This weekend, I started on a new personal project. To be honest, it’s my only personal project right now, and it’s the first personal project in a long while that I’ve sunk any kind of significant time into. And I have no idea what I’m doing.

I’m making a game. In a previous entry, I talked about how I’ve been devoting a lot of my time to the hobby of tabletop RPGs and how it’s been a really great experience for me. It scratches so many of my various itches (creativity, storytelling, socializing) that I’ve happily devoted hours upon hours to this new hobby.

This weekend, I took it a step further and started developing my own hack of the system my game group has been using to play Monsterhearts and Monster of the Week. I don’t want to really say anything specific just yet, but the stories I’m drawing inspiration from are supernatural family dramas and romances in the vein of Practical Magic, Witches of East End, and The Secret Circle. I’m looking to have a really early alpha of the system ready to play test by September.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a personal project I felt really excited about or invested in. Leading a nonprofit for three years was a gratifying and deeply formative experience for me, but it didn’t give me a lot of time to do the things that made me feel alive in the way our hobbies do. It was surprising to find myself pulled into the making of something again, to realize that I was spending an entire day just working on a single thing with such intense focus. I found it so refreshing.

One of my bad habits is to fixate on the finished thing when I work on something new, so I’m trying to let myself enjoy the process of this. I’m also trying not to let myself get stuck on the idea of what I’ll do with the finished product. I just want to see how things go, to see what it’s like to do something without purpose for the sake of how it makes me feel. That’s new to me, and I want to see where it goes.