Musing: March 2008 Archives
... and yet I manage to fall off it.
It's a kind of gift.
At any rate, I'm back from my unannounced hiatus with all kind of news.
Writing related: my agent writes to tell me that my last round of revisions were good and there are just a few more things to work on she's ready to talk to some publishers! I'm... actually a little shocked, to be honest. Not that she is happy with the story or anything, it's just that... I've never been at a place with Hidden Things where I wasn't working on a revision of some kind for someone. It's new and dangerously alluring territory for me, this "someone else is working on it" place. It's a good place -- I might try to get back here more often.
Wedding: Twelve short days to the BIG DAY. I will not be cliche and say "I'd just like for it to all be over," because frankly that's not the case. However, I *would* very much for it all to be going. Started. In process, if you see what I'm saying. Let's have us a wedding.
The next two weeks, I'm off go-into-work work and am instead working on stay-home-and-work work. This includes two editing jobs on roleplaying games that I'm frankly pretty excited to get started on, but also involves thing like last minute wedding tasks and fun additions to my daily schedule such as being able to catch up on my Google Reader while at the gym in the middle of the day -- there's something very satisfying about doing "real work" on your own personal projects -- it's virtuous and decadent at the same time.
When was you're last work from home day? What did you do that had nothing at all to do with work?
As I ponder this, I have to share a simple fact -- for all that I rarely play DnD (and honestly liked the original redbox rules more than the 3rd edition), that game and others written by Gary led me to some of the most enjoyable moments in my life, bar none. He was an inspiration and a muse and someone who, if nothing else, encouraged my creativity and imagination and gave me a space in which to dream.
Every day (and for the last twenty-seven years), I play games directly descended from his creations, or play around with them in my mind; he was to gaming what Tolkien was to fantasy: a recreation of the genre, a defining touchstone to which all descendants are, favorably or not, either compared or contrasted.
My family has always very supportive of whatever kind of creative activities I wanted to dive into (even when it involved hours and hours of tinkering with 'that damn game' in high school), but Gary was family too, of a sort; a kind of great-uncle I only spoke to via wordy, typed letters -- gruff and sometimes off-putting, but the sole adult who went beyond 'supportive' said 'let me show you how *I* create things.'
Appropriately, he will be mourned and missed.
