It was a little depressing. After a life full of whirlwind changes, the last ten years have been amazingly static. I've been with the same woman since 2002, nurturing the same kids since 2003 and 2005, in the same house since 2007, and in the same job since mid-2010. None of that is bad, but it doesn't make for some kind of sweeping narrative of hope and change, either. Given the turbulence of my previous decade, I suppose that a quest for stability -- seen clearly only in hindsight -- was a natural outcome. But going back through some of my older writing, I also felt keenly that the thing I've done most is to keep on keeping on.
Let's rephrase that, though, and put it into some context. I'd moved something like thirty-five times leading up to our settlement in Stratford in 2007. I'd left the Army in 2000, struggled to adapt to a less-caring world outside the Green Machine, moved to New York, and then watched my dad die a slow, painful death that finally culminated in 2007. By 2010, my mom was sick; she died in 2011. Sally, too, has had family issues (to say the least), has come back from service overseas and struggled to reassimilate, and has found herself lost in New York. So. The one really important thing that I -- that we -- accomplished in the 2010s, the one thing we did that really matters, is that that we got our lives together and stabilized. That's allowed all four of us to grow happy and healthy and mostly content in a world that's increasingly less so.
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| Casa Cabeza, Fall 2010. |
I started a blog called Storyteller's Playbook back in February 2010. I was sad at the time because we'd had to close Proletariat Comics just a few years prior due to a flood at our old house back in Fairfield. PC LLC was trying to become something like what Comixology is today, but we didn't have the capital or the connections to do anything other than play an extremely long game. It's ironic because if today's technology had existed back then, I'm pretty sure we would have made it. We certainly had our share of guerrilla fans and believers. But the world wasn't ready for a strictly digital publishing theory back when we were trying to push the idea, and when those tools finally became widely available, I needed whatever money I had to bail my family out of the jam created by the flood.
What can you do?
Bear in mind that while all of this was happening in Fairfield, my dad was steady drinking himself to death back in Tennessee, and my mom was at turns sick, in chronic pain, and just plain angry that I moved to New York. We didn't have any support. We just had me and Sally, and on the writing end, I had my partner Jerry. But there wasn't anyone who was going to help me, like, make my dreams come true or offer encouragement or anything. My folks actually wanted to see me fail, so I'd have no choice but to slink back to Tennessee in disgrace. They were actively hoping for calamity, sometimes in an openly mean-spirited way.
Eventually, I started a fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign on the (now defunct?) Mythweavers board -- just as a creative outlet. I ran that game for four years. I wanted to tell a story and have someone care about it, and The Sellswords of Luskan, as the campaign was called, really helped with that. In time, the game got kind of famous on the site, being one of the site's longest-running, and as I started to feel a little better about myself, I launched Storyteller's Playbook. It was about the arts of storytelling and Dungeon Mastering, hence the first post.
“Mediocre writers borrow; great writer’s steal.”
--T.S. Eliot
As storytellers, we all want our work to be unique and original. Even in a game that’s as necessarily dependent on outside sources and established mythology as is Dungeons and Dragons, the fact is that there are times that we want to take our players by surprise. We want to innovate. We want to find a common theme or trope and turn it on its head. And, y’know, that’s good. It’s good to want to get outside the norm, to want to push the envelope, to want to, as Simon Cowell so often puts it, take something established and “make it your own.” And yet, even as we acknowledge that desire to be different, to stand our from the crowd, I think it’s worthwhile to take a minute to realize that without some seminal works from which we all draw inspiration as a community, well, there probably wouldn’t even be a crowd from which we could stand out. Because before you can innovate, I think you have to understand the basics. You have to be able to see the common forms and have a feel for how and why they work. And then, too, I think it’s important for storytellers to understand their own motivations and internal tics, and those are often formed as a function of our innate tendency to imitate our favorite works. I don’t say that’s a bad thing, merely that making the best use of our influences depends in large part on understand what those influences are and why. To that end, I’d like to take a little time to go through some of my personal influences, looking a bit at what I liked and why, and if nothing else, you can at least take some potential recommendations for your own future reading.
So yeah. I could've written that yesterday, save that I'd never write a Wall of Text like that for the modern audience.
2010 also saw me doing triathlons. As the year started, I was entering my third season in the sport, though at that point, I'd not yet finished a season without either major injury or illness. I fell off my bike and broke my arm the first year, and I gave myself athletic-induced pneumonia my second, in both cases because I really didn't know what I was doing. Even reading my workout logs, it's hard not to look back and laugh -- or at least sigh.
Monday: 18 miles on the bike
Tuesday: Off
Wednesday: Off
Thursday: Gym - Back, Core, Quads, Biceps
Friday: Swim - 2000 yards
Saturday: Short Run / Swim - 2000 yards
Sunday: Medium Run - 5 miles
92.8 points for the week. Not bad, right?
I'm ten years older now, but this would be an off-week for me these days, and I'm not even competing anymore. Crazy, right?
As I got more into triathlon, I got less into D&D, and somehow, Storyteller's Playbook picked up a few readers, mostly as pertained to local area triathlons. Arguably the blog's most successful post was this one, about the struggles of juggling multiple interests.
With all the triathlon talk around here lately, I’ve been wanting to do a post on straight Dungeons and Dragons for at least two full weeks. I mean, I like triathlon and all—I love it, really—but this blog was conceptualized as a blog specifically about storytelling for folks running online role-playing games. And yeah, I’m not dogmatic enough to feel like I need to keep the blog on-topic or anything, but at the same time, it’s been months since we’ve done anything even remotely related to D&D, and that seems like a shame. So that’s what I’d like to do today.
But first…
Sally and I picked up a copy of the latest Competitor Magazine a couple of weeks ago at the Milford Y-Tri. Competitor is a free, presumably ad-supported magazine that I’ve seen in a lot of the local bike and tri shops around NYC and Connecticut, and I wasn’t hugely surprised when we found copies in our goodie bags after the race. So having finally finished The Way of Kings—which I liked a lot, if you’re wondering—I finally had a chance to leaf through my copy of the May 2011 Competitor during lunch last week. And I’m glad I did.
By October of 2011, I'd realized that it was time to move on.
Yup. This is the end.
I decided to start a new blog, called Danno's Lair. I did it because, bottom line, I think this blog's name is a little confusing and more than a little off-topic. So if you want to see what's new with me, head over to the Lair and check it out. There won't be any more posts here, so there's no need to come back... unless you absolutely want to.
See ya in the next life!
* * *
I have two goals for 2020, and they're related. In my head, they're related to what I wrote above as well, though I don't expect anyone to necessarily appreciate the linkages.
1. I want to watch less bad football.
2. I want to spend more time worrying about things I can actively control.
Storyteller's Playbook, for all its faults and lack of readership, was good about both of those things. My more recent writing hasn't been, though it's been astronomically more popularly read. I'm not sure how that's going to play itself out, but something needs to change, that's for sure.
Happy New Year, everyone. I wish you all the best of everything in the 2020s.
less bad football and more ice hockey! it’s good that you have been able to keep perspective and take the long view. Happy New Year!
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