Jennifer M. Baldwin

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Ten Titles, Ten Characters (from my notebook, January 2024)

January 1, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I was flipping through my notebooks from 2024, mostly to see how many books I’d read in the past year (more than 40, by the way… so not bad, but now I’m thinking I want to set a challenge for myself to read over 60 this year), when I came across an entry from my January notebook that included two “Try Ten” lists.

One was ten titles, one was ten characters. Here are the lists:

Ten Titles

  1. Bicycle Repair
  2. Professor _________’s Guide to the Magically Perplexed
  3. Went Away Sailing
  4. Grandma’s Gnocchi
  5. I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream
  6. Brennivin. Shot. Cold.
  7. Stolen Goods
  8. The Voice in the Heating Vent
  9. Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat
  10. Whenever You Think of Criticizing

Ten Characters

  1. An old cop who serves evictions now
  2. The ghost of a young woman’s dead twin
  3. A boy who is in love with his best friend
  4. A foreign cleaning lady
  5. A tree that can communicate with a human
  6. An old man who stole a fellow soldier’s ID back in Vietnam
  7. The driver of a bus that takes devils in and out of Hell
  8. A middle-aged woman who once got to spend her afternoons with a unicorn but hasn’t seen one in decades
  9. An oracle/fortune teller who has lost her power
  10. A man who must take care of his sick wife in quarantine (he hasn’t seen her in a week?)

I’ll admit, that last character entry doesn’t quite make sense to me looking back at it now. Has he not seen her in a week but now can see her and must take care of her? Or has he been taking care of her in quarantine but she left him and hasn’t been seen in a week?

I really don’t know.

The funny thing is that I used one of those titles and wrote a short story to go along with it. “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream.” It was a writing challenge I did with my Creative Writing students where we had to write a short story in one hour. I participated and used this title.

The story turned out all wrong. I tried writing an unreliable narrator and it was an utter failure. Just didn’t live up to the title at all. And I tried an ironic twisty ending that was pretty stupid, frankly.

But I still like the title. I’m tempted, even now, to use the title again and write a different story. And why not?

In fact, it might be kind of funny to write several short stories, all with the same title, all different, and then put them together into a collection.

Or maybe that would be utterly not funny but just kind of stupid. I have a difficult time distinguishing between the cool and the stupid until I’ve done the thing. Before I’ve done the thing, it seems pretty cool. After I’ve done the thing, it feels pretty stupid. I have two choices, then: either keep doing the cool-sounding thing, hoping one day it won’t turn out stupid, or stop doing any of the cool-sounding things. Which means I’ll have done nothing.

I think I know which choice to make.

Better to write a dozen (or more) stupid stories than to write none at all.

Anyway, some of these ideas and characters and titles don’t sound particularly interesting at the moment, but I often wonder if these little seeds and sparks of ideas might turn out to be pretty great once put into action. It’s the action that matters. The telling of the tale. Because otherwise they’re just a list of words. I could write a dozen stories called “I Saw Ursula Le Guin in a Dream” and they would all be different. Who can say, just from that title, what stories may come?

This is why the ideas really don’t matter all that much. I can come up with ten more ideas right now. So can any of us.

It’s the weaving of the story that matters. The particular sequence of the tale is what counts.

I do wonder, though, what would happen if I combined a title from one list with a character from the other. Might be a fun game. What kind of challenge could I make for myself in this new month of a new year. From two lists in January 2024 to ten stories in January 2025…

To do that, I’d have to get over my trepidation. My worry that I’m not up to the task of writing ten stories in one month. Can I do that? Can I get over that hump, that lack of confidence?

My husband said that the word he would use to describe my 2024 was “confidence,” but I just don’t see it. I feel the opposite, like my confidence is slowly draining away. But maybe he can see something I can’t.

I hesitate to even set a challenge like ten stories in one month because what if I can’t do it? What if it stresses me out? What if I simply don’t have the time, on top of all the other duties and goals I’ve already set?

