Picking Up Speed

Journal 58 11-17 July 2022

Two weeks in a row with full write sessions and word goals met.

Not gonna bury the lede on this one. I’ve been really putting in the time. Though I will admit I have also been putting off other work to do it. Also. Next week was supposed to be my annual trip to my favorite Writer’s Convention, Necon. I LOVE it there. With the pandemic we’ve been on hold for years and I’ve missed it a ton.

But alas, I will not be able to go this year. Which upsets me, but also means I have to work extra shifts at the day job. And sooner or later I will have to take time to take care of the things I’ve been ignoring.

But for now, we have a second week with many, many words.

Words

Got in three sessions, finished chapter 9 and 10. While it has been multiple weeks since I started the novel it has only been 19 sessions. 19 days of work if I had done them consecutively. And in those 19 days I’ve broken 60k words.

This week I managed a total of 10,795 words, and the book now sits at 60,352 total words.

Characters

I introduced one of my favorite characters finally to the book, a necromancer named Geezer.

Geezer is a character I made twice but only really got to play once, and the version I played was not the original version as intended. I was forced to change a few things to make him fit the DMs house rules.

But Geezer is a strange man, more at home talking with the dead and doing abhorrent experiments that got him expelled from polite society. He tends to view body and spirit as two separate things, with only the spirit being the true essence of a human being. Therefore, the body is just raw materials and a nuisance. He doesn’t take good care of himself, and he was always a serious child and his hair started turning white during puberty. As such the other kids called him oldman and geezer, and it just stuck.

He has a ghoul manservant who wears an executioner’s hood and is stitched into sack cloth and leather outfit to hide his undead flesh. The suit is also stuffed with cedar and other potpourri to hide his stench. I based his look on Jeff Cobb’s Monster Montanza from Lucha Underground. Only with the arms covered and the mask is cloth.

Geezer has a number of other gimmicks and toys at his disposal, besides the ability to raise and control the dead. He has spirit guides, ghosts in bottles, hydra teeth (ala Jason and the Argonauts for instant Harryhausen Skeletons), and things he’s built.

I have two more characters to introduce after Geezer, though each is several chapters away, before the main storyline has its full “team of adventurers.”

TTRPGs

Speaking of teams of adventurers. My new Tuesday campaign has started with the first adventure, and I have not revealed the brilliance of my character yet, and to be honest out in the middle of the wilderness is not my forte. But our group is gelling together quite well, even if out quest seems a little foolhardy.

We’ve taken it on ourselves to pre-emptively help a group of our people in a different city who DID NOT ask for our help with their problem. In other words, (and using business speak for the analogy) we’re trying to gain status and clout in the parent company by walking into a different office and solving their issues.

In my weekend games (we alternate 2-weeks of A and 2-weeks of B) we started week 1 of A, wherein our “English” scholars left their offices in “Cairo” and are currently exploring “Crete” and an ancient order of psionic monks. Most of that game is exploration and discovery and trying to understand other cultures. We’re all scholars (artificers). One of our number is a cartographer, the other is an engineer, and I’m an alchemist/healer who was once a knight but is now a priest.

Aside from the jokes about planting our flag and claiming every new land for Angland, we’re actually pretty good guys.

Ravenloft

One of the sad things about missing Necon this year is that my monthly Ravenloft group is going to meet in person and play Curse of Strahd without me, and worse they are playing through an epic encounter that I really wanted to be there for.

Sigh.

Hopefully I’ll get a totally epic recap of events and as I understand they’re only going to have about 90 minutes to play so… that kind of puts a crimp in things anyway. But that’s plenty of time to run a single epic fight.

Digressions

I know that more and more of my blogs are related to my gaming, but I want both of my main loves on this page. I mean I’m not going to live forever and I would like some of my loves to live long after me. A foot print of who I was.

Anyway, I have a write session to get in, I keep falling behind James Moore as he is almost done with his novel, and despite my 10k words last week, the gap between us keeps growing.

Thank you again for reading this far, and please feel free to comment or let me know if there is a topic I should be talking about other than gaming and writing—or if there are aspects of gaming and writing you would rather hear about. Let me know.