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Good question! Assuming Paizo is still interested in letting me do some other stuff, the answer is "soon".
Basically, my wife and I had our second child last January, and the trials and tribulations of being a stay-at-home dad to a baby and a 5-year-old have cut into my work time dramatically, and forced me to completely change the way I approach my mapmaking. I work best with long stretches of uninterrupted focus time on a map, and that sort of environment is extremely challenging to create when you're responsible for a preschooler and an infant.
I've been struggling to rebuild my productivity to the point where I can take on more projects, but it has been a very long road. It took me a while, but I finally found a routine that works wth my family and provides the kind of focus I need. I have one outstanding job to finish up for another company, and I'll finally be ahead of the game and ready to move ahead with some of the personal projects I've been planning in the meantime. My New Years goal is to reach that state in the first week of 2007.
Wish me luck! I'm very very eager to get started on some of the things that have been brewing in the back of my mind for months.
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I, for one, know how hard it is to carve out time while watching 2 younglings. My solution is to stay up as late as I can to still be able to function in the morning (usually gives me 2-2&1/2 hours to myself). I sleep from 12:45 or 1am until 7am (to be readjusted in September when I will need to get the oldest off to school). Luckily I am fully functional on 6 hours of sleep.
Sorry, off track, but I sympathize.
I look forward to your triumphant return with anxious glee and anticipation as I am sure many others also do. Hope all goes as planned for you.
FH
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Thanks very much!
I used to be a phenomenal nightowl, routinely staying up until 4am or later (or even skipping sleep altogether if on a deadline) to work on maps, but the need to be functional in the early morning to get my preschooler off to school and take care of the newborn squashed that habit to a large extent.
Now I'm rearranging my lifestyle to focus my productivity on the weekends as much as possible, with some signs of success. (I'm also a blindly perpetual optimist, but I genuinely see some progress in this regard.)
If I don't find a way to get these project ideas realized, my head will probably explode from trying to contain them all. And no one (least of all me) wants to clean up that mess....
Good luck, you produce some really fine pieces of cartographic art and we all appreciate the great stuff you've done for Dungeon. Incidentally, are you a full-time or part-time cartographer?
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Thanks for the kind words!
I used to consider myself a full-time cartographer. In recent years I've become a full-time dad and part-time cartographer, and my productivity has reflected the transition.
My "new years resolution" is to make 2007 the year that I return to the kind of mapmaking capacity I enjoyed a few years ago.