Unforeseen Circumstances

Last Wednesday, both for when this came out and when I was writing it, oddly enough, I ran into one of my most frustrating unforeseen circumstances that I just wanted to take a little time to both rant about and work through verbally with myself and on the page. See, I’ve not written for the Displaced series in… god… over a year at this point. I haven’t had the time or wherewithal to do so, and I was trying to figure out why I felt so creatively drained. 

Now, this won’t have any affect on my potential releases, dear reader (he says as though he had a large audience and wasn’t just doing this to feel like he was actively doing something in order to ignore the fact that he’s not doing the advertising he needs to do to actually succeed… no, no, no…) as I have the first nine or so books completed. However, it does have an effect on my mental state, and today we’re going to go a little deeper into that. 

Now, I mentioned a while back that I have used AI as a sounding board to help me plan, create, and generate stat blocks for my games. I used it for a brief while, helping me create things (that I had to rewrite, sometimes on the spot, because it made no fucking sense, thus creating more work for me) giving up on the damn thing both when I realized that it was more work, more trouble, and more environmentally devastating than it was worth. I also realized that it damaged my creative muscles, and I spent weeks if not months rebuilding them to a point where I was happy with the result. 

AI can only be blamed for part of that, as I will also note that I’ve been in a pretty rough space mentally due to things discussed in Monday’s final reflection. If you haven’t read that, go back. 

Today, however, I wanted to talk about something good that was going on creatively. Now, I can’t get too into detail on what I was working on as you’ve at best only read book two at the point I’m writing this, which is in arc one, and I was working on developing things for arc four, the final arch of the campaign. I was tempted to open a tab for chatGPT, simply to make a stat block and move on with my day… then I got mad. 

I got mad at myself for thinking that it would be acceptable to even consider with how detrimental it had been to me in the past. So I started, almost defiantly, to do things the way I used to do them. I started jotting down some ideas, asked myself questions, did more research into something, learned something new, went down the rabbit hole, and before I knew it, I’d planned almost the entire first half of this particular chapter of the game. I had allies, villains, stories, plot hooks, and a whole new appreciation for the Lakota tribe of Native Americans that I’d never known about before (small hint for you that won’t pay off for years, I promise). For the first time in a long time, I was excited to get to this point. All that remained was that night’s game where we had to get through a crunchier session, then it would be time for drama!

Note: For people who may not be in the know, when it comes to the term “crunchy” in the gaming community, that’s referring to a game where there’s a lot of combat and dice rolling, essentially we were “crunching numbers.” 

So, excitement had filled my heart once again. Both for the game and for the creative process that came before it. I hadn’t felt like this in months about something I’d created, and the spark seemed to be coming back. All that we needed to do was get through the combat, the drudgery that they needed to experience to set the tone for the part of the world they were dealing with, the understanding of the danger, heartbreak, and destruction that the enemy was inflicting on the population and the lengths the people would go to in order to defend their homes from what they saw as invaders…

And my DAMNED INTERNET GOES OUT!

Remember, dear reader, this game has never, if rarely, been played in person. I moved to South Carolina before we began, but not before I began writing the ideas for this particular campaign. My friends remained in New York, though they either were or began to become more spread out over time. You know, that whole growing up thing that we do against our will. So the internet became the only way I was able to interact with my dear friends, players, and gaming group. And as the DM, without me, the game pauses. There were four combat encounters that they were going to need to face in a row. Four!

We got through one. 

Then the internet went out. 

And I spent forty minutes fighting with a router trying to get my internet back. Eventually, one of the players needed to get to bed, so he logged off. The recording was preserved, and by the time I logged back in, despair filled my heart as I knew that we wouldn’t be able to continue this battle for another two weeks. A week from the day this is released. And all that research, all that excitement I felt while developing the next stage of this adventure, would begin to cool. 

Now it is my great hope that once we begin again, the spark will reignite, and the world I am creating with my friends and fingertips will be just as engrossing to me as it was last Wednesday when I felt that old familiar feeling begin again, but inspiration can be a fickle thing, and often we feel that if we do not jump on it immediately that it will fade away forever. Perhaps it’s a simple measure of remembering the process in which my inspiration birthed itself anew, however, there is just as much possibility that in the weeks, or even month, it will take to begin to share what I began alone with those who get to experience with me, I may lose something precious in the process. It is the fear of all creatives that one, what we create will not be good enough, but a close second is that we will create something wonderful, but lose the spark before we can complete it. 

I have no answers for you here, no three steps to reigniting your spark. I saw how researching mythology, flipping through the books I have on the subject rather than allowing a computer to do any thinking in the process, helped reignite it in me, for at least that afternoon. However, your process may be different. Follow the dopamine, I suppose is the best advice I can give, but don’t be so rigid in your thinking that new avenues can’t open up to lead you back to the place you want to be. 

There had been a stockpile of blogs that I had put together for the past few months, and thus I had not been writing as much as I once was. That cycle was broken today, as I sat down and wrote with more intent than I had for a very long time. Perhaps persistence is just as important as spark, but I’ll have to keep doing the research. Until then, my rant is over, though my anger at Spectrum remains.