Why I’m Writing by Hand Again..

Digital writing is fun, but by hand is where you really connect to your inner gamer.

I’ve been doing something lately I didn’t expect to enjoy quite this much: going back to writing things out by hand. Just pen, paper, and a quiet stretch of time where it’s just me and the journal, normally during a break at work or during lunch.

This isn’t about nostalgia. I’m not trying to chase some idea of what writing used to be. It’s more like... I needed space. Somewhere less noisy. Somewhere the cursor doesn’t blink like it’s waiting on me. Somewhere I could work through thoughts and not really care. If it makes sense, it makes sense, right?

So, I grabbed one of my old blank DM journals that had been sitting on a shelf for years. I cracked it open, a few days in, writing in it ideas that come to mind. Maps. Session ideas. Random NPCs I might never use. Musings about game balance. Scribbles. Arrows. All of it.

And it’s freeing. It doesn’t need to be clean. It doesn’t need to be polished. It just needs to be honest. (My handwriting isn’t always the best, but hey I can read it, right?)

Which got me thinking, why not share some of these pages with the folks supporting me on Patreon?

Starting soon, I’ll be scanning and uploading select entries from my daily DM journal over at Patreon.com/TheEvilDM at the “Initiate” tier level, I won’t share everything, obviously. Some pages are messy or just too half-baked to be useful. But the ones that feel like they might spark something for someone else? I’ll post those. Might be an encounter setup. A quick dungeon sketch. A table of weird relics. Maybe just a note I left myself that turned into a whole side quest.

It’s raw stuff. No fancy formatting. You’ll see the coffee stains and the corrections. But that’s kind of the point. It’s what the process actually looks like, not the final product. Because that’s what a daily journal of thoughts is like, raw and unedited notes with all these ideas for games. Now I am not sure how I’ll list it as a reward, because I don’t want to lock myself into something I may down the road not enjoy doing. So I’ll probably list in on Patreon as “occasional note pages as I do do them, because we all know work and life get in the way, everything falls to the side.

Anyway, if you’re the kind of person who likes peeking behind the curtain, or just wants some analog fuel for your own campaigns, keep an eye out for the drop and take a look. I’ll make the first one public so you get an idea of what you’re getting yourself into, sound good? Good!

More soon.