If you had asked me about Neil Gaiman before recent horrific news broke about his abusiveness, I would have said I was a fan.
Not a huge fan, but a fan. I liked The Sandman comics, liked Neverwhere, liked the movie adaptation of Stardust, liked some of his children’s books, liked the movie adaptation of Coraline, liked Neverwhere.
But even more than being a fan of his work, I was inspired by him. His prolific career. His advocacy for libraries. His ability to write in several different mediums, from comics to film to novels and short stories. Probably because I myself am NOT prolific but aspire to be, I’m inspired by those artists who ARE prolific: Bradbury, Andre Norton, Brandon Sanderson, Gaiman. And Gaiman’s brand of dark fairy-tale-esque fantasy suits my sensibilities quite a bit. I’ve never loved anything he wrote, but I definitely liked a lot of it, and even more importantly, I was inspired by it.
I can’t deny my inspiration, as much as it sickens me that I was inspired by such a creep.
The accusations against him are absolutely horrible and sickening. I don’t really have anything to add other than I hope his crimes are punished and his victims find healing.
I have heard of Tanith Lee, but I haven’t read anything by her. Now I see that this negligence needs to be remedied ASAP. If Gaiman was stealing her ideas and her style this whole time, then I was getting inspiration from the wrong person. I should be reading Tanith Lee. I WILL be reading Tanith Lee.
And because she too was prolific, I have a new writer to admire.
Let Gaiman fade into shadow and infamy. Let him face both human and cosmic justice.
This one was always going to be a challenge. It’s a tortured history, and I might not be ready to confront it.
I wrote the first Merlin book in roughly 2014-2016 (exact dates are fuzzy because it was so long ago, which is exactly why my goal to finish Ysbaddaden is so fraught).
That was almost ten years ago, when I published The Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Not too long afterward, in January 2017, I wrote a Merlin prequel short story, and I started the second book of the trilogy, a book about the giant Ysbaddaden, a chess game between Merlin and his arch-nemesis, and the continued hunt for the treasures of Britain.
Yeah. It was gonna be great. It was gonna rock. I was gonna finish this book and get it out, then write the third one and have a complete trilogy and be awesome, yay, yay, yay.
Then, after I had completed the trilogy (so my plan was planned), I was gonna write more. So much more. Dozens more. Dozens upon dozens. Ideas for more books, more series, more stories. I had so much more I wanted to write.
So, while I was excited about the Merlin trilogy, I also had plans for more. I needed to get “through” the Merlin stuff to get to all the other stuff I wanted to write.
I was excited for Ysbaddaden, yes, but I was also nervous about it. It wasn’t something I had a clear idea about plot-wise. I knew roughly what I wanted to see happen, but I also wanted to discover new things as I wrote. This is my way. Discovery writing.
I started writing, started the journey roughly in 2017, but then life stuff happened. Another pregnancy happened. And the excitement of the Merlin trilogy began to chafe against my unclear idea of what would happen with Ysbaddaden. In those days, I didn’t have a good handle on how to deal with “stuckness” as a discovery writer. And I was stuck. Stuck physically (with the pregnancy), stuck emotionally (also with the pregnancy), and most especially stuck with the story.
I didn’t like the direction Ysbaddaden was going. And I couldn’t find time to write.
The redrafting was better, and I started to find a good footing with the story, but then two of my side projects started to become main projects. I finished Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion during the time when I was “supposed” to be finishing Ysbaddaden.
By 2023, I had published those two side project books, but I still had a half-completed manuscript for the second book in a trilogy I first started publishing in 2016. And instead of barreling ahead with Ysbaddaden, I decided to start ANOTHER book, Norse City Limits.
So, as I indicated above. Fraught.
This is probably a Critical Voice problem. Fear that the second book will be worse than the first. Fear that my ideas are stupid and I’ll ruin the series.
