendar week, stretching the theoretical maximum interval between two posts to 13 days. And naturally, after publishing my first post, I immediately started to push the interval towards this limit.

Last Friday at 11 PM, I knew that we would visit my partner's family over the weekend and it would be impossible for me to publish anything during that period. So I had to publish something right then and there, or already be kicked out of the club, ideally while not losing much more sleep than I already had.

The problem was that all ideas for topics I had lined up were far too large in scope to write about on such a short timeframe. Desperate, I turned to the RPG community and over at the Prismatic Waystation, asked for ideas for posts that could be finished quickly.

The community turned out in spades, and out of the suggestions, I built my second blog post – basically two random tables to generate ideas for mobile lairs. The whole post went from idea to being published in around two and a half hours. This included selecting and editing the title image as well as adapting a small web app I had built before for rolling on specified random tables to use these new ones, changing the style and deploying it.

And the little amount of time spent shows! For each d20 table, I only managed to generate around that number of entries in total. So in both, there are a lot of obvious entries anyone would have had almost immediately when trying to come up with such a table on their own. In the past, this would have kept me from publishing it. And, realistically, most likely this would've meant that I'd never publish it. Because I have bad perfectionist tendencies, combined with a wildly wandering attention.

But due to the artificial external pressure to publish something on a schedule, I did. And... nobody cared. No comments, no likes, no shares. Even though many people probably saw it in some form or other. This likely means that they thought it wasn't very good or interesting. An anxiety-inducing thought! This would've crushed me if I did put in more work. But I didn't, and so it didn't crush me.

But then the question becomes, what did I get out of the whole process for it to be worth it? Because "not being crushed" is kind of a weird thing to be aiming for when voluntarily putting any amount of work into anything. What are some positive things I wouldn't have had in my life if I didn't "force myself" to write and publish something right then and there?

This is the list I came up with to answer this question for myself:

The List of Things

During initial research I found this amazing paper about the "Supernatural beings of Pomerania", which comes with this absolutely incredible map of the location of their lairs.

This whole paper and map will probably turn into its own blogpost at some point.

This also taught me about the existence of the journal that published this paper and map: the Journal of Maps

It got me talking to a lot of cool folks in the OSR community on Discord. Something I didn't really do before, but have already done multiple times since.

In the process, I realised that one of the people suggesting topics was actually DrCuriousVII , whose blog post I had previously turned into a small web app but hadn't had the chance to tell them about yet.

I looked at a ton of cool art from Dragon Magazine for the header image. I even found this book (also on archive.org) that collects much of it and has many covers without any text on them.

In the process of putting together the header image, I tried out a little graphic design technique I hadn't before (where part of the image is above the text, while another is behind it, to generate a kind of 3D effect).

And while it didn't turn out well, I now know specific things to look out for and improve if I ever want to do it again!

I wrote my first stand-alone random tables. Previously, I had only written two others for my Cairn science fantasy background .

Again, I now have a bit more real-world experience with what works for these and what doesn't.

Like the fact that tables with more generic entries work well if they are part of a system (see Mythic Bastionland's spark tables). Whereas standalone tables benefit from a lot more specificity.

I built some momentum around writing and publishing. Or at least maintained the small amount I already had. Which I can hopefully leverage to write things closer to my heart in the future.

It was fun!

And at the very, very least I got a few ideas for mobile lairs from the more evocative entries in the table. Now I'll just need to come up with what's living inside "A fallen knight's armour attached to the fur of a large animal". An OSR blogger, probably.