The Lee of the Stone

The 1982 animated Secret of NIMH falls neatly within the Netflixian sub-genre, "Terrifying 80s movies marketed to children" along with such classics as the Last Unicorn, and the Neverending Story. In case you haven't seen the movie, or have buried the horror deep in your subconscience, the climactic scene in the Secret of NIMH is focused around Mrs. Brisby (changed from Frisby as in the book) and the rats of NIMH attempting to move her house (with her children in it) to the lee of a big stone so that it won't be destroyed by the farmer's plow in the morning. The scene takes place in the middle of a rainstorm and involves anthropomorphic baby field mice, nearly drowning in mud while entombed in their sinking cinder-block home. It's the family movie of the year!

Anyway, my recent move has me thinking about that scene a lot lately. From an objective point of view, my move has been a breeze. No rats, or drowning in mud, or destructive plows. But change is difficult for me, even if its good change, and this move is no exception. We've been in the new house a little over two weeks, and we're in a good spot, considering. The Wife and I are completely out of our old apartment. The packing boxes are being emptied and are gradually disappearing. We haven't found any horrible surprises at the new place. In short, everything is proceeding according to plan. I should be happy, right?

Nope. I'm still struggling with the transition. I feel uprooted, like one of the mouse kids dangling in a swaying cinder block high above a mud pit. Everywhere I look, I see something that needs to be done. art to hang, furniture to buy, racks to install. All this chaos has me creatively blocked for a number of reasons. Up until last weekend, our new craft room was the dumping zone for most of our boxes. While I have now cleared it out and set it up as best I can, we are still waiting on some furniture that is in storage, and on some other furniture we have yet to buy. Even when I've felt the urge to create despite my makeshift setup, I've been quickly subdued by creeping guilt for thinking about trying to draw or paint, or craft while there's still unpacking left to do. My game books are also all still in boxes while we wait to get the last of our furniture out of storage.

I want to be settled. I want to relax, safe in the lee of the stone. From outside my head, I can tell we are moving in that direction and that we'll be there soon. Unfortunately, inside my head, I'm stuck in the mud.

This post is part of the Insecure Writer's Support Group.

Pinteresting Locations

I am a busy dude, and as I have become more experienced at running my regular D&D game, I have found myself trimming the fat from my prep time whenever possible. One of the best tricks that I have added to my DM toolbox deals with creating locations. In the past, I would spend hours, if not days or weeks painstakingly dreaming up and then drawing out the maps for location-based encounters. I would agonize over whether the dimensions for different vertical levels in a structure lined up properly, or whether there were enough fields around a city to maintain its population. I really didn't have time for that kind of crap, and my players didn't really pay attention to it. They wanted cool places to get into fights, and that's it.

Then I realized, why spend all that time fighting writer's block to dream up totally unique places, when you can draw inspiration from the fantastic places already out there!? I set up a Pinterest board called Gamespiration, and over the months that I've had it, the board has filled up largely with photos and illustrations of fantastic locations. The pictures are great for breaking through creative blocks that might otherwise result in yet another fight in an 8x8 room with a couple pillars.

Let me give you an example of how I pulled several existing images together to inspire the location where the final climactic episode of my last campaign took place.

First, I knew I wanted the battle to take place outside a ruined city on a plateau up against a glacier, out of which were running rivers of blighted water. But drawing a city map can take FOR-EV-ER. So I looked around until I found Ani.

I kept the basic shape, changed the fortifications at the north edge to the foot of the glacier and converted some of the landmarks into sites appropriate for my particular ruin.

I also knew I wanted a Helm's Deep style fortress set into the foot of the glacier, so I grabbed this image and a couple others for visual inspiration.

I also grabbed this one for a top-down map.

I ignored the underground cutaway on the bottom of the map, replaced the steps and altar at the top with a keep, and added a few more breaches in the walls from time and previous battles. All-in-all the modifications were much quicker than dreaming it up from scratch.

When my players headed to the ruined city to scout things out, they went poking around in some ice caves looking for a back entrance to the mines they thought might be the source of the evil blight. I took my inspiration for the cave environment from this image.

The beautiful thing about using Pinterest to inspire location is that you can draw from rich visual resources, which can add depth to your locations' descriptions, or even just be shown at the table. "You enter an icy cave that looks like this."

You also can be laying the foundation for incredible locations outside of your prep time without disrupting your usual activities. Anytime you see a cool or potentially inspiring image on Facebook, in an article you're reading or anywhere else online, you can just use the Pinterest plugin in your web browser to toss the image onto your board. When it comes to prepping a location, you then have a one stop shop to get things rolling!

The Creative Doldrums

Being December 2012's post for the Insecure Writer's Support Group

I have been one of those ubiquitous creative funks of late. It's not exactly a block because I know what I need to do to move forward. It's just that none of the creative projects I have sitting around appeal to me. I have several blog topics jotted in my notebook, partially painted minis on my desk, partially written adventures for the next step in my D&D game, and even a really engaging book that I've been picking my way through at a snail's pace. I feel a bit like the despondent child with too many toys, surrounded by fun, but having none of it. Waaaah!

That's not to say that I haven't been doing anything creative. I have occasionally been dabbling here and there. I recently watched a bunch of instructional videos on OneNote and have been using my knew knowledge to reorganize my D&D notes into a more functional system.*  Like everything else, however, my reorganization remains unfinished. To make matters worse, I only feel the faintest spark of inspiration when I'm at work and can't devote time to this stuff.  I have created this handy graphic, which illustrates my current creative process quite nicely.

What do you do to break out of the creative blahs?

*I may even upload a blank copy of my notebook structure, or at least a couple pages in case any of you are OneNote GMs too.

In the Beginning

Being my second submission to Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group:

That's it, no more monkeying around trying to write Shakespeare. The content writing phase of my big project at work has officially begun and I expect that my life between now and the end of February will be characterized by grumpiness; deer in headlights looks in response to otherwise reasonable requests; interesting, impromptu hairstyles; baggy eyes; frayed nerves; and an obsessive focus on a single subject... oh, and of course, writer's block.

Starting a writing project is always the worst part of the endeavor. No matter how much I tell myself, "The first draft doesn't have to be good, just put something on 'puter!" My mind can't let go of thoughts that belong two or three steps down the road. "Is this information best included here? or there? in combination with this? or that? or left out entirely?" My mental state quickly devolves into a self-directed argument about how over-thinking is going to slow down the process when there is a very aggressive, borderline-unreasonable deadline to meet, to which the response to myself is:
"well, at least I'm thinking about the project instead of nitpicking about how slow its going"
"Oh yeah, well you're nitpicking now, and because I'm actually you, you are just as bad as me, you self-righteous prick!"
"Who do think you are calling me self-righteous!?"
and on, and on...
And of course this usually happens when I am either trying to write or trying to sleep so that I can write the next day.

Anyway, I am at the part in the process where I feel like this:

This video was made for a friend-of-a-friend by several of my friends. 

Read the previous sentence over and over until it gets too annoying to bear

The implications of my impending writing block/blitz for work is that my writing for pleasure--including the posts I pen for this blog--will likely be sporadic at best. If you enjoy what I have to say, stick around, because I'm not giving up on the blog, I'm just getting busy... awww yeaaaaah!