But even more than fear, I think what’s happened is that I’ve lost the momentum. I can already tell that momentum is starting to wane with NCL too. Turns out, I need to keep momentum going on a project or else risk losing interest. I’m like a kitten or puppy, distracted by every shiny thing that comes my way.
Going forward, with new projects, the key will be to keep the momentum going and not get too rolled by hiccups and life events.
But for these older projects, for the eternal project that is Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess, I need to somehow regain the momentum. With NCL, I think I’ve managed it, but only time will tell. My goal is to finish it by March. Then, it’s on to Ysbaddaden, trying to finish it in the second quarter.
Regaining momentum on a long-delayed project is not easy. Frankly, I’m not sure how to do it. The best I can figure is the old stand-by for when I feel creatively stalled: More input.
If (for both NCL and Ysbaddaden) I can start reading and watching and listening to stuff that fuels my creative voice, then I might be able to rev the motor and restart. Reignite.
For Ysbaddaden, the list includes The Sandman comics, tons of medieval romances like Tristan and Isolde, the Lais of Marie de France, and Parzival. And, of course, the ur-text for all my Welsh Arthurian stuff: The Mabinogi. Throw in some Tennyson, some T. H. White, and maybe even some Susan Cooper, and add a dash of my favorite old fantasy films like Labyrinth and Excalibur, and I’ll be good to go.
I do know that I need to stay connected to the story once I start writing it again. I have to work on it a little bit every day so that the momentum never falters too much. And I have to keep the whole thing fun. Momentum and fun. I’m learning that these are MY key factors for finishing. Momentum and fun.
I think what hurt me way back in 2017 was that I was overwhelmed with life stuff and the writing was harder and harder to fit into my life. I made the book “important” and put myself under pressure to write it. The importance and the pressure and all the personal stuff just stalled me. And instead of being gentle with myself and going easy on the self-criticism, I went self-critical HARD. I beat myself up for my lack of progress, and that made progress all the harder to come by.
I’ve grown a lot as a writer since 2017. I know how to handle stuckness a little better, and I know that I’m really doing quite a lot, actually, so I don’t need to beat myself up about it. The most important thing is that I haven’t given up.
So what did I do with my Christmas giftcards? I bought the first two in the series, of course!
When I opened the envelope the other day, my children were all very interested in these books (especially after I explained how much I loved them as a kid), but to my surprise, it was my middle child who asked if I would read the books to him so he could play. He’s not the one I would peg as being “into” fantasy the way my oldest is; I could only guess that he was intrigued by the monsters and potential for fighting. Whatever the reason, he asked several times before I had even thrown the packaging away, so after taking care of the padded envelope, he and I settled onto the couch, pencil and book in hand.
Thus began our nearly ninety-minute gaming excursion in which I got to witness the Lone Wolf books through the eyes of a child.
I had read them most recently on my own, as an adult, and while they were a nostalgic trip for me, I was approaching them with thirty-plus years of life experience and fantasy fandom and all the other things that make a grown-up a bit inoculated to the sheer joy of playing an rpg adventure book like this. I loved them for the memories they conjured, and I liked them for the old-school, somewhat simplistic fun they provided to adult-me.
But playing with my eight-year-old son was something different entirely. Each choice was a considered one, sometimes accompanied by checking the excellent and evocative map of Map of the Lastlands provided in the front, sometimes talking aloud the risks and potential rewards of the various options. My son really weighed each choice, often making his decision because something would be “nice to do” or “helpful” or “because I don’t want to hurt anybody” or simply because venturing forth into a dark tunnel under a hill would be cool.
When we faced off against monsters, and he had to point his finger at the number grid in the back, waiting for me to read the result from the Combat Results Table, there was real tension and anticipation in his face. When he scored victories, he would pump his fist and cry, “Yes!” with such beautiful innocence, that I couldn’t help being overwhelmed at seeing the pureness of his joy.
After he made each choice and waited for me to the turn the page and read the next entry, I could see him tense up, wondering if he’d made the right decision, worried that he hadn’t. And when his choice resulted in something good, the relief on his face was infectious.
