Author: Wren

Coldheart and Iron: Part 36

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

“What?” Camille blinked rapidly and stared at me

“Like, we talking Power Rangers or Pacific Rim?” Lucas arched an eyebrow and looked like he was about to bolt through the door to where I’d just been.

“What’re those?” Tiffany shook her head. “Never mind. A robot? Like, a monster kind of robot or like the things people used before the Collapse?”

“The lower half is built a lot like the monsters. Same sort of amorphous body with a bunch of limbs that flow around as needed. Except they’re one hundred times bigger. Thing’s at least one hundred and fifty feet tall, if not taller.” I wiped my hands over my face and cracked my neck as I tried to guess more accurately using the remnants of the skyscrapers in the Chicago Enclave. “Probably about one hundred seventy when I saw it. It might be able to get taller though, if the lower half really works the same as the monsters do.”

After a moment of silence, Camille prompted me. “And the top?”

“Oh. Entirely humanoid. It’s got a face that looks like someone who didn’t understand Human features tried to give it a face like ours. Two arms, but they’ve got a dozen joints instead of two. Hands that seemed pretty normal, but I didn’t get a good look at them since it was wrecking buildings with them. No hair, just normal head-shaped. Maybe a little more cylindrical. Chest was probably to scale from Lucas.”

“It’s attacking the Enclave?” Lucas stopped looking toward the door and directed his attention toward me.

Camille started unslinging her rifle but then paused as if realizing she was too far to shoot it and it was unlikely to have much effect. “Shit.”

“Yeah.” I pulled myself to my feet. “What do we do?”

“Leave.” Lucas shrugged. “We have enough supplies for a couple more days and there’s a hideout to the north we can get more from. Enough to last until the rampage is over and the blizzard has passed.”

“Lucas.” Camille threw his name out like she was throwing a dagger. “We can’t just abandon them. Or Natalie!”

“What are we supposed to do against a fifteen to twenty story monster that can just smear people on the ground whenever it wants! This must have been what the army fought at the bases and they lost! There’s a reason they lost and we don’t know what it is so let’s just save ourselves and tell everyone what happened here so no dumbass with a rifle ever causes this to happen again!” Lucas was shouting by the time he stopped. Chest heaving, face flushed, he glared at us all in turn. “I just want to stay alive. That’s it. I stayed as a Wayfinder until it seemed more likely that I’d die out here than survive so I retired and now even that looks like it’s not the bastion of safety everyone assumed it was.

“So now let’s leave. We can survive and maybe even do some good with our lives if we can make it through today and tell the rest of the Enclaves about what’s hiding in the storm. Maybe they can figure out some way to stop it, then. I just know that one more old man with a gun isn’t going to make a difference so we should do what we can to help Humanity instead of just the people we see in front of us.”

Lucas was purple in the face and his jaw worked for a couple of seconds after he finished, as if he was about to say something he decided to keep to himself. He glared at us each in turn and neither Camille or Tiffany had anything to say to him. I could see the despair of the situation weighing on them all, Lucas more than the others.

I looked down at the ground for a moment and then back up at Lucas. “You’re right.”

Camille and Tiffany looked over at me, surprise clearly written on their faces. Before they had a chance to speak, I carried on. “You are correct, Lucas. Someone needs to make it through today and give this information to the other Enclaves if we fail. You’re the fastest of us, the best at surviving alone, so it should be you.”

I dropped my pack to the floor and took all of the food out of it except a few of the protein bars and the water. I offered it all to Lucas. “Take it. You’ll have a better chance of survival if you take the rations.”

“But what about you?” Lucas’ face had gone from purple to pale.

I shrugged, still holding out the food. “I won’t need it. Either we succeed or we don’t. Either way, I won’t need food for tomorrow.”

“But what if you survive and the Enclave is wrecked?”

“There’ll be plenty of food hanging around. I won’t need this.” I stood up from my crouch, walked over to Lucas, and stuck the food into his backpack. While I did so, Camille and Tiffany started unloading the food from their packs as well. I looked at their food and what Lucas had in his backpack. “You should be good for about ten days, using all this. Longer if you ration it a bit. That should be plenty.”

While I loaded him up with the food Camille and Tiffany handed off to me, Lucas looked down at his feet. When I was finished, I walked around to the front of him and stood shoulder to shoulder with Camille and Tiffany. After a moment of avoiding us, Lucas looked up. I could see tears in his eyes for a moment before he wiped them away. “Fine.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “I’ll go. But only if you promise to meet me at the Wayfinder cache just south of the Wisconsin border sign ten days after the blizzard has cleared up.”

“It’s a deal.” I held out my hand for Lucas to shake. After looking at me for a split second, he grabbed my hand, pulled me close, and hugged me. “Stay safe.” I squeezed him tightly.

“I always do.” He hugged me even more tightly for a moment before letting go. “Don’t take any stupid risks.”

