Fiction: Roy's Prayer

[The second of three stories I wrote about my Pathfinder character from the last year, a tengu bard named Roy Raven. 

In this installment, we were near the end of yearish-long campaign and I felt like Roy -- who began as a bit of a boorish smartmouth -- had made something of a personal journey. One of his friends had recently sacrificed himself for the group, and I was thinking of giving Roy a level in a divine class like paladin. Our Gamemaster Alex suggested that Pharasma herself -- she's a deity in the Pathfinder world -- might step in and offer something more drastic.]

I offer a prayer to Pharasma. 

I have never been a holy bird, so Lady honor me with your patience. I was alone when I was born, like most folk are. I've been on the receiving end of kindness now and again, but for the most part, it was up to me to figure out how to survive. That's how it was for a long time, and that's how I learned most of my habits. I've stolen from the living and the dead, and it's never made me particularly sorry.

When I wanted to give up that kind of life, yours was the first face I saw. This old dwarf gave me a job and a shovel. Well — he gave me the job, but he docked my pay for the shovel. His name was Bardin. We buried people. Humans, dwarves, orcs — we buried a tengu once. He was a young guy too, younger than me. We buried the dead, and we got paid a copper for it. It wasn't work I was proud of, at first. I made jokes. I pocketed some possessions that were meant for the ones I was burying. Old Bardin never caught me, or if he did he never made me stop. You made me stop.

I overheard a cleric reciting a prayer to you, in advance of the body being given to me and Old Bardin for the burial. I don't remember the words, so apologies again, but I do remember part of what he said. "The Lady shall keep it." I didn't know exactly what we meant, but also I thought that I did, if that makes any sense. I thought maybe it meant … well, I dunno. Not the soul, exactly. For whatever reason, I decided it meant all their worry. The world is hard, and it was nice to think that when some poor old folks were finished running around in it, when they've finally met their bloody end, that they could have some rest. That they didn't have to carry that worry around anymore, of going hungry or going poor, or being stabbed to death by some adventurer who wanted a name for himself. I thought that it mean that you would keep it, that worry, so that they wouldn't anymore. And I liked that.

Old Bardin died. I buried him in his own plot. Nobody paid me to do it.

Nobody paid me to bury anybody after that. I took what Old Bardin had left behind, which wasn't much. A book of myths or stories for dwarves, a banjo, a cloak, and a shovel. I burned the cloak. I left the shovel behind, and mine own too, so that whoever took the job next could at least start with a leg up. I read that book, over and over again. About dwarves who went down too deep. Did you know that every dwarven story is about that? Digging too deep and finding something foul. Or giving yourself over to greed. Or drink. Every dwarf story has the same lesson, Lady Pharasma. I started plucking at the banjo too, and after awhile I got not-bad enough that people stopped yelling at me to stop. They started giving me a copper or two to keep going, and that's a better way to earn it than digging graves.

Anyway. That's how I found these guys, the Bugbears. They're all right. I think their mostly good people. What I mean is, they're probably the best guys I've ever known, but you know. If I told them that they'd just make sure their coinpurse was still there. Which is okay. I have old habits.

One old habit is how I still feel about those departed folk. I know a body is a just a body, and that the soul moves on. That you keep their worries for them. But it still means something to me, and I don't think it's just because of my old job. A body is a holy thing itself, and that's one thing I've learned since those gigs in Ravengro. A body shouldn't be used how the Way wants to use them. I think they're real wrong about what they do.

But I didn't really mean to talk to you about the Way. They're bad, but I think we can handle them. I meant to talk to you about Muzgash. He was a real weird guy, you know? And he smelled bad, and he walked slow, and sometimes he would help the people who wanted to kill us. Help them not to hurt. But he was also real all right. And that thing I guess he did, to cleanse your temple? 

Well. All due respect, I guess you owe him pretty big for that. I hope you keep his worries for him. He had a lot, I think.

And I don't always know what to do, but if there's a thing I can, I want to do it.  I think Muzgash has the right idea. You've got to just do it all, all that you can. I don't have a soul worthy of cleansing a temple or anything, but I can be pretty good at shooting things. And I can play Bardin's banjo a little. So if there's something I should do, and you can see it and I can't? You tell me what it is. Okay?

The Lady shall keep it. Amen.

