#rustic vale

2015 and 2016 were not good years for me. I’d given up on my dream of being a writer as my primary trade, thrown myself into my secondary passion to become a professional fundraiser, and was struggling with a tough job market, stringing together contract work and part-time jobs to make ends meet. My romantic life was a bit of a mess, my personal life was a lot of a mess, and the world didn’t seem to be going great.

So I did what I often did when I was depressed. I created. And what I built was a little town, where people who were ordinary went about their days surrounded by things that were big, and magical, and dangerous, and they focused on their day-to-day lives because making changes there was what would save them. 

I built a hero who just wanted to live a normal life, and a fortune teller who just wanted an exceptional one. I built a kid who wanted to grow up too fast, and a merchant who was losing sight of her goals. An old man who’d forgotten the things he sacrificed everything for, and a young one who was quietly rebuilding without anyone knowing. A priest who had seen the world pass them by and didn’t know how to reach out, and a mechanic who was reaching out and didn’t know how to stop. All of them were my own fears, my hopes, and my dreams. These little folks were living the life I was, or the life I wanted or the life I was afraid was waiting for me. 

And in the middle of all of that, I got a bit of encouragement. Jenna Moran, the creator of Chuubo’s, happened to see Rustic Vale, and she let me know that she thought it was good. It meant a lot, and I set about turning it from a campaign into a project - something that I could actually share with the world.

Which is where things kind of changed. I’m in a better place these days. The world is still a mess, but I have a job that I care about, a spouse I love deeply, and a life that I’m proud of. I’ve published two novels, I’ve written commission work that inspired me, and I’ve got a raft of little RPG projects that people like to read.

But I never published Rustic Vale.

I wanted it to be perfect. I wanted it to be professionally laid out, with gorgeous artwork and careful editing. I wanted it polished, and finished, and I kept making little changes and shifts. Along the way, the mechanics I’d used to build the characters changed as Jenna continued her own work on the Book of Golden Hours, and suddenly the characters were going to need substantial fixes. And releasing the book incomplete felt wrong. It felt like a betrayal.

But it’s not. The world is in a bad place, and maybe what some of you need right now is what I needed back then - just a little bit of a window into a place that lost everything, and built it back up. It’s not much. It’s not finished, and maybe it never will be. But it’s mine. It’s Rustic Vale.