That steady march of time is both reassuring and frustrating, I'd say. Years do, indeed, end and sometimes it's a good riddance. The past two years--since March 2020--have been a pretty low-point for me. There are global reasons for that, which most everyone knows and understands, as well as personal reasons. (If you weren't aware of my wife's battle with cancer, you can read my thoughts on it here.) The ending of 2021 has not been any easier, as familial strife has riven the peace.
Not only that, but my personal goal of writing at least half a million words annually continued its meteoric descent into the ground. With my recent obsession of painting miniatures, making (and playing) board games, and occasionally reading something that I'm supposed to, I have purposefully pulled myself away from writing. For a while there, I would sit in the loft of my kids' parkour gym and write for an hour in one of my notebooks while they learned how to do cartwheels and freak out about doing backflips. Lately, however, the errands and responsibilities of being a chauffer dad eroded those chances. Then there's been sickness in the family that prevented us from going to practice, so that hour of writing time evaporated. Of course, I could have found more times to write. I just…didn't care. I don't know that I'll ever 100% stop writing, but I'm definitely burning out on the desire. It's hard to say this "aloud", since all I've ever wanted to do, for as long as I can remember, is to write books. Like years, dreams eventually end. We have to wake up and face the realities of the day. And so I guess I'm finally waking up to this reality: I don't have it in me to be a writer. My skin's too thin, resolve's too weak, my desire's too tepid…whatever it might be, I guess this is my way of tapping out. I'm hoping that by trying to convince myself that I no longer have a goal of being a writer, of somehow providing for my family's needs via the written word, I will be able to rekindle an interest in writing. This is something that I tried to teach my students when I was a creative writing teacher: You have to understand what your goal really is as a writer. Is it to write? Is it to world build? Is it to edit and tidy up and fix broken parts? Is it to invent something new? Is it to share stories with friends and families and maybe some randos on the internet? Is it to simply say, "I wrote a book"? Is it to get a book out somehow, regardless of how? Is it to have your book sitting on the shelf, surrounded by your alphabetical peers? There are lots of different ways of being a writer, and all of them are equally valid. For me, I wanted that last one: I wanted to be a traditionally published author. That was my goal, that was my plan. And, like it has done for so many millions of others--billions of others, perhaps--COVID has taken that from me. Not only are my chances of finding an agent and getting the book sold diminishing daily (not even counting the fact that I haven't sent out a query in over a year), but the market is getting more crowded while readers are thinner on the ground than ever before. (According to a 2019 finding, almost an entire quarter of the adult population of the United States doesn't even read one book annually.) And while there's plenty of nuance to sus out about that issue, the main point is that the competition for books is harsher than it's ever been. And of all the words I can use to describe myself, "competitive" isn't one of them. I'm not interested in besting others. So there isn't a really strong drive to try to get myself into a position where I could achieve what I'm after. It's been really rough on me as I've been fiddling with this problem. I tried NaNoWriMo this past year and gave up halfway through the month. The vivid colors of writing have faded, as it were, and I couldn't find the emotional and mental energy I needed to put my butt in the chair and fingers on the keyboard for it anymore. Part of that was my own lack of passion. The last time I was really excited by one of my own stories was 2018. That's almost four years in the past now; that's a long time to not be truly motivated by a desire to tell stories. You can't draw from a well that's dry, after all. I've stumbled along for the past few years, hoping that it was just a rough patch or a phase or some other issue. Then COVID hit and my life crumbled at the edges; then the breast cancer arrived and fractured my life at the core. Raising a teenager, trying to convince myself that I still love teaching, battling my own depression, watching my wife struggle in ways that I can't help with…it all took its toll on my creative acuity and the once-sharp blade of storytelling desire dulled. I don't know what could possibly whet it, either. I feel a touch of remorse at this, as if I'm letting someone down by saying, "I'm done." Does it undo all of what I've taught students over the years? Am I now a hypocrite for thinking that I don't want to keep pushing? That I'm