[After this, Alex and I role-played a scenario via email where Pharasma offered Roy the chance to give himself over to her divine mission. His feathers turned white and he lost all of his bard and thief levels, replacing them with levels of Inquisitor. I still played him with the same rakish personality, only know he was on a Mission from God, kind of like Jake Blues. It was a fun change, and it felt character-based and natural.]

Fiction: The Old Bird of the Shackles

My gaming group, the Diplomancers, spent much of the last year meeting every Thursday night to play a Pathfinder adventure called The Carrion Crown. About halfway through, some of us actually wrote up the backstories to the characters we'd already been playing for months. This was the secret origin of Roy Raven, my bardish thief, who later found religion.

The Shackles are the home of pirate lords and smuggler kings, with ruined towers dotting its islands and rocky outcroppings, carved with images of cannibal cults and terrible tentacled things never seen by living eyes. With an unending hurricane and the lawless and savage Sodden Lands to the north, the harsh and unforgiving Terwa Uplands to the east, the Shackles are also home to those who are too helpless, too hungry, or simply too forgotten to live anywhere else.

Sandy was one of the hungry. A decade and more ago he had tried his hand at buccaneering, robbing, and raping, but quickly found that while his cutlass was willing, he simply hadn’t the heart of a ruthless ravager. His first time boarding a merchant vessel he puked over the side when he witnessed one of his fellows disembowel the other ship’s boatswain, and the second time he himself jumped overboard and swam to shore, either unnoticed by the pirates or mistaken for a drifting corpse. He drifted to shore on Motaku Isle, fell in love in the warrens of Quent, and took over an abandoned farm on the outskirts of the jungle, hoping to raise his new family there, astounded at the good fortune that had led him away from a murderous life and to one of love and stability.

Of course, nothing stays dry for long in the Shackles.

Sandy’s family grew to three children and a wife he adored, and worked hard for. But growing crops on the rocky Motaku Isle was ever a challenge, and more often than not the nearby Eye of Abendego, a hurricane that had been raging for centuries, would send hellstorms that would drown even the simplest, hardiest harvest.

“I’ve no skills,” he admitted to his wife one night, when the children were in bed and presumed to be asleep. “The only thing I’ve ever been good at escaping with my life when everyone around me was dying on a pirate’s blade.”

“You were absurdly lucky,” said his wife. “Maybe you can put that luck to good use?”

The islands and rocky atolls of the Shackles called to adventurers seeking treasure and heroic challenges. They also called to Sandy, who sought food and comfort for those who mattered to him most.

There was one particular atoll, difficult to reach due to rocky spires that lurked just below the water’s surface, but which was perhaps the last hope for a hungry man with hungrier babies at home. Sandy rowed carefully, his eyes always on the water around him. The rocks and ruins he glided over could end his trip if he skirted too close and one punctured his small skiff.

It was a thing of wood that Sandy had borrowed from one of his neighbors. Old Edward would already have discovered it was missing, and was no doubt cursing Sandy for a fool that would likely never return. But if Sandy returned with what he was seeking, Old Edward would be too busy eating to be angry. And if Sandy didn’t return, well, he wouldn’t have to listen to Old Edward shouting at him anyway.

He could see his goal in the distance, through the fog of the sea. It was a tower, slender and tall, rising above the waves. Not terribly tall, but straight and strong enough to have withstood wind and water and the terror of the storms caused by the Eye of Abendengo.

It was there that hope was said to still live.

Sandy had heard of the tengu, but had never seen one with his own eyes. They were said to be good luck on ships, if only because the birdfolk attracted all of the spare bad luck to themselves. And in Quent, the largest city on Motaku Isle, there was tengu rookery that was known to be a den of avarice and sin. He knew of taverns there that would occasionally serve tengu eggs, for a few hours raking in fistfuls of gold from the curious, and before a murder of tengu descended on the place to shut it down and run off those who had gathered to eat the tengus’ unborn. But here in this tower there was rumored to be a tengu nest unprotected by what passed for birdfolk warriors, and even if some civilized men (like Old Edward) would frown on eating the eggs of intelligent humanoids, Sandy had a family feed. And, if his conscience got the better of him again, he could sell the eggs to buy food that didn’t have its own part of town in several civilized cities.

