In other news…

‘Tis Saturday, which can only mean one thing: tonight there lies in store a closing shift for yours truly.

Not to say that’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but it can become rather ludicrous. My store’s aim is for everyone to go home around 9:30; recently, however, we were stuck there until 10:30. To give you an idea of what exactly we were doing… well, this really doesn’t require an analogous example. Twenty people spent an hour and a half moving merchandise to the very precipice of the shelves- ‘breaking down’, as it’s called. It provides a sense of orderliness which I suppose some people find appealing, but I can’t imagine the customer(s) will care very much if a jar of three-meat spaghetti sauce is slightly out of line with the rest of its countless kin.

Now that I’m done moaning about work, I have good news! Within the next week or so I will have some original work to post here, and get this: I’m not lying this time!

That’s a common thing for me, really. Motivation is a precious resource and doesn’t often have a mind to stick around all that long. I’ll be caught up in the moment, happily banging away at my tired old keyboard, convinced that I’ll have some splendid piece with no trouble and people will gaze at it with awe and wonder, asking themselves ‘who is this prodigious fellow, whose words move me so?’

Actually, it’s more likely they’ll make a noise and continue surfing blogs. I’m not actually sure how much interest in fiction exists in the blogosphere, and to summarize the nature of my writing, it’s almost certainly going to be fiction and while I do work with concepts more advanced than ‘and then they had a battle’, there’s quite a bit of action in my work. So here’s hoping at least a few new people become enamored with my grand tales!

Well, I’m off. The lady and I- that’s abukkitfulloffoxes on the right sidebar there- have a friend to meet before I trudge off to work. Thankfully, I have further time with said friend and the fair Bukkitfox once the grind is over with.

Cheers!

P.S. Hear about that FTL (faster-than-light) event recorded by CERN during the course of its OPERA project? If it’s of interest for you, please do initiate/participate in discussion in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this and, should you happen to have any, all of the above.

P.P.S. I noticed that the word ‘work’ appeared far too often in paragraph 5. This has been corrected.

A thousand pardons!

Dear reader, I fear I’ve let you down. It’s been three days since my last post!

Let me assure you, however, that there is a perfectly good reason for that gross breach of your trust. To be concise, it seemed pointless to copy and paste the previous post (“Lost Time”) with a few minor edits. I did not, however, want to leave you in suspense. So this is my excuse, my doleful confession: despite possessing my full share of human potential, despite possessing talent (or so they tell me) for and love of writing, I spend much of my time doing little or nothing (this includes writing blog posts).

My good friend Lucy (findmeastorm in the rightmost sidebar!) described it quite well: “mindless tv-and-video-game junkie.” No, she wasn’t describing me, but it fits. There may be considerably less TV in my life than video games, but the end result is still the same; I spend valuable time doing nothing worthwhile. It’s a fairly common condition these days, I hear, and that makes it only more unbearable when I decide to actually think about it.

After all, if I can write and indeed love to write, love to tell stories, should I not write? That’s only logical. What defies logic is the miserable sinking feeling I experience whenever I sit down to write, the infuriating hopelessness that drives me back to another five or six matches of Team Fortress 2.

There are a few explanations. I don’t work much, and thus don’t bring much to the family. $80 – $120 a week just doesn’t make a dent (and I suppose if I were able to make more I’d be out of the house anyway). Sure, there are countless alternatives to working at a grocery store, but not all of them are improvements. So instead of looking to fast food or housesitting or any such ‘high school job’, I look to retail stores and restaurants. So far, no luck. I can only hope the situation improves if I continue to submit applications! Common wisdom  insists that it will.

At the risk of sounding long-suffering (and therefore rather insufferable), I do suffer from some degree of depression. The medical history of my family is rife with it; without getting into any details, I am third in a line of writers, as my father and his father ply the trade as well, and we each deal with a unique flavor of depression. I spent some time working with counselors, and at one point was taking welbutrin, an extremely low-level antidepressant. I kicked all of that to the curb upon turning 18, confident that I could handle the mounting bleakness on my own.

