Y'all, I may have changed my life this month.
Things are shifting again.
For the last few months I've known that I had SOME kind of "PROJECT" (multipotentialites, please emphasize those exclamation points with me!) that would revolve around sharing my OCs (original characters) with the world.
Side thought: I had to google whether the characters I play in TTRPGs (table top role playing games) are considered OCs. Check! Yes, google says yes. (And that makes sense, I made them up, but you never know with the internet these days)
There are a lot of things you have to mentally juggle when it comes to running your own business, especially if you're in the beginning stages (again) like I am: building a "new" brand and figuring out how it all works together so that you don't have to stretch yourself too thin. I'm not new to the entrepreneurship game, so I kinda know what I'm doing and what's worth experimenting with. But this is also my first time not pursuing a strictly service-based or "teaching" model, so working on being an artist brand has been an ongoing learning experience.
This blog post is mostly about that process and why I think that pursuing my latest interest (writing a novel) could solve a lot of the problems I've been running up against. Maybe.
Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that I am running/building a business. It's perfectly okay to play TTRPGs, perform in AP shows, make art, and write novels purely for the joy of doing those things. My personal goal is to make a career out of this, and that requires a little more OOMPH than simply doing something for the fun of it. Apologies if I come off entitled or critical – it's just how my brain works when I want something badly enough to take the risks required to get it.
Can I walk you through my thought process? Gather around for a story, my friends.
It started with the AP (actual play) shows.
(insert cozy fireplace sounds here, but none of that AI generated bullshit, thank you very much)
Exploring Geeky Publicity and Marketing via AP Shows
Maybe I have a potential career in the AP space as a performer and artist?
If you haven't noticed, I've been dabbling in actual play shows (that's where you play a dungeons-and-dragons-like game for the internet to watch, whether pre-recorded or livestreamed) and I thought I had some kind of plan tying that into how I can build an audience for my creative work.
I guessed wrong somewhere.
My Frustration with Performing on AP Shows as an Entrepreneur
I'm a good player to have at a TTRPG table. I was worried that claiming that publicly would be premature but ya know what?
I'm good at these games.
And I'm a open communicator and I'm a frickin' delight to play with, too.
I know that from the feedback I've gotten.
I'm an AP Performer who also does character art commissions.
People who are immersed in the storytelling aspect of TTRPGs have been the most common types of people who commission me for character artwork. I thought that might translate somewhat into the AP show world: not as in the other cast members commissioning me, but as in:
We're playing for an audience that's really into our story!
And maybe they'll take interest in the supplemental art I make of my own character from the show!
And maybe people might be interested in commissioning me for their own character illustrations?
... maybe?
Because I would love to have a fanbase for my creative work, ya know? (Insert "get in front of other people's audience" business mumbo jumbo here. That's how it works, right?)
Well, it did not work.
Mostly, I think, because it turns out that AP shows have abysmally low viewer count and hype and support in general, and I could go on about that if I wanted to.
(At least, based on my personal experience with the one I was on and the ones I have watched that aren't Dimension 20 and Critical Role and NADDPOD, etc.)
It's not meant to be an insult. It's just the truth.
My surface level guess is that there are just SO MANY SHOWS out there that it's hard for anyone to really grab people's attention.
They've got the podcast problem: where everyone starts a show, and then you realize you have to do some serious, heavy lifting to promote it. And you have to get people to actually take action (i.e. actually watch the show).
And you have to do that for every single episode.
It's the perpetual trouble with people not having a lot of marketing experience promoting things we wish people on the internet would interact with.
For example, most of the live interaction in chat during our livestreamed AP show was from people I personally invited and have personal relationships with. One of them even gifted 5 twitch subs to the channel we were hosted on (and I don't even think we had 5 people watching other than the cast, at the time. But that's what I bring to the table, ya know?)
Ya gotta hustle. Before and after anything gets published.
But speaking of after! I did my part on that front, too: I clipped and edited a bunch of noteworthy scenes to help promote our show. All of my CTAs (calls to action) were to watch the replays that would be posted on Youtube, as promised by the organization that's producing the show.
But nearly 2 months after our premiere, none of our videos are up on the Youtube Channel. (But other shows are up. It's been... interesting. Being produced by an existing channel that produces multiple shows is interesting.)
But again, topics for another discussion/blog post (that I will probably never write, because why dwell, ya know?)
The Silver Lining of Learning via AP Show Performances
I LOVE performing on AP shows. That's the big win, here.
I caught the bug.