Sandy’s boat bumped into a rocky shoal under the water, and the sound scraped against the bottom of his wooden boat. He would have to slow to keep his boat safe, using his oar as a pole that would propel him off of or away from the ruins under the waves. Sandy’s boat coasted to where the tower met the sea. It rose straight from the water, its base down below the sickly lapping waves. He pushed his way around and found a hole in the tower wall at the waterline just large enough to glide his skiff through.

It was dark inside the tower, and the sound of the water echoed around him. A spiral staircase, carved of stone from the interior wall of the tower itself, curved and rose above him, broken in places by time and the salty sea. More than sixty feet above Sandy there was a wooden landing, and sunlight broke through it in places. If there was an isolated tengu nest here, that was the most likely place for it.

He glided the small skiff to where the stone stairs rose from the gently lapping waves. The stairs were so worn -- and so wobbly and weak in places -- he had to move up them on all fours, hand over hand and foot over foot. He stopped every few moments to listen for evidence of his quarry up above, but he could hear nothing but the echoes of the water and his own guilty heart.

When Sandy reached the landing he was momentarily blinded by the sudden sunlight. The roof of the tower had been torn away -- by what, he couldn’t say -- and the landing itself was a tangle of rotten and sea-stained wood, moldering burlap sacks, and detritus gathered from who knows where.

There, in one back corner, under the last remaining vestige of the stony ceiling, was the shadowed form of what could be one of the birdfolk, the tengu. Over the sounds of the sea all around, Sandy could hear labored breathing and the wheezing of a creature most certainly close to death.

Sandy’s heart sank. What if there was a tengu here, and it was already spent and nearly dead? He didn’t know if he had the heart to put it out of its misery (which meant he surely wouldn’t have had the heart to kill it and steal its eggs), and then paddle his way home with nothing to show for his voyage, or this theft of Old Edward’s skiff.

“Hello?” said Sandy. He pulled a simple dagger from his belt, feeling quite rude and boorish for drawing a weapon in what clearly a stranger’s home. “I’m sorry,” he said, feeling immediately foolish for apologizing to a creature he’d not yet met, and from whom he’d intended to steal that which was surely most precious to it.

There was a rattle of breath from the shadowed corner, followed by a wracking cough.

“My doom,” said a voice unseen, “comes to greet me, it seems.”

“Hello,” Sandy said again, feeling quite foolish all over again. A vision came to him of his babies crying for food, and of Old Edward admonishing him for stealing his skiff. “I’m afraid I may have come to rob you.”

The shadows in the corner collected themselves and shifted and moved. Sandy took a step back and nearly dropped his dagger, so slick from sweat were his palms.

“You have come to kill me,” said the thing he still could not properly see. “In days past, when one came clambering up my stairs I would rain oil and arrows down upon the burglaring bumbler. But I am old now, and ill.”

The things shuffled into the sunlight, but the smell of it hit Sandy before the sight. It smelled of old meat, wet feathers, and rot. It smelled of something sick and dreadful, and it moved much the same. It was one of the birdfolk, true, but it had a broken arm (a broken wing?), and a hollow mess of red where one beady eye had once been. Its beak was cracked and askew, and its feathers were matted and torn where they weren’t missing altogether.

Sandy backed up further, and startled himself when he backed into the tower wall. He drew in a gasp of breath at the sight of the poor creature before him, and was flooded with pity. It’s why he made a poor marauder, and an even worse thief. He had no heart for killing or the taking of another’s property, and though he wasn’t particularly strong or especially bright, he would rather aid a helpless creature than take from it.

“What’s done this to you?” said Sandy.

The wheezing old tengu doubled over with a wracking cough that Sandy soon realized was a laugh.

“Time,” the thing said. “I am old, human-man. I am 64, and though I don’t know how long your kind naturally survive, that is a respectably lamentable age for the tengu. Age has inflicted much of the damage you see before you. The rest was courtesy of an especially brutish pirate band, the remains of which you see there.”

Sandy looked down and into another corner of the tower landing, where he saw the sunbleached bones of several canine-skulled creatures. They had been gnolls when they were alive, hyena-humanoids it was best to avoid whether on land or at sea. This tengu of the tower had been accosted by them, and they had undoubtedly planned to do precisely what Sandy had come to do: kill her, and take away her eggs.

