After much thought I’ve decided to make this blog a bit more personal in nature and try to update at least a few times a week with my actual reflections on the work I’m doing and my daily tasks, along with the challenges of trying to balance two jobs and school. This will be kept to writing-related posts only, and these posts will be placed in their own category, so if you just want to read the actual articles, you can skip them.

I’ll kick this off today, I suppose. My team has experienced a bit of recent turmoil which leaves everyone’s morale a bit shaken, I think. It’s hard to get people back on track after something like that. I basically resorted to explaining the situation, letting people voice their thoughts and get any rants off their chest, and then… I moved on. We switched gears and started working on cleaning up the critical path for Purgatorio. I do wonder if I handled it correctly, but I suppose I’ll find out if it causes conflict down the road. My team members seem to think I make a good leader, but the truth is that I’m essentially winging it with a large dose of common sense.

However, in trying to do my job to a level far above what is actually expected of our team, I’ve pretty much run myself ragged. I need a hard swig of self-evaluation this week, I think, or I’m going to end up pulling another 6am to 1am in front of my computer trying frantically to get a full storyboard and character model sheet done for school. Over the course of last week I spent nearly 40 hours working on the critical path in some form or another, and its taken its toll. Now we’re one team member short, and I fear it’s just going to get worse unless I police my schedule.

Another thing I’ve noticed about throwing myself into game-writing is that I really don’t have the time or energy to do any other sort of writing. I haven’t touched my script for the Bioware demo in weeks, and even my writing for my pen and paper game has suffered due to my brain melting out of my skull come the end of the day. And let’s not even discuss the fact that I wanted to get into the gym a great deal more than I have over the past few weeks.

So how do you do it? How do you balance the time it takes to be a good writer and a good team leader with the rest of your life? I suppose there’s an answer out there somewhere. For the time being I probably need to get a super-sucker hand-vac to clean up this mess of melted brains.