You know how it’s awkward to call that friend you haven’t talked to in a few months out of the blue? It’s like, now after so long, you can’t just call to chat... you need to have a reason. Blogging feels the same way sometimes. I get into such a groove with it, and then nothing... it’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s just that getting to update the blog becomes the last thing on the list to do.
It’s not like it surprised me... I knew this was coming. Every year is the same. I do some creative work in the spring, I peak in the summer, and then fall comes- back to school, I direct a play, the play dovetails right into a major musical production, and I’m creatively invested in my professional life so much that the last thing I want to do when I’m not at school is do more creative stuff.
However... spring is coming! Our musical (Beauty and the Beast- it opens Feb. 2) is a monster of a show, but it’s a monster that I can almost bid adieu. I’ve enjoyed working on it, but my mind knows that it’s almost time to work on gaming again... the clock in my head just clicked in the last few days, and suddenly ideas just started running together.
It’s the funniest thing; I don’t think about gaming much for months, and suddenly it’s front and center in my imagination, with ideas popping in new ways. I actually have come to appreciate the process quite a bit. I’ve tried to get ahead of it, getting gaming stuff in the can during my summer creative bursts to keep up some visibility in the 5-6 months I know I’ll be ‘game hibernating’, but it doesn’t seem to happen. It’s probably just time to accept that’s how it is, and for what it is. I also like that this process gives me enough emotional distance from my own work to look at it as it is, rather than in some overly-glorified vision of awesome.
The only gaming stuff I have done actually has been to look at some OSR games (Labyrinth Lord in particular), reading through those books with fresh eyes. I rolled up my first B/X character in over a decade, and I remembered how much fun that was. I’ve also been keeping up on all the blogs on my list (I check in every few days), but haven’t bothered posting anything (or felt compelled to by anything I’ve read about).
I don’t know what exactly I’ll be working on next, but I’ll probably blog about it before another 4 months goes by...
