How am I Making Spell Saga™ 2nd Edition?

Hi, I’m Todd Michael Rogers (world famous to some). I am once again writing to you from my car. And I am exhausted! I don’t know if it’s the pollen counts, or having a toddler, or working a shit-job™ for shit-people™ (I work in a high-end restaurant, in the middle of a pandemic, where I waterboard myself all night by wearing a mask and pouring $100 bottles of Pinot Blah-Blah for Southern celebrities). It could be any combination of those reasons. But it’s probably just because I stayed up too late drawing THIS:

Lyric is a character I’ve been thinking about since at least 2006.

And I know what you’re thinking: “Todd, you are “world-famous to some” AND forty years old! Why lose sleep over drawing the fever dream of a high school dropout?”

And to this, I would say: I am thirty-EIGHT. Which is PROBABLY the reason I am so tired. Regardless, I am keeping my promise to return this week with another newsletter about The Project.

I have been working on the same project for 15 months straight, from mid-pandemic, to our culturally enforced make-believe end of it. That project is called: Spell Saga™ 2nd Edition. And I’m going to tell you all about it. But first, a roadmap is needed, because this answer is going to be spread out across four separate newsletters:

WHY & WHAT (LINK)

HOW (part 1) (You are reading this now !)

HOW (part 2)(Available May 25th !)

WHEN (Available June 1st !)

Last week I talked about WHY Spell Saga™ needed a second edition, and WHAT that will look like. This week and next, we are discussing the “HOW” of it all, including how it involves you. Because make no mistake, You, (Not the other people reading this. But You, Dear Reader.) are absolutely integral to the future success of Spell Saga™.

**Do not print your pans out. They will only go to ruin (Todd 19:84)**

HOW (you can trust me to do this.)

1

Spell Saga is a multi-million dollar franchise, guided by creativity instead of profit.

It just hasn’t happened yet.

Why?

2

I know a lot of people talk about “speaking stuff into existence” or some other shit, but I tend to run away from anything that sounds like prayers, prophecy, or a wooden sign in a dining room filled with mistranslated religious text. ( "Do not allow a sorceress to live." Exodus 22:18 ).

To see an impossible future, and find a path to that vision, is not magic. It is the work of every artist. The problem is that most of us become lost pretty quickly. Even if we’ve found the courage to move forward.

I’m gonna talk about mental health, okay?

I have what people call ADHD. This is commonly thought of as a deficit of attention. But in reality, it’s the exact opposite: my brain is trying to focus on everything. All the time. Having ADHD means I was born with a supercomputer for a brain, but the rest of my body wasn’t built for it. I ain’t got enough RAM, not enough memory to run all the programs that are open. This leads to confusion. It leads to apathy. It leads to broken promises, stalled projects, and lost opportunities.

People with ADHD can do more than others. But they also can’t.

What a lonely, hopeless way to live.

No wonder I wore eyeliner in high school.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

The same gift that allows me to make Spell Saga™ 2nd Edition also makes it impossible to reach my goals in a timely or goal-oriented manner. So I called a doctor. I got on meds. And I shed my former pre-conceptions of self in the naked humiliation of change. These meds are a tool to stay on the path until I reach the vision.

Spell Saga is like an ADHD litmus test. If you like playing Spell Saga, I would encourage you to look into ADHD. Here is the article that changed my life. (LINK).

HOW (I’m going to execute this plan)

3

The artist sees a vision. This beautiful moment will come to haunt the artist soon enough. So the artist does what all artists do: they begin to problem solve. They work the vision backward until they can see the path that leads to it.

This is where a lot of people fuck up (myself included).

If you proclaim to the world that you are about to sing the alphabet, and you want others to appreciate it, or sing along with you, the first thing you should do is learn the fucking alphabet.

Sure, you could just sing the vowels, or try singing the letters in a different order. But these would be self-pleasuring acts of nonsense. Most people won’t be able to enjoy it, or sing along with it either. You’ll look like an idiot (or worse, an uninteresting performance artist). It won’t matter how much work you put into it, or what it means to you, personally to sing just the vowels. People will think of your performance as a waste of time. Or that you have some vendetta against the consonants (and who could blame you! Those second-shelf letters, with their unrepentant curves and smug angles… Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you? Corinthians 6:19)

Being an artist means having a vision. The goal is to reach that vision. But doing so requires a plan.

For our purposes, a plan is defined as a series of thoughtfully researched steps, followed in chronological order, to give yourself boundaries that will maintain the purpose and integrity of your vision, while delivering it in a timely manner.

The Brave Composer is one of the main characters from a future Tabletop Novel release, called “The Discordant Shore”!

4

Making art is hard. Those of us cursed with a vision have two uphill battles, both of them repeatedly fought and won with every single project: The First Battle is “How Do I Make Good Art?”.

Right?

That is so hard.

But the next battle is the worst of the two, and it’s where most people fuck-up and die (myself included): The Second Battle is “Now that I made art, what do I do with it?”.

To this end, I have spent the last year creating a plan. I call it Paper Engine. Think of it as a fill-in-the-blank business plan for artists, a carefully guided tour to reach your vision.

I didn’t have the time or money for a proper education, so I looked up which books were taught by all the major business schools, and picked the ones that were found on each syllabus. Then I did further research into cutting-edge theories on eCommerce, marketing, and branding. I spent last year reading through a stack of used hardbacks from eBay, and shit I found on Kindle. I worked through two packs of highlighters and pulled every helpful note I found. Then came the hard part: Putting all the shit I learned into a single document, arranged in a manner that I found most conducive to a strong and successfully growing business.

I know some of you reading this also make art, so here is a quick overview of The Paper Engine path to success:

SECTION 1: SELF (KNOW YOUR GOALS)

SECTION 2: PRODUCT (KNOW WHAT TO BUILD)

SECTION 3: BRAND (KNOW WHAT YOU SELL)

SECTION 4: MARKETING (KNOW YOUR PLANS FOR FINDING WHO TO SELL TO)

SECTION 5: SALES (KNOW HOW YOU SELL)

SECTION 6: BUSINESS (KNOW HOW TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER)

SECTION 7: GROWTH (KNOW HOW TO GROW AND MAINTAIN)

There’s a LOT more to it, about 200 pages, actually. But it is my belief that anyone making good art will find success by following those steps.

Paper Engine and medication are the tools I need to find the best path to my vision of Spell Saga™ 2nd Edition. And to help stay the course, I’ll be using future blog posts to work through the document in real-time, so that you can see what works for Spell Saga™, and what doesn’t.

Tune in next week for HOW we’re going to do this (part 2).

Here is a sneak peek at the first Tabletop Novel release of 2nd Edition: “All our Uncounted Stars”

Spell Saga™ will always be free. For those who want to donate, a subscription-based service to help me work on the story full-time will be presented at a later date. Until then, you can always help by donating $10 bucks to my Venmo @SUBHEATHEN , but you are of course free to decline the offer.

-mE