I was seeing what it must have been like for me as a kid: the same anticipation, the same dread, the same relief, the same joy. I could no longer experience that innocent pleasure myself, but I could watch it on the face of my child and get a time-traveled glimpse of my own first foray into the world of Lone Wolf. I was the adult, the grown-up, the one whose emotions were a bit too calloused to fist pump after a victory against a burrow-crawler, but I could bear witness to my child’s excitement, to the gleam of wonder in his eyes, and that gleam was surely once my own, when I was eight years old and reading the Lone Wolf books, and the Endless Quest books, and the Choose Your Own Adventure books off in a corner somewhere, lost in my own world of quests and magic.
I’m glad I could give my son the experience of the Lone Wolf books, but I’m also grateful for his gift to me: the gleam in his eyes and the wonder in his smile.
The best TTRPG Kickstarter from 2023 was Gavin Norman’s Dolmenwood. The whole Dolmenwood universe has been my favorite fantasy adventure gaming stuff since way back with the Wormskin zines. It’s the perfect distillation of my favorite fantastical elements–magical forests, goblins and fairies, a quasi-Medieval world that feels like an old Arthurian romance– and it’s inspired by some of my favorite fantasy art, from Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell to Tolkien’s “Smith of Wooten Major” to Ridley Scott’s Legend.
Dolmenwood is the gaming world designed to perfectly match my sensibilities. It’s a bit too dangerous, perhaps, to want to actually live in, but it comes awfully close. It’s an Elfland I’d love to occasionally visit, after falling asleep by a fairy mound and finding myself walking through a sun-dappled, autumnal forest.
Norman and a host of other indie game designers are doing some of the most interesting world-building in all of fantasy art and literature. In the case of Dolmenwood, Norman mixes in a lot of traditional fairy tale and folk lore elements, but the combination of whimsy and horror, of earthiness and strangeness, though drawing upon familiar iconography, ends up feeling singular and original. Maybe this is because original D&D was inspired more heavily by Sword and Sorcery fantasy and not fairy-tale fantasy, but I also think it comes down to the fact that Norman is so well-versed in the fairy tale and folk lore he draws upon, while at the same time adding original elements that feel as if they belong to those old tales.
The mysterious Drune, for instance, are (as far as I know) original to Dolmenwood (though they definitely have a druids-in-the-glade vibe, inspired perhaps by the clash between pagan and Christian believers in early medieval Europe), and the breggle, though drawing upon medieval traditions about goats and their connection to Satan, are nevertheless a novel concept, taking these medieval traditions and turning them into something new. The same could be said of the cat-fairies, the Grimalkins. Or the wood-grues. Or the mosslings.
Needless to say, I love Dolmenwood. Everything about the world, the game, and the way it makes me feel–that slightly topsy-turvy feeling of excitement and anticipation a kid feels on Christmas Eve–are why I don’t want to wait until I can set up a gaming group to play. I want to play it now. Solo-style.
I’m still making my way through the Player’s Handbook, but I’ve listened to enough 3d6 Down the Line podcast to understand the basics of game-play (and I’m pretty familiar with OSE rules too). My plan is to create a trio of PCs and have them travel to the mound in Winter’s Daughter. After that adventure, I’ll see where it goes.
I have a bunch of resources for solo gaming, though I don’t think I’ll need much for this Dolmenwood adventure. Using the module and the three core books should get me pretty far, and then a simple oracle (that can answer “yes/no” questions), and a couple of reaction and random encounter tables (that can answer “what kind?” questions) are all I need.
I have Knave 2e and Cairn and other game systems like World Without Number and Shadowdark that all have excellent random tables, so if I need to, I can use those tables for extra detail and randomness. But since I’m using the module Winter’s Daughter, I won’t necessarily need a lot of tools for building the dungeon or encounters.
