Fresh Start 2023

Writing Journal #77 1- 15 Jan. 2023

I intended to take off the last two weeks of the year and come back strong… a week ago. But I completely forgot about everything for the last three weeks.

First Christmas and then New Years, and for me New Year means inventory at work and is quite a lot of work. So, I knew I would need to recover from that. And then during the first week of the year I started the final push to move my office. A task that I only finished on Thursday, the 12^th. Meanwhile from last weekend until now I have been sick, luckily just a normal cold and not the plague.

But carrying a desk thru the house and down into the basement, along with boxes, notebooks, etc. It’s an ordeal even when you aren’t sick.

What this all means is that from my last blog until this one, I have not written a single word.

Well, that isn’t completely true.

I have not worked on the novel. But I have been world building, finishing more maps, writing gaming material, and other such.

I’ve also been watching my favorite TTRPG getting ruined by the company that produces it and watching as the online “community” has exploded.

In other words, this is a crappy time for a lot of things, but it is also time to buckle down and get back to work.

Plan going forward.

I have sent my desktop out to see if it can be fixed, and it looks like it might be a total loss. (Actually, it looks like I might have got hacked and had my hard drive completely erased, in which case I’m very screwed).

Saying the desktop gets fixed or the HD gets recovered, I plan on blasting out all my query letters and restarting the agent hunt. Otherwise, I need to start completely from scratch. Then again, last time I checked the bulk of the agents on my list were still closed to queries or oddly silent (like not even showing up on social media anymore).

I do plan to get back to a regular writing schedule again. Even though I am second guessing myself and thinking a complete change up of POV (meaning a complete rewrite of everything including the previous novel from 2021). I still have the problem of limited to no feedback and no volunteers. I also don’t have the money to offer it as a job.

This is sad because I spent some time cultivating work share among several of my friends. The sheer number of stories and manuscripts I have read and given feedback, or basic edits on, should have garnered me a bit of karma. Oh well.

In any case, I should be able to report word counts starting with the next blog (or the one after if things go a little south).

The rest of my plans revolve around trying to run a game again, playing jrpgs, and reading more.

I’d also like to get a little exercise in there and cook more.

Too many plans (resolutions) this year, I fear.

Gaming (Trouble In:)

Where to come in on this one.

I still love D&D as my go-to game and as the basis for my world and everything that came before. I think in D&D even while I write. Stuff like, “How can I describe this magic effect so that a reader who plays D&D can guess what the spell is supposed to be?”

Though to be completely honest I very much drop the whole spells per-day and a lot of the gaming (mechanical) language to tell my story. I mean, many of the characters and a lot of the events, parts of the world, were all created as a part of GAMING… but I am not retelling the story of some campaign I ran. Just aspects of several campaigns. Characters cut from different eras and given a new life.

It very much is everything is “inspired by” but this is not a 1-to-1 lift of a game. That would be boring and also impossible to do as I’m pulling from material from over 20 years… actually closer to 30.

All that aside, we currently have a battle going on where a lot of people are dropping D&D in anger at the parent company. (I mean Hasbro and Corp Wotc are not the best of people in the world, but this is not a place to air those grievances… plus I’d have to also air my grievances against the other companies that people are waving banners for).

Getting to the point.

I wanted to run a game again starting this year. My new office also has space for running games. And I was going to pull out the D&D books. But so much is going on now that I have to think about possibly finding another ruleset to run things and just running my game (which was divorced from a ton of D&D base conceits anyway).

A bunch of the companies I like are putting together new books, but that will be months or a year down the road, and I kind of want to keep working on my ideas now.

I have thought about checking out the Chaosium Basic Fantasy Rules. Call of Cthulhu is one of my favorite games and the rules are very similar. I mean I always wanted to play Runequest, but Runequest is very much linked to a setting and the mechanics are built for their material. (which is very different from what I’m doing in my own world).

I only need a good frame work to make characters and arbitrate the details. I don’t need all the world building. This might be a very interesting year… or might totally kill my enthusiasm to run games again. I don’t know how it will go but I will talk about it in here.

Gaming is still storytelling, world building, plotting, etc. It is all writing adjacent and builds a great skill set.

Other Gaming

I did start to play SMT3 Nocturne and have found the game thoroughly enjoyable. I’m about 10 hours into it and just about to hit one of the hardest bosses in the game, but I took a week off and when I came back to it I totally forgot how to navigate the dungeon, so I’m running in circles right now.

Next week, Persona 3 and 4 drop on the Switch. I’ll be downloading those as well.

I feel like I should start scheduling each hour of my day, because I just want to accomplish a ton of things and a lot of them get left aside, or pushed off as I randomly decide what to do with my day.

Maybe I’m over thinking…

HA HA HA!!

Says the guy who mapped out over 64,000 square feet of land… twice (once in the past and then 10,000 years later) of an area of their map that they don’t intend to run games in or write stories in for quite a while. (Its planned for about 9 or 10 novels from now).

I’m also the guy who did an entire timeline of a single NPCs (Non-Player-Character) career and life, linked to real historical data and events just in case my players asked me about any part of it. So, overthinking is kind of my problem.

Also, forgetting the more likely details/questions in favor of following more esoteric.

Outro

Well… I feel like I’m running on for quite a bit.

I was going to talk about more things. Comics. K-Dramas. Toku.

But I feel like I might be running on and on. And I’m trying to break off three weeks of rust here.

I will attempt to get my writing back on track, I will keep working on games, I will keep mapping/worldbuilding, and I will keep telling all of you all about it here.

Thanks for reading.