I did not post yesterday, so I'll have to make this one fairly substantial and give you two of the things that I'm grateful for.
I'm grateful for the rain. We got a pretty good rainstorm here yesterday while we were grocery shopping, and while it wasn't the most convenient time for it, it was good to be out in. Ryan says that the reason people dislike getting wet is because they have the expectation of being dry. Get rid of the expectation, you learn to be OK with being out in the rain. I hereby submit that this is the most Zen thing he's ever said. :)
Rain on the rooftops and the sidewalks always makes me feel comfortable and mellow. I'm a lot better about being rained on, but I still think it's best to enjoy it indoors. ;) There are so many things to be done; book reading, coffee drinking, lounging, snuggling, that sort of thing. It's OK to be leisurely during a storm if you want, and here in California there really aren't that many times where it's OK to be leisurely.
I'm also grateful for music, in general. There are a lot of ways one triggers memory, but music is always one of the most powerful for me. A conversation about Garth Brooks albums puts me in a very specific headspace; being in high school, staying up late to do homework and play card games that I had invented for myself. Cold winters sleeping in a living room that was converted so that my sister could have her own bedroom, getting up early and listening to WPOC while reading some book or another. Matchbox Twenty puts me in that space between high school and college, where I was working two mall jobs and hopping onto FurryMUCK from the Towson Public Library. Third Eye Blind puts me at St. Mary's University of Maryland, walking towards poetry readings and Pagan Student Union meetings with my battered Walkman. So forth and so on. It's another particularly soothing influence on me that I'm really glad that I have in my life. Reminiscing on all of the country I used to listen to really makes me want to buy Dwight Yoakam and The Mavericks, and Mary Chapin Carpenter, Pam Tillis, Diamond Rio...
Maybe I should stop now while I still have a bit of musical respect left amongst my friends. :)
Anyway, I'm feeling a bit better from the other day, where I was just down from...calling everything into question. It's a necessary part of the process for me, but my ego takes a few hits every time. I really shouldn't take myself as seriously as I do.
Most of my writing energy is currently being taken up by my Dungeons and Dragons game, run on every other Tuesday. It's been a blast so far; I've got a really great group that keeps me on my toes constantly, with a very wide range of interests and abilities. Right now I'm trying to fit all of the puzzle pieces together more or less, so that the characters get comfortable with each other and the players all get comfortable with me, and vice versa. Through little tests here and there, I think I'm getting a better handle on who everyone is and how they like to play. The players have been constantly surprising, which just rocks. It throws me for a loop every time, and they're not letting me get away with things they don't agree with.
The story is taken from my last D+D game in Arkansas, which did not end very well. There were a lot of things I could have done better with that one, but the main thing was making sure to pay attention to the players and why they were there. I think that, when push came to shove, my running style was just incompatible with the playing style of a few players; they were looking for a different experience from what I was giving, and I don't think I was sensitive enough to that fact. This time around I'm trying to be really careful about determining what people want, and finding ways to give it to them. I *hope* that I'm doing an all right job with it. Everyone seems to be pretty satisfied, which is the important thing.
The plot begins a bit before it did in my Arkansas game; the players are converging in the capital city of Splendor to celebrate the new floating castle constructed by the High King and Queen. They come from all different parts of the kingdom, from all walks of life; a barbarian and a dwarf from the frozen tundra of Morein, a bard seeking his fortune away from his homelands in the Duchy of Summer, a mage whose family sent him away from the southern duchy of Feingold to study magic, and an elf who comes from the lands of the Eldertree. They happen to be staying at the same inn, and through circumstances beyond their control, get roped into being dragon-dancers for the big parade.
The dragon, once it reaches the castle site, unleashes a missile at the castle instead of the fireworks display they had been told would happen, and the party finds themselves unwitting accomplices in an assassination attempt. They're now in hiding with a mage who's saved them from certain death (treason isn't to be taken lightly), but whom they don't trust at all -- especially when he gives away a secret the bard has been harboring for sometime now. This last game ended with some peace being restored with a reluctant apology, though there's still a lot of...mistrust all around. That's certainly fun, and it was oddly thrilling to watch the party unite in their hatred of this particular NPC. ;)
Anyway, they're in these strange woods where all kinds of odd things happen; a very strange wolf attacked our barbarian already, leaving the party with a deep-seated fear that he's been infected with lycanthropy. There's a wild elven child as well, ghostly dancing lights, a bear and...other things. The party has been getting information through their bard and mage about exactly what kind of woods they're dealing with, and they're a bit ill-at-ease. Another thing I really want to be sensitive about is not throwing in too much too soon; in the Arkansas game things unfolded a little too rapidly and the party got hopeless as a result, which is one of the things that lead to its dissolution. I do trust these guys to handle whatever I throw at them, but I also need to learn the value of giving them only one thing at a time.
Multiple story arcs, I've found, don't work as well in games as they do in other episodic forms of storytelling, like television. :) I thought that giving characters a "B-story" that provides clues to the over-arcing plot or a personal character arc might be a good thing to work in, but it tends to leave the party torn on which path to take and makes them feel overwhelmed. I think there's a way to have multiple things going on at once, I just need to be better at signalling what is an interesting tidbit that should be tucked away for later, and what requires immediate attention.
Though, now that I have a bit more time both at work and at home to work on writing things, I'll be trying to (finally) edit some poetry and write short stories. As usual, the less said about this, the better. Though there is an exercise up on
writerrabbit that I'm kind of pleased with. Please go check it out if you've got a free moment.