2014 – The Year of Tumult

Stay with me here – I got a lot to let out in a short period. It’s frontloaded with a lot of negative – but I promise there’s a turn around.

To say this past year was difficult would be an understatement.

At this time of the season, many turn back to look at what has passed in the year that ends around them. I have been waiting for this time, but not to look back with nostalgia. No. I want this year dead and buried.

Because as I look into this year past, I cannot help but think of 2014 as cursed from the get go. The bad times technically started in 2013 on the winter solstice with the death of Josette, a brave woman who had finally figured out who she was, what she wanted to be, and had come to terms with everything that meant. She was fell by something entirely out of her control and unknown that she’d carried since shortly after her birth. It was a shadow of what was to come.

2014 was officially heralded by a woman in an elevator who my best friend heard on his way out of the hospital (who had just seen my girlfriend hooked up to a ventilator). She had angrily shouted into her cellphone: “Man, 2014 has been nothing but bullshit.” It was January ninth. The woman was a goddamned prophet.

2014 - An angry, loud, prophet with no sense of personal boundaries. — An angry, loud, prophet with no sense of personal boundaries.

The new year rang in and (as you could deduce from the prophet’s words above) my girlfriend went into the hospital for half a month. She spent half of that time paralyzed and on life support. I was also very sick in that time with the same ailment (though protected to a limited extent by immunizations), and we’re both still paying off the medical debts that this trial incurred, and we both still carry emotional scars from the experience.

I went through a series of expensive labs to learn that I had sleep apnea – something that anyone probably could have deduced just by listening to me snore. If I want a night of decent sleep I have to wear a noisy mask that often inflames my Rosacea. Oh yeah, still paying for that too.

My grandparents both took staggering blows – my grandmother was diagnosed with late stage Alzheimers in the early spring and my grandfather diagnosed in autumn with Stage 2 esophageal cancer. My grandfather remains in as best a state as he’s able and has moved in with my parents, but my grandmother is now in an elder care facility, lost in her own mind and unable to escape. Seeing them separated pains me greatly, but is nothing compared to what they must feel.

My family, under a great deal of stress from many sides, has its own troubles. We’ve become shorter with one another, less forgiving, less able to trust and relate. We argue and bicker, and I’ve said things myself that I cannot take back that have done lasting harm.

There was the car accident just before Thanksgiving that still troubles me. Lingering pains and discomfort still come and go (as I type my neck twitches and sends small messages of strain across my nerves there), and my girlfriend also still hurts from the accident from many bruises and a battered knee. To add insult to it, the car was almost paid off. I was looking forward to having more money back in my budget after a financially shaky year.

There’s even more stuff that is personal that I can’t even get into here for all sorts of reasons – stuff that has forced me to re-evaluate some of the very cores of my life.

All of the blows that came this year were sudden, but had long lasting ripple effects.

Yet, amongst the flaming wreck of 2014 I can find both solace and salvage. There is much to yet be grateful for and that also will ripple.

My girlfriend and I yet live. Between the plague and the accident, we yet walk among the living, bent, but not broken. We continue to carry on. Be build and grow despite obstacles.

My family has not broken. Though we find ourselves tested and harried, we remain a comfort to one another and gather for one another’s company every Sunday. The rifts that I have formed by my own hand remain, but we are working to mend as best we can.

My best friend got married to another good friend in October, and I stood by him as his best man. I also planned his Bachelor Party and had a fantastic time during it in July. They will carry on into the future as well and create an adventure for years to come.

I had another year to watch my niece and nephew grow – albeit from afar – and to see them turn into tiny people who talk and ask to speak with Uncle Chewbacca (they were briefly fascinated by my beard). I look forward to seeing them sometime soon – hopefully this year.

And, even though I have to wear a mask attached to a machine while I sleep, I sleep better now, and I dream. Hell, last night, I dreamt I found a hidden text by Salvador Dali called ‘The Spirit’ in a hidden cache of what I thought was another book entirely (dream logic – work with me here). With dreams like that, I think I can hang in this writing gig if I ever finally sit down and start doing it.

So I’m ready to put 2014 behind us. While 2015 will no doubt hold the same potential for peril, though it may bring endings and changes, not all of these need be dire. There will be celebration to go with hardship. As there always is.

I hope that all others who have borne the brunt of this (mostly) awful year will join us in walking forward to find more of our life’s bounties, the light of our lives giving comfort and solace and joy to one another.

Walk with us. We should enjoy your company for as many years as time will allow us.

December 31, 2014 0

Short Story Writing Challenge

Nano is real popular insofar as challenges go.

Despite my current feelings toward it, it’s really good for people starting out, and it did a lot for me in getting my writing process down.

