Getting There

Habit forming is hard! But once they're in place - "good" habits I mean, productive ones - they do most of the heavy lifting of the work that you're trying to do.

A little over three weeks ago I started writing on here again, following the idea that I could use the interruptions to my sleep (provided by now 10.5 month old daughter) to see what ideas were lurking that could then be connected with the hobby. In the space of those three weeks this has lead to 16 other posts, more than the rest of this year so far combined. I think this is important.

"I have no time!"

And I still don't. I have no more time. I've been on holiday, away from my computer and any notes, I've had to work, I've had to take on more childcare things while my wife steps up her Masters work, and we're doing work on the house.

A simple provocation. That's all it took. It hasn't, strictly speaking, taken yet: I miss days, I dawdle too much on ideas (the zoo-inspired post where I try to make a connection between captivity of zoo animals being like life before G+ and the wild being G+ looks like it has festered rather than flowered, but let's remain hopeful) and I've not played anything in ages.

But.

But maybe that can be tweaked a little more. Let's see what August has in store.

Quick idea for sped-up Oort Cloud chargen: choice of weapons and gear a la Apocalypse World's chargen choices. So, e.g., Killer's pick one of brutal close-up weapon and peashooter gun; two less deadly close-ups and a reasonable ranged weapon; a short sword, a handgun and a rifle; a rusty spoon and a BFG.

Writing Camp

I make notes of things all the time. Half-thoughts, stray notions and little "I wonder..." moments go in to journals, on to scraps of paper, and more often now get captured by Google Keep. I keep saying that I will make time to develop these further, but always find reasons/excuses not to.

So in July I am going to use the framework of Camp NaNoWriMo to make something of these ideas. I've set a goal of 31,000 words of material: 1,000 words per day. I'm not sure if I will be able to write that every day, but averaged across the month I hope to produce some (at least) half-polished pieces.

My aim at the moment is to create/polish:

• A series of useful/interesting random tables, encounters, creatures and items for old school style games.
• At least two nano-games that I have been sketching ideas for while I was on holiday recently; these have the working titles "Crash Land" and "Blood Bank Heist".
• "Die Hard in a Wizard's Tower" - taking it from the notes that I have at the moment to a scenario.

I might also ask people on G+ for challenges! My goal with all of this is to try and develop a writing habit again. I have that more or less when it comes to the professional writing that I do, but want to do more in RPG writing. Maybe this will help.

Stay tuned...