Revenge of the Gamer

Its been a while since I’ve found a video game worth playing.  Fallout 3 was amazing, but it was also amazingly short and I finished it in under a week.  Since then I’ve looked endlessly for something else to play.

I even went so far as to re-activate my WoW account, though I couldn’t get back into the game.  I’ve done the raiding grind, which was fun but has gotten old.  More recently I did the pvp grind.  That was more rewarding especially at the highest level of play, and I really enjoyed it.  It just requires too much time and there simply aren’t enough battlegrounds to keep my interest.  I’ve been playing Arathi Basin, Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch for for years and they’ve just gotten old. 

I cancelled my account again in June and since then I’ve spent a lot of time on Netflix and at the gym.  The latter has been pretty rewarding as I’ve started losing more weight.  Forty more pounds and I’m back to high school shape!

Anyway, two weeks ago Christine badgered me into renewing my Everquest 2 account.  I originally tried the game in late beta and just after release.  At the time I had a blast and ran a large RP guild on the Antonia Bayle server called Whispers of the Damned.  It lasted for about eight months, but we ran out of content in the game and I decided to move to WoW.

Now that I’ve come back I’m shocked.  There is a ton of new content.  The game has been streamlined and overhauled, and is a lot more fun than it once was.  I rolled a new coercer and have already gotten him up to 44th level.  Quite an accomplishment, at least compared to how long it took to level before.

Quite by accident a couple of friends of mine (Luke & Heather) also came back to the game within days of me.  They even rolled on the same server, although we hadn’t talked about it and neither side knew the other was playing.

As a result I’m having a blast with a game for the first time in a while.  I recommend EQ2 for anyone who hasn’t tried it, particularly because they have a free fifteen day trial.  If you like roleplay, decorating your own house and more challenging content than WoW can offer give it a shot.  I’m having a blast and I think you will too!

The Quest for Publication

My writing has been going well too.  I submitted Night of Black blood and The Tree of Blood to the Dragonmount Anthology, and am waiting to hear back from them.  All four sections of The End of All Things have been sent to Palladium.  The feedback so far has been favorable, and I’m hoping I’ll see the whole thing published over the next year.

I have a few more short stories I want to churn out, but they’ve been put on hold for the time being.  I finally started writing The Bond of Jhordil, and now that I’ve started I can’t stop.  I’m belting over 2-5k words a day, and am already up to sixty pages after about a week and a half.  Since I already have the story written in my head its just leaping onto the page.

The material is good, though of course it needs work.  It feels a little barebones and needs more detail added.  That will come in time of course.  The important thing is that the rough draft is moving along far more quickly than I could have hoped.  If I maintain this pace I should have the rough draft completed by the end of January.  Wish me luck!

The Exalted Game

My Exalted campaign is still in full swing, and we even added a fourth player recently (an old friend of mine named Chris Pomeroy).  We’ve missed a few sessions for various reasons, but we’ve had six full sessions so far.  It looks like we should be able to play for the next several weeks in a row without interruption, which should help strengthen the game.

I managed to get past the training camp debacle (that’s what I get for using a published adventure), and have the next major story arc lined up for the players. 

That’s the good news!  The bad news is that my interest has waned some.  I’m still putting together the best sessions I can and will continue to do so, but my OCD is really getting in the way.  When I do something I tend to do it whole heartedly, and right now that means focusing everything I have on the Faelands novel.

I have so much more world building to do, and to be honest I love the process.  Its so much fun to discover details of the nations, gods and creatures that inhabit the world.  Its also necessary if I want to do the novel justice, because I need know how all the pieces fit together before I can write about it.

Anyway, I know this is a short post and I’ll try to get up another one by the end of the week.  Back to the novel!

If you’ve read some of my previous posts you know that I grew up very poor.  I still remember climbing into the back of a moving truck when I was eight to fetch a piggy bank so that we could have dinner that evening.   Many people give me horrified looks when they hear that I had weeds growing through the floor in my room. 