However, I’m finding my writing needs changing a bit. It’s hard to write long format now and I feel like that creative core inside me is atrophying a bit. I need to do something measurably possible in the time I have available to me.

So I think I shall devise a challenge of my own.

It will involve zero knights, and zero herrings. Well, maybe red herrings. But 2,500 words is a little short to be throwing out red herrings.

I don’t want to name it, so it’ll just be a personal challenge and I can post the results right here – and you can yell at me when it’s not getting done.

I’m thinking that the challenge should involve the script that Ben hooked me up with, already pre-loaded with the 20 master plots, and, genres, settings, and elements that I already like. Each short story should be somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 words (challenging for me – my average ‘short story’ is something like 5K-6K words).

With that in mind, my first story the script popped out was:

I’m writing a Dystopian Forbidden Love story, featuring Ghosts and Urban Exploration in The Middle of Nowhere.

Well… I’ll see you next Tuesday (Oh god. The pop culture meaning is killing me).

December 16, 2014 0

The Human Condition – The Quest For Light

Life is a messy business, and having a well developed forebrain doesn’t make the human lot all sunshine and roses. Humans are blessed with more cognitive ability than any other creature on earth (excepting mice and dolphins, just you wait – Douglas Adams was a prophet) and with that comes all sorts of extra baggage. We know that we are doomed to die. We know that because of this we will, eventually, lose everything. Our family, our friends, our pets, our stuff, our dignity and independence. There is no way to beat the house – it always wins.

Furthermore we know the world doesn’t actually hate us. If it did, we’d at least have something to try to fight. What we have from the natural world is indifference. You can fight it all you like, the world will move on tomorrow whether or not there’s organic life (or specifically your organic life) on it to notice or not. Some make the argument for a benevolent God who will spare us from this, or point to some aspect of spirituality that can avert it. Sadly, I am not one of those men. If a higher power is around, I’ve seen nothing to substantiate its existence and have little faith in letting something that may or may not be there call my shots for me. Particularly not in the year 2014 in which almost everything turned into a toxic brew of shit in short order.

It’s been a bad run this year. It had an appetizer of death in which a friend of mine passed away in 2013. And once the big day was here, my girlfriend and I got so sick we almost died. This is not hyperbole. My girlfriend was on life support for a week and I was out of commission myself for about ten days, most of which I was so sick I couldn’t even go to the ICU to visit her. Gran got diagnosed with Alzheimers after that. Pop got cancer. The family has taken on enormous stress from it and it’s made us all a bit more short with one another, a bit less understanding. I’ve taken financial hits this year, been in a car accident that racked my girlfriend and I up something serious, and I’m not writing any more – aside from here where I try to keep my chops in working order. Add to it two of my friends living under threat of eviction (just in time for the holidays) and this year, apart from a most anticipated wedding, has been blow after blow to the face, kidneys, and balls.

humans - rocky — Seen above: Stallone looks how I feel.

Now, it’s fair to say that when one complains about something but has no answer, that’s called whining. And you’d have a point – but life has no answers because it’s actually a question that has not the structure to indicate that there could ever be one true answer. Billy Crystal learned from Curly that it’s that one thing, and that answer is not a one-fits-all answer. The one thing is different for all of us. Ebeneezer Scrooge learned that giving was the answer, but as James Earl Jones said in Fences, some people ain’t got a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. Tyler Durden said that life was nothing but hitting bottom and knowing that some day you’ll die – fatalistic to the extreme and uncomfortably close to the mark, but not satisfying in any way. Despite my agnosticism, Tyler couldn’t be my messiah.

But, there was a pretty smart guy in Ancient China who did say that there’s a way for us individually and that if we follow our natures we’ll find it. It doesn’t take a benevolent outside skyfather to find it, and it’s not the same for everyone, but all the same we walk along it whether we like it or not. It’s set out for us by the forces that work on the world invisibly, and you can argue something spiritual behind them, but it’s not required. There’s no expectation of reward, no demands for worship, zero morally superior beings benevolently looking after us. Nature provided all things great and terrible, but there are a great many paths to walk through it set out for all humans. One of them belongs to you, and probably crosses or walks along side many others.

Understanding that my road is there does something to dispel some of the darkness we humans have to traverse. Knowing the road is there makes is easier to walk so long as I’m not stepping off the path. You can know the right path when you’re on it. And the path itself offers some illumination. It gives you a torch to hold against the dark.

Right now, my way is pretty dark. I feel as if I’ve lost my footing on the path set before me or somehow blundered off of it. Some people who were there to hold torches in the night surrounding the path have proven to be carrying false light, some lights have been extinguished altogether, some have dimmed. Yet others have run off in different directions or started swinging their torches at each other, desperately trying to light each other on fire. Some have done many of those things in rapid succession. Never has the path been this muddy, this cold, this noisome, and this dark.

