Last night worked out pretty well. In spite of the heat and an appointment early in the evening, I got home and banged out over 900 words. If I can manage this 5 days a week, I may finish in a month!
…
Huh. That’s not exactly encouraging.
Well, not as much writing accomplished as planned.
Friday I got horribly distracted by my shiny new iPhone. Got some writing done, but nothing spectacular.
Saturday was meant to be a writing day, but most of it got sucked up in “girlfriend moving in chores.” Moving my stuff out of my old storage unit into the new one took very little time. But then we drafted people into helping organize my unsorted comic books from the last year or two. That night I had the choice between writing or spending quality time with the girlfriend watching a movie. I opted to go with the quality time.
Sunday was just hosed from the moment I got up, and I hadn’t planned on trying to write. There was the hope of getting some writing done in the evening, but between the laptop deciding to misbehave on me and having to have an emergency logistics discussion with the girlfriend, the evening ended up being a waste.
Even when I have been writing, it’s been like slogging through mud. The more Red King portions of Court of the Red King flow pretty well, but the protagonists are harder to write. Hopefully this doesn’t make me a villain in a Gato Loco novel.
Not much to report. As anticipated, the company dinner I went to basically filled up my whole evening and we went to bed right away. Tonight, though, looks promising.
I’m blowing the dust off of this blog to use it as a way to keep on track of my writing. I did NaNoWriMo last November and got in something over 50,000 words. In the eight months since then, I’ve gotten in something like 9,000. I haven’t entirely slacked off on writing, which in some ways is the problem. For five of those months I was focusing more on writing short stories for Crossed Genres than the novel. After I got one published with them, I was jazzed to have a market and would try to squeeze something out every time they revealed their new genre.
My recurring analogy is Walter Mosley’s comparison between writing and “gathering smoke.” Writing is a delicate thing, and easily lost if you don’t cultivate it every day. Eight months of barely pecking away at this year’s novel (The Court of the Red King) has left me feeling like I’m trying to cozy up to a stranger.
My goal is to finish the novel before November, hopefully with enough time to make at least one pass through for a first round of revision. I’m estimating that it will weigh in at 80-100,000. Each day, behind a cut, I’ll post my current word count, a forecast on when I can squeeze in writing and also reflect on how I failed to get writing done. It may end up being tedious. You’ve been warned.
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Blue Planet was sort of a poster child for why I wanted to start doing the One Hit Wonders. It is the pinnacle of “games bought because it sounded neat but no one ever actually wants to play.” And we played it, oh yes.
Many game lines will put out the “adventures with water” sourcebook. Shadowrun had Cyberpirates, oWoD had Blood-Dimmed Tides and Changing Breeds: Rokea. There were a few different things that came out over the years for D&D, I think.
Invariably they seem like a weird marketing choice, because they seem to be loathed by many people I talk to. And they are a little useless, because you really have to want to run an all-aquatic game. And not many people are really jazzed by an all aquatic game. Otherwise you can’t really make a character based off that sourcebook in many games. Being a cyberpirate in the Redmond Barrens is as useless as a fish on a bicycle.
It takes a special sort of dork to really want to play with these weird little settings. And I am that special sort of dork, my friends. I buy these books, put them next to my copy of Shadowbeat and practice my contrived slang from Shadowrun. (“Hoi! What the frag is up with all this hoopy drek, chummer?”)
This weekend I attended Go Play Northwest 2009. This is my recap. SRSLY. I am working on this in lieu of my novel, so I’m taking my life into my own hands.
I’ve wanted to play this for… over a decade at least. I also learned a fun fact when I went to run it. Paranoia “5th” Edition, which is the only version I own, is apparently reviled by die-hard Paranoia fans. One of the players brought it up at the session, and Wikipedia confirms it. And if it’s on Wikipedia, you know it’s true. SRSLY. It seems that the absurdist, slapstick “kill each other because everyone is secretly a traitor” is not the original setup for the game. It was meant to be more of a dark humor game with complex satire.
I find this extra amusing because I have always loved the 5th Edition rules and it was what made me want to play Paranoia in the first place. Huh.
For reference, there was never a 3rd or 4th edition. I guess it was a joke. Ha. Ha.
Hey, only took me a couple months.
April 16th-19th, I flew out with the special lady friend for four days of roleplaying at the 20th anniversary AmberCon US in beautiful, scenic Livonia, MI. For those who haven’t attended one, these cons are relatively small (ACNW and ACUS have 80-100 attendees each year) and lack some of the features you see in larger cons. Like a sprawling dealer room and such. Instead, it’s just solid gaming from Thursday night through Sunday night. And by gaming, I mostly mean “roleplaying.” Like serious, immersionist, actor-stance, honest-to-Buddha roleplaying. There’s a bit of indy gaming that goes on. Fringe weirdos like Amber players tends to have some overlap with the indy game crowd. But there’s also some people who staunchly hate indy games. Especially the story game, roll-for-narrative control sorts of games.
The con definitely has a different feel from ACNW, which is the con I spend most of my time at. It was started by Erick Wujcik himself and has about seven years on ACNW. The median age often feels older. It seems like there are more ongoing campaigns than there are at ACNW, some of which may very well have started in the early years of the con. This is, and has been, the major stomping ground of many of the people I got to know through the old Amber Mailing List. When I think “Amber Community,” I think of this place.
Last of the horribly past due OHW posts before I do my AmberCon US recap. I’m only a couple months behind. Seriously. =P
For this one, we had a rousing session of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. I’m not sure which edition the GM was using. I believe the newest.
Home with a nasty bug, figure I can at least work at catching up with this a bit.
The next OHW we did was Green Ronin’s Mutants & Masterminds, the d20-derived superhero game.
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