Two Weeks Off

Journal 72 17 Oct-6 Nov 2022

I took two weeks off of the blog. Partially due to not having much writing going on and partially because my work schedule got switched around to cover a co-workers vacation.

I would love to say that I got so much writing done. But I’ll be truthful, I didn’t work on the novel at all. But that is not to say that a bunch of writing didn’t still get done. Just none of it was toward the current novel. (Kind of).

All Writing is Good (and Related)

I tell myself this all the time as a way to excuse my “slow downs,” or periods of “in-activity.” Though in truth, I’m always staying busy. But I have guilt when the novel doesn’t progress.

I didn’t work on the novel. Instead, I did a bunch of painting projects to make some money and worked on writing a D&D One-Shot adventure as I’m part of a “round-robin” game.

I can feel your question. You have time to write gaming stuff but not the novel? And yeah, I understand that all my other writing, gaming, etc, draws time away from my novels. But several blogs ago I mentioned that if I was going to spend time gaming (which is my main hobby and socializing) then I’d have to link it to my novels.

Which is pretty easy since my novels take place in the world I ran back in the day. The way I see it the only way I can run games now is if they take place in the same events happening in the novels or in adjacent stories. As such, any work done on the adventure is helping me flesh out history, details, etc for use in either the current novel or in later ones.

And Related Goodness

I have fully fleshed out my pantheon for the first time ever. (I used the generic D&D pantheon in the earlier games, and then sprinkled in gods from real world myths, and changed them up every few years).

I’ve written the history and mythology (so truth and lies) of my main villain. I mapped out part of the moon. Worked on the generations of the gods and how they have different names. Wrote the history of several nations, mapped cultural changes as people migrated and absorbed each other’s beliefs.

In short, I have done tons of world building that will affect both the current novel and future novels.

Future Blogs and Writing.

So, the plan is to get back on track with the novel. Get in the writing and keep it moving forward. There are still obstacles in the way.

I’m renovating a room that will become my new office and that will be taking a lot of my free time. Between setting up the new desk, moving furniture, and all of that… BUT none of that can even start until we put in the new flooring. I’m hoping that having a dedicated office space will lead to me writing more… also painting, gaming, and other hobby as well. But currently my desk space is tiny and overloaded, and moving to a larger space will do wonders.

I promise not to skip any more blogs.

In order to do that I am going to devote some of this word count to discussing gaming, storytelling, and writing for D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and other such. We’ll be talking story and all that every week, it will just swap back and forth from novel writing to gaming to improv storytelling.

I might also talk about painting minis and how you can tell a story with the way you paint and set up the bases.

Another thing I’m going to do is start picking a topic and doing a sort of essay/ conversation on here. Next week I’ll talk about how restrictions and saying “No” to things in gaming is sometimes better than the current 5E philosophy to allow anything and everything. Specifically, I’m going to talk about how this philosophy has affected Campaign Settings and how it might be doing a disservice to players and the game overall.

I’m also going to do a series of paragraphs at the end of each blog where I tell the story of what happened in the adventure that I’m about to run. (More on that below).

And finally, I will get back to my normal word counts, story progress, etc… and if I did not progress on the novel then I will talk about what replaced it. Such as painting minis for my players, or taking on another commission, or working on another adventure/background/world building.

Gaming Section

There will be a gaming section at the end of each post for the next few weeks.

I have not run a D&D game since about 2007, back in the 3.5 days. But this week I run my first 5E adventure, and I foresee it going about 3-5 sessions. Therefore, you will get recap posts where I talk about what’s going on.

To that end I should start this week by talking about what came before hand.

Origin of Wheel of Masters.

My brother passed away this summer, and one of my younger brothers contacted me about coming over his house and playing a D&D game in person. So I did. And what I discovered was a circle of friends that I have not seen or talked with much over the last… probably 10 years. I moved around a lot and gamed in a different circle and just grew apart from a bunch of friends.

The reconnection was (and is) a wonderful thing. We set out to create a game where everyone gets a turn at being the Gamemaster, and we peppered the hell out of the set up, world, and story with references to my brother, his characters, and all the games he ran for years and years.

It’s an absolute schlock fest with 80’s cartoons references, 90’s anime, and comics. A main character who is one part J. Jonah Jamieson and one part cyborg (redeemed?) villain. Spelljammer had just come out and we took it totally sci-fi/fantasy and placed out base on an asteroid that is actually a giant dead turtle… and it just goes from there.

Story so far:

Each player has 2 characters and we’re all specialists in different ways and our leader, X3, picks our teams or has us volunteer for missions. Some of us are criminals coerced into service and others are idealists who believe the lies of the organization. In any case, we started with our base near destroyed and we’ve been rebuilding. The first adventures were all fetch quests to get the power source, get the MacGuffin, and work on bettering our ship.

We lost a few characters in the middle of one mission and the story switched over the B-team (who all seem to be the better, “gooder” characters). My first character was one of the two who was lost in that earlier mission.

After the fetch quests we then found out more about the group of people who destroyed the base in the first place and why we were recruited. This multiversal threat that is trying to dominate and control every world in the multiverse. It’s WAY above our pay grade, as we’re very low level characters who are just trying to survive and make sense of things.

Our last adventure had us taking out an artificer who worked for this evil org, The Dominion (very distinctly different from the Star Trek villains). This Alchemist Artificer had polluted and killed an entire planet to create a furnace that created this liquid metal that is semi-alive. Our warforged hero somehow absorbed 20x his body weight in this liquid metal, we destroyed the furnace, killed the alchemist, and looted all of his notes and research.

We also managed to recover one of the two lost members of our earlier expedition.

Which brings us to my game.

Where X3 is going to gather his teams and ask for volunteers to go and retrieve his lost Goblin. My character, Yorrick Yelloweye.

So, yeah. Next week I’ll give you the set up and write up for what the group did.

Calling it here

I could talk movies. I could talk video games (I was going to start one but I kept putting it off because again, I felt I didn’t have the time to commit to it).

I hope I’m not a disappointment to the few of you who are regular readers. I’ll improve.

Thank you for reading this far and I look forward to both a word count next week and the game recap. Also an essay.