What's Up With Ichabod
You would think, this being the weekend after Thanksgiving, that I would regale you with stories about my family's Thanksgiving dinner. The thing is, nothing really happened. It's not that it wasn't fun to see everyone, especially Aunt Gail and Uncle Dave. Not everything happened that I wanted, but it was a nice dinner with the relatives, complete with a cornucopia of vegetable dishes.
However, I took a nice long break from work, and it was great. I got a lot of work done. Not work on my roleplaying game, but that's in abeyance anyway (is it me, or am I just spewing forth with a perfluidity of multisyllabic verbiage?). It looks like I'm going to lose over $10,000 this year, plus taxes, which makes printing a roleplaying game as self-advertisement seem kind of stupid. Maybe if I could convince myself that I'd break even. We'll see.
I did do some work on it. I came up with a completely new dice mechanic, that isn't even a target number system. Using this mechanic would of course require completely rewriting all of the rules, so I think I'll just stick it on a back shelf somewhere in the back of my convaluted mind.
What I did that really struck me was breathing life back into my writing hobby. I started work on my novel again, but it's no longer a novel. Why should it be? The story I was telling wasn't big enough for a novel. So I will tell the story as it needs to be told, and not expand it needlessly just to fill a novel.
Isn't that what is wrong with the fantasy literature of today anyway? With a few notable exceptions, authors are taking stories that deserve a novel, or maybe even less, and filling them out so that they can write a trilogy. It's gotten to the point where one of the best selling series is a never ending story where nothing ever happens.
So I am working on fiction once again. I will even clean up my Old Ben story and post it on this site. When I am done with the story I am working on now, I will post it on this site. But be patient. Fiction is only my hobby, and meanwhile I am working full time, designing and attempting to publish games, searching for a meaningful long-term heterosexual relationship, and working on my primary hobby: this web site.
And since it is the weekend after Thanksgiving, allow me to thank God for giving me a second chance back in 1988; so that I could find the error of my ways for myself, and change my life into the one I have today.
Score: 134 - 87 - 4.
Last Updated 11/28/1999
Created 11/28/99