As a GM with over a decade of experience, and a devoted writer and world-builder, I had been honing and developing a set of skills that I didn’t realize would one-day materialize as a business opportunity. It struck me one day as I was finishing the design of a one-shot style dungeon for my group of regular players: I could sell this. When I was in college, I often heard wizened people say: do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. Translating that into what kind of career I wanted to pursue, I majored in English for professional writing with a minor in History. Writing was one of those things that came easily and that I really enjoyed, so I figured, even if I wasn’t writing fantasy books all day, professional writing was close enough to pay well in the “real world”. SAHM Dream Then I got married and had a family and I knew that I wanted to be a homemaker. I didn’t have my children just to see them for a couple of hours in the morning, maybe a few at night, and weekends and holidays (sounds more like a visitation arrangement if you ask me). I also wanted to build our house into a “home”, not just a place to live and exist, but a place to be built up, renewed, refreshed, healed, empowered, encouraged, and loved. Like the vast majority of families in this world, this wasn’t an easy state-of-living to achieve. One-earner households are increasingly rare as our costs of living and workplace expectations change. So, when my husband got a job that brought in the absolute minimum we needed to survive, we took the opportunity for me to become a SAHM. It was important to us for raising our children and building our home. (Our new goal is to get my husband in a work-from-home situation so we can be together all the time! It’s not that crazy an idea, folks. Families living in close, nucleus settings were commonplace until modern times). But I had a plan. Even though I’d be making myself busy with child-rearing, homeschooling, and home-making, I still had a desire to “work”, but on something I wanted to do and something I felt I was good at doing. So, when I had that thought: “I could sell this”, I knew what venture I’d be pursuing. I knew early on that I would need good artwork. Something to make the products standout and attract customers, especially considering that many customers buy products simply for the artwork alone. Luckily, I had the perfect person in mind. Wit and Honesty My siblings and I inherited our bountiful creative skills and knack for saying the honest thing to any person, whether they wanted to know the truth or not, in a brazen approach from our mother. We inherited our knack for sheer awesomeness (to counterbalance the whole brazen thing) and our comedic prowess from our father. So, when I considered an artist (for sadly, that gift was not passed on to me), my first and immediate thought was my mom. I knew the quality of work she could produce, we got along and could work well together, and she was mostly available. Initially, my mom agreed to do the artwork for me and suggested my brothers might like to produce some content through my company, seeing as how all of us were TTRPG players and content creators for our regular groups. I thought it sounded like a good idea and let her disseminate the information to them. That’s when I got a call back from my mom: she not only wanted to do the artwork, she wanted in on the company, and interestingly enough, my youngest brother did as well. two years later **SPongebob Narrator Voice** I now had 2 other partners in this venture, each with a unique set of skills that filled gaps I critically lacked. My brother was good with researching and understanding legalese (I mean, I can take the time and understand legalese, too, but if he’s volunteering, he can endure that particular torture), he was also good and comfortable operating finances (again, I could do it, by why put myself through that?). My mom had the artistic talent I lacked, and she was also far more comfortable on various Adobe programs than I was (due to her college education) and she was similarly trained/skilled in web design and marketing. All skills I would have had to arduously learn from scratch or else shell out money I didn’t have for, and it’s highly unlikely I would have come to the same quality.
So here we are, two years later. It’s been a long time in the making, but through it all, three things really kept us going:
have the financial capital to pay skilled labor to complete some of these tasks for us, so 2. we had to become the skilled labor, by self-teaching and honing skills on software and doing research from the ground up. In these last couple months, the results of our determined progress and long hours of learning the tools of our trade paid off as we saw rapid and exciting progress. The finish line didn’t just come into sight, it rushed to meet us. Of course, this is only the first finish line of many; the end of one hurdle and the beginning of so many more. And we’ll be ready to meet them all.
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