And not without reason. You see, when I write- when I sit down and take myself to task, crank out no fewer than a thousand words- I feel fantastic. I feel as though I’ve accomplished something meaningful. Writing leaches the sadness from my world, leaves me feeling rejuvenated and ready to face down the troubles of the day.

Bearing that in mind, I concluded that so long as I could force myself to continue writing, I would do just fine. It still makes sense to me, and I’d still love to put the idea to the  test. It’s a shame, then, that I continue to slack off and accomplish nothing. At 14, I was driven to write the next great fantasy epic by the time I finished high school. An unreasonable goal to be sure, but at least I gave it a shot. So what the hell has become of me? At 19, I work a bit, play a lot of games and tell myself that as soon as this shift is up, I’m going to write up a storm. I’ve got at least one NaNo novel under my belt- a short story or two should not be such a big freaking deal.

Yet it is.

That’s enough woe and use of the word ‘I’ for one post, however. It already feels awfully self-centered. Tell me, reader, if you made it this far: what is tearing at you right now? Commiseration is always welcome.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out the fine folks in the sidebar. They’re three of the people responsible for my continued struggle to achieve success in writing.

Long, Lazy Day

Nothing happened today.

Well, nothing of note, anyway. Having slept too long, I woke up groggy and have stayed that way for most of the day. After a few hours of Team Fortress 2- and yes, I am quite the avid video gamer-  Emma and I were graced with a visit by our good friend Jake, commonly known as the ‘Ginga Ninja’.

Obeying tradition, the first thing we did was go for food. The second thing we did was to lay about and watch awful (yet hilarious!) movies on Netflix. Most notably “Blade II”, still playing out on my screen. It’s your average action romp: nice coats, nicer weapons, lots of disposable mooks. In this case, vampires. Wesley Snipes’ incredible flat-top really steals the show, though. If there was some artistic credit to the film it must have passed me by while I stared in uncomprehending awe at Blade’s immaculate ‘do.

That’s about it, sadly. Tomorrow I hope to have some epiphany to report, or perhaps a bit of new work to share. Today was just one of those empty, aimless days.

Lost Time

So, remember when I said I’d be posting daily? You may notice the distinct lack of a post between Thursday the 22nd and Saturday the 24th (that’s today, to be clear). Sorry about that. I really have no excuse other than a rousing 12 – 4 at the grocery store followed by a game of Pathfinder. I arrived home around 10:15 and proceeded to completely drop the ball in terms of ‘getting a blog post in before 12:00 AM’.

To make up for it, I’ll try to make this post twice as long!

Yesterday’s interesting tidbit: So begins the final race weekend of the season. What does that mean for the people of fair Concord, New Hampshire? Well, to be brief:

• Horrible traffic.
• Packed grocery stores (it’s times like these I remember that, as a cart pusher, grocery bagger and general peon, I am the indisposable cornerstone of the grocery industry. Were it not for me, the folks in charge would have less time to stand mysteriously about!).
• Fun-times drunk driving!
• Fast cars turning left while thousands cheer, overcome by pure NASCAR ecstasy.

Today’s interesting tidbit: It’s nearly 1:00 AM, and I’m not nearly tired. Don’t give me that look- it’s been all of an hour. What did you expect?

If I were a worthwhile writer, I’d have some work to discuss or even post up here for you, esteemed reader, to read and contemplate- even discuss! It seems I’m not, though. Therefore I pledge on my own honor that, before the next week is out, I will have some freshly assembled words to present for your consideration. In case you’re wondering, it’s very likely to be fiction of some sort. Classic fantasy races and tropes abound, though I aim to make use of them in innovative and original ways, telling grand tales and developing sympathetic- if not always lovable- characters.

I aim for depth before complexity, but don’t ever discard the latter. More often than not my stories are character-driven, and I spend quite a lot of time (especially at work) pondering their lives and natures. Not every story centers around them, but they are forces in the universe I am building bit by bit.

