Moving toward dreams

One of the things that keeps coming up for me is that writing and possibly publishing roleplaying stuff has been a dream of mine for years… but the longer I live, the less writing I do. I get wrapped up in stuff that, while fun and often worthwhile, moves me away from fulfilling my dreams. Or maybe it's more like, "The more complicated the Internet gets, the less writing I do."

I think Gary Gygax's death has really highlighted this for me… while he had a spotty career, and is by no means universally loved by fandom, he's accomplished so many of the things I'd like to do. I've been talking about starting a game publishing company since the mid 1990s.

And I realized, at nearly 40, if I'm ever going to do the things I dream about, I'm going to have to get started for real… I'm eventually going to run out of time. My dad's 70, and he just had a coronary stent inserted… when I visited him in the ICU, he was watching golf, and mused that he'd never learned to play but that it was too late to start. When I'm in my retirement, I don't want to be musing about how it's too late to start.

All this came shortly after a recent "house cleaning"… dumping many of my self-imposed "obligations" to the Fudge community and the local roleplaying club, and putting my own dreams as top priority.

Gorilla Con helped get me interested in gaming again, which is a good thing. Now I just need to find people to game with.

As a present to myself, and an emphasis on "just writing", I bought an AlphaSmart 3000 off eBay for eighty bucks. I wrote most of this blog entry on it and I'm finding it quite nice. It's essentially nothing but a portable word-processor… with a 4 line by 40 column screen, enough memory to store "about 100 pages of text", and runs around 700 hours on one set of AA batteries. Everything I type is automatically saved and it boots in about two seconds to the exact place I left off.

More importantly, it doesn't have Internet or any other applications to distract me. I can't do anything with it but write. It's light-weight enough I can take it nearly everywhere with me, its instant-boot feature means I can pull it out to just take a few notes and put it away in less time than it takes my laptop to boot, and I never have to worry about power while I'm writing.

On top of that, a herniated disc in my back has kept me from getting up and about and given me plenty of time to get acquainted with my new friend. (That was fun… it happened Sunday morning at the con, in my hotel room as I was getting ready to load my car, check out and hit the game room. Instead, I rounded up some help to load my car, checked out, and managed to leave town at 10 AM. Sunday is kind of a dead at Gorilla Con, but I was hoping to get in one last game.)

So what am I writing? I think I'll talk about that later. That's enough for now.