tired? I don't know the answers to those questions; as Pi says in Life of Pi, "Why can't reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there's so little fish to catch?" I can't answer so many of the questions that I've asked myself that it's more than a little maddening. Since COVID struck, I've had to turn to all of my coping mechanisms so often that they've become my living mechanisms. I don't have a way to find balance since everything I'm doing seems to be utilizing every trick I use just to keep moving forward. As a result, the loss of my writing muse rankles even more. I didn't realize that I could only write if things were stable. I thought that it was a deeper part of myself, rather than a fair-weather friend. Yet here we are. I've unofficially left my writing group--a group that stuck together, in one form or another, for over a decade. Another casualty to the coronavirus. I see their posts on Facebook and I can't do more than read what they're talking about. I don't chime in, I don't assert myself. I don't know what to do about any of it. I don't know how to navigate the difficult world that we now live in, one with political fault-lines embedded in the precautions we take, the decisions we make. Do I say to my group, "Hey, I'd love to get together again, but only if y'all are vaccinated!" If I do, whom does that alienate? Why do I even have to wonder about that? These sorts of tumults are another symptom of my writing sickness: I can't get out of my head long enough to become immersed elsewhere. Too much of my brain is clamoring with chaos and there's just no room for that creative space. That isn't to say that I'm not being creative. Most of my word output this month has been as I've written up the rules for a board game. I'm over 10,000 words into the rulebook (which, for obvious reasons, is not what the final draft of the rules would look like) and still enjoying that process. I paint, drum, guitar, and play games. I still do things that I appreciate and scratch a particular itch. It's just…I don't know if I'm ever going to do that with my words again. At the beginning of 2021, I taught a D&D Winterim with a coworker. As is common in almost all of my Winterims, the big assignment of the students is to make their own version of whatever it is that we're studying. When I taught Lord of the Rings, I had the students make the beginnings of their own language. When I taught video game theory, they created a concept of what video game they would like to make, had they the time and expertise. When I taught D&D, they made their own TTRPGs.
I usually find it enjoyable to make a similar product while the students are working. It isn't always very good (my Quidditch game from the Harry Potter Winterim was an interesting, albeit very flawed version of multi-leveled chess), but it's always really fun. Last year…er, rather, eleven months ago…I started making my own version of a TTRPG that was heavily inspired by Bloodborne. (I had finished the game for the second time just a few weeks before and it was big in my brain…still is, as a matter of fact.) I wanted a game that had the same sort of frenetic kind of action, one where the dice rolling happened simultaneously and frequently. I started it off as simply a Bloodborne RPG, using the names of weapons and locations from the video game as my starting point. Eventually, I pushed away from the streets of Yharnam and instead created my own city wallowing in its own destruction, a place called Drimdale. I concocted an interconnected introductory campaign in a single location to help me conceptualize what the game would feel like and play like, only to hit a bit of a roadblock part way through the summer. Maybe, I thought, I'm looking at this from the wrong medium. I started writing a novel set in Drimdale (it was part of my abortive attempt at winning NaNoWriMo this year), I tried to write lore and a catalogue of background information…it just wasn't working. While I really like what I've made, it wasn't gelling as it was supposed to. As the year has worn on, a new hobby emerged: Miniature painting. This is also directly influenced by Bloodborne, as I bought the board game of the video game from a Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately (or not, depending on how I look at it), I "accidentally" bought a good $200 worth of the game--with four expansions on top of the base game. They contain dozens of miniatures of creatures from the game, and I quickly ended up spending several orders of magnitude more on painting the figurines than in playing the game. (I still play it, occasionally, and I have a lot more fun with the painted minis than I do the unpainted ones.) As my hobby time and money started flowing into this new exercise, I picked up a lot of interest in wargames (Warhammer, as cool and robust and deep as it is, can't justifiably fit into my budget--though some of the Age of Sigmar and Necromunda stuff is just so tempting). Nothing was quite right