Writing Again

Journal 148 12 May- 1 June 2025

Sorry for the break.

Weekends have been busy and I had little to discuss until these past few days.

The stars have aligned; my mood has shifted and I put pen to page once again. Though not on the novel. I’ve returned to work on my D&D campaign. My world building.

This time concentrating on collating mechanical (rules for the game) and less fluff (story /narrative). Though in good gaming the rules should support the fluff. And of course, all my fluff is based off of my novels… and all my novels are based off games I played over decades.

It’s a weird cycle.

Am I Pretentious?

Don’t answer that.

Considering none of my gaming happens in-person anymore, and the fact that collating data is easier when done on the computer… why am I doing everything with a pen in notebooks?

I think the sitting and writing it long hand is what’s making me do it again.

Weird, I know.

But the act of sitting back with all my old notes spread all around and a brand-new notebook filling up with new material just makes me happy. And chasing that happiness is what keeps me at the project.

Creating more work?

I face the fact that I’ll probably end up having to transfer it all to a word file eventually though. Its just easier to update, edit, and fix if it’s a word file. Plus the fact that everything right now is in literally a dozen notebooks, and scores of loose papers.

At least I stopped using random loose papers for notes a decade ago, but the old ones are still piled up all around. Though most of that information was committed to other notebooks or revised over the years.

It’s a bit of a mess.

But there is just something so satisfying when the pen is scratching across the surface of the paper and the notebooks fill up with script. I guess its romantic. Or I’m just weird.

Why not both?

Gaming Break

I blame this on scheduling issues stopping my regular gaming.

With our schedules my nights have been freer, and I think that’s what pushed me to pull out the notebooks and start working on the game material. It might stem from the fact that I’m the main note taker at our games and I have literally hundreds of notebooks filled with the exploits of my various characters over the last 20 years.

Gaming is my central hobby and having it suddenly dry up for a couple weeks pushed me back to other creative endeavors.

This reminds me of an interview I read with Steven Erikson, when he was asked if he still Role-plays. And he answered that he had to stop all the gaming when he became a full-time writer, because both activities “flexed the same muscle.”

My Problem too?

He couldn’t devote the time and energy to both, he had to choose one, and he was contracted for the writing. I laughed about it when I read that years ago, but now I wonder if it might be a truth I wanted to deny?

Even faced with the evidence that without gaming I started to write more… I don’t think its wholly the case for me.

I wrote a ton while at (and after) college, and still maintained two games a week for most of those years.

So, I really don’t know why I am the way I am. Ha ha.

Digressions

In any case, I’m digressing a bit… or not really as I don’t have much of a topic today. I just felt that I had let too many weeks go by. Plus, I wanted to report the new notebook and the project under way. Though my novel is still sitting and waiting for some love.

I’m still about 7 weeks behind in my comics reading and I haven’t touched a novel in a long time. All my reading time is spent on visual novel games or foreign TV shows. I read so many subtitles in a week that I have no time for books.

I did watch more K-dramas. I put Jinxed at First on-hold, it wasn’t hitting for me. But I watched 5 dramas, and started two more before the end of the month. Most of them were short.

I don’t know if I should devote a few hundred words to them here or not. I kind of feel bad that I have used k-drama talk to fill these journals in the past.

That said, if you have Prime, Divorce Insurance is pretty good, and for you heathens that don’t read, Amazon dubbed it.

Game talk

I haven’t talked about D&D characters in a while. But again, I don’t really want to sum up three weeks of mostly skipped and missed games in a couple paragraphs. Perhaps I will devote all of next week’s journal to talking gaming, and then the week after that get back on track with the normal material.

Not that I really have “normal material” anymore.

Suffice, we have come to end of todays post.

Thank you and be well.