Might be fun though… the old cop serving evictions, entitled “Went Away Sailing,” and the old cop has to serve someone who never seems to be home, who might have gotten on a sailboat and drifted away, and the cop tries to find them, to serve the papers, yes, but also, just to see what it would be like to sail away from everything…

The old fortune teller who has lost her gift… every time she tries to tell a fortune and see the future, she sees her grandmother, bent over the kitchen table, rolling out potatoes and flour to make the gnocchi dough… Maybe she has to talk to her grandmother, and maybe she can’t break through, she’s lost her gift, after all…

The foreign cleaning lady hears a voice in the heating vent…

The driver of the Hell-bus… “Abel Gave Me a Wool Coat…”

(I could go on, but I’ll stop for now. The question I always have as I make up these stories and possibilities, is will my story end up being worthwhile? Will it have any meaning? Any emotion? Will readers enjoy it, or am I simply playing a word-association game with myself?)

To write ten stories in four weeks means roughly two or three stories every week. That seems like a lot, especially as I try to get NCL finished. Maybe the challenge isn’t to do it just in January, but to do a story every week? Or try to write ten stories in the first quarter? Or… I don’t know. Something.

I feel a pull toward this challenge. It’s not a coincidence that I opened my January 2024 notebook to this page with these two lists. I should ride it out. See where it goes.

I always was dissatisfied with that first “Ursula Le Guin” story. Time to try again. And the new year is the perfect time.

“Rule 5: Be Self Disciplined. This Means Finding Someone Wise or Smart and Choosing to Follow Them. To Be Disciplined Is to Follow in a Good Way. To Be Self Disciplined Is to Follow in a Better Way.”

December 31, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I have wise and smart people that I follow. When I stop following them, I get off-track.

Last year, I was following the pedagogy of artists like Lynda Barry, Austin Kleon, Ray Bradbury, and Sr. Corita. It wasn’t a perfect teaching year, but it was pretty darn good. Made me glad that I had returned to the classroom.

This year, I didn’t outright reject any of my “someones,” but I got a little too focused on outcomes and trying to measure up to what I thought a “good teacher” was supposed to be. I wanted even higher test scores for my students. Even greater “growth” as measured by data.

And this semester has been a tougher one as a result.

I wasn’t following in a good way. Definitely not in a better way. I wasn’t following the wise or the smart, just the “efficient.” I was doing what I thought was “necessary,” without doing what I knew was good. I was falling prey to the same “product”-focused mindset, the same “transactional” trend in education that stripped a lot of my teaching down to an unrecognizable grind.

Not good discipline. Not good discipleship.

For starters, I abandoned my practice of having students write daily in a writer’s notebook. Yes, last year I had many students who never took it seriously and treated it as busy work. But instead of experimenting this year with ways of making the notebook actually matter to more of my students, I chucked it completely. Bad discipline. I knew the notebook worked for me, for others, for lots of students both last year and years past. The solution wasn’t to stop following the practice that had sustained me in the classroom; the solution was to find ways to make it work better for myself and my students.

Similarly, I went back to letting students use their laptops much more in the classroom. Many of them utterly hated all the handwriting we did last year.

But again, I knew — from so many artists, writers, and thinkers that I admire, and from my own experience — that hand-work is good. Doing tangible, analog things with our hands and bodies is important to our minds and souls.

Instead of finding ways to make the hand-work more meaningful for students, I gave up on it.

Not good discipline.

A new semester is starting in January, and I’ve decided to get back to following in a good way. Hopefully, even, a better way.

Lone Wolf Christmas

December 30, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’ve written before about my love for the Long Wolf RPG adventure books, but it was only recently that I found out the books have been reprinted with snazzy new covers in larger paperback format.

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.

Dolmenwood Solo Gaming

December 24, 2024 / / 0 Comments

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.

“Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe” by H.R. Ellis Davidson

December 23, 2024 / / 1 Comment

When I was reading this book, I was on fire with drafting Norse City Limits. When I stopped reading it (due to other reading obligations), the writing dried up.

Coincidence?

Ideas don’t come from thin air. At least mine don’t. Mine come from what I see, what I read, what I listen to, what I notice. When I’m reading a book that’s bursting with ideas, suddenly I’m bursting with ideas. When my reading is directed toward something related to my work-in-progress, my work-in-progress gets a boost from that reading.

And when my reading or attention shift elsewhere?

The writing does too. It shifts into that other elsewhere or it withers a bit from lack of sustenance.