I wouldn’t change that part of my life for anything.  It instilled in me an appreciation and understanding of the value of money.  When you have none everything you own becomes precious.  I learned the value of hard work at a very young age, and that taking care of my possessions was important.  If my bike was stolen or a toy got broken there was no replacing it, because that took money.

Since my parents couldn’t afford to give me an allowance I needed to make my own money.  When I was ten years old I went and got myself a job delivering papers.  Oddly, I never even considered asking my parents before doing it.  I just went out and took the job. 

At first they were against it, but after I made my case they decided to let me keep it.  How could I learn responsibility if I wasn’t given some of my own?  They were forced to agree.

The paper route only paid a few dollars a week, and in hindsight was definitely more trouble than it was worth.  In additon to delivering the papers I had to go door to door collecting money from people, which was pretty intimidating for a ten year old.  It taught me alot.

By the time I was twelve the paper route was no longer paying enough to buy the roleplaying books and dice I wanted.  I knew I needed to make more money, but not too many people will hire a twelve year old so I was left with few options.  Fortunately, I was going through puberty and it afforded me exactly the opportunity I was looking for. 

We had a local bookstore in the shopping center not far from my house.  Every week I was in there buying novels and I remember the place well. I discovered Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance and the Dragonbone Chair in that little store.

I also discovered a rack that held adult magazines, but I knew the guy behind the counter would never let me buy one.  I blame the raging hormones for what happened next.  Since I couldn’t buy the magazines I decided to steal them.

To do this I needed a plan.  I carried a massive sachel over my shoulder that was designed to hold about fifty newspapers, and by the time I got to the bookstore every day it was nearly empty.  I’d walk in and give the guy behind the counter a free newspaper.  He was very grateful and would immediately crack it open.  As soon as that happened he was oblivious to the world around him.

I crept over to the rack and grabbed a fist full of magazines and shoved them in my bag.  He didn’t notice.  Pulling the latest Dragonlance book off the shelf I walked up to the counter bold as you please and paid for my book with the pile of stolen magazines safely stowed in my bag.  The man never noticed.

For a twelve year old a stack of Playboys has a magical quality to them.  At that point in your life you are just discovering the opposite sex, and is really all you think about for the next ten years or so.  I was no exception and I loved my new stash.

I quickly realized I could take a few magazines a month without anyone the wiser, and that’s exactly what I did.  As my collection grew I realized other boys in my class were also going through puberty.  They wanted to see naked women just as badly as I did.

So I brought a stack of these magazines to school, and quietly spread the word through my seventh grade class that I had something special to sell.  Seven or eight boys eagerly coughed up a week’s worth of lunch money for each magazine, and all of a sudden I was pulling in over $50 a week from my ill gotten porn.

I was ecstatic!  Not only was I providing a valuable service to hormonally charged boys, but I was making great money doing it. 

Of course word got around and eventually the girls found out.  Suddenly a lot of glares were shot my way every day, but I didn’t care.  I had money!  Then one of the girls told a teacher, and the next thing I knew I was being dragged out of class to have my locker searched.

The tore it upside down but couldn’t find a single dirty magazine, but as luck would have it I’d already sold my entire stash that day.  They tried to get me to crack and admit to selling them, but my father taught me at a young age never to give up until you are sure you’ve lost.  I kept a stone face said I wasn’t sure what the girl had been talking about and went about my merry way.

Unfortunately while I wasn’t actually caught it did scare away most of my clients, so I had to move on to another scam to earn enough money to buy my novels and roleplaying books.  Still, out of all of them this was certainly my favorite and not just because it was my first!

Well, I finally finished the Yuri novel.  I gave it one last edit this weekend, and have submitted it to White Wolf.  Now its a waiting game.  I don’t expect them to publish it, but anything could happen I suppose.

I’ve also sent off quite a few things to the Rifter, and I should see a steady stream of published material from them over the next year.  Now I’ve moved on to other original short stories aimed at publications like the Dragonmount Anthology, and Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.

At the same time I’ve been putting work into The Bond of Jhordil.  I’ve finished writing up the two story arcs that will form the novel. I’m adding character bios slowly but surely, and am starting to flesh out chapter outlines.

