I am feeling a little frustrated with myself because what with Easter and the Royal Wedding (lol) I had two four day weekends. You’d think I’d have jumped eagerly on this time to make some decent progress on the module but, no, I pissed it away, while feeling guilty for doing so. I think one of the problems with working on an insanely large project is that you could theoretically spend all your time ever on it, and therefore you have to introduce artificial constraints upon yourself to stop yourself going completely nuts. Possibly I just have bad time management and/or other psychological issues. Also I think when you have four days of glorious sunshine ahead of you, drawing the curtains and settling down for the long haul with your imaginary world could very easily be an entirely miserable prospect. So, yes, this is a pathetic justification for why I’ve done fuck all.
Chapter 3 seems to be going on forever. When you write a novel, or any long document I guess, there are particular periods that always seem especially gruelling. I usually find the 30k word mark is a killer, since you’ve made quite a lot of progress, and you can look over your shoulder and see what you’ve done, and it’s sufficient that you couldn’t just say “fuck it” and try something else instead, but you’ve still got miles to go and there are no particular landmarks insight. So, yeah, that’s where I am. Whinge!
I am, however, looking forward to getting back into it. And I am especially looking forward to pwning Chapter 3 because I feel like I’ve been stuck here forever, in some sort of game designer’s groundhog day. I think perhaps what happened was I overcompensated in a pretty major way for not really having much of a clue what I was doing in Chapter 3. I realised I needed the chapter to introduce a character, about whom you’d be making decisions later, and (angsting aside) I’m actually pretty happy about how that went. And I did have a plot for the chapter but it was a bit less focused then the plots for the other chapters, so this led me into a very free-form space, into which I just kept piling extra shit.
One of the things I really like about making a module is that I find the creative process very emergent. And that may just be the most pretentious thing I’ve ever written ever. So sorry for that. But I’m basically a hack – and I always have been. I don’t think I’ve ever written something I’ve considered “precious”. Or anything I haven’t been willing to tear apart and refit for money, for attention, for whatever was needed. And I don’t mean to be cynical about it because I’m not cynical about it. Anyway, I find this flexible, used-car-salesman approach to artistic endeavour stands you in really good stead for module design. I’ve written before about the limitations of my own ability and I usually deal with that by shaping everything around my limitations. Which should be limiting but it isn’t. It’s weirdly liberating actually. Can’t code your original idea? Well do something else! Area looking shitty? Well, stick something down to hide the mess and write it into the story. And generally the things I do because I couldn’t do something else turn out better than the other stuff. It would be bad for my pride, if I had any.
I also re-visited Hordes of the Underdark over the long weekends – Deekin is officially my favourite henchman in the world ever. He is adorable. So adorable. There is a very small, hidden tribute to him my the module. No plot yet. But a tribute to Deekin. Ho hum.