Donna Tartt’s process seems right to me: read something related to your work-in-progress at the end of the day.

Of course, the lesson here is to get back to my Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe book.

The difficulty, is that I have a growing stack of books I need to read for my winter semester classes, and a book club book, and some library books that will soon be called back to the returns bin. Making time for my weird mythology book is hard to justify.

Still. I need to justify it. I need that sustenance. That juice.

Watching more film noir will get me that juice too. I can’t keep running off the fumes of what I remember from my twenties and early thirties when my art diet consisted of a steady stream of movie noir and hard-boiled fiction. I need to dive back in. Myths and symbols, alleyways and wise guys. More jazz. More Led Zeppelin. More Thor and Odin and trolls.

I started writing NCL because of my love for both Norse mythology and film noir. But that love needs nurturing.

My fantasy writing (maybe all my writing) really thrives from using symbols, thinking about symbols, reviving and trying to breathe life into old, familiar symbols. The Davidson book is full of these: blood, birds, wood, stone, feasts, water, wolves. The mystery surrounding our understanding of these early northern European pagan peoples is part of the fun, part of the allure. Using these half-guessed at rituals and rites, tales and traditions, as the material for my story is part of why I tell stories. I want to remix and re-imagine. I think most fantasy writers do. Whereas science fiction writers are farseeing into the future, we are farseeing into the past. And then we mix it together with whatever else is swimming in our imaginations. Fantasy is a synthesis. Neither old nor entirely new. A bridge between times (and worlds).

Challenge for 2025

December 22, 2024 / / 0 Comments

What’s the difference between a goal and a challenge? Honestly, I don’t know, and I don’t know if it matters.

Call it a goal or a challenge, the point is, it gives me a kick in the pants to write more, make more stuff, etc.

The perennial goal/challenge is TO BLOG EVERYDAY. I always say I will, and I never meet the challenge.

Yes, it helps me “fail to success,” but for 2025, I really want to hit that success. It would be cool. A weirdly neat accomplishment.

(And maybe I miss a day or whatever because a kid broke his arm and we ended up in the ER for twelve hours or something. But even if I miss a day, I can’t miss more than two in a row, per James Clear’s advice in Atomic Habits.)

The reality is that I need a set time in which to do this blogging. Can’t be ad hoc. My mornings are for writer’s notebook and usually fiction writing. This is the quiet time in which I am alone enough to actually get things done.

The seemingly obvious answer is to do it at night. Blog about what I worked on during the day, blog about something cool that happened or something I read. Blog about “input.”

The seemingly obvious object is that I’m dead tired at night. Also, it’s the one time my husband and I are alone and can hang out.

Maybe there’s another option?

Finding that “habit time” is the secret sauce, at least for me. Whenever I’ve moved away from designating certain times for certain habits, it hasn’t worked.

The great part about early morning writing is that it’s the one thing I can (mostly) control. Unless a child wakes up sick or I have a weird doctor’s appointment at 7:00 a.m., I can control my wake up time and my quiet, alone-time in those pre-dawn hours.

The trouble is that I can’t add daily blogging to those early-morning hours because I don’t get up THAT early. I have enough time to wake up, stretch, make school lunches, write morning pages, and then work on my fiction for, say, thirty minutes or so.

Adding blogging to that mix seems like the proverbial straw on the camel.

In the spirit of “experimentation,” I’m going to try the night thing and see how it goes. To make sure I don’t get lost down in blogging-land, I’ll set a timer and try to write in the time allotted. Fifteen minutes. Then it’s back to the living room and hanging with the hubs.

That means my blog posts might tend to be on the shorter side. Maybe that’s okay. I can write some thoughts about a topic and then return to it the next day. Serialization!

Maybe I’ll blog more fiction too. Maybe.

I don’t want the daily blogging to be tedious, boring stuff, though. That’ll be a challenge. Gonna try to “show my work.” Share my influences. Share process and quotes and ideas I’m working through (that might end up turning into Substacks). Share my solo-RPG attempts. My input.

I’m not even sure why I want to challenge myself to blog everyday, except it would feel good to do something that forced me to get a little uncomfortable, to be a little more disciplined. I need a challenge because I need to grow. It’s as simple as that.

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