Looking Back on #dungeon23

There is a post that has sat unpublished in the queue on this blog for almost a year: the last installment I started on last year’s #dungeon23 experiment. 

I got as far as July 8th before throwing in the towel. Why only till July 8th? Well, a couple of things: 

  1. July means summer class. I teach intensive writing courses in the summer and winter break, and the workload can be pretty full-on. I don’t perfectly remember, but I have to assume that was part of it. 
  2. I hit a wall, not of creativity so much as of the limitations of my chosen structure. In other words, I’d have to go back to the start and rethink my approach if I wanted to do the project the way I wanted. I didn’t choose a dungeon, mind you, I chose a shattered moon with multiple parts to it, and with some dungeons on its various surfaces. With something a little more straightforward, like, say, a dungeon, I might have been able to keep it up for a year, but with the project I chose, I eventually realized there was a better way to organize everything, but didn’t want to go back and attempt that because it would mean restarting from scratch halfway through. 
  3. My creativity is more of a feast/famine type thing: it’s quiet fallow periods followed by periods of intensive activity, and doing “one little bit” each day just isn’t really how I operate. I knew that going in, but thought I’d give it a try anyway, and… yeah, I was able to confirm that it’s not for me. 

I’d still like to do more with the shattered moon setting: at least run it for a group, or maybe even work it up for publication. But the optimal format for either of those things would be pretty different from what I came up with originally, and I’m still thinking over what is the really optimal format for it. Perhaps after finishing with a big translation project my wife and I have taken on, I’ll return to it? We’ll see. 

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