“Is there anything I can do?” he said. “To help you, I mean. I don’t really have much, in fact, I --”

The tengu wheeze-laughed again, sitting down where she stood, as if the effort of walking and talking was altogether too much for her.

“You can put me out of misery,” she said, “as you no doubt intended to do when you broached my tower. I have lived here long, and I have defended this place from the likes of you just as long. You would come for my treasure, or my eggs, or simply the glory of killing a lonely sea-druid. Which was it that called you across the waves, pink one?”

Sandy shook his head, with every intention of denying the truth of her accusations, but he could not keep his eyes from flickering behind her, to where her nest must be.

She shuddered and coughed again. “My eggs,” she said. “You came for food, is that it? You have the look of a hungry one. But you come alone, which means you must have someone waiting for you back home. Little ones, perhaps? Or a nagging she-man who demands you provide?”

“She does not nag,” said Sandy. “She tries her best as well, but the truth is, neither of us are very good at, well. Anything. But there are little ones. They’re much better than us, or at least better than me. They’re good. They love hearing music. They love to play together, and they’re never cruel. But life here is so hard.”

“Is it?” said the tengu. “Is it hard where you live, on land, surrounded by fishable waters and lush green plants? By neighbors who would help you in hard times? By family and friends? Is it hard there, where you live among others, never driven off a ship when your good luck charms wore off? Or out from a settlement because the humans drew tired of your ways, of your strange smells, of your beady eyes? Is it a hard life for you?”

Sandy’s face grew hot, and he could not look her in her one remaining eye.

When he finally looked up, she had sagged even closer to the ground. Whether he put her out of her misery or not, this creature was not long for the world.

“There is something you can do,” she said. “I have little treasure, but if there is anything in my worldly goods that will help you, you may take them. I am old, but I and all of mine have been fertile all of our days. There’s many of my own kind who make the treacherous trip to this tower as well, to gain the favor of Ruk, the Feathered Druid of the Sea. I have a nest of eggs here, and you may take them as well. You may feed them to your little ones, you beast of a man -- all but one. One egg you must swear to hatch and raise as your own, and you must swear to treat the chick as equal to your little ones. You must not force it to lay its own eggs for you, should it be a maiden. Raise the little birdling as your own, but with full knowledge of who they are and from whence they come. Do that, and the rest of my eggs shall be yours.”

Sandy though it over for merely a moment. What else could he do?

“What’s to ensure I keep my promise?” he said.

“Do the men of the Shackles keep their word?” said Ruk.

“Not most,” said Sandy. “But the good ones do.”

“Then do, if you are a good one,” said the tengu. “If you are not, and you mean to trick me: tell me so, and kill me before I can curse the day you rowed to my tower.”

“And yourself?”

“Leave me be. I may have one last spell in me yet, and I would give myself to the gods under my own power, if I may.”

Sandy agreed, and gathered Ruk’s eggs into a sturdy burlap sack she provided. There was little else useful to him in her tower, though he agreed to take a momento from her that he would pass on to her chick when the little birdling was old enough to understand: a compass, seemingly normal and with no shine or sheen to draw attention to it, but tingly to the touch for reasons Sandy could not understand.

The voyage back to shore seemed even longer than the trip to the tower, and the sound of the tengu druid’s wheezing laugh would not leave Sandy’s ears.

Back home he apologized to Old Edward for the theft of his skiff, but as recompense he gave the old man the largest of the tengu eggs. “You can sell it if you want to,” said Sandy. “It will surely fetch a high price.”

“What will you do with yours?” asked Old Edward.

“Feed my family,” said Sandy. “For a little while, at least.”

He told his wife of the promise he’d made to Ruk, and within a week they were the adoptive parents of a small, screeching black-feathered boy.

“What will we call it?” asked Sandy’s wife.

“Him. At least, I think it’s a him. We’ll call him -- Roy, after an old uncle.”

“But -- he, he’ll not have our last name,” said his wife.

“No, that wouldn’t do,” said Sandy, remembering another part of his promise to the old tengu: that the chick should always know his own origins.

“What was his family’s name?” asked Sandy’s wife.

“I don’t know … he had the head of a raven.”

“Raven, then,” she said. “We’ll call him Roy Raven.”

