AND WE ARE BACK!

YAY! and so out of the valley of death I reamerge as a champion of light wreathed in the fires of victory. Actually I just managed to produce 50k words in one month. Though I forgot to turn them into NANO so I didn't get my chintzy pdf certificate. That is sad. Not really I think I deleated the one I got from last yhear. I am weird about keep sakes. What do you want from me? The thing is though is that the story itself isn't finished. I kinda got a little bit lost in the idea of internal monolouges and wandering around and whatnot. Also for a good half of the novel I didn't like it. This isn't anything against the charecters it just took me awhile to get to know them and decide who they were as people. The more I kicked them around the more I started to like them and the more I got used to having them be a part of my inner sea of people. The novel itself is deadful and the writting is unusually stiff and blah blah blah. I keep forgetting to post it up on the internet but it isn't like I have people bugging me for more parts of it so I don't really care where it is. I am going to finish it though, mostly cause I wanna and partly because I feel like I should. Also because writting has once again become a way that I fill my time and now that I have blazed through most of the new COH content I can retain my usual schedual of writting, reading, and et cetera. So I'll finish it. It won't be like the last novel which had a definite end to it because these are people who are forced to go one with life, some forever, and some will grow old and die. The whole point is learning to live the struggle of trying to have an oridnary life and failing utterly.

However, now that the month is over and I am 50k in I can reel it back a bit and write more when I feel like it and less of I HAVE TO which is nice, I am hoping that the quality will improve but I don't paticularly have any airs about that. I am both happy and sad that it is over and I will continue on in a way so that I am more happy about the things rather than less. More happy about the things. See that I am a master of the english language PRAISE ME!

In other news I've been doing more reading. I finnally finnished Light in August which is the first Faulkner book I actually sat down, read, and enjoyed. It worried me though because I didn't really have a whole lot to say about it. I did feel like doing some racial commentary invovling Mr. Brown's name, actually the whole book had rediculouly easy names to mine for paper topics. However, Brown was the only fun one. Highttower to I suppose but not as much. Hightower is a fun charecter though and his ending segement is wierd and would be a lot of fun to kick around for long periods of time. I think I could get some things going with it but for the most part when I closed the book I was pretty much done with it. So I was worried. Am I broken? Do I no longer desire to write papers on the stuff I read? The last thing I really wanted to root around in was the Kindly Ones and good fucking god how do I love that book. I kinda wanna read it again I mean it was like a ball peen hammer to the face, it was brutal in all ways and yet so uncharecteristicly gental AND FUCKING WEIRD! There were midgets and gay nazies what more could you possibly want? Sex I suppose but whatever it isn't important. So I was starting to wonder if I should close this chapter of my life and move on. Nope. I just got doe reading "The Informers" by Brent Easton Ellis. I had two reactions one there were all sorts of things I wanted to try and write about it, but I knew that if I were to do so I would have to flip the book over and read it again. I started to do just that actually but then I stopped when I realized that I have a shiny NEW book to read and I really wanted it in my mind right now.

The point is that the book made me wanna write. I made me wanna write a lot. It made me wanna write my own book, and it made me wanna write papers. It made me wanna drag out the sublime and smear it all over this book in an attempt to unlock some secrets and I know it would work too because I got that excitiment in my gut that happens when you are on to something and time seemed to slow down and everything goes all fuzzy while my brain makes all these connections all over the place that I know works. I got dizzy and excited and I didn't do anything for over an hour except sit and think of the possibilites. Then I realized that it is okay and I just didn't really want to talk about Faulkner. Great guy don't get me wrong but he isn't who I wanna be when I grow up.

Moving on so I decided before NANO got started as I was hunting around for topics that I needed to write more in my life because I really really shouldn't be having this much competition over what the hell I am going to say while I force myself to write crap for a month. Like this really really shouldn't be a problem, topic selection should be a problem, or maybe getting other projects out of the way should be a problem but not I have 5 different things I wanna write and I can only write one of them. THAT should not be a problem. That is the wrong problem to have. So in the name of coming up with solutions to the thinbgs that bother me I will keep writting. YEAH! Man I wish all my problems were that easy to fix. Write now I am going to tackle two projects at the same time and I plan on doing some siginifigant amount of writting at least three days a week, possibly closer to four. The first thing I wanna do is finnish the novel I've started. I'll make it a coherent literary unit and shelve it until forever.

The next thing I also want to do is to revive NA25. NANO has shown me that profiction is possible when I set my mind to it. When I set my mind to it all sorts of things are possible like being awesome. What kept tripping me up on NA25 is the concerns I kept having about the system. I kept wanting the system to do certain things and as a result I wouldn't write any of the game background. This is retarded. Why I kept doing things like this I do not know but they ANGER me. Ergo I will stop and write up everything I need and then when I got all the extra stuff done I can start the system. I realize right now I am in a great place in terms of finding and getting feed back from a large willing playgroup. So I should get moving on it before things change.

One thing I really wanna do is drame the game in such a way so that it is quite and easy to pick up its background information. I am taking many cues form the forge G/N/S theory of roleplaying but I plan on producing a more cohesive product rather than a game that can only really be played one way a limited number of times. The setting and the rules will remain closely interwined but I believe that the setting can be there to service the rules rather than being sort of tacked onto them. I'll fiddle more with this concept in a little bit for now I think it is best to get started on getting the setting bundled together into a playable shape.

The other thing I want to bring to the table with this game is the idea that players are really only willing or able to donate so much time to reading a book, or more impontly only so much money. Also there is the important consideration that the main way this book is going to be distriubted is in .pdf format. TO that end I want to have the vast majority of the game's setting components to be presented in the format of a hand out. That is, I want them to be one page, single facing, no columns. This way a gm can easily select what informaiton he wants to present to the players in the forms of player packs, or her can give the players information on any of the unfamiliar setting elements in a quick easy to read summary. This way everyone can be on the same page in terms of setting elements and everyone can spend more time playing the game rather than introducing it.

As much as I enjoy running lesser known games like Asylum, SLA Industries, Obsidian, or even Toon getting all the remavent, fun/important chuncks of setting information rooted into everyone's heads takes work. A lot of work. If I can make this task easier then why the hell not eh? SO I want to get started on that. Also breaking the book up in this way will make it easier for me to organize, format information, and present to the audience. For now though it isn't doing any good if it is going to just sit in my head. So out it will come over the course of the next couple of months or so. It involves world building. I LOVE world building it is like my favorite thing to do.

As a side thing I would love to get mutants and masterminds back up and running again but I would need to flesh out more of the game world for that to happen. That's cool though because I actually really like that that game world alot. It has all sorts of elements to it that are really fun to deal with. I paticularly like the idea of the schister lawyer who specializes in getting super hero drop offs out of jail. After all these people certainly weren't given any sort of due process, and my players first reactions was to get the lawyer but it wouldn't ever be that simple.

I truely hope that Grant Morrison tackles this idea in Batman Inc but somehow I think it is to "small scale" for what he is planning much to our loss.

And okay then I think I am done here. For now. Oh and of course I want to do this more, which means I am going to have to find some time somewhere. I'll do it though. Don't you worry. I will. Or not whatever.