This is not the blog post that I wanted to be writing, fate dictates that it must come to pass.

In 2015 my family suffered a house fire. Within minutes a lifetime of progress was reduced to ash, family heirlooms were lost forever and decades of collecting trinkets, games and countless other things were just gone.
We heated with wood, so insurance wouldn’t touch it, meaning that our life savings were wiped out and we had to start over from the beginning, rebuilding the family home, which 10 years later is still not finished due to rising costs and a lack of time.

3 weeks ago it happened again. Fortunately this time my mother was around when the fire started and she ran in and grabbed my computer, which was fortunate because I had not done a backup for a while, but again I lost everything else. A decade of rebuilding a collection of RPGs, miniatures and board games, all gone in the span of 10 minutes.

I now have a temporary place to live and have gotten my computer and the internet back to something that sort of feels normal, but now I have to deal with the aftermath, which unfortunately I am familiar with.
The next few months will be a test of frustration, often reaching for something out of habit only to remember that it didn’t survive.

The desire to rebuild my games collection is countered by the idea that if I never collected anything, I would have lost less. Those people who live out of a suitcase may be on to something, but I also need to continue to build community at my FLGS, so I do need to to get some things back.

The cost of rebuilding the family home is astronomical, easily being in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which pretty much requires a winning lottery ticket. I did buy one, …luck only works in one direction it seems.
I considered launching a GoFundMe, but all of my social media is tied to Trapped Chest, so it is a bad look if a company starts begging for money, especially considering that later this year I am hoping to crowdfund an RPG.

Even the small things start to add up. I want to rebuild my Malifaux crew, as I was attempting to build a local miniatures community, and while the crew itself is not that expensive, the adjacent products add up, with paint being exceptionally expensive.

This has also slowed my design work. I had planned to release Join Their Ranks for Reanimated for the 3rd week of May, but now I am not sure if I will be done in time, simply because I can’t focus on writing while my mind keeps returning to the hardships to come.

If there is a silver lining it is that I had recently come back from a convention and all of my stock was sitting at work.

Now that everyone is depressed, I’ll offer some friendly advice. Make multiple backups of your projects. Data is valuable and you never know when things will go wrong.