“I never do.” I smiled at my oldest friend and then watched him say goodbye to our other companions. Camille hugged him tightly and they each mumbled something to each other. Lucas awkwardly walked up to Tiffany after legging go of Camille and Tiffany held out her left arm. She’d attached a glove to her stump and Lucas, without a moment’s hesitation, grabbed it to shake. When it came away in his hand, his eyes bugged for a moment and then he burst out laughing. Tiffany leaned over and hugged him tightly for a moment before he pulled away, still chuckling, and disappeared through the door.

I watched the where he’d disappeared and then turned to my friends. “You could have gone with him.”

“Sure.” Camille nodded and Tiffany shrugged.

“I mean, it’s not like we’re going to be able to do anything.” I tightened the straps on my backpack and got my rifle into a comfortable position for a lengthy run.

“Well, now we can all do nothing together.” Tiffany smiled and adjusted her straps as well.

“Very true.” Camille nodded sagely. “I find it is best to be with people when you are doing nothing. It makes it much more enjoyable.”

I stopped what I was doing and looked at both of them. “Seriously. I’m going back for Natalie. If I can save people, great. If not, I’m going to do my best to grab Natalie and get out. There isn’t anything you two would add to this effort since it’s not like you can distract the robot while I do find Natalie.”

“What if we can, though?” Tiffany hoisted her machine gun and shrugged. “This shoots a lot of bullets.”

“And it’s bound to have a weak point somewhere. If it has one, I can find it and shoot it.” Camille grabbed the machine gun from Tiffany and strapped it to Tiffany’s pack. “You never know.”

I took a deep breath. “Fine. Just… Stay alive, alright? If it looks bad, just get out and go find Lucas.” I started at them until they both nodded even though I knew they were lying. I contented myself with sticking the idea in their head. Maybe that’d be enough to convince them to leave if things went as poorly as I expected them to go. I took another deep breath to fortify myself and then stepped through the door.

I jogged through the building to the stairs down and took them at the same pace. It wasn’t quick, but I had a couple of miles to cover and I needed to do them in less than an hour if I wanted there to be anything left of the Enclave by the time I got there. I ignored the urge to count the steps and landings as I went, focusing just on putting one foot in front of the other.

By the time I’d gotten outside, I could hear the booming in the distance once again. I took half a second to orient myself and then took off toward Chicago at a sprint. I heard Camille call out after me, but I didn’t stop or look back. They could take all the time they wanted. They could conserve energy in case they needed it later. They could even turn around right there and go after Lucas. I was on a mission and I wasn’t going to save anything for later.

If I didn’t get there in time, I might never see Natalie again. Even if we both survived the attack, somehow, we’re have to count on luck to bring us together again. Even if we both went to the fall-back rendezvous point I’d set up with her, Lucas, and Camille, we’d still have no idea if the others made it out alive or if they’d even be coming. We’d set it up years ago, back during the chaos of the Collapse. There’s no telling if any of them remembered it. There’s no telling if they’d be healthy enough to get to it.

So I ran. I ran toward a giant monster that stood for everything that had gone wrong in the world since I noticed it starting to fall apart. I put all of the rage I felt at the loss of my friends and family, rage I still felt about being one of the few people who saw the Collapse coming and was unable to do anything about it. All the rage I felt at idiotic people who paid for guidance from one Enclave to another and then recklessly endangered others when they felt like they weren’t getting their way. I put all that rage into each step and used it to propel myself forward. Even the little bit of rage I felt at a dumbass student so caught up in trying to impress us that he signed the death warrant of tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands. Everything was used to keep me running past the point I should have collapsed.

By the time I staggered to a halt, gasping and my vision going dark around the edges, I was only a couple of blocks away from the edge of the Enclave wall. The nearest entrance was a few blocks further south, so I still had a good half of a mile to go, but I’d crossed about two miles faster than I ever thought I could. I gave myself a sixty-count to catch my breath and then staggered onward. As my attention returned to the area around me, I finally noticed the constant gunfire and the rumbling crash of some massive weight crushing buildings. The screams that followed it were enough to get me jogging again.

Once I got in sight of the door, a new problem presented itself. The door was clogged to bursting with people trying to leave the Enclave. They were streaming out carrying everything they could hold as they ran out the door and turned south. There was another Enclave, relatively close, in Indiana. Unfortunately, it was one of the smallest and would be filled to bursting by just the people I could see right then, not to mention all the people streaming out the other doors.

I made my way to the door and then just dove into the crowd, shouting at them to get out of my way. No one gave me any space, but I was gradually able to work my way through the door and into the Enclave by staying pressed up against one wall and bodily pushing people out of my way. Getting through the fifty-feet of tunnel into the Enclave took more time than the jog from where I stopped running to the doorway here and it felt like an eternity.

When I finally popped out the other side, tired in more ways than I knew how, I glanced over my shoulder. I caught sight of Camille, her face towering about everyone trying to escape, and waved. She waved back and shooed me onward. After nodding, I turned to face the city and the robot inside it. Even having seen the robot from far away, I was still caