Bought tickets today to go visit mom at her place in Florida. Sarasota, to be exact about it. March 13 to March 17. Knowing that it’s just around the corner, almost, helps. RIght now, feeling very tired and depressed and disconnected. Feeling the cold, feeling the lack of light, feeling more than a little de-energized and dumpy.
Realized a critical problem with the Orien Journals today. All the “action” — the fighting, the battles, the swordplay, the dialogue — is necessarily revealed second-hand. It comes to the reader through the mediation of a letter or journal entry, rather than through ‘direct experience’, insofar as reading is direct experience. I haven’t quite figured out how to handle that yet. I may just have to break down and write in the present tense, and write direct experiences rather than in a pure epistolary style.
Also feeling a lack of gaming in my life right now. I very much want to have some role-playing stuff in my life. Working on this free-lance writing project for WW has rocked in some ways, but it’s also reminded me how little I understand the world I write for, and how alien it is for my own experiences in gaming, and how much I want something smaller-scale. My friend Rob put together this idea for a game called “Small Hands” based on a quotation from Elrond in Fellowship of the Ring, about a group of small-time heroes in the neighborhood of Bree during the years of the War of the Ring. That idea appeals to me, because it means a group of heroes centered around a specific locale, rather than racing all over creation. Small-scale stuff, not earth-shaking. A campaign around the village of Three Alders on Gont, for example, would be cool, for example. And I realized that there seems to be minimal interest in , least of all from me.
Talked with my dad tonight. My grandma is not doing well, and he and she worked on her will, and making some modifications to it. She could live a year, a week, a month, a decade. How does one cope with that. Everytime I speak with her now, she makes it sound like the last time, and maybe it will be. She breaks my heart with it, really. Wrecks and ruins me.

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