Freeport bottleneck

I've created a bit of a bottleneck for myself. While I am perfectly happy reading more than one book at a time, I do prefer to only read one type of book at a time. It used to be one non-fiction, one gamebook and one novel. I've now added pdfs and Kindle books as separate categories, because I usually read them in different contexts, on different devices. However, most of my Freeport collection is in pdf, but not all of it. I do have a few hard copies left over from the early 00s. Right now, I'm currently reading "Denizens of Freeport" on pdf, but next up on the trawl list is "Black Sails Over Freeport" which I bought years and years ago as an actual physical book. However, when I finish "Denizens" I probably won't be able to read "Black Sails" for a while, because I'm already in the midst, and kind of at the beginning, of another physical copy gamebook, the Eberron Campaign Setting. It's over 300 pages, and I'm still (relatively) at the beginning. That means that "Black Sails" will have to wait until I can finish Eberron. And frankly, after finishing Eberron, I may want to concentrate on another book. Just because I read more than one book at a time doesn't mean that I can give equal time to all of the books that I'm reading; I also want to finish Space Pirates of Andromeda, and then read A Darkness at Sethanon so I can finish the Riftwar Saga re-read. And, my reading may be a bit constrained anyway; I'm going to be busy helping my anxious wife get the house ready for company, and then my daughter, son-in-law and grandson will be in town at the end of the week, for a week or so. After finishing "Denizens" it may well be a couple of weeks or even more before I can even start "Black Sails", and then, I don't anticipate "Black Sails" will be a super quick read. I don't remember liking it much after my last read-through, from many years ago. It's the silliest, campiest and most ridiculous of all of the Freeport products, I think. But sharks must be jumped, and peak ridiculousness means that on the backside is more reasonableness. 

I'm also about to hit a stretch of products that were made by someone other than Green Ronin, although I notice that Ronin Arts' "Vengeance in Freeport" has now been republished by Green Ronin itself. But all of that is going to have to wait. Eberron and some time with extended family. Maybe even another hiking trip, which I haven't done in a long time. But later, my wife will be out of town for an extended trip to help my older son and daughter-in-law when the twins are born in the fall. Because they have three kids already, all rather young, they're feeling overwhelmed and my wife volunteered to spend the better part of two and a half months helping out, and mostly watching the older kids and stuff. What that means for me, of course, when I'm not coming and going to our old house (which my son and his family still live in for us; we'll sell it eventually when they're ready to move out) is that I'll be at home by myself for a lot of time. I won't spend all of it reading, of course, because I'm kind of a shorter attention span kind of guy sometimes, but I imagine that I'll bang through books at an accelerated pace while she's gone. My original reading goals were thirty books for the year, with a forty book stretch goal, and a fifty book "crazy" goal. Given that we just crossed into August and I'm already at forty-five books complete, I had to add a sixty book "insanity" goal... and I may even pass that up. Given that many of the Freeport books aren't that long, I may even finish, or at least mostly so, the Freeport Trawl by the end of the year. Even though I added every title I could think of. Many of them aren't really that long. I added the Bleeding Edge modules, and most of those are only 32 pages. And they include maps and illustrations, so they're not super dense 32 pages even so. 

But it beats frittering away time on YouTube. I still do some of that, but I've tried to limit my YouTube consumption to documentaries of stuff that I actually enjoy, like hiking videos, overlanding videos, and the occasional history or archaeology video. And, of course, some RPG lore videos from time to time too. YouTube without substance is dumb. And when I was stressed by work, or other things, it was all too easy to come home and veg in front of YouTube, and accomplish nothing. Since deliberately stopping that, little has changed in my life except that I've more than double the output of what I read.

I also hope to accomplish more with my ongoing gaming endeavors. I'd like to get some online GMing going, possibly with my kids again, although they seem to be busy with babies and stuff, which is more substantive than gaming, of course. I'd like to make more videos for my YouTube channel. I'd like to finish development of some of my 5x5 efforts. I'd like to do my Solo gaming, or barring that, just write some shorter fiction that can later possibly become a fix-up "novel." In general, I want my involvement in the hobby to be less periphery than I feel like it is right now.

Not that it really is. I blog about it pretty frequently. I'm playing in a regular campaign. I'm reading gaming books like they're going outta style. But it feels insufficient to me.

UPDATE: I've decided to put the Freeport Trawl list on a separate page, so I don't have to copy and paste it every time I read something. I'll just edit the page, and put strikethrough on a new title when I finish it.