The crowdfunding campaign for my TTRPG Chancers, findable and backable over here, has about four days left to run on the ol’ calendar. That means, by my reckoning, I have sustained a cheerful optimism about the project for about 26 days at the time of this entry. That’s an awfully long stretch for a broad-spectrum worrywart like me, and remaining in that mode can be challenging. But I think it can be wise to put in the practice for those times when outcomes and eventualities are only partly in my hands.

The very responsible and well-adjusted adult in me knows that optimism is a perspective and a choice; when I’m in paraprofessional hypnosis mode, I’m also keenly aware that such perspectives are the fruit of how we think and talk about things. It often amounts to a strange kind of mindfulness exercise. In my normal mode I’m often playfully pejorative when I talk to myself (or “engage in self-talk,” as therapists would probably say). I’ll refer to myself as clown or the more elaborate Clownsocks when I’m trying to goad myself into doing something difficult or even unpleasant. During the past month, however, I’ve tried to more often talk to myself as bud or friend, which is only slightly awkward because that’s the same language I used to talk to our backyard squirrels most days. It’s not a huge thing, but a tiny trick that might be worth remembering when I’m confronted with a long march toward something that seems nearly–but not quite entirely–out of reach.

I’ve done about 75% of the promotional work I intend to do today, and I’ve got just enough gumption left to handle the last of it. Not bad at all for a midsummer Saturday.

Although I am new to crowdfunding, I knew going in that the challenges of a promotional campaign are akin to the challenges of writing long-form fiction. The formula for fiction typically prescribes writing a compelling hook that leads into a writing-sample quality first chapter, all the while remaining mindful of pacing and the big payoff at the end. Because the middle is typically going to feature all the connective tissue and incidentals that hold the whole story together, the going to get a little bit sloggy.

I think this is especially true in detective fiction, which might be why so many of them slip into cat-and-mouse thriller territory. Mixing in one or two additional murders can go a long way toward upping the stakes and can make it easier to conceal critical clues.

In crowdfunding, there’s often a similar graph, a big obtuse angle, the letter V on muscle relaxers. Folks who’ve been keeping an eye on the launch date for will dive in first, aided and abetted by regular folks who browse crowdfunding sites by looking at the “Recently Launched” page. There will be another spike near the end, as people see projects prominently displayed on the “Ending Soon” menu. In the middle, it’s just tougher to whip up fresh interest.

The same fate might have befallen Chancers, which is entering the home stretch of its campaign over at this here link. The good news for me, however, came from three directions. One potential backer who’d been supportive of the project along the way decided to take the plunge; two of my oldest friends decided that the midpoint of the campaign was a wise time to jump in; and my good friends over at Superhero Necromancer, who are wise in the ways of crowdfunding, lent their mojo to the drive during the midpoint dip as well. More happily still, the first and the third parties, who have a reach that encompasses many RPG players, added their promotional backing to the drive and posted a link to the project so their friends could easily access it.

In fiction, the usual remedy for the morass in the middle is vicious editing. In crowdfunding, more often than not I suspect it all hinges on good luck and good friends, and not in that order.

Day Three of what? you might ask, my obliging pal.

Today is Day Three of the Chancers crowdfunding campaign, which perhaps I should have announced a bit sooner, but my strudel has been all over the place this June.

It’s humming along so far; here’s the link, if snazzy TTRPGs are of interest you.

Yesterday, at the recommendation of folks who misliked the ways in which BackerKit distributes information, I revised the “Story” section of the game pitch to be as concise and art-intensive as possible. The original Story was a little dilatory, covering emphases in and inspiration for the game, while the revised version folds in more of the stuff you might normally find in a FAQ. So the new version is eminently readable, with small paragraphs squeezed between big, representative images, with a couple of chunks devoted to announcing my collaborative partnership with The Blue Way and early bird specials. Even so, it misses a couple of significant beats that I wish I’d had space to mention.

The first missed beat is the inclusion of art by Bill Spytma, the Creative Director of Superhero Necromancer games and an all-around wonderful feller. I’ve got a folder full of his art, and I’ve earmarked much of it for the module included in the game, but I wanted to check in with Bill to make sure I have the green light to post his art on the campaign page before I in fact post his art.

The other issue with the revised Story, and the tricksier one, to my thinking, is the cutting I had to do for the sake of brevity. In the first version I leaned into the diversity of the game milieu, emphasizing the fact that the first decent king of the Drifting Kingdoms was a transgender man; in a write-up about the adventure I include in the book I also drew particular attention to the gay couple that players will meet when they first venture out of the capital city, as well as the two dozen folks of color they will encounter along the way. I’ll probably add a Story segment before long that addresses both of those omissions, but I’m trying to be savvy in the rollout of new material so that folks coming to the party a little late will have a little more information to consider.

Am I doing it rite? as the kids sometimes inquire. Them What Lives Beneath the River only know. But I am trying real hard–trying my best, really–so I’m not going to beat myself up with a cricket bat over it.

Today I’d planned to post a wee meditation on luck, one inspired by a recent rereading of The Old Man and the Sea, which reflects on the idea of luck in several ways. And today started off at about 4:15am with what felt like a stroke of good luck, as overnight I’d accomplished something I’ve been trying to do for about two weeks. Suffice it to say, alas, that by 6:00am, in an effort to be kindly and humane, I’d undone said accomplishment. So now it’s back to the drawing board, and I can’t be sure if any of the progress I’d made in the run-up to this stroke of good luck will be preserved.