Strength Is How Strong You Are

Hey guys. What's new?

I have a new Dungeons & Dragons group. My last regular group was during the LA Days, and we played 4th edition. That's the one where the core races & classes are split up over multiple players' handbooks, and everyone gets sweet special moves when they level up. If you get through 2 or 3 combat encounters in a single session, then you're moving at a pretty quick clip.

If it sounds like I'm being harsh toward 4E, then it's because I'm being kind of harsh toward 4E. In general it's true that your D&D game is as fun as you make it, but after running a 4E campaign for a good three months of weekly sessions, by the end it was just lots of searching through papers for the proper power and, to me, a lot of restrictions on what I could make happen on the fly. The encounters in 4E involve a lot of different types of the same monsters -- Kobold Minions, Kobold Skirmishers, Kobold Slingers, Kobold Dragonshields, Kobold Wyrmpriests and Kobold Slyblades -- and a reliance on miniatures that made game prep lots of work and not a lot of fun. In general I'm not a snobby kind of dude, you know? But I think I really decided that 4E isn't for me.

But! After the move to Baltimore I found myself with a cadre of new friends who were interested in some D&Ding. I don't remember now how the idea first came up, but I know that Kate and I invited more people than we thought would/could come, because I figured it was the kind of event where folks would try it, get bored with it, and then maybe half would become regular players. But this very eve we're going to launch our fourth (I think?) session, and so far everyone has come back for more. The players are mostly new to D&D, and I don't think anyone is an RPG aficionado, so I took the opportunity to foist my preferred edition unto their unsuspecting nerd-holes:

In the words of Pierce Hawthorne, "I won Dungeons & Dragons! And it was Advanced!"

I chose 2nd edition partly because I already have a lot of the books, but mostly because my memory of AD&D is that it fosters more role-playing. The rules are there, but kind of loosey-goosey. Even as they expanded into more campaigns and realms of greater PC-customization, there was a core make-it-up-as-you-go to the game that was surely rooted in playing it in high school when no one wanted to actually read the rulebooks cover to cover, but also, I think, inherent to the system. The jump to 3rd edition brought great satisfaction to the players and DMs who wanted every question answered somewhere in the rulebook -- take a look at the size of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, which is built on the bones of D&D 3.5.

It's probably more true that whatever version of D&D you come to first will be your D&D, regardless of the reasons. Wizards of the Coast have just announced "D&D Next", being the next edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and they did it in the New York Times of all places. 4E came out in 2008, 3E in 2000, and 2E in 1989. That's a slight acceleration of a few years with each new edition, and the reasons are pretty clear. D&D started with Gary Gygax and Dave Arenson at TSR, the product of a couple of guys playing games in their figurative basement. It grew and changed through licensing deals and cartoon shows and toy lines -- re-reading 80s New Mutants comics lately have led me to some rad ads for D&D the game and D&D the product line -- but in the 1990s TSR was bought by Wizards of the Coast, who made their mark on the gaming world with Magic: The Gathering. A few years later, Wizards of the Coast was bought by Hasbro, toy and gaming overlords whose history is the same as most successful 20th century corporations/brands. They had success in the mid-century with things like Mr. Potato Head, and have grown since through mergers and acquisitions. This means that the people currently making Dungeons & Dragons have corporate bosses and conference calls and R&D meetings. I'm not saying Gary Gygax didn't have those over the course of his career, or that AD&D is pure and 4E is not because one was homegrown and the other was playtested at Hasbro-sponsored events. But I am saying that the development of a new set of rules is now more about selling a ton of new core rulebooks, rather than collecting new rules and revisions that have been developed organically by the gaming community.

Part of any given Dungeons & Dragons Edition lifespan is now a planned obsolescence. Maybe that was always true and I was too young or naive or disinterested in such things to observe it before. Maybe it's from having a professional life and seeing office politics play out in a number of environments, so that I can understand better the benefits a major rules overhaul would bring to Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro's year-end sales.

But what I feel in my bones is that I'm having friends over tonight to play AD&D, and the only things it's going to cost us is the price of snacks and beer. Kate & I are going to make a pasta bake and a pot of chili and we're going to sit in my office and pretend to be elves and dwarves and kobolds and owlbears. I'll leave the fighting and the pre-ordering to somebody else.

