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1/17/09 05:35 pm - (Mind-) Jammin'
New Year's over and the evenings are starting to feel a little longer. Today was the first warm day of the year, time to take a tour of the smallholding and check on the fences, animals, trees, winter damage done, and start some tidy-up chores before the work of the spring begins. It's a good time of year - still like a tightly-coiled spring, everything waiting, under starter's orders - a quiet sense of anticipation for the burst of energy to come.
It's good for the writing, too. I've got three "projects" underway at the moment, all in various stages of completion. My writeup of my "New Commonality Era" far future space opera campaign using the Starblazer Adventures rules continues apace, and is cracking good fun. Playing has been a bit delayed, largely because during the past two sessions we've been having such a cool time making characters! All being well in the next ten days, though, we'll sit down for our first "proper" session. Looking forwards to it very much indeed - Starblazer is still feeling like a very cool system.
On the Chronicles side, my "mini-campaign" supplement "Vales of Yala" managed to sink to priority 3 in early December, partly cos of the huge injection of enthusiasm for Starblazer, and partly cos of a nasty bug in Campaign Cartographer 3 which kept causing my City Designer 3 maps to refuse to save into PNGs, etc. I rummaged a couple of nasty workarounds using print screen, but basically it was such a pain in the arse I left off the maps and did something else instead. Vales of Yala is pretty much in first playtest draft stage barring the maps, so when I feel up to it I'll re-gird my loins and fire up CC3 and see if the bug is still there. With the vagaries of Windows Vista, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it hadn't got mysteriously "better" in the intervening space...
Fiction writing is going good. I spent most of last year researching an occult thriller I've been toying with for a couple of years, and this past month I finally got round to putting pen to paper. I'm structuring it as a "novel in short stories", which is a first for me but was inspired by William Jones' "The Strange Tales of Rudolph Pearson" - it's a trick to string ten or so short stories into a coherent narrative whilst maintaining an interesting and compelling structure, but I really fancied having a go and the current plot I've got figured out lends it to that structure perfectly. Also - and again as a structural exercise - I'm writing each short story separately, ie finishing off one before proceeding to the next, almost as if the stories are being serialised. I've never done this before either, but it'll be interesting if I feel compelled to go back and change previously finished stories (which I'm trying not to do), or whether I can use the structural restriction to kick off some cool narrative episodes. Only time will tell - I'm hoping to do one story a month for eight months, but realistically I'll be very happy if the whole thing is finished by year end!
Lastly, I've been going to a "writers' workshop" here in Normandy for the past few months, which is proving a real cool thing. I'd been in need of some external, non-games-related stimulation for a while on the writing front, and there are precious few writers out here in the boondocks, either French or English or whatever, so happening upon this particular group was great. It's a mixed bag of variously insane and eccentric wordsmiths, and as ever a totally cool way of holding a mirror up to one's own writing whilst getting covered in heaps of outside influences you'd never necessarily winkle out on your own. I'm hoping they'll be able to act as a sounding board for the occult thriller thing too.
That's it for now. Compared to this time last year, my writing calendar is full, and the planting season is still a couple of months away - so I'd better get scribbling!
*****
It's good for the writing, too. I've got three "projects" underway at the moment, all in various stages of completion. My writeup of my "New Commonality Era" far future space opera campaign using the Starblazer Adventures rules continues apace, and is cracking good fun. Playing has been a bit delayed, largely because during the past two sessions we've been having such a cool time making characters! All being well in the next ten days, though, we'll sit down for our first "proper" session. Looking forwards to it very much indeed - Starblazer is still feeling like a very cool system.
On the Chronicles side, my "mini-campaign" supplement "Vales of Yala" managed to sink to priority 3 in early December, partly cos of the huge injection of enthusiasm for Starblazer, and partly cos of a nasty bug in Campaign Cartographer 3 which kept causing my City Designer 3 maps to refuse to save into PNGs, etc. I rummaged a couple of nasty workarounds using print screen, but basically it was such a pain in the arse I left off the maps and did something else instead. Vales of Yala is pretty much in first playtest draft stage barring the maps, so when I feel up to it I'll re-gird my loins and fire up CC3 and see if the bug is still there. With the vagaries of Windows Vista, it wouldn't surprise me at all if it hadn't got mysteriously "better" in the intervening space...
Fiction writing is going good. I spent most of last year researching an occult thriller I've been toying with for a couple of years, and this past month I finally got round to putting pen to paper. I'm structuring it as a "novel in short stories", which is a first for me but was inspired by William Jones' "The Strange Tales of Rudolph Pearson" - it's a trick to string ten or so short stories into a coherent narrative whilst maintaining an interesting and compelling structure, but I really fancied having a go and the current plot I've got figured out lends it to that structure perfectly. Also - and again as a structural exercise - I'm writing each short story separately, ie finishing off one before proceeding to the next, almost as if the stories are being serialised. I've never done this before either, but it'll be interesting if I feel compelled to go back and change previously finished stories (which I'm trying not to do), or whether I can use the structural restriction to kick off some cool narrative episodes. Only time will tell - I'm hoping to do one story a month for eight months, but realistically I'll be very happy if the whole thing is finished by year end!
Lastly, I've been going to a "writers' workshop" here in Normandy for the past few months, which is proving a real cool thing. I'd been in need of some external, non-games-related stimulation for a while on the writing front, and there are precious few writers out here in the boondocks, either French or English or whatever, so happening upon this particular group was great. It's a mixed bag of variously insane and eccentric wordsmiths, and as ever a totally cool way of holding a mirror up to one's own writing whilst getting covered in heaps of outside influences you'd never necessarily winkle out on your own. I'm hoping they'll be able to act as a sounding board for the occult thriller thing too.
That's it for now. Compared to this time last year, my writing calendar is full, and the planting season is still a couple of months away - so I'd better get scribbling!
*****
creative
excited