As I write, I’m listening to a great podcast, Novel Therapy, which my friend Gina flagged to our writing group. The premise is that it’s a conversation between two women, one a wannabe novelist (in the nicest sense), and the other, a bestselling author. It’s lovely to see an unfolding of a mentoring relationship –though I note “lovely” is one of the words they say they don’t want to use! I’ve written a few notes from the first episode, namely about the importance of:

“creating a gap” for the ideas to come through. Quiet times of peace where you can welcome ideas, and examine them gently.

I’m still on track with my own writing; Catmage is up to 10,447 words, and I’m enjoying giving myself the room to think wide about my novel rewrite. I’m really enjoying sitting down at the laptop, with a hot cup of coffee, after walking back home from the bus stop, and I tell myself I just have to write 500 words on the story. It’s a very gentle unfolding, and I am completely following my nose, only adding to, and deleting from, a small bullet-pointed list of things that could happen next. I have the feeling there’s not much more to go on the story, and then I’ll give it a bit of a prune, and send it out for the writing group to read. It’s a good feeling :)

Gaming-wise, I finished up my Scratch Zaphod hexcrawl (just a wee one), though I had some trouble yesterday with Recordvault. Am going to try and tweak it today, and then I’ll put the link up here. Since then I’ve also kicked off another adventure (“campaign” sounds a bit grandiose) with Scratch having some bad luck on the return journey home, and being shipwrecked on Hot Springs Island (I bought this version, with physical map and .pdfs of the main books). So far the generators, etc, have been a lot of fun, though I’ve seen some comments on reddit that GMs running it for a group found all the dice rolling a bit stressful.

On the computer I’ve been meandering a bit. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is still up there on the list, as is Morrowind, and Project Zomboid. I really, really, like PZ, and it’s incredible to me how much gameplay is available in this thing that’s still in pre-release. The only thing is that I find if I play it too much I start getting what I’m going to call the Apocalypse Blues, a lot of negative thinking about “the state of the world,” and also imagining zombie attacks everywhere. So I have to play it in spurts, and take pretty regular breaks from it. I guess that’s testament to its theme and worldbuilding (and my freaky imagination) more than any sort of negative criticism.

Onward, friends! May your days be happy and free from expectation :)