Tabletop Mentorship Stories

I had my first meeting with my mentor Aaron (from Boards Alive ) and as I mentioned in my last blog post, I really wanted to focus on three things: Improving the sound and content of my podcast, improving my reach, and reducing my editing time.  With Aaron's help, I've already started to work on all three of these!   Let's start with reducing my editing time, which has become my #1 priority.  This was taking up much of my free time, as I was averaging between 8-12 hours to do as single hour long episode.  With a full time job, this was cutting into my time to do other things (not to mention playing games to generate content for the channel).  Aaron gave me the advice to "let it go".  I was deleting every single "um", "but yeah", and other crutch words that I frequently use.  Part of the process is trying to not say them so much, but the other part is to let a couple slide occasionally, which actually helps the podcast sound more organic and not...

I mentioned in a previous post that I had largely left The Queen Must Die untouched for the better part of a year. In that time I did push some imaginary cardboard around in my head as I lay in bed on a great number of nights, but both the IRL version and the TTS version remained untouched. This was all due to my early Covid crisis responsibilities and then, essentially, momentum. It was actually really useful time. I was – and kinda knew it at the time – overly connected to too much of the game. I desperately needed to trim. “Kill your darlings” they say. This is also a well-worn philosophy in film. It seems however that the psychology between taking a beloved scene out of a screenplay or an edit is very different from taking a favourite mechanic or phase out of a game. A lot of this difference is simply practical. Hit ‘delete’ and read or play the screenplay or film over and see what damage you’ve done and what has benefitted – apply fixes as necessary (which may actually be ‘just...