With The Shadow over August now complete, I’ve been reflecting on the experience of writing it. This was the first time I’d ever devoted an entire month to a single “theme,” unless you count those old blog challenges that used to make the rounds back in the early days of Grognardia. I took part in at least one of those during what I like to call the First Age of the blog. However, The Shadow over August was different in both purpose and content, which is why it’s left me with so many thoughts.
In fairness, it wasn’t completely unlike a blog challenge in one key respect: it gave me a convenient frame for my writing. One of the hardest parts of maintaining a blog – especially when aiming for daily posts – is figuring out what to write. I’m never short of ideas, but not all of them are ready to be developed and my attention tends to bounce between a dozen threads at once. That usually results in an eclectic mix of posts, which I know some readers enjoy, but it also makes it harder for me to build momentum toward something more substantial.
Having a clear focus last month, namely, Lovecraft and his legacy, helped channel my creative energy in a way I haven’t experienced in years. August turned out to be my most productive month of 2025, surpassing even July. More importantly, I feel the quality of my posts was higher overall, with at least one standing among the best I’ve written since returning to blogging five years ago. In that respect, The Shadow over August was a real gift to me, providing a framework that sharpened both my productivity and my creativity.
That said, that same framework also acted as a kind of restraint. Even though not every post last month was about Lovecraft, most of them were and, when other ideas occurred to me, I often hesitated to post them. On some level, it felt wrong to break the flow of Lovecraftian content with posts on unrelated gaming topics or news about Grognardia Games Direct. The focus was liberating but also limiting in ways I hadn’t expected. The flipside of this is that, now that The Shadow over August is over, I almost feel sheepish about making any more Lovecraft posts, despite the fact that I still have a lot more to say about him, his works, and his influence of roleplaying games.
That's, of course, one of the other unexpected outcomes of last month: I gained a new appreciation of HPL's Dreamlands stories, so much so, in fact, that I'm now devoting myself to the development of an Old School Essentials-derived Dreamlands RPG, Dream-Quest. I certainly didn't intend to be so inspired that my head was suddenly overflowing with ideas for such a game and yet here I am. The Muse is mysterious. Rather than try to puzzle out her motives, I have simply decided to let her guide me where she will. Whether this results in anything substantial or just another half-finished project, who can say?
I think, on balance, the experiment was a successful one, so much so that I've already begun contemplating doing another one in the future, perhaps in January, which is the birth month of both Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith (and J.R.R. Tolkien and Abraham Merritt and Edgar Allan Poe and ...). However, a lot will depend on how my various projects evolve over the course of the coming weeks and months. I feel as if I've been on something of a creative roll lately and I'm honestly struggling a bit to decide which projects deserve my attention.
"The Muse is mysterious. Rather than try to puzzle out her motives, I have simply decided to let her guide me where she will. Whether this results in anything substantial or just another half-finished project, who can say?"
ReplyDeleteWords of wisdom.