And, of course, I have my notebook with the dot grid and some pens, pencils, and dice. Eventually I’ll have the Dolmenwood minis from the Kickstarter, but for now, I’ll settle for theater of the mind.
Playing solo from an adventure module might be a bit tricky because I need to read some portions of the module to understand how to proceed, but I don’t want to read too much and miss being surprised by what I find in each room. It means I have to pretend not to have certain knowledge at times so my characters can act freely, which is where I’ll rely on my oracle. Even if I, the player, know going into a certain room is bad news, I’ll let the oracle decide these things for my PCs so I don’t fudge them.
What I’m most excited about, especially as the icy winter descends upon my own town and fog is predicted in the forecast for Christmas, is the chance to embark on a journey into Dolmenwood, even if it’s a solo journey. Hopefully, after a few dice rolls and pencil scratches on my characters sheets, I’ll have three imaginary traveling companions, ready to trek into the mists and bramble of the tangled wood in search of an ancient tomb.
This was an idea my husband proposed today, so we’re getting a one-day-late start to the challenge, but he suggested that everyone in our household (aka me, him, and the kids) should try to make or draw something every day this month.
(If we miss a day, we can do multiple things in a day to catch up.)
I decided that I might draw some stuff for a zine I’m working on (title: “Saturday Morning”), but I might also “make” something for my various role-playing game campaigns (a solo one, a husband-and-me one, a family one, and a kids one). These somethings can include making a PC, an NPC, a map, a location, a dungeon room, a whole dungeon (!), or a treasure/magic item. I’m stealing this a bit from Dungeon23, that fabulous challenge from last year that got me started making my very first megadungeon (which, sadly, I never finished… so maybe I can work on that for my “makings” this month!).
Anyway, I like a loose definition of “making.” We have a similarly loose definition in our Creativity Club at my school. Spurred by their time in my Creative Writing class last year, the students who started the club are welcoming anyone who does any kind of creative endeavor to join, and we aren’t judgy about the kinds of things that count as “making.” We decided that even kids who want to make jam are welcome in the club! (But they should definitely share their jam with us once it’s made. :D)
My “making” for today’s family challenge was to come up with some NPCs and their backstories/personalities for the Hero Kids game I’m playing with my children. They are currently investigating the Basement O’ Rats and trying to find Roger, a local village boy. I’ve got an idea that Roger was taken by the King of Rats at the behest of a dark force that is also taking others away from Brecken Vale for mysterious reasons. This will be the central mystery of the campaign.
Does this counting as “making something”? I think it does. I took an idea, put it to paper, and developed it. I also stat-blocked Roger in case he comes with the Kids on any further adventures.
I’d say that counts for the day.
Now I just have to make something to count for yesterday…
I teased this ages ago, but it’s finally here. The first installment of what I hope to be a regular series on the blog: “It Came from the Game Closet.”
We have this closet, you see. It is in our living room, and it is quite tall, and it is filled with games. Stuffed. Bursting. Unruly and untapped.
You see, we have filled this closet with games, but we’ve hardly ever played ANY of them, we’ve just let them languish in the game closet and think to ourselves, our heads nodding with pensive melancholy, “Someday… someday…”
And yet, “someday” never comes. We keep putting new games into the closet and never playing them.
Until now.
I’ve opened the weird sliding door of the weird corner closet with the triangle-shaped shelves and I’ve pulled out a game. It’s one of the few games in the closet we’ve actually played, but we haven’t played it in a long time, and it gives me warm fuzzies just looking at the box’s cover art, so it’s the first one I picked.
I wasn’t able to PLAY play it (it’s not really a game that works solo because you need the other players to play the hazard cards), but I did use the cards to make up my own stories and added in a few hazards just to keep it fun. I tried to imagine myself as a hobbit sipping a pint at the Green Dragon, regaling the crowd with my masterful yarn-spinning skills. I felt silly at times, yes, but I had a good time.
