Can you spell cacophony?

For a number of years I have been telling myself I want to do more gaming (as in RPG gaming) and more writing. To make things easier, I thought I would try to make the two run together. Of course, I’ve participated in the last two NaNoWriMos (winning the last two), but precious little gaming and no writing outside of NaNo. There’s an expression about good intentions that I think applies here. Over the years I’ve had a couple of good ideas for a setting for this stuff but other than a few notes on various bits of paper, nothing much has happened. I even considered expanding the setting of my 2008 NaNoNovel and I didn’t even like it all that much!

Now, I am actually going to do something concrete. You read it here, so it must be true. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, if only because having people know about what I’m trying to do might keep me a little bit accountable.

Here’s the plan. The gaming (which will be solo initially, expanding to include the children as time and circumstances permit) will be using Swords and Wizardry and Mythic GME. The writing will be to fill in the blanks in history and world setting or to expand on something fun or interesting that comes up in the games. I hope to have plenty of back-story to be able to do NaNo ’10 using the setting and my NaNo/Twitter friend winnie3k has encouraged me to try to add a short story per quarter into the mix too.

Mythic Yahoo! group member blastedpsychic has produced a very clever Random Campaign Start-up Generator for Mythic which I have used. While I was planning to veto any rolls that really didn’t appeal (what on earth is a ‘Noir’ theme anyway?) I managed to get a very interesting setting out of it. I’ve given it the working name of Bladesage (after the significant city state in the area) and I’m planning to expand on some of the details I rolled up as I go..

I have a basic history, a set of bad guys, a possible good guy/girl, some external influences, some internal movements, a couple of non-human races and a terrifying wandering monster. I hope to share some of these in my next couple of posts.

Watch this space.

Hot on the heels of my second NaNoWriMo win, and thanks to a post from fellow wrimo Natnie, I’m going to have a go at the inagural Project52.

I’ve complained regularly of spending more time fiddling with the theme on this site than I do writing on it. This could be a good way around it. I had already set in mind a goal to do more writing here this year but Project52 seems to be a good idea. It’s concrete (write once a week), there’s community (one of the great things about NaNoWriMo) and hopefully some accountability.

So this year expect a bit more traffic here. It will be no more focused than it normally is. Maybe once I get into the habit of writing more often, I might be able to “brand” the site a bit and maybe focus on one particular topic. But we’ll leave the future for the future.

For an interesting exercise, I’ve created a soundtrack for the forthcoming film of my 2009 NaNovel.

We can dream can’t we?

• Love Lies Bleeding – Elton John
• Julie’s Been Working for the Drug Squad – The Clash
• She’s Invisible Now – Eurythmics
• Would You Believe? – Roxy Music
• Superman Main Title Theme*
• He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother – The Hollies
• You Know I’ll Always Love You – Budgie
• Flames of Fire – Machinae Supremacy
• Super Steve – Machinae Supremacy
• Laura – Flogging Molly
• Liar – Queen
• Blood Brothers – Iron Maiden**
• Liar, Liar – Castaways
• For All Tomorrow’s Lies – Berlin
• Ride of the Valkyries*

* I apologise in advance for the use of the Superman Theme and the Wagner. It was just too hard to leave them out, being a superhero story and all (My MC can’t even fly!)
** I also apologise for the Maiden. But I’m fairly convinced that my muse comes disguised as Eddie, so I’d best make this small offering for the sake of a smooth and comfortable November.

Via Lifehacker, I was directed to an article entitled “Give Me Something To Hate“. Go read it. Bottom line is much the same as the NaNoWriMo philosphy: better to get something down on paper that you hate (but can improve later) than procrastinate and obsess over and end up with nothing. Love it.