I actually prefer it to private TTRPG tables now, because my personal experience was that the people I played with were more locked in to the goal of telling a story (putting together a "show" for the viewer) versus private tables where it's basically a board game to play for the sake of playing the board game.
Performing. I love it. It's fun.
It scratched the itch I've had my whole life of never getting to be a theater kid.
Love it. More, please.
Problem Solving as a Small Business Owner In Charge of My Own Personal Brand
So, what's the real problem, then?
To my own detriment at times, I am a perpetual problem solver. And I have lots of problems.
I could see that I was longing for something MORE, and I expected to find "whatever it is" via the AP show community.
I still might, but it's October and we're headed into the end-of-year, "No one is available for anything, everyone is busy or expecting to be busy or is sick" season. So, casting calls have slowed down.
That likely means my ongoing experimentation as an AP Performer will have to wait until 2027 when I assume everyone in this industry will hit the ground running just like every other industry hits the ground running at the beginning of every calendar year.
So We Focus On The Things We Can Control
I knew I wanted to expand my community and deepen my storytelling experience and capacity in some way. But being on an AP show didn't quite do the trick. And now I still have more unfinished stories that I want to share, and "no one" to share them with.
Reflection Questions for When Frustrated Things Aren't Working
So, what do you do with that problem, Rochelle?
You do some reflection!
Here are a few questions I considered:
- What did I expect?
- What feels disappointing?
- Is any of that within my control?
- How else might I provide myself with the outcome I want, using what I already have access to?
Preliminary Reflections:
Well, I realized that I want to share MY stories.
The stories I tell with my characters are not just for me.
I want to use my characters to connect with people. It's an act of love and personal expression: to connect. I want to bridge that gap with other humans who feel pulled to tell stories and get creative and laugh and just feel great together, and TTRPGs are one way that I've been able to do a lot that over the last year.
How Pay-to-Play Has Skewed My Expectations in Community Building
But unfortunately, the joy at a TTRPG table is limited to just that specific table.
If you're limited to pay-to-play tables like I am, you end up not having anyone to geek out with, and obsess about storylines and characters and interesting moments because (again, in my experience) people who pay-to-play tend to come for the game and the game only. They're not really interested in being your friend outside of that game. Pay-toplay Discord servers are pretty quiet in between sessions, whilst I end up mostly boiling in my fangirl brainrot over our previous session and want to squeal and yell about everything that happened with someone. It's awkward.
Most D&D pay-to-play players come for the game and the game only. They aren't really interested in being your friend outside of that game.
There are outliers, of course. I have made a couple of friends that will likely be life-long connections even after our campaign ends.
But for the most part? Pay-to-play is an excellent avenue to almost guarantee a weekly game that rarely gets cancelled, but that's about all it boasts. The rest of the "finding a good fit table" challenges are still there.
Playing for free, however, with volunteer performers on a show, locked in a little more of what I was looking for. I'll need to explore that in future shows that I'm in, for sure.
But back to those problem solving questions:
What did I expect?
I expected to meet new people who might be interested in my performance skills, my art skills, and my story telling skills. I hoped it would add to the sense of community I'm seeking out while I re-build my life after a major personal loss. I wanted to gain some fans and get some attention for my creative work.
It felt disappointing to create a character and a story that almost no one would be able to experience with me.
What feels disappointing?
I wanted other people to be interested in the story I'm telling with my character. For the AP show, the only way people would get to know him was if they tuned in and watched 3 hours of a livestreamed show, and continued to do that for several weeks in a row. That's a big ask.
It felt disappointing to create a character and a story that almost no one would be able to experience with me.
(Side note: All of the absolute respect to my cast mates, who definitely do appreciate my character and have said so in our post-session wrap-ups. But I'm talking about the bigger scheme of things as a brand, and performing for the very large internet world that is not tuning in).
It's like creating visual art and then immediately shoving it in a bottom drawer forever.
Is any of that within my control?
Not immediately, no. But then I got to thinking about it creatively!
Veneer (my character on the show) only exists within the context of that show.
I can keep making clips of him to share publicly on social media and within my social circles.
But the primary format is the show itself, and the show's replays are not being posted. So I have to just accept that.
But Veneer isn't my only character. I have others!
And specifically, I have some characters I haven't quite given up on, who belonged to campaigns I had to leave.
What if??
What if I wrote some stories for them myself, instead of relying on 1) finding a table, 2) hoping the table is a good fit, GM and player-wise, and 3) waiting for what may take more than a year to see if the story pans out the way I hope?
What if I just... skipped all that?