Hobbit Tales is a storytelling game, and as such, it lends itself to use as a storytelling tool. As I was playing it solo, I realized how I could use it for my writing and role-playing game prep (I should have realized its use for RPGing sooner, since the game literally bills itself as an aid/companion to the first edition of The One Ring RPG… I feel a bit dumb about not catching that until now).
Each card has a title, a picture, and a quote from Tolkien’s fiction, and thus there are lots of jumping off points for storytelling/prompts for writing and gaming. Yes, there are a gazillion writing prompt-generators out there, digital and analog (I have these really cool Writing Dice, in fact, that my husband got me for Valentine’s Day), but there’s lots of charm in using the simple story seeds from the Hobbit Tales cards.
The open-ended quality of the titles, illustrations, and quotes means they’re flexible enough for any kind of fantasy story, and because they are simple and often archetypal, they prompt lots of symbolic and even mythic ideas.
For instance, one of the random cards I drew “Weather-beaten Traveler.” This immediately prompts me to think of types of weather that could beat someone down: rain showers, snow storm, wind storm, floods, even sandstorms and drought. And the idea of a “traveler” is so basic and yet full of possibilities. The traveler could be a stranger in a strange land, a person seeking a way back home, an explorer, someone on a quest, or someone simply out for a stroll who got caught up in a weather phenomenon.
What would happen if I drew such a card as a prompt for a story, or to give me something to insert into a story where I’m stuck?
I’m currently working on Norse City Limits, an urban fantasy inspired by Icelandic sagas and old 1940s film noir, and my main guy, Grettir, is about to speak to a dead man (could be magic or Grettir could simply be hallucinating due to a drug-induced haze… I don’t know yet). If I wanted to, I could play a free-association game with my “weather-beaten traveler” card.
Perhaps the dead man is a vagrant, caught up in a web of lies and vice that he’s totally alien to, just the wrong man at the wrong time.
Or perhaps he was traveling to find Grettir, got caught and killed by Grettir’s enemies, and now he’s shown up anyway in the form of a corpse.
Or perhaps he wasn’t killed by humans at all. Maybe the weather killed him, an extreme form of weather (and maybe that weather was caused by a spell or a god), and his death is a portent of things to come.
The Hobbit Tales cards are really fun in this regard because they spur ideas, invite me to play with archetypal elements, and provide several points of entry, all without being too specific or “out there” in content. Nothing in these cards will veer my stories wildly off-track or be too wacky.
The uses of these cards for role-playing games is obvious. Instead of a random encounter table, simply draw a card from the deck, or several cards, or a adventure card and a hazard card and try to combine them into a unique encounter, combat, trap, or puzzle.
Sometimes writing prompts from outside sources are too particular or too prescriptive. There are times when that specificity or oddball quality will instigate an exciting and unique story idea, but more often than not, I end up with something that doesn’t fit my sensibilities as a writer.
With the Hobbit Tales cards, I have prompts and ideas that work much better with the kinds of stories I like telling and which can easily be integrated with my current works-in-progress (if need be).
Also, the artwork and aesthetic of the game is charming and a pleasure to interact with. I like taking out the cards and the green coasters and spending time with them.
As a game, Hobbit Tales is low-stakes, congenial, and more about creativity and having fun with mates rather than the competition of who has the most points at the end. Yes, it is “competitive” in that there can be a winner at the end (teller with the highest score at the end of all the rounds), but that’s really not the impetus for playing. It’s much more about enjoying Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, pretending to be a hobbit, and flexing your storytelling muscles.
For people who are intimidated by the improvisational storytelling, the game might not be as enjoyable, or it might take some time to realize that none of these stories will end up being “good.” The fun is in trying to tell the story and include the hazards if necessary, not to be some brilliant performer.
In some ways, it’s a good lesson for everyone, professional storyteller or amateur: Have fun and don’t worry about whether something is “good” or not. Let the creative voice do its thing. Let go of perfection and have a good time.
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