There's a big difference between playing D&D and being an active member of the D&D online community. As with most online communities, it's full of dark corners and bad attitudes -- but there are two blogs I've been reading since getting back into the game that I feel bring enthusiasm to the topic and show their love of the game. One is Grognardia, written by an RPG creator & enthusiast whose allegiance lies with 1st edition, and the other is The Id DM, written by a gamer who returned to D&D after several years away, and who currently plays 4E. Also, The Escapist did a great series of articles on D&D's Past, Present, and Future, the latest of which is a little outdated now after the "D&D Next" announcement. But still worth a read if you're interested in the game and its history and the people who are invested in either. It's especially illuminating with regard to the switch to 3rd Edition, the Open Gaming License, and the resulting "Edition Wars" that are bound to break out all over again when the new version premieres.

Where I Write

(very much inspired by this piece on the Rumpus by Chloe Caldwell).

On the left sits Testimony for Man, a history of the City of Hope medical center outside of Los Angeles. It's on top of a Verizon bill I'd rather not open. An iPhone I found under an overpass in L.A. has the headphones plugged in. I use it as an iPod. Most recently I listened to an episode of This American Life about a reporter who confronts the man who raped him when he was a kid. He has an elaborate plan to murder the rapist, but changes his mind when his parents discover what happened by reading an ancient diary. The reporter says, "If you have a secret and you don't want anyone to know it, never write it down." That's a paraphrase. He also says, "Avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengence is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." That's from the Bible. Under the iPhone are some tax documents I'd also rather not look at.

A tiny framed painting by James Kochalka leans against an external hard drive. I bought the painting at Wizard World Chicago many years ago, when that was the city where I lived. I like it a lot, and I always keep it near the place where I work. In front of the painting is a cross-stitched Abraham Lincoln K gave me for my birthday this year. Next to that is a small bust of Abraham Lincoln that I bought at Lincoln's birthplace in one of my cross-country drives. That particular drive was in 2008, from Oakland to Ohio, and I bought two of the same bust. I kept one and sent one to SJ. I have a lot of Lincolns in my office, and they're all related to girls in one way or another. What does that say? About me, about Abe?

There are speakers plugged into my computer. My current MacBook is a replacement for the one I spilled Coca-Cola on when I lived in Ohio after grad school. I think it's lasted the longest out of all of my computers. I probably shouldn't have written that -- I'm not superstitious about much except for computers.

On the other side of my computer is a Cincinnati Reds gnome my mom sent to me before my Los Angeles-Vermont cross-country drive. She asked me to take pictures of the gnome as I drove, and I did, even though some kids were a little too-cool-for-school about it. But I thought it was fun, and it was something my mom asked me to do. There are a lot of little action figures next to gnome -- a cylon, Captain Marvel, Thanos, two Spider-Men and a Green Goblin. I don't know what to do with them, but sometimes I pick them up when I'm reading, or when I'm thinking about what to write.

There's a picture frame with family photos in it, also something my mom gave to me. It has pictures of my dad and Ma, my parents' dog Daisy, our backyard in Ohio, a family photo from several Christmases ago (we're all in the picture, so I think it was taken by AM), and a picture of my dad, my brother, Grandpa Jent's tree, and me.

There's a rock in front of the frame, but I don't remember where it came from. Possibly the beach of Lake Champlain, from the visit K and I took here last year, when we decided to move to Vermont. There's a rubber D&D Grell monster, and a heavy lead Watcher statue Pato gave me for my birthday this year. There's a white NBA sweatband I sometimes wear when I'm writing. There are two pens, my current journal, my wallet, and a stack of books: DK Eyewitness Mythology (from K, from birthdays past), the Tanakh, The Emperor of All Maladies, and They Called It the City of Hope, all for work. Beneath the books -- more bills, mostly paid.

Behind me there's a pillow AM made for me long ago, that I use to rest my feet on when I want to write and recline. A calendar, a page torn out from an oversized comic book, Galactus the Devourer of Worlds, and a printer that hasn't worked lately. A copy of Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, and a robot action figure.