And wrote my own character's stories, myself?
Sidebar: I know this isn't mind bending. But I've never been a fiction writer so the answer wasn't obvious to me. I only tell stories (at the moment) via artwork and performance, and those are significantly limited. I guess I just never realized that I could do it myself, on my own without depending on a GM or a group.
How else might I provide myself with the outcome I want, using what I have access to?
Omg. I can write my own stories.
And I can have full control over them.
And I can share them as often as I want, instead of waiting for them to never be posted on Youtube!
And I'm also an experienced business owner and marketer, and I can use that "whatever it is (written work)" to connect all the different parts of my brand in a way that make building an audience a lot easier over the long run, if I really want to do this.
... Do I want to do this?
Hell yeah.
And that's the plan!
Sidebar, again: It is not lost on me that this is a wildly relevant metaphor for the real life journey I'm on. I am writing my own story and choosing to share about it. But that's a lot scarier than "I made up a fictional character and drew a picture of him," so please bare with me and the ongoing personal growth I'm trying embrace. This shit is scary.
The Novel I'm Writing is Part of the Business Plan
Okay, imagine you're in a business meeting with me and we just came to this conclusion together.
So, what now? How do we do this, Rochelle?
First, we make real decisions. We get more gritty and specific.
I decided I want to write a "something" with my gloomstalker ranger who never got the story I believe he deserved in a Drakkenheim campaign I left.
At first I thought it would just be a series of short stories, inspired significantly by an illustrated children's story book anthology I found. At this point I was still assuming I was limited to visual storytelling with my artwork.
I even considered doing a graphic novel about him, but I knew that would take a LONG time and a lot of effort. Particularly because I'm a slow renderer and also because I don't read graphic novels and comics, so I didn't want to tread on another medium I had no experience with. I hate when people do that.
And then I was like, wait! What if the short stories were actually a book?
A BOOK.
Written by me!
I can write their stories myself. And share those stories. And then make my own art for those stories.
I probably have an equal amount of experience reading fantasy books as I do making art. I just never thought I'd be the one writing those books, so this next step wasn't obvious.
Enter my epiphany: OMG I CAN WRITE THEIR STORIES MYSELF! AND SHARE THE STORIES! AND MAKE MY OWN ART FOR THE STORIES!
I decided to put that idea to the test and figure out a way to fully commit to this idea.
I got tired of the maybe's and question marks.
So I attended a solo retreat for writers hosted by my author friend Marie Parks (you may recognize her name from the sticker sheet illustrations I did for her!) and HOLY SMOKES.
I'm writing a book, y'all.
That weekend changed my life and anchored me into this thing.
I learned a lot, I read a lot, I wrote a lot. I'm already so glad I'm doing this. And I haven't even scratched the surface.
(For real, I have no plot. I just have fun, emotionally engaging scenes between my ensemble of characters, which is FUN but also, what the heck am I doing? But that's where the learning writing comes in!)
I've already slipped in a cameo of my artificer character that I'm still playing in my current (and only, and probably last) D&D game and it is FUN.
Writing is FUN!!
I've already got it in my head that this is a duology, with the second book about a secondary character in Runt's story (spoiler: the love interest, another character from another campaign I had to abandon. I'm going to make them kiss each other and it's gonna be great).
Maybe a novella about Augden will be in the works, set in the same alternate universe from the campaign he's in right now. I'll probably write some short, stand-alone stories for Veneer too.
How I knew I've Landed on the Right Idea / Choice
What feels right about this is that the book idea seems like a good "single, solid project" for me to focus on, especially since it has an obvious finish line: the book will be done when it's done. And there are plenty of writing challenges and accountability systems I can implement to make sure that happens.
From a business and branding perspective, it's the thing I can always promote, perpetually, but it also ties into all the other things I do:
Artwork from it? Right there.
Spin offs? Right there.
Invite me to your table? Here are some video snippets of when I played this character in a campaign right there.
It just seems like a great way to make all my creative projects come together in one cohesive brand. And I'm so grateful for that.
I figured it out! I did that!
SO. EXCITING.
Rochelle's first fantasy novel, coming soon!
(Well, not soon. Not for a long while. But it's in progress!)
Please come sit with me on this weird and wild journey of figuring out how to do what I love for a living as an artist! Sign up for my emails because f*ck the algorithms, and also f*ck the AI scraping, right?
Was reading through my brain tangle of a process helpful or interesting to you? Please let me know in the comments so that I don't feel like I'm writing for nobody. Or simply because you want to. Thanks!
