Writing Stuff

Writing has been on my mind a lot lately, and I've been doing it a lot more lately, as previously stated, it is kind of a coping mechanism of mine. The first time I sat down with some Deathmole playing and the PageFour program opened up and ready to go, fuck, man, that was rough. The blinking cursor glared at me relentlessly, it was hard. I haven't wrote wrote, in quite some time. Stuff for my Hekinoe setting or the campaign book or the wiki just flows, it comes to me easily. Writing a story for pleasure and trying to make it not stilted and somewhat instructional like the wiki or campaign book is difficult.

Oh do I hate blinking cursors, oh do I hate them. I once joked that if Fred were a ranger, his favored enemy would be Wil Wheaton, mine is the blinking cursor.

I've been toying around with a few writing projects to idle away my time. Mainly I've been concentrating on writing out the tale of the first campaign and playing around with The Norse story and converting it into The North Story, so it fits back into Hekinoe. All of this is inspired by my desire to revisit Keroen Skathos and the Nel and that sort of thing, but I can't bring myself to do that.

For some reason, I just look at the book and the outline of the changes I want to make, and I just feel...not nothing, but not really excitement or desire. I just can't get excited about the Nel like I used to. They're not fascinating and intriguing to me any more. They're too powerful and too hard to write challenges for. There is nothing compelling about their struggles, they're little arrogant gods smacking each other around with poorly defined and unstructured magic. Keroen Skathos just goes off the deep end and starts killing shit whenever anyone gets in his way, he doesn't think around problems, he just cuts them in half and steps through, or blows them apart with his magic. Granted, that is who he is, that is how he resolves problems, and it can be neat to read the story, but the further I get from the story, the less cool it seems. These limitlessly powerful entities I created in my early twenties don't really attract me the way they did eight or so years ago. I could rewrite it, tone them down, cripple Keroen and so on, but I don't want to. I wrote them as they are, they were supposed to be over the top, to change that feels, I dunno, disingenuous I guess. Like I'm sacrificing the "truth" of the characters to make it a better story or something. Heh, I dunno. I guess what I am saying is that I'm over writing about magical demigods, at least the Nel, for the time being.

I do kind of want to keep writing in Hekinoe, I love that place. I mean, why not? Everyone writes somewhere, why not keep my stories in Hekinoe? Greenwood still writes about Elminster and the Realms (Ed Greenwood is the creator of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, it is his original homegrown setting he played with his group), I believe. Salvatore is working on his umpteenthundreth dual wielding dark elf novel involving drow and dwarves and the underground.Weis & Hickman created and wrote in Krynn, though they've distanced themselves from it nowadays. 

I do have this silly idea that I kind of want to play with in a non-serious fashion, kind of in the vein of Inconsistencies Continued. I once read on a blog about modelling a DnD campaign based on the EMS film Mother, Jugs, and Speed. Bill Cosby plays Mother. It is about an ambulance company and the trials and tribulations of competing with other services in the area and dealing with the idiosyncrasies of all the nutjob personalities working for the service. It is a bad movie and too many people in EMS feel that EMS should be like in the film, watch it, you'll understand. Bringing Out The Dead is a fantastically better film, in case you care about learning about EMS.

I had a thought that it might be hilarious to base a story on this concept. Kusseth has some fairly advanced medicine compared to the rest of the continent, and it might not be irrational for them to have poorly trained proto-EMTs carting the sick, dead, or injured to a sick house or asylum or graveyard or whatever. Anyway, I feel that a lot of nonsense and humor and violence could be found in following two to four Kusseth EMTs as they wander into sorcerous disasters and gang fights looking for bodies to cart away, or rob. I dunno, we'll see, might not develop into anything, but it is good that I am wondering about this sort of thing.