I have to admit that I was kind of discouraged that night. We didn’t really even finish making up characters, let alone actually play the game. This is frustrating to me, because I’ve been plotting out this game for months; years, actually. The campaign setting has been in development for a very long time and I’m pretty pleased with it… if only we could get the game running. I’m not entirely sure what happened… we chatted and tried to get going, but it didn’t really happen. While Evilpheemy and Cearalaith tried to work out the details of her character in the dining room, Craymore and I wandered into the living room to develop some background for his character. Then the others followed us, and the conversation just drifted into other areas. I suppose that these things happen… just the same, though, this is going to be a very difficult campaign for me to run if the pattern which has been holding so far continues: one session every eight weeks or so, and that session being an incomplete character development sesion.

My enthusiasm for the project waxes and wanes. Evipheemy’s going to be putting his part of development on hold for awhile while he gets some of his other projets up and running for Chaosium This is good. I approve. I want Evilpheemy to make this stage of his career a priority, over Outer Darkness. On the other hand, I have to admit that because I’ve always felt like I’m part of a team for this thing, it’s hard for me to put my heart into it when I’m going solo. The milieu is an interesting one, and the limits we’ve placed on it make for some interesting challenges for my creative self, but it is rather tough for me to develop fully within its constraints. To be perfectly honest, I think I’d much rather ran another Dungeons and Dragons game right now than "Incident at Mount Joyce". I’ve got an intruiging world and storyline that I developed over the summer but which I haven’t gotten to run because I was focusing on Outer Darkness.

But, then, that’s just the way I feel at the moment. It could change at any time.

Gaming used to be a very central part of my life: from my college days when I was running two simultaneous campaigns in different settings, two or three sessions a week, five or six hours at a shot (time I probably should have more productively spent planning out for some sort of career), to the days when I ran Underground Puppeteers, a Live Action Role-Playing game in Davis, elements of which are still going on (and which is as much a creation of Craymore now as it is mine — perhaps more so, since he’s actually put more work into its overall development than I have at this point). Now, though, I feel very isolated from the gaming community that used to be so central to my life. New LARPs spring up which take place in the Underground Puppeteers universe, which is kind of weird — the universe I put so much of my creative energy into evolves without me, and I sometimes get the sense that the new maintainers almost resent any input I might give into how some elements of it might develop (although I believe this universe is in very good hands, as the people who are maintaining it are brilliant and creative).

It’s not just the games, of course… I also am starting to feel cut off from the people in the gaming community, some of whom I used to be very, very close to. One in particular I used to chat with on a daily basis; that same person is graduating from college now, and I only found out about this second-hand.

I suppose these things happen, but it’s still somewhat depressing. I still love all of my friends… I just wish I had more time to spend with them.

Bah. I must just be feeling grumpy.

The job hunt is as glacial as it ever was. I’ve applied for over 150 jobs at this point without a single interview, a statistic which I find does absolute wonders for my self-esteem, the way that an iceberg did wonders for the Titanic. I’m having difficulty figuring out how to launch a freelance writing career, because of the old catch-22: people who would pay you for writing for them want to see samples of professional writing, which you won’t really get under your belt until somene pays you for writing for them. I’ll be meeting next month with a career counselor in the hopes of making my resume a bit less pathetic.

The temp job I’m in is fine. I like my co-workers, and it’s close enough to home so that I can ride my bike in, which is good. I enjoy riding my bike a lot (though there was that time, two weeks ago, when I messed up my legs badly trying to ride hard against the wind, to the point where I could barely walk without liberal dosages of ibuprofin and ice packs), but the best part is that I can park my bike without having to worry about moving it every two hours to avoid getting a parking ticket.

On another note, I did finally get to see Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones this past weekend. I enjoyed it, but I think I enjoyed it more for its place in the overall development of the Star Wars storyline, rather than for itself as a movie. It was a decent film, much better than Episode I; the special effects were spectacular, of course, and I was thoroughly impressed with the design of the scenery in the Coruscant scenes. And I was pleased that Jar Jar Binks was mostly absent from the film, and that there were no poop jokes. But I do wish George Lucas would admit that he’s a bad scriptwriter and an uninspiring director, and let someone else handle those elements. I’d have to join the legion of nerds and fanboys who say things like, "Yeah, if I had to choose between Attack of the Clones and Spiderman, I’d go see Attack of the Clones… but I really liked Spiderman better."

That muse of mine is being recalcitrant. "Homeworld" is a difficult story for me to write, because it requires a different approach than I’m used to writing. "Mother Tsan Chan" is difficult because I have no idea what story to build around the basic plot elements. And The Troll King’s Daughter doesn’t feel ready to start yet. I set myself a goal a couple of weeks ago of writing 1,000 words per day, but I have yet to meet that goal on any of my projects.

Ah, well.

Here’s hoping that the next time I write one of these journal entries, I’ll be in a better mood.