Post-birthday thoughts
Yesterday was my birthday, and I had realized a couple of days earlier that I didn't have any of the usual mix of anxiety and giddy anticipation. It was going to be ... another day! Not any worse, not any better necessarily -- simply a day. Huh. Why did that happen?
Make no mistake: I still love presents! I still love getting birthday greetings! And presents! Have I mentioned presents? But it was definitely different this week. When I had faced the Anxiety of Birthdays Past, the thing that had always nagged at me was the classic feeling of mortality; I hadn't left my mark on the world. Twenty years ago, I envisioned my future self as a critically acclaimed horror writer, along the lines of a Robert Bloch or Ray Garton. Sure, maybe I wouldn't have made a King-ly or Koontzesque mountain of moolah, but I would've had a fanbase and critical praise, and that would've been cool.
I wrote -- and still have in my files -- notes and scenes and even a short story or two. Yet a couple of things kept getting in the way: 1) I'm too self-critical, which is probably why I'm a good editor, and 2) I'm a procrastinator. Bad, bad, bad. Every accomplished author whose advice I've read -- from Harlan Ellison to Stephen King -- says you need to treat writing like a job, where you set a schedule, stick to it, and make sure you write something, anything, every day. It took me about 15 years to come to terms with the fact that that wasn't me. I wasn't driven enough by my muse or inner demons to arrange my life into the routine that the Craft of Writing seemed to demand.
The flip side, though, was that I discovered I could channel my creativity in other ways -- namely, role-playing games. Although I had been playing RPGs since the mid-'80s, it wasn't until the mid-'90s that things kicked into overdrive. I credit a lot of that inspiration to the Ravenloft setting (as well as its inspirations, i.e., Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and every Hammer movie ever made). And starting this decade, I began writing detailed recaps of my group's Ravenloft sessions, which allowed me to play around with themes, subplots, foreshadowing, and atmosphere.
And then there's Goodman Games, for which I've been doing much freelance work as an editor since 2003. Not only do I feel like I'm karmically repaying the industry for all the entertainment it's given me, but I also get a thrill out of taking a piece of text and making it a little bit better or of finding a tiny error in continuity. Any editor out there knows what I'm talking about. And that reached a high point last year with two things: my mega-edits on the much-discussed epic Castle Whiterock, and my first publication as a paid writer, for "Madness at the Mutilated Oak" in DCC #48. Sure, maybe the saying is true that "Those who can't write, edit," but so far I'm having my polyhedral cake and rolling a gooey 20 with it, too. Holy Messy Metaphor, Batman!
Yet there was a third thing that happened in 2007: The biggest impact on my birthday this year is obviously my family. Now that Judy and I have brought Jordana into our lives, I have made that mark on the world. As Jordana grows up, I'll pass on what I know to her (including the plot of every episode of Angel), and I know that some of me and some of Judy will go on. So, between Jordana and the PDFs of the Dungeon Crawl Classics (v3.5 adventures now half-off!), DragonMech, and Etherscope that will float around in the RPG ether forever, my "legacy" -- such as it is -- will be set. And you know what? I haven't given up on getting that short story published one day, either.
So yeah, I was pretty relaxed on my birthday. And damn, I got presents!
Make no mistake: I still love presents! I still love getting birthday greetings! And presents! Have I mentioned presents? But it was definitely different this week. When I had faced the Anxiety of Birthdays Past, the thing that had always nagged at me was the classic feeling of mortality; I hadn't left my mark on the world. Twenty years ago, I envisioned my future self as a critically acclaimed horror writer, along the lines of a Robert Bloch or Ray Garton. Sure, maybe I wouldn't have made a King-ly or Koontzesque mountain of moolah, but I would've had a fanbase and critical praise, and that would've been cool.
I wrote -- and still have in my files -- notes and scenes and even a short story or two. Yet a couple of things kept getting in the way: 1) I'm too self-critical, which is probably why I'm a good editor, and 2) I'm a procrastinator. Bad, bad, bad. Every accomplished author whose advice I've read -- from Harlan Ellison to Stephen King -- says you need to treat writing like a job, where you set a schedule, stick to it, and make sure you write something, anything, every day. It took me about 15 years to come to terms with the fact that that wasn't me. I wasn't driven enough by my muse or inner demons to arrange my life into the routine that the Craft of Writing seemed to demand.
The flip side, though, was that I discovered I could channel my creativity in other ways -- namely, role-playing games. Although I had been playing RPGs since the mid-'80s, it wasn't until the mid-'90s that things kicked into overdrive. I credit a lot of that inspiration to the Ravenloft setting (as well as its inspirations, i.e., Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and every Hammer movie ever made). And starting this decade, I began writing detailed recaps of my group's Ravenloft sessions, which allowed me to play around with themes, subplots, foreshadowing, and atmosphere.
And then there's Goodman Games, for which I've been doing much freelance work as an editor since 2003. Not only do I feel like I'm karmically repaying the industry for all the entertainment it's given me, but I also get a thrill out of taking a piece of text and making it a little bit better or of finding a tiny error in continuity. Any editor out there knows what I'm talking about. And that reached a high point last year with two things: my mega-edits on the much-discussed epic Castle Whiterock, and my first publication as a paid writer, for "Madness at the Mutilated Oak" in DCC #48. Sure, maybe the saying is true that "Those who can't write, edit," but so far I'm having my polyhedral cake and rolling a gooey 20 with it, too. Holy Messy Metaphor, Batman!
Yet there was a third thing that happened in 2007: The biggest impact on my birthday this year is obviously my family. Now that Judy and I have brought Jordana into our lives, I have made that mark on the world. As Jordana grows up, I'll pass on what I know to her (including the plot of every episode of Angel), and I know that some of me and some of Judy will go on. So, between Jordana and the PDFs of the Dungeon Crawl Classics (v3.5 adventures now half-off!), DragonMech, and Etherscope that will float around in the RPG ether forever, my "legacy" -- such as it is -- will be set. And you know what? I haven't given up on getting that short story published one day, either.
So yeah, I was pretty relaxed on my birthday. And damn, I got presents!