Its a radically different process from how I wrote the Yuri novel, but by being much more organized I’m hoping I can do what Orson Scott Card did with Ender’s Game.  He prepped everything, and then wrote the actual novel in just a few weeks.

The writing of the novel will take me longer than that, but if I have the framework in place I think I can get the novel written in two to three months of solid writing.  I’ll kick off the actual writing on November first, which puts a full rough draft at completion somewhere between February and April.

I’m still floored at all I’ve accomplished this year, but it feels like I have a long way to go.  Thank you to those who’ve shown me so much encouragement!  It helps knowing I’m not alone!

Earlier this week I had the chance to do an interview for d20Sapphire, who is trying to learn more about the history of women in the gaming industry.  Please take a moment to read it here, and give her some encouragement.

I don’t know about you, but I’m happy to see the growth of women in the hobby.  I try to support anyone who wants to increase that trend!

Ever since I’ve been a kid I’ve avoided most sports.  Ten years of little league instilled a hatred of baseball, and the idea of getting tackled ruled out football.  My high school didn’t have a soccer team.  I enjoyed basketball, but was never more than average at it.  That meant the only sport I participated in during high school was track.  As much as I enjoyed it even I admit that running circles isn’t much of a sport.

As I got older I had a chance to play games like Lazer Tag, Q-Zar and Airsoft.  All of them were a blast, but the first two went out of business and the last was difficult to find games for.  By the time I moved down to Los Angeles I’d forgotten about all three.

My first job in Los Angeles was at a mortgage company called U.F.M.C.  This was during the height of the refi boom, and we were doing over a hundred million dollars in loans every month.  In an of itself the dollar amount wasn’t that impressive, but the fact that we were doing it with less than fifteen people definitely was.

So much so that the head of our office decided to throw us a team building event.  We were given a number of choices, but we decided on paintball.  About fifteen of us headed out to a local course and shot each other up with paint for most of the day.  I have rarely had so much fun, and fell in love immediately.

Being a young mortgage exec with a high salary I bought up a ridiculous amount of paintball gear, a very nice gun and every other little accessory I could find.  I was at the field nearly every week, and much to my surprise I found that I was very good at the game.  For all of you geeks out there the skills you build up in first person shooters transfer seamlessly into paintball.  If you’re good at video games chances are you’ll rock on the field. 

Living in Los Angeles I was used to seeing stars all the time.  From Sylvester Stalone to Clive Barker to Will Smith you tripped over them wherever you went.   One of those stars happened to play paintball at the same field I did.

Martin Lawrence rolled up in a black escalade with two friends.  Both were over six feet and looked ready to murder anyone who even approached ‘Mr. Lawrence’, and most of us were content to gawk from a little ways away.

When the day’s games started I ended up on the opposite team as Martin Lawrence, and most of us groaned in anticiption of getting slaughtered.  Martin and his two goons were decked out with some of the nicest equipment I’d ever seen, including top of the line guns.

Imagine our surprise to learn just how badly Martin Lawrence sucked.  He couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn and our team ended up winning the first two games easily.

In the third game I ended up behind a barricade with a clear shot on Lawrence’s hiding spot.  I waited patiently and when he popped up over it I let loose a torrent of paintballs that splattered the hell out of his mask.  Most hit him square in the mouth, and for those who don’t play let me explain how horrible that is. 

Most people play with their mouth open, and the paint tastes like sour milk.  It’s also nearly impossible to get the taste out of your mouth.  I covered Martin with enough paint to fill his mouth and block his eyesight.  I was elated!  I’d shot Martin Lawrence in the face.

Unfortunately I forgot about the goons.  They turned their high end guns my way and I turned to run like a scared little girl.  Before I could make it more than a few feet pain blossomed all over my back, ass and legs.  I was hit so many times sitting was impossible and sleeping on my back didn’t happen for a week.

The refs called out both goons for shooting me long after I’d surrendered, and they spent the rest of the day glaring at me.  I never got another chance at Martin Lawrence, but when I left at the end of the day I was ok with that.  Shooting him even once still makes me grin.

It took me weeks to heal, but every last bruise was worth it just for the bragging rights!