Heh

I saw that Robert had been afoot and left a bunch of encouraging posts to people. Then I thought, "darn. I didn't get one." Then I thought, "... maybe it's because you haven't posted anything, you dork." :p

(Does anyone else have arguments in the second person in their head? Or am I just strange that way?)

Anyway, so I thought maybe I should write something. Anything. :)

Unfortunately there's not much to report on the writing front. I haven't done a darn thing in relation to any novels. I've fiddled with my outline for the Labor Day novel a bit, but that's about it. Since Robert isn't going to officially enter, I'm not going to bother either. I'll still attempt to write it though. Still holding steady with the Stranger on a Bus idea.

My werewolf game has stalled out for the moment. One of my players (who is also my favorite GM) has vanished, and I don't want to continue until he gets a chance to post something. My other player doesn't seem to mind too much. Theoretically I'll have up to 5 more players, two of which are currently working on character generation (chargen), and three more of which claim to be interested and/or working on something but I have yet to see anything. Three of those are vampires, and two are werewolves.

I've been tinkering with the various plotlines in my mind for other creatures besides werewolves. There's still nothing obvious popping out as a main plot for the vampires, but I suspect I will have something by the time the first guy actually finishes something. Why?

Because he's currently being a major headache. :p He's not happy with the already-generous allotment of stat points and keeps trying to find loopholes into getting more of them. If I don't say no directly, he takes it as a yes. The published books say that there's a max of 7 flaw points, and at the moment he's managed to worm his way up to 15 so that he can buy stuff that he wasn't able to get because I refused to give him more stat points for writing a lengthy backstory.

Mind you, I did mention the possibility of more points for a good quality backstory. However, length and quality are not the same thing. His backstory, although quite lengthy, gave me almost nothing to work with, and in fact attempts to take the game focus and scope way, way way out of what I would enjoy running.

So I said no to that. Now he's trying to get creative with flaw points. Very creative. :p If I actually let him keep all of them, I would be able to come up with enough plots just to screw him on his flaws, and I won't need any external plots at all.

And to think I actually enjoyed running this guy in my freeform Stargate game. *sigh* I know he writes well, and once we start it should (hopefully) be all right, but good lord.

Aside from that, I'm kind of hoping that the other two promised vampires will be more enjoyable to work with. The two potential players are the GMs of another game in which I've signed on to help moderate. So far I haven't started helping with theirs yet. I'm slowly getting up to speed by reading through past threads (it's a very old game, been going almost 2 years now, with nearly 4800 posts). They also strongly recommended that I make a character to play in it as well, so I'm also working on that. I sent them a backstory this morning and haven't heard a response yet.

Meanwhile there's a third werewolf that's almost completed. Then he had visiting family arrive, so he won't be ready to start for at least another week. I'm hoping that by that point, the other two will have reached a point where it would make sense to introduce him.

Timing is an art form in an online game. Players are always popping in and out due to offline crises, or insufficient advanced planning for such things as school starting up. (I'm hoping I don't have any student-aged players; typically they join lots of games early in the semester before any homework sets in, and then suddenly realize that they need to quit everything.) So it's a bit of an art form trying to get the in-game timelines to line up right, so that characters can meet up for appropriate scenes without stalling out the entire game.

In the Stargate game, we pretty much just ignored time entirely. If two parties ran into each other, it didn't matter how much time elapsed for each of the separate groups. They still met up just fine as if they'd had the same amount of time. Also, we played through almost an entire out-of-game year without ever changing days or having anyone go to sleep. After a while people just kind of assumed that "a few days" had occurred between the beginning of the plotline and whenever they were at the time of posting. Even though there were no actual breaks anywhere, ever.

Then Robert mentioned wanting to play a werecat, which would require some slightly different plotlines than what would work for either the werewolves or the vampires. Fortunately, I have a couple that would actually work pretty well as solo plotlines. Now it's just a matter of seeing whether he can get ahold of the right books so he can make a character... unfortunately they're out of print, so once the stocks are gone, they're gone.

There's potential room down the road, too, for some of the other were-creatures - wererats, werespiders, and wereravens in particular. But that's something that would get set up after the vampires do. I need for the city to make sense as a consistent setting first, and that won't happen until after I have a few more vampire backstories to fiddle with. ;)

I really do like the story that's developing. It's very heavily based on the plots of Amulet I - one of the Fortress Launne novels I'm hoping to write in November. Both of the two key characters are going to be in the game - Edward Duchene (as the vampire prince) and Iorli (a werecat). Iorli wasn't originally going to get any screentime, just be a background element, but if I do end up running Robert, he's going to be featured pretty prominently.

Then the rest are additional events and characters that would've reasonably occurred in the same time period, even though they probably wouldn't fit as part of the same novel. (In particular there's a couple of powerful mages.) So the game is helping me think and plan what to do with all of that for the Nano.

There's a bunch of maintenance type things I'm kind of procrastinating as well. Namely, I need to convert it from a Werewolf game to a World of Darkness game that includes more than just werewolves. This would involve setting up more chargen info threads and figuring out how exactly I want to organize everything. I also need to revise my game ad to reflect the changing focus. But right now I'm too annoyed to look at any of it because I have to figure out how to rein in the problem vampire. *sigh*

Other things I'm doing ... playing lots of Diablo 2. The ladder season just reset last week, so everything is once more from scratch. I'm playing low level characters wearing crummy equipment again, and this time I don't have huge throngs of friends ready to donate handmedowns. I used to be a shameless items whore. I accepted anything from anyone, because I was too lazy to do the work to find my own. :p Now I'm the only one left playing so I have to find everything myself.

They also upgraded the software - and the latest version keeps causing my computer to crash. :p Hopefully they'll releaes another patch soon to fix that.

And finally, a friend passed along an interesting website - http://www.psipog.net. It's a fairly large, well-established community of psychics (except they call themselves "psionics"), with the purpose of helping each other learn how to do paranormal things. I read through the "newbies" section, and the intro PDF, and I really like their approach and view. It exactly matches mine. The paranormal abilities are not my religious beliefs. They're separate, and I have always looked at them with a fairly scientific perspective. But I always lump them in with my religious beliefs because it's easier than trying to explain this to others and come across as a nutcase. Now there's a whole site that declares it with confidence. I feel rather vindicated. And I feel like I've come full circle on yet another fairly important aspect of my life.

This has certainly been a year for those. Everything coming together from my first 30 years of being alive. The last puzzle pieces falling into place.

I read through the intro PDF and noted that I can already do most of it. Have been doing those things for decades. In a couple categories, it's almost more of a curse than a blessing to have abilities that I've had to learn how to deal with and turn off when necessary. The difference is that, now, I can finally look at all of it, and look at other people doing the same things, and not get all bent out of shape about whether or not I'm 'special' and 'different' from others. I no longer need to be 'the only one and the very best' in that category. I am no longer a unique cog looking for the one task and place in the Grand Machine of Life where I am uniquely suited to fit, and I am no longer trying to compete. There isn't just one spot. There are many. And even in that many, even if I'm not the very best at a particular thing, I am still uniquely suited to be me.

12 to 6 months ago I was finally understanding what it meant to not be different, what it means to be human, and that it is actually a good thing, not a bad thing, to be the same as everyone else and to not be an oddity. 6 months ago to now, I was coming to terms with the fact that I am an oddity, different from others, and always had been - just as I had suspected all along. Just not in the ways that I was expecting.

Now? Full circles. In all sorts of different paths, all coming together within a single year.

It makes life feel grand again.