Luck, I know, is largely attitudinal–it’s not a force so much as an interpretation of events and responsibility for them. The same goes for karma, which I was thinking about when I tried to do the humane thing, to think through what that might finally look like. I would like to say that I did the things I thought were right for decent reasons, but I inadvertently did them wrongly, and the outcome was bad. Short-term retrospection find me blaming myself, and it also has me mulling over the course of action I should take if luck should come round again. It feels as if attempting the kindly, humane approach will doubly important the second time around from a karmic standpoint, assuming I get a second chance, but there’s a vicious part of me that would rather dispense with the kindly approach and go with the conclusive approach, which might leave me with clear-cut closure rather than peace of mind.

The harder task, I think, will be assigning the event to its own pocket dimension of my experience, to stop the train that has set out knowing I did something unwise and is scheduled to hurtle toward the conclusion that I’m a fool or an idiot. My mistake has fouled the morning, but there’s a better than average chance that it will foul the whole day if I allow it to. Friday I made myself miserable because I had a rare free day to work on Chancers and felt like I’d squandered it; I got stuck on an issue in the Armor section of the chapter on Combat, and I stayed gummed up for long enough that I had to call an audible and work on other stuff. By the end of Saturday, however, I’d realized that I needed to relocate the section, that the snag called attention to a problem in logic I could fix with just a little revision.

I’m trying to let the Saturday afternoon version of my consciousness take the lead on today’s mistake, though I know only retrospection and a bit of calm philosophy allowed me to get there. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel a little better about my miscalculation, but right now it’s a heaping helping of regret.

Addendum – 2/9/26: And here we are, a smidge into the future, and a heaping helping of good luck (and something akin to karma, maybe) has stopped by the Abbey. The humane, kindly solution I aspired to yesterday, achieved, and botched has today been achieved twice over. And that’s a rate of return that feels awfully nice circa 5:00am on a Monday.

This week has been A Week. I started off by a visit to my new Primary Care Physician, hoping that he would be a little more proactive than my old doc. He was, to my thinking, sorta mid. I got a bit of a scolding for taking as many nutritional supplements I do, as well as a mini-lecture on Doing It All Wrong when it came to caring for the long-term headache I’ve had since 2020. He then sent me off for lab work, where I caught the Rookie Phlebotomist who could not fine a good spot to draw blood, this from me, a critter with very pale skin and ultra-prominent veins and arteries. Tuesday was spent dawdling while a tech installed the very costly new transmission for our washing machine, and Wednesday we discovered we had a mouse in the house. No sooner had I noted to the Missus that I was pretty close to my stress limit than she was obliged to tell me that our dryer had apparently conked out.

Thanks to a lifetime of practice I could spend all day kvetching about it; I built those muscles long ago. But one lesson I’m trying to teach myself is that optimism, as a habit of mind, is really effortful. No one told me how much energy is required to look at things rightly.

Let’s take Mr. Mouse as an example. When we learned about him on Wednesday night, I was instantly down in the proverbial dumps. When we had a mouse last year we spent about two hours cleaning and sanitizing all the likely surfaces and four days trying to trap him. This year, in contrast, the catch and release process went just about ideally. We already had traps that we knew worked, we already knew where to set them, and we already knew which bait to begin with. I broke the clasp on one of the humane traps while setting it, but I was able to close it back up with packing tape. And when I woke on Thanksgiving morning I heard the mouse before I saw him, since he was trying to lift the lid with the millimeter of give that the packing tape allowed. I immediately went to dispose of him and the taped trap at a faraway dumpster at about 4:30am, and my repair job allowed me to release the top easily, giving the little feller a fighting chance at finding warmth on a cold winter day. From discovery to eviction, the whole process took about nine hours, a very speedy resolution to what could have been a week-long stressor.

It didn’t take me too long to realize how fortunate we were in the case of the mouse, but most things can be hauled out into the sun with a little effort. At one level it sucked to have another few hundred dollars fly out of our accounts for the washer repair, but we got it done in a span of five days, including the weekend, and the fix is under warranty for a year. The dryer failure was a downer, but by the morning the Missus had already figured out how to install a new heating element for about $55, a plan that she confirmed with an electrician friend of ours.

I am, as the cosmos can attest, a habitual worrier. Of the three major sources of stress–guilt, regret, and worry–the latter is number one with a bullet for me. I fret about the future quite a lot, and often in very dumb ways; I can get myself worked up in minutes over a big bucket of nothing (see, for example, my short-lived conviction that the guy who fixed the washer sabotaged the dryer during his visit). Left unchecked, I would spend the whole winter fretting about ice and wind damage to the Abbey.

But in virtually every instance–if always with significant cognitive effort–there is some roundabout way of finding excellent reasons for feeling more sanguine about seemingly bleak situations. I’m still learning to be patient with myself as I process the initial “Alas! Why me?!” responses I have to many stressors, but I’m at least fractionally better at tamping down my (over)reactions to nothingburger worries about the far future, especially in those cases over which I have zero control.

I’m a piss-poor advice columnist, but I think it’s effort worth making. When we find ourselves run aground on some exasperating reversal, it can be worthwhile to take a little time and see if there are more positive, even optimistic ways, of looking at it. Instead of wondering “Why me?”, these days I’m trying out “What if this all turns out well?”

(Photograph by Greg Rakozy at Unsplash)

Plenty to mull over and talk about these days–or so I’m told–but I thought instead of wading in to those waters I’d post an update on Chancers. If all goes to plan, you should be able to click and download from here–please feel welcome to share the document far and wide with anyone you think might be interested! And if you’ve stopped by the blog by Chance™, the link above will take you to the BackerKit page, where you can keep up to date on the project as it evolves!