Out of the Jars of Babes

My favorite distraction now has an expiry date. It’s very sad. I hope they do find some ways to maintain the community and the adventuring spirit. I also understand shorter term corporate goals trump such ideals.

I spent a lot of time there, and none here. It also cut a bit into my offline creative writing time. In some ways the end of City of Heroes will help me. Of course, I should have gotten rid of the bathwater before the baby.

My characters there were echoes of the characters in my stories. Visualising them, and telling their tales in little 1000-character biographies, helped me cut to the essence of the characters. Mostly it was procrastination. Seeing my characters every day felt like progress. Now for some real progress. So here’s to my patheon, may they enjoy their novelisation as much as I enjoyed their massively multiplayer online game existence.

Another year, and another Thank Godfrey It’s Over party to celebrate those who managed to poop a novel in a month. Despite failing to finish myself, the finale gathering was strangely cathartic. I feel invigorated to write more, about anything, albeit slower than November’s 12-novels-per-year pace. There will likely be workshops coming up, led by the German-smalls-clad Sarah Coldheart (progenitor of this article title) that I’ll attend if at all possible. More than anything else, I need to write more. I’ve probably churned out a million words in the last six months working as an region editor for a technical publication, and two or three more words in corporate emails, but none of that prepares me for what I am trying to write here. Which is something even better than a Garfield movie. So I desperately need practice.

Now, I’m sure both of my readers would prefer to hear about the TGIO party than my paltry 15,000 Nanowrimo words of winsome, so I’ll stick with that. Let’s see… I won a prize! For… turning up. I got an egg-headed Animax ninja! The top of his head separates like a breakfast egg, but it doesn’t seem to have any purpose except to give him a reason for having angry eyes. A good enough reason. I also managed to correctly recall the hyphen in the website name of the organizers, which scored me a key-ring. Not bad performance at this high-powered, winner-take-all, megalithic event. It even had a steampunk cake! Well, a mechanic cake. With chocolate screws, nuts, spanners and a set of pliers! For making chocpunk things, I guess. Twas the source of much worse innuendo, which I guess should be expected from a collection of authors. Writing what sells.

My time to write something lurid then. I will write something Singaporean about a hybrid, because someone suggested that might be a good idea. It seems more like an utterly random idea, but it will be good to take a break from Bahn’s tale. I just need to manage my work time a wee bit better and I’ll get it done. I was in Singapore for all of 10 hours this week, which made the timing of the Nano party even more remarkable. Thanks most of all to my wife for letting me go! Okay, now I go write. This does not count. If this counted, I could just post you some epic stories about mudlogs and rotary tables from my work-related forum. You wouldn’t like that. Trust me.