That’s about it for now, actually. I seem to have hit a literary block- but that’s a common issue, as you’ll come to understand.

Thank you for reading, and as always, give those stupendous folk in the right sidebar a look. You won’t regret it.

Behold- Thursday!

Thursday is a rather important day for abukkitfulloffoxes and I. Traditionally, it’s the day the great Legacy D&D Campaign takes place, a game which began more or less on a whim back in the dark age of 2009 and has simply chugged on since then, passed down from dungeon master to dungeon master and spanning several different characters’ lives and times across the face of our ‘make-it-up-as-you-go’ campaign setting (yet unnamed).

For those of you who might not know exactly what D&D is, it’s essentially one step from freeform roleplay- at least the way I play it.  You create a character with generic ‘ability scores’ for things like Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, etc. and specific ‘skill modifiers’ for things like Perception, Acrobatics, Toffee Making, etc.

You play the game mainly with a 20-sided dice, rolling it and adding the result to the relevant skill modifier to see if you beat the set DC or ‘difficulty class’ for a given challenging task. It’s as simple as that, even if character creation can get fairly time consuming.

One player known as the Dungeon Master (DM) sets the stage for the rest of the players whose Player Characters (PCs) will be facing various challenges involving combat, detecting and avoiding traps before they kill you dead, solving puzzles and occasionally trying to gab your way out of a bad situation. The DM controls the world and the aforementioned challenges and the players must use their characters’ unique abilities to keep the adventuring group alive.

So I’ll give you the rundown on the current legacy campaign game. We’ve been running it for well over a year now, starting at 1st level. We’re now sitting pretty at 23rd level and, according to our honorable DM, we are just about to hit the final stretch. Which is good, because the party is getting a little restless. Each of us now has a specific goal in mind, something we have to do for our own reasons that doesn’t involve merry romps around the globe solving problems and narrowly avoiding horrible death. Here’s a rundown of the trio:

1.  Atris – The Wizard. Also known as the Explosion Catapult, this recovering alcoholic keeps over 40,000 years of arcane knowledge locked up in his brain, blocked off by repeated instances of ‘falling off the wagon’, so to speak. He is charged by the goddess of his old faith with restoring his shattered plane to existence.
2. Inwe – The Rogue. Also known as the Stab Wound Connoisseur, this lovely half-drow rose is covered with thorns. Her goal is rather less clear to the rest of the party, but she has been experiencing crippling hallucinations as of late, especially if the group does anything related to the planes known as the Shadowfell or Underdark.
3. Mazidur (me!) – Also known as the Zealot With All Them Swords, this young (83 in comparison with Atris’ 40,000 years!) elvish knight is my oldest character and belongs to a world I’ve been developing and writing in for years now. He serves Aeomanric, the god of Justice and seeks the power of an ancient relic he believes will allow his order to… well, any number of things. All he knows is that more power for the church means greater ability to pursue and destroy wicked entities (demons are a specialty).

Oh! There’s also the DMPC Alexis, who belongs to the same church as Mazidur there but is rather less enthusiastic about her duties than he. Understandably; she must divide her duties between being a knight of the order and being a cleric of the order! They’ve got something of a “partnership” going on at the moment- we expect it’s excellent stress relief.

Well, that’s about all I had planned for this post. I’m off to go play D&D!

As always, give the fine folks to the right a read. You’ll be glad you did!

Well met!

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

I’ll be trying to post in this blog every day. Sometimes it’ll be a few sentences detailing what amazing and adventurous things I’ve done with my day (read: played games, visited friends, pushed shopping carts). Sometimes there’ll be some prose involved. The hope is that this practice will encourage me to produce new work so I have something to post other than random boring junk.

See you again soon.

—

Oh! This is very important:

That section to the right- ‘Fellow Wordsmiths’- is half the reason I’m even writing here. Every person on that list is a good friend and an inspiration to me, and as you’ll read in the ‘About’ section, we are trying to combine our efforts (literary and otherwise) toward the goal of success at writing and life in general.

Check them out. You’ll be very glad you did.

-Drew