My favorite distraction

Okay, before I met Flavia I was not prone to talking like this, but...
I love this cat.

I am going to get an oil painting of Panther Octavia, this year. Okay it's official - I am not only the old deaf guy, I am a crazy cat person.

Pleasant, yet tiring, Fictions

November through January is "fiction writing time," plain and simple. Or so my schedule, done sometime in October, no less, says. But after writing game "stuff" for most of the last year, do you realize how hard it is to write fiction? All three of the projects I have set to complete before February have great starts, but after the initial detailed descriptions I just... well, just seem to not want to go further because of this or that detail or special dialog that I want to research "just a little further." Frankly, I keep wanting to develop player-character stats or commission an illustration after I get four type-written pages down.

I am especially addicted to the super-hero, and villain, stuff I have been working on lately. I never knew how much actual writing, as in narrative and scripting fantasy and science fiction took, until I started getting Powers Out of this World, or POW! (excuse the exclamation mark), worked out for play-testing. Did you know that super-powered character stuff only really requires a scene description and some decent encounter/NPC stats for about 80% of the piece that you are pulling together? Wow. Will I ever want to write a full paragraph again?

Ah but luckily, reading real writers is considered a productive pastime when one is in "creative mode." Been able to finish Ken St. Andre's latest novella, as well as some historical stuff on Philby and other spies of the 50's, and a great re-print of Marvel's "All-Winner Squad," from 1946, no less-- Oops, more superhero stuff. Gotta stop that.

Well at least I am keeping up on my typing skills...