Things going well, for the most part

I'm excited lately. I'm not sure if I have a reason. It could just be that I've changed (re: dropped some of) my medication, and a little bit of my ADHD is coming back. It could be that I'm replacing the missing stimulant with caffeine, though I'm actually hardly drinking any more than I did before. It could be, and I hope it is, that some things are going right.

I successfully extracted my health insurance from the bureaucratic barathrum that held it out of my reach for 72 days, at final count. There's a story there, but it may be the sort that diminishes in the telling. I am not Franz Kafka; this tale is outside my expertise. Suffice it to say, in brief, that I called and I called and I called, and the whole process felt like fixing a broken VCR by swatting it with a rolled-up newspaper. Eventually something went "clunk" and the mechanism moved.

The immediate upshot was that I could go to judo last night without being afraid that I could bankrupt myself by dislocating my pinky toe. I had a good time, skinned my knuckle, tore the knee of (one of) my uniform pants, and got sore. And it is wonderful to have a body capable of picking other bodies up and throwing them down again; it is wonderful to have a body capable of self-repair when the same is done to it.

I was up late the night before that working on 12 when I had a breakthrough, or an inspiration, or just a couple good ideas. I should keep this in mind in the future as evidence that you really can find a solution for a story that's stuck by sitting down and writing at it for a while. I wish I could explain exactly what I thought of, but I should just put it in the story. Anyway, sometimes, occasionally, writing actually is exhilarating, and it has been once or twice this week.

I've been talked into playing Guild Wars 2, which is also exciting. That would entail playing with friends, and it was also explained to me that the game allowed you to combine skills with other players' on the fly in a manner reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, which made my heart sing. Actually sing. I need to see someone about it.

I also finally remembered to throw some money at the Kickstarter for The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate. You should too, if you haven't (and soon--the deadline is September 7), because it's going to be good, and Bryan will be in it. They even shot some of the movie already at this year's GenCon. Here, watch this:

Now I suppose it's possible that that makes no sense to you, in which case I apologize. A little.

The last thing, I guess, is that I'm leaving tonight for New York to visit my parents. My plan for the weekend consists of visiting, taking advantage of the pool, and little else.

Adventures in adventuring

I hit a dubious milestone during my time in Cape Cod. You may recall way back in January, when I submitted my first pitch to Paizo. A few weeks ago I finally heard back that it was rejected. I was confident enough in my vision for the adventure that I think it's the worse for them if they don't buy it, but I'm exercising my prerogative and they theirs in that. Rejection does mean that I have the rights to the pitch, which makes me wonder if I want to go into adventure publishing for myself.

I wanted to try my hand at a Pathfinder adventure but I didn't want to beat my head against that door; if they didn't like what I had, I would take my ideas elsewhere. I didn't want to go out of my way to have new ideas amenable to their pitch format, and I certainly didn't want to wait seven months to hear back from them if I could help it. So this probably would have been the last I thought of pitching anything to Paizo, except that I stumbled back to their submission blog in a clicktrance the other day and found this.

At the beginning of August, just before I got my rejection, they changed the submission process. (Note, I'm not saying they changed the process out from under me; this isn't health insurance.) In fact, they changed it to something that made a lot more sense. In Mike Moreland's own words:

We found that asking for a few hundred words of prose didn’t give us a good sense of how an author would actually perform when tasked with writing encounters, designing stat blocks, and mapping, all of which are vital skills any freelancer needs to possess...

Which is kind of what I was thinking as I wrote my pitch. So what they're looking for now is actual miniature adventures instead of prose summaries. I didn't think I would, but ideas came to me. I think I actually might.

My regular (or erstwhile) players would hate me if I sprung what I'm planning on them. Mostly because spiders. It's basically an exercise in seeing how many spiders I can fit in an encounter. My desire to experiment with spiders may be the result of reading It. Something about tapping into visceral horror. Maybe also something about living with a lot of people who can't stand spiders.