for me, though, despite some really cool looking things. Then, on Black Friday, two things happened: Miniature Market had a massive clearance sale on its Wrath of Kings stock, and Amazon was selling one of the most highly-rated board games of all time, Gloomhaven, for about $80. I had received a $200 Amazon gift card from a student's orthodontist's office (I don't know who the student was, but I'm flattered that they thought of me) that was burning a hole in my pocket. What better way to use some of that unexpected money than buying a new board game that I would likely only end up playing by myself? I'll give another post about Wrath of Kings later (once I've actually managed to, y'know, play it), and this isn't a review about Gloomhaven (which I'm liking mightily). The point is, this all converged in making me want to revisit some of the core mechanics that I made for Drimdale. I'm still trying to figure out how to get the flavor and theme of my own board game to stick right, but the modification of my TTRPG ideas into a modular, tile- and dice-based board game is coming along really well. I've created a bunch of small cards, a player mat, the tiles, and a few thousand words of rules. I've even used my 3D printer to give me more tactile, more interesting versions of some of the terrain. (It makes a big difference when you can see a pile of stones and think, Hey, that's a pile of stones, rather than a red cube and think, What is that supposed to be again? Oh yeah. A pile of stones.) Utilizing a lot of the miniatures that I've acquired over the past dozen months--including the stuff that I've 3D printed as well as purchased for Gloomhaven or the Bloodborne Board Game--I've cobbled together a fairly strong prototype. It's far from finished: I want to have five classes with different abilities depending on the gender the player selects, as well as a card system to help mitigate the randomness of the dice-rolling process, and a host of other issues. However, it's basically playable in its reduced form right now. In fact, I played it with my son yesterday. We started at about 12:30 and didn't end until 2:45. I hadn't realized that I'd created a multi-hour experience. More than that, though, is the fact that it was actually fun. I mean, I know that's the point of a board game--of games in general--but this isn't the first time that I've tried creating something like this, only to be severely disappointed in my prototype. Part of what really speaks to me--and, indeed, is the core inspiration for the combat mechanic--is that I get to use a lot of the dice I've collected over the years since I started playing D&D. And by "a lot" I mean that, at the two-player minimum level of play, you need to have approximately 25 dice of different types. There are times when you're holding entire fistfuls of dice and dropping them on the table, then picking through them like a prospector seeking out some golden nuggets. This game was designed for dice-goblins (you know who you are) and fully justifying having spent way too much on plastic polyhedrons throughout the course of one's life. It's also fun because you get to play as your own character, but also as the enemies who challenge your opponent. (It was originally thought of as a co-op game, but that possibility no longer really fits…I think. We'll see.) So your turn involves making life harder for your opponent while struggling to win the game yourself. It means that turns are quick, and you're never long from rolling dice again. And again. And again. The fact that there are still a lot of kinks and bugs to iron out is frustrating only in the sense that it's hard to playtest something solo. My son is a good sport and I think he really enjoys the game…but he's also 11. He has other, more digitally based things to do. So I often find myself sitting on the couch, staring at slips of poorly-trimmed pieces of paper, a notebook with so many contradictory notes scrawled into it that it's essentially incomprehensible, trying to devise what I actually want from a Trap Card, and always thinking…Who's going to play this? That is, of course, the wrong thing to consider at this point. Having almost fully given up on creative writing because I got so enamored of the idea of publishing that almost all desire to write has evaporated, I don't want to accidentally poison my passion for this game by trying to think that it will become more than what it is. Then again, there's a strong motivation in wanting to see one's internal vision become external and tangible. The dream of seeing the game fully realized with artwork, miniatures (original ones, rather than stuff cribbed from other sources), and polished to the point that other people might enjoy it? That's a powerful dream. I've learned, though, that powerful dreams can sometimes overpower reality, and that discrepancy can really hurt. So I'm trying to manage my expectations. Still…it is a lot of fun. |
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