Hey

[Nixis]

Hi everyone,

Happy New Year.  I've had this sitting on my computer screen for nearly a month now, but couldn't bring myself to post it.

I am sorry for vanishing on you.  I've had to come to terms over the past two months that I don't have the capacity or drive at this point to keep doing Mythweavers in a way that is responsible and respectful of your time, and I've been dealing with a lot of **feelings** about that.  Cycles of sadness, avoidance and determination to just post anyways.

TLDR - I need to take a break from mythweavers for probably a couple of months.  I'd *like* to come back and discuss either resuming the game at that point or calling it if I haven't improved, but I'd also be happy to just write out what the remainder of the story looked like from my end and we can let it go.

A longer explanation:

When we started this game, I was a somewhat bored, somewhat underchallenged researcher in an academic lab.  I had a really great schedule - I could update games in the morning while my experiments were running and always felt on top of things.  I had given up my more intensive games - the ones that brought about the setting for my world - when my daughter was born because those required setting aside multiple times per day in which I could check and post, but for the games where I was maybe updating one every day or every two days, it worked fantastically.

Fast forward to 2020.  I got a professorship!  I started my own lab!  So exciting.  And then the pandemic hit.  Things were now more challenging because I had my kids underfoot all day, but it was still usually possible to post in my usual timeframes.  Once we got back in the office, though, things started ramping up - more activities, more people to manage, more balls to juggle and meetings to go to.  I still could manage, but with increasing frequency, the time I had to check and post shifted from the morning to the late evening, when I was more tired and it was harder to be creative.  Still... okay.  Posting definitely slowed down, but it was managable.

On top of that, the **type** of my work was changing.  I was going from a lot of hands-on experiments to a LOT of writing.  Thats basically all I do for my job now - manage people, go to meetings, and write, write, write.  Sometimes at the end of the day the last thing I possibly wanted to do was write more - even if Mythweavers writing was totally different from the standard writing I did for work.  And as I was managing more and more people, that meant that the writing I did for work now sometimes had to be pushed out of its normal windows and into the late evening, totally displacing Mythweavers time.

Still, it was... okay.  I felt bad - all the time - that I wasn't keeping up the pace I used to be able to, but I wasn't slipping other than a week or two every couple of months in terms of updating.

And then I finally got COVID earlier this year and I've never quite recovered from that.  I have some mild form of Long COVID at this point - easily fatigued, occasional brain fog, that rears its head at frequent but not predictable intervals.  This has totally thrown any system I had into chaos.  Basically any time I have to write I am using to keep up with the times when I'm at work that I **should** be writing but don't feel capable of doing so.  Likewise, sometimes the times I had planned to write in the evenings are overruled by my body demanding sleep **now** which puts me even further behind and exacerbates everything.  

And so here we are.  I try to find the energy to design and write a post, maybe get it partway put together - maybe even tell you all I have it mostly ready - and then BAM I'm not able to do it for a a few days, which makes me feel bad and avoidant and by the time that passes... I'm in the midst of another wave of exhaustion or a spike in work and I don't have the capacity to post, and it snowballs.  

And so I think I need to take a break for a bit.  Work to establish new routines, work to continue to deal with this new reality health-wise I find myself in (things **are** improving, just on a slower timeframe than I'd like.)  One of my resolutions for this new year that I've been putting together is to do a better job at managing my trainees so that less of my time is spend ad hoc helping them and that I have more time built into my day to do the writing part of my job, which will hopefully free up time to do the things I love to do, like this game.

It is my hope that doing this will get me back to a place that I can play with all of you again in a way that is respectful of your time.  I would LIKE to come back, check in in say, 3 months or so, so maybe early/mid april and let you know how I'm doing and make a more long-term decision about things at that point.  My hope is that I'll be in a better place at that point.  That said, I also totally understand that 'lets take a break for a few months' isn't what any of us signed up for and that another path forward would be to have me write out what else I was planning to have happen in the game and give us all some closure.

Regardless of what happens, I want to say thank you to each of you for this entire journey.  I've thought so much about each of your characters, told stories to my RL friends about the times you were clever or funny or just totally surprised me. Each of you and your PCs have taught me things that I want to take forward into the characters that I play in the future, and the games that I run.  Thank you, and hopefully see you in a few months to see this thing to its end... one way or another.
 

[daltar]

Awww Nixis.

 

That's entirely understandable. Life changes and the time we have to do things can shift a bit with it. Long COVID is certainly a big factor that can make things more difficult to handle... not to mention, all of your new responsibilities at home and work. I do know how it feels when it gets harder to post and forcing it I think does more harm than good. I hope you can take a nice rest, let the pressure off and we'll see how you feel in a few months. For my part, I am willing to wait and see.

[Shadeus]

Sorry to hear you are having such a a difficult time right now. It sounds like you do want to come back, but aren't in a good enough place right now so do that. One bit of advice as a fellow manager is to consider your workload and see if there are things you can delegate to your team. Your job isn't meant to be this all consuming monster. If you can delegate some of the more mundane tasks, it frees you up to manage the team. That takes some pressure off all the meetings and some of the writing.

I obviously don't know your exact job or understand the reality of it, but that helped me be a lot more comfortable in my own job and also made me a lot happier as a result.

Best of luck and we hope to see you in a few months! And if that doesn't work out, it still was a great game.

[Peacemonger]

As others have said, take the time you need. For a hobby where writer's block is a sufficient explanation to take an extended break, what you have on your plate is more than enough reason. Thank you sharing, know it's hard after some time off to come back to say you need more time, but that's sometimes the situation we have.

Best of luck with everything, and of course will be around and more than accepting whatever you're able to do/whatever conclusion you can do for the game or not. Echo Shadeus's sentiments, that it's been a great game, easily the longest I've been on and been interesting to see what a long campaign looks like firsthand.

[pyrrhicPachyderm]

Och, I'm sorry to hear this, but I totally understand. Writing sure is the least fun part of science. I hope things get better for you.

And again, thanks. It's been a great and long game, and I'll always be glad to have played in it even if we don't get to wrap it up. Looking forward to seeing you again in a few months, whatever the result might be.