Up ahead of me and to the left I have hung up a map of my novel. There's a book case with the books I'm not currently reading, but that I like keeping close -- Popeye comic strips, D&D books, theses and books my friends have written. On top of the bookcase is another Abe, this one wearing Mardi Gras beads, and a concrete Elvis that Sharon gave me longer ago than almost anything else that's happened to me that even counts, as a grown-up anyway. Across from me is the open doorway to the kitchen that won't be mine much longer. I'm terribly nervous that I won't find a place to live with an open workspace like this one. I tend to romanticize where I am, whether that's a good idea or not. I can never imagine finding friends, or finding places to spend my time, that will be as rewarding as the ones I currently have. But then, I always do. That's not to diminish the friends I have, or have made in the past -- every one matters, and I mean it. But there are just *so many* interesting people in the world. They're everywhere, all the time. I want to meet as many as I can.

I'm terribly nervous, and terribly excited.

Baltimorelandia

I just packed up two boxes of books, and in the second box I included volumes 1&2 of American Elf, the daily comic strip diary of James Kochalka. American Elf was where -- long ago, in the distant early-aughts -- I first heard of a town called Burlington, Vermont. Flash forward several suns, and I've been living on the outskirts of Burlington since last October. You can tell you're in my part of town when you see the spooky boat in the woods.

I came here most recently from LA, which is where I moved after grad school in San Francisco (with a stopover with family in Ohio for a few months in between). When I arrived in LA, I thought I'd be there for a few years at least (and at most), I thought I'd finish my book there, look into some freelance writing gigs, maybe even start teaching. And it's certainly not Los Angeles's fault that it didn't work out that way -- it's a big town with lots of opportunity if you can grab it, and I had a hell of a writing group during my year there. This is a sizeable chunk of said writing group on top of/inside of a giant ball made of sticks at Disneyland.

My reasons for leaving LA are becoming mistier the longer ago it was, but I do think it was the right decision to go. Most of the folks I knew were writers or stand-ups, and they were working their asses off to find/keep/create jobs that I would have entertained as day jobs, but that I would never want to fight for. And there are a LOT of people there who are willing to fight for those jobs, so what was I gonna do? My girl and I grabbed our cat and headed east to Burlington, "the West Coast of the East Coast."

Well, Vermont -- I hardly knew ye. Last week I took a job that will take me down to Baltimore as soon as I can find a place to lay my head down there. I have a cautious excitement about the move. I'm excited to be going back to a larger city -- they have zipcars there! -- but I went for a run yesterday along the Lake Champlain bike trail, and I'll definitely miss the water and the trees and the outdoors here. All the same, for reasons personal, creative, and emotional it's been a struggle to find my people here. Going through a break-up recently has made me feel especially island-like up here on North Cove Road, and a train trip last weekend to Baltimore to visit writerly friends was just what I needed and wanted to clear my head and reassess the next few years. And there just doesn't seem to be a downside to working a job that keeps me creatively engaged, living near people I love who are really good writers (hi Adam and Kate Lynn!), and, frankly, having a new town to explore. I've been moving around a lot for the past few years, and I thought with all my heart that Vermont was going to be home for the foreseeable future. But this weekend a friend said -- "You get used to that life after awhile, of moving to place after place." So maybe I just embrace that for now. I'm finishing a new draft of my book by early summer, and I'm looking forward to a break in the cold. In the billboard of life, Baltimore is the dude with one eye, and I am the girl with the bulbous head.

Shared Worlds

Thinking of shared worlds again ... playing Fallout 3 and a new D&D 4E campaign has me itching to world-build. I think my perfect vision is a wiki based around a concept that would be split into different eras or specialties -- and four or five writers would contribute, each specializing in a corner of the universe that may or may not overlap with the others. One of the basic rules would be that whatever you did had to build on what someone else did, but not negate it.

It would have to be a group that worked together well, that was keyed into the same ideas and wanted similar things from the project. There would bound to be disagreements, but hopefully the wouldn't turn nasty, and would ultimately lead to something even better than what was there before.

The ultimate goal would be to have a world that any of the contributors could then set stories within -- novels, screenplays, games or whatever they wanted to write.

I started something with this basic idea with Pato -- god, about a year ago now. But I haven't ever been entirely comfortable with the "hardware" issue -- with the wikis that we found, and with my own capabilities of building it. So I've tended to let the actual wiki sit, even as I keep taking notes on the world and even writing stories set within that world.

Anyway. I've got airships and tentacles on the brain these days.