Roondar Nackle

            Meet Roondar Nackle. He is a forest gnome with some magical talent who enjoys nothing more than watching corpses decay. It may seem like an odd hobby, but for someone who may live up to five hundred years, taking a year or so to observe the process of a body turning to dirt seems totally reasonable.

            It’s probably a good thing that he’s more interested in the dead than the living, because the living tend to have no idea how to deal with him. It would be better if he was morbid and morose, because his constant enthusiasm and excitement when talking about corpses is rather unsettling. He tends to get a lot of vacant and confused looks, though those that know him well have discovered that the best way to avoid his decomposition lectures is to point him in the direction of a dead animal they saw recently.

            Roondar is a character I made for playing in a D&D campaign that, sadly, didn’t last that long. However, I’ve recently joined another game that is allowing me to play him again – my hope is that this time, I’ll be able to explore him to his full potential. However, this isn’t really a blog about D&D; this is about that picture up there.

            About a year and a half ago, I decided to start working on several tasks every day to improve skills that I wanted to develop. One of said skills was drawing. I used to thoroughly enjoy drawing as a child, but at some point I felt my skills had reached a plateau and – that plateau not being particularly high, I stopped. However, I never stopped wishing I could draw – so, at last I decided that what I lacked in talent, I would try to make up for with practice and skill.

            I wasn’t certain I would get anywhere with it, but I knew I’d never find out if I didn’t try. So, I started working on drawing exercises. Every single day, I spent some time drawing, constantly moving on to the next task and training my hand to actually draw what I wanted it to. I very rarely attempted anything outside of the various drawing tutorials or exercises I found.

            When I resurrected Roondar for a new D&D campaign, I decided it was time to attempt an original piece – no model, no tutorial, just something straight from my imagination to paper. It took some work, and I still had to reference some of my earlier exercises for proportions and such, but I at last completed something that I was happy enough with that I was willing to share – and I was delighted to see that my efforts had finally paid off.

            Roondar here is the result of a year and a half of drawing daily – only spending between 10 and 45 minutes on each of those days. Looking at how little time that is in the grand scheme of things, I’m quite happy with how far my drawing skills have come. Soon I’ll have to stop claiming that I can’t draw.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Perseverance for Data

            This week, I was talking with my wife about promoting her business. Starting a new business is a challenging and frustrating process, but spreading the word about it is the hardest part. A lot of time and energy gets put into figuring out how to reach potential customers and it can be disheartening when it doesn’t pay off.

            The important thing to remember, though, is that a business is a long-term prospect, as is figuring out what works for you. Perseverance is extremely important, as well as collecting additional data before jumping to conclusions.

            Colleen was disappointed in a couple of marketing techniques she’d tried, without seeing any improvement in her business. She compared what she’d done to the one method she know has worked, which was getting listed on a website – far less time and work than her other, more creative attempts. I told her that these new attempts needed more testing before she ruled them out as effective. She didn’t have enough data to make the decision.

            To demonstrate my point, I pulled out a coin and told her to make a tally chart – heads vs tails. I explained what I had learned about probability in grade five; if you flip a coin enough times, it will eventually land on both sides the same number of times.

            I started flipping the coin. The first three flips were all heads, and we finally got a tails on the fourth flip. At this point, I asked Colleen what side the coin was most likely to land on next, based on the data we had. She said heads, of course – and that’s what we got.

            We kept on flipping the coin and the heads column kept a lead, but tails did catch up a little. With heads at seven and tails at six, I asked again – based on the data, what is the most likely side of the coin? Heads again.

            Tails finally caught up with heads when they had both landed nine times. At this point, I explained again that, however many times we flipped the coin, it would eventually even out. However, until we had gathered enough data, we had no way of knowing that – or, in our case, knowing if it was true.

            Applying this to marketing methods, I explained (or would have if Colleen hadn’t already figured out on her own) that having a clever marketing method not yield any results once or twice does not provide enough information to call it faulty. Perseverance is required so that enough data may be gained to determine what does and doesn’t work. Then, a decision to continue or discontinue the method may be made.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.