But it is still there, and I’m walking it the best I’m able with the help of other torch bearers. Where there’s friends there’s light. Where there’s steadfast family, there’s a campfire. And where there’s love, there’s bonfires burning in the night to defy the darkness.

There is light though – and for those who gather round with me in hard times, you have my thanks. I just need to keep those lights as close as I can. I’ve lost too much light this year. Let’s walk the path together for as long as we remain on the same road.

Walk with me.

December 15, 2014 0

Wraith 20th Anniversary Edition Kickstarter

I love ghost stories. Always have. Even as a kid, ghosts fascinated me. Invisible, unseen, potentially everywhere. Spooks, spectres, poltergeists, and wraiths. Couldn’t get enough. This is why Wraith: the Oblivion was so special for me.

In most RPG games I played growing up, things like ghosts were just bad guys. Annoying bad guys. Couldn’t hit ’em with regular weapons. You had to use magic, you had to have some kind of charmed weapon to hurt them. You had to bury a body or desecrate a corpse to make them stop. Ghosts were almost always wicked creatures that were to be fought against. There was very little sympathy for the devil in the early days when it came to the restless dead, but Vampire turned that on its ear and started putting out games where you played the monsters instead of hunted them. It took ’em a good long while to get to Wraith, but once they did I was hooked.

Wraith has a reputation of being the redheaded stepchild of the original World of Darkness franchise, right next to Mummy and (I shit you not) Street Fighter. Wraith didn’t have the oozing sex appeal and power of Vampire. It didn’t have the savage brutality or mysticism of Werewolf. It didn’t have the raw power and hubris of Mage.

What it did have was one of the most over-the-top dramatic settings I’ve ever seen and a true grasp of what personal horror was all about.

wraith - wake me up — No Sharpies? Well, this oughtta do in a jiffy…

In Wraith, you were playing the ghost. You were born, you lived, you made connections, you had drives and needs, and then, you died with those drives and needs unfulfilled. Your passions and fetters kept you tied to the land of the living, but death made you a part of the Underworld and subject to its empire and its Deathlords. The Underworld was a place filled with the spirits of those too defiant, too willful, too driven to just let go when their bodies expired. These are desperate souls with everything to lose – so it’s fertile ground for storytelling… provided you could wrap your head around it.

The game was maligned on several fronts. The biggest was that it was depressing. Games are supposed to be fun! Foremost, people labeled Wraith as an event where everyone sat around and got sad which really kind of missed the point for a game about passions so strong you defy death.

The second was that it was antagonistic as hell. The Powers That Be of the Underworld were very, very nasty. Every single group with any kind of power was either trying to smelt you down into raw materials or were trying to indoctrinate you into their cults. And that was if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, the inhospitable denizens of the Tempest were trying to literally eat you undead.

Third, every character in the game had in essence an insubstantial evil twin, The Shadow. It was the part of the Wraith that has one hundred percent accepted its death and just wants the Wraith to let go and sink into Oblivion – and that entity was portrayed by someone else around the table who wasn’t your GM. When another player in the group is playing your nemesis, it’s easy for you to start hating that person.

wraith - shadow — Muhahaha, the Shadow’s job is done here.

The big stumbling block though was the depth of the Underworld as a setting. It was complex and nuanced, and it was hard to wrap your brain around it. You had to break down locations into the Skinlands, where the living yet move; the Shadowlands, the dark mirror of the land of the living just beneath the Skinlands from which Wraiths could watch and sometimes even interact with the living; The Tempest, the roiling storm beneath both Skinlands and Shadowlands in which one can find the varied Empires and Far Shores of the Dead; and then there was the Labyrinth, the home of Spectres and their dark lords the Malfeans. At the bottom of the Labyrinth was Oblivion – the growing core of darkness that will eventually destroy all that has ever been. It was too much for a lot of people to keep track of, and the non-Euclidean nature of the Tempest didn’t help when trying to explain things.

wraith - escher — Like this, but more confusing and with inadequate lighting.

Finding the kinds of players who’d sign up for this experience was hard. I ran Wraith for a grand total of three groups between maybe ten sessions. None were successful, but man did I love that game. And so did a lot of other people – just not nearly as many as there were fans of their other bigger, better-selling titles.

And now, Onyx Path is gonna revive the game’s corpse and make it better, faster, stronger… deader. That’s right, it’s getting the 20th Anniversary Kickstarter treatment a la V20 and W20. I didn’t Kickstart either of those products – but you can be guaranteed I have Kicked The Living Shit Starter out of this at a Reaper level.

