Eoh; Torc (reversed):

“I've been cryin' lately/ thinkin' about the world as it is”

Well, maybe not quite, but the impulse has been strong of late. I've mostly stayed quiet, not really knowing what to say about how I've been feeling, as much for a lack of creative inspiration as for concern that I'd just be rehashing all the things I used to bitch about.

I figure it's been long enough that I can bear to repeat myself if I have to.

Now, what's happened since the last time I posted? Well, I turned 35 for one. Not exactly a benchmark age, but old enough for one to look back and wonder “What the fuck have I been doing with my life?”, especially if where you find yourself is no where close to where you intended to go.

Shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

What have I been doing? Well, paying down my debts has been prime on my priorities list until recently; finally, I'm seeing a house on the horizon in my future. How that turns out remains to be seen, but for once, I have hopes.

Unfortunately, that brings to mind a less than positive thought that came to me at work the other day: “We find ourselves born into a world in which we strangle hope at conception rather than suffer it to be stillborn.”

Aren't I just a bright ray of sunshine?

Anyway, I've been burying myself up to my eyeballs in writing, gaming and reading in an effort to distract myself from those many things that might drive me off my established path. I'll break down each activity into it's own paragraph below for whichever might interest various readers.

Gaming: I bought Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim for my birthday; it's a real-time strategy game involving the constructing of a medieval kingdom while contending with the independent inclinations of the various units in the game. It was entirely too short for a $40 game with very little replay value, but I'd been waiting for a sequel to the original game (which no longer played properly on any of our household computers) that I couldn't help myself. It was fun as far as it went though and if they add more content to the game in some way, I'll be happy to snap it up.

I've also tried my hand at the MMORPG D&D Online Eberron Unlimited, with extremely limited success. While the graphics for this game a pretty good and the developers actually seemed to have made an effort to make the game more than just a powergamer wasteland, it still fails in most of the ways 'free' games of the same type tend to: a certain amount of repetition in gameplay and the near necessity to play with a group, even when the game has sections designed to be playable with a single character. I go back to the game pretty regularly, but don't play very long because I get frustrated so easily.

Reading: I just finished two very good books in a row. First, the dark fantasy artist's first proper full length novel, The Child Thief . This is a very well thought out and extremely dark re-imagining of Peter Pan, mixing the core elements of the beloved “fairy tale” with elements of Celtic folklore, the stark realities of childhood we all seem to gloss over when we grow up and the violent imaginings plumbed from the depths of Brom's own macabre imagination. I highly recommend the book to...well, anybody really. Although I felt left the tiniest bit flat by the ending, the bulk of the story is engaging and unconscionably real.

I followed that up with Jacqueline Carey's newest offering from her world of Blessed Elua, Naamah's Kiss. I really enjoyed her previous trilogies from this world where the blood of Jesus was supposed to have given birth to a divine being so beautiful that it drew angels down from heaven to serve it. Now, I put this book on reserve at my local library almost immediately after discovering it would be available, but then made the mistake of reading a professional critique of the book on Amazon.com that suggested the whole plot of the book was designed to drive the main character from one sex scene to the next. As a result, I almost passed on the book when my reservation came through, but I'd just finished The Child Thief and I was pretty much up for anything at that point. I'm glad I gave the book a try. While I'll admit the story involved quite a bit of sex (a staggering amount lesbian sex, in fact), who ever wrote the critique must not have bothered to read the previous six books that would have showed that sex is a key element in all of this series of books. I liked how Naamah's Kiss switched the character script a bit from the previous books and and kept the main character moving from one unfamiliar place to the next with little time to adapt; that kept the story from getting too stilted in one place for too long, but it also detracted a little bit from the characterization. I look forward to what Jacqueline does with the subsequent novels.


Writing: As has been my wont for the past few years, I've been struggling desperately with my own creative lethargy to make something cohesive and, more importantly, complete to add to my portfolio of work. My two most consistant projects, my Samrahad epic and my single novel of Frotley, have continued to evolve beyond the parameters of my original concepts, making for very unstable foundations to work from; the factions in Samrahad keep fragmenting and reforming themselves and the very structure of Frotley keeps changing so that I have to change how my main character ends up approaching it.

I miss being able to just throw any old crap down on a page and then fix it later; these days, I'm such a perfectionist with my writing, I've already given up on an idea before it properly makes it to the page.

Well, that covers the things that have captured my attention (or that I've pinned down and stared at until my eyes started to bleed). My wandering heart and inconsistent libido only bear mentioning in that they've not much changed their attitudes from my past complaints; they remain irritants, but constitute the core points of constancy in my life, so I suppose I shouldn't complain; at least I know to expect my heart and libido to squirm uncomfortably every time I see a passingly attractive woman. I'm neither surprised nor shocked an longer...just annoyed.

Well, that's about it from Planet Raven for the time being. I wish all my readers (be ye infrequent and far between) fortune, fame and, as always, a....

Good Journey
Raven Stromdans