You Probably Saw This Coming

If not, it's okay. I foreshadowed poorly.

A lot has happened since I announced a brief hiatus to pull Flights of Foundry together. The good news of it is that Flights of Foundry was wildly successful, more so than I expected. If you haven’t been following my work with the Dream Foundry closely this won’t mean a whole lot to you, but after the convention we found ourselves in the position we’d expected to be after successfully completing our startup five year plan. We’re going into year three. There was, and still is, a lot of sudden planning and overhaul needed to adapt to that and make sure we follow through on the opportunity granted to us by that success.

Just as it felt like I was getting on top of that, cops in Minneapolis followed a long established police tradition and murdered a man. They did it in the hip new style of “blithely while on camera,” and people are having some feelings about that. I’m one of them. People are acting on those feelings. I’m one of those, too. Work I was already doing has suddenly gotten bigger, more abrupt, and harder to plan. That’s not a complaint: I vastly prefer this to the alternative, which is more nothing. I live in Chicago, a city I adore beyond all reason, and there is no aspect of this situation for which Chicago is not only complicit, but actively on the wrong side, frequently as a founder and leader. It’s not okay, and I have the luxury of being angry without being in danger. My ideals and hopes for something I love are at stake, not my life. Not my personal prospects for the future.

I want to teach the setting and world building class still. Art is important at all times. Sharing skills and knowledge is always a worthy endeabor. But I am one person with a limited capacity and when one aspect of my life grows to take more time, another part must shrink, or I’m cheating both.

This substack blog is on permanent hiatus. I am not promising to bring it back: I have no idea when I’ll have time to give it the care and attention it deserves, or whether substack would still be the best platform for that when I do. If you’re a paid subscriber, you should cancel your subscription. If you’ve already been charged for June and want a refund, let me know and I’ll do whatever it is on my end that’s required to make that happen.

I’ll see you around. Stay safe. More importantly: work to keep everyone else safe.