The folks at Onyx Path had made some noises about this previously, but other than a couple low-key announcements they were very quiet about it. Wraith was a difficult horse to back, so I understand why. I remember the Curse that seemingly followed this entire product line. Until I saw that 300% Kickstarted funding reached didn’t want to dare to hope. Shit, they even acknowledge the curse on their own Kickstarter site:

Click and read, they dare you!

But, we can keep funneling blood an Oboli into the production of the book. There’s still stretch goals to reach and about twenty-seven days left to hit ’em at the time of writing.

So go out there and make it happen. Or something may come for your soul.

December 9, 2014 0

The New Fit – It Is Here, and It Is Purple

While I am very sad to say goodbye to Wembley, my trusty 2009 Honda Fit, I am pleased to announce the coming of my new 2015 Honda Fit.

Wembler — This should look kinda familiar.

It’s nifty. And… that’s pretty much it.

Yay, car! (Boo payments!)

December 4, 2014 0

Post-Mortem – Long Live Wembley

Well, you may have noticed that I’ve not been posting a whole lot lately. This is because I’ve been in a car accident, and a humdinger at that. Long story short, the other driver was definitely at fault in the front driver side to front driver side collision. Insurance stuff is finally starting to move through and accounts are being settled. Everyone walked away figuratively from the accident.

Myself and my girlfriend are still hurting, but we’re alive. She has a lot of bruising, I have a lot of whiplash and shoulder pain, plus a mostly healed chemical burn/abrasion from the airbag that will leave a tidy little scar.

As for my vehicle, you might remember Wembley, my prior Honda Fit, from this photo.

Wembley was a good little car. I spend a lot of time looking at that image there. I now spend a lot of time looking at this one as well.

As you can see, Wembley is totaled. Once the airbags come out, that pretty much puts the toe tag on a car. Even if they hadn’t gone off, there’s a lot of damage there (both seen and unseen in the pic) – too much for the car’s value. So now, I have to bury Wembley and find his spiritual successor.

I also have to put myself back together.

Anyone who’s been in a collision like this can I suppose tell you a similar story to mine. The initial shock, the adrenaline pouring into your body, the confusion, and chaos. It’s bad. I was worried more about my girlfriend, and curiously enough, the guy who plowed into us, being alive and ambulatory, in that order. I got an ambulance ride and they took me to trauma where they cut me out of my clothes, jammed in an IV, and carted me off for various scans. Three hours later, I was released with a buttload of pain killers in my system and a prescription for more. The pain has been pretty bad – but the Percoset (and all painkillers, really) has some very negative side effects, so it’s been mostly Ibuprofen and bed rest when I can catch it. Sleeping is proving to be a bit of a difficulty. No matter how I try to sleep, it’s hard to get my shoulder into a position that doesn’t lock it up and cause a lot of pain which then turns into insomnia.

wembley - shoulder pain — Google says that shoulder pain looks like this: Dr. Manhattan magically causing a supernova in his shoulder. Close. But, still off.

It’s been about two weeks now since we were struck. There’s still a lot of lingering pain, but, it feels like a lifetime ago otherwise. The event has already earned it’s place in the pantheon of life changing events in my life. It is now filed under ‘The Accident’ in my mind with concomitant capital letters. When I think of the word accident, this will be the first thing that hits my brain from now until either the day I expire or another accident of greater magnitude takes over this one (which I pray does not happen). The accident has adjusted my perceptions enough to change course of things to some degree.

The biggest change is that of the financial path my life was to take. I was almost there. I was almost paid off on this vehicle. In another five months, I was going to be car payment free for however long I could keep Wembley running. I am now back on the horse for car payments. Probably as soon as this week.

Wembley - car payment — Think no one cares you’re alive? Try missing your car payment.

This also means car shopping. The good news on this front is that the car at least held some kind of value. The insurance folks have reimbursed me and paid off the old lien on the car. Now all I have to do is just wait for things to finish up. I have an appointment to work with the guys at the dealership tonight, and with any luck, Wembley is replaced with a younger brother. I was so pleased with the Fit, that it is my go to for replacing Wembley. It’s name is yet to be determined. I hate to be the guy who goes with Wembley 2.0, Wembley II, or Junior – but I’ll think of something.

In the meantime, I’m counting my blessings. Thank you to those who’ve checked in and made sure my girlfriend and I were okay, thanks to those who helped with the immediate aftermath, and thanks to everyone who offered support through prayer, well wishes, blood sacrifice or the famed and justly popular ‘other’ (always the biggest category).

Here’s to seeing everyone out on the road again soon.

December 1, 2014 0