RPGs aren't just about inflicting pain on your friends/acquaintances. They're about facing terrible things and beating them. GMs and adventure writers should be purveyors of high-quality victory. That's what I'd like to do.

Arguing with fortune cookies

My first day back from vacation nobody, understandably, wanted to cook. Consequently I'm still working through fortune cookies, and I have to say that this last batch has been a bit odd. The old tricks don't work so well. (You know the ones I mean; "Do not hesitate to look for help, an extra hand should always be welcomed... in bed.")*

That's the sort of thing you expect. Of course there was the one time my grandma got "Pass the check to the person on your left," but that would make less sense if it came with take-out. But the one I got the other day, and really wish I could find now, said, "Evil as a force cannot exist to the healthy mind."

Does that mean to you what it means to me? Because my reading of that is that only crazy people could believe in the Devil. I think my cookie was trying to pick a theological fight with me.

I don't even believe in evil as a personal force, but I know people who I think do. It's not a conversation I've had recently. It's not that I'm personally insulted, but... pretty cheeky for a cookie, don't you think?

The next day I had a fortune cookie with (or maybe for) breakfast, which said, "Today is probably a huge improvement over yesterday."

Why, yes, cookie, at least so far... in the realm of cookie fortunes.

* Before you judge me, I swear that that, minus the coda, was the first fortune I saw on fortunecookiemessage.com when I went looking for a "normal" fortune.

Back to something

Sometimes, as good as it is to be gone, it's better to be back. Sometimes I suppose the opposite is also true. At any rate I am back, and happy to be so. The summer, defined here as vacation season, is over.

Hanging out with my grandmothers the past week entailed a decent amount of time spent watching the Olympics, an alternately intriguing and appalling affair.

Intriguing, because some people have gotten shockingly good at some odd things. Teenage girls busting out acrobatics that I dismiss as fanciful when I see them in video games. People moving at impossible speeds. And it does warm some hidden patriotic organ of mine somehow to know that an American swam the fastest, even if I never attached any importance to the activity before and probably won't again, except maybe four years from now.

Appalling, because I find myself watching network television again, and all of my mechanisms for surviving that environment have atrophied beyond recovery. Was I really able to sit through six commercials at a stretch when I was a younger man? I am not what I used to be.

Now that things are boring again, maybe there will be time to do things worth writing about.

Summertime, and the livin' is crazy

Summer is a crazy time. On Wednesday night I got back to Maryland from Cape Cod, by way of a layover in Philadelphia. On Sunday I'm leaving again to go on a tour of my grandmothers in the Carolinas. In all this I'm trying to find time to work--to work work, mind you--and also to write.

I didn't finish my 12 Dancing Princesses story, which I'll just call "12" for now until I come up with something better. That sort of diligence didn't really seem in the spirit of the vacation I was taking, but I'll keep at it. I actually think this story will be cool when I finish it. I like it.

Over the last six weeks I've been having a Kafkaesque experience with Maryland's state health insurance plan. It's not such a great story in the telling. The upshot is that the enrollment department's game plan is apparently to tell me my paperwork is out of date and make me fill it out again, and repeat, until (I guess) I give up or die. So I am currently, technically, uninsured.

So between being out of town and knowing that I'll have to sell my kidneys if I break my arm, I haven't done much judo lately. I can console myself by watching it on the Olympics, although that itself is a strange experience--NBC, assuming nobody in America cares about judo (I guess), has left most of the feeds raw. But I can be excited, at least, by the news that an American has finally won a judo gold medal. I can also look forward to picking through NBC's three-hour feed to watch that happen.

I have now watched The Dark Knight Rises twice since I last posted about it. It was a very good movie but did not flirt with greatness like its immediate forebear did. I am satisfied. Now I can start devoting my anticipation to The Hobbit, which I hear has now been racked out to three movies. No doubt there will be more to say on that.