As someone who is examining low-cost holiday present ideas for this absolute disaster of a fiscal year, I’ll admit that I find myself somewhat frustrated that I can’t really fall back on my creative talents. Musicians can record songs, visual artists can offer pieces of their work, and craftspeople can give excellent handmade gifts. If your skill is words, it is a lot more difficult. I had an excellent gift from a friend that was a treasured memory written in beautiful prose, but I myself am not so inclined. Partly because I’m skilled at producing lots of words but feel like the weave of my prose is lacking, and partly because I genuinely don’t have many memories that aren’t tinged by sadness or loneliness.
Continue readingAuthor: Wren
Lingering Chill
There is a certain pleasure in hunkering down for the winter months in the cold, enduring Midwestern north. As the temperatures drop, the rain turns to sleet that turns normal stairs and sloping lawns into treacherous slides for those without adequate caution. Empty, grey days turn into cozy retreats as people turn from excusing their flight from the worsening weather to embracing it. Life goes on, as always, but the quiet moments that once demanded to be filled are now left empty save for rest and warmth, attention turned inward instead of outward. Homes become bastions of warmth and life, drifting and disconnected from the world around them save for the moments that they open up to share their light with those daring enough to still travel between them.
Continue readingA Day’s Allotment of Writing Time Later
I reached the end of the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on. I knew I was close to it, but it caught me by surprise. I started this project with a few broad strokes, one of which was the ending, so I knew it was coming but I wasn’t entirely sure what form it would take. I started this project for National Novel Writing Month 2020, did about half of it in the first pass, fell off working on it for most of 2021, and then finished it yesterday. Well, I reached the end, anyway.
Continue readingMy Horror-ble Need For Tabletop Music
Trying to find the right music for a tabletop roleplaying game is a pain in the ass. You have to find something that evokes the right emotions in people other than just yourself without asking your audience since that would risk revealing something. You need to figure out how to incorporate it for the right dramatic tension if it applies to what you’re doing. You need something that either no one will recognize or that will evoke the right feelings even if it is still recognized. Not to mention finding enough music in the first place, equalizing it all so a song never comes on that completely interrupts the tension you’re building, and knowing the songs well enough that you can time things out. Or just finding stuff that can repeat endlessly.
Continue readingThe Modern Malaise of Mixed Emotions
It is a brand new month. Not a lot has changed since yesterday when I was upset about being in a tough financial spot (though I’ve crunched numbers so at least I know exactly how much wiggle room I have), but I did get my yearly Spotify stats today so now I’m wondering if I have a music/podcast addiction or if I’ve grown reliant on those forms of media to combat my constant solitude. I spent an average of 7.2 hours a day listening to Spotify, exactly 21% of which was a single podcast.
Continue readingThis Capitalist Hellscape
There are days where I consider getting an extra job. I have full-time work with the opportunity for overtime, but there’s not always work to do there and sometimes you just hit the point where you’ve been bashing your head against something for so long you can’t really do any more. A second job would have to be something mindless, something maybe physically taxing but not mentally taxing, since my current day-job takes pretty much all the mental energy I’ve got. Unfortunately, that would mean losing pretty much all of my writing time and energy.
Continue readingLooking To The Future
I took a weekend off. It was nice to get a chance to rest. Or at least sort of rest since it is me and I still did laundry, Dungeons and Dragons prep, and worked on story ideas in my head. I also spent time cleaning and doing home improvement/winterization projects. I experimented with insulating my windows with plastic, the first time I’ve had to do so since I have been lucky to have good windows and well-insulated apartments in the past, and learned a lot about the struggles inherent in this sort of shit. They look terrible and half of them need to be fixed or entirely replaced, but it’ll be easier going forward since I have some experience now.
Continue readingPost Holiday Reflections
Thanksgiving is over. It was fun to visit two of my siblings, horribly stressful to drive into the Chicagoland area since I haven’t drive anywhere more crowded than the central Wisconsin suburbs in about two years, and a delight to have two Thanksgivings in a row with mostly the same group of people so we can all say we’re building new traditions away from bad family situations. I’ve also finished most of my writing projects I’d assigned myself over my week of vacation, caught up on most of the media I missed, and managed to not fall further behind on anything else. Now, resting can begin.
Continue readingWisconsin Winter Preparations
I have lived many winters without ever needing to put plastic insulation over my windows. If this sentence makes no sense to you, well, congratulations on not living in shitty or old apartment or house in a frigid midwestern or generally northern US state. Or, you know, anywhere else in the world where the outside doesn’t get so cold in the winter that it can leech through every exterior surface of your dwelling to steal every drop of warmth you posses but also so warm in the summer that an unattended egg can cook in thirty minutes of sunlight or less.
Continue readingDungeon Master Chris’ Complex Custom Content
One of my strengths as a DM is my ability to create customized, interesting content. I normally wouldn’t assert this because it includes a value judgment and is based on preferences, but part of the nature of customized content is adapting things to fit the interests of the people involved. It can be incredibly exhausting to do when the various players have very different interests (shoutout to my lovely but incredibly interest-diverse D&D group that meets no more than once every other week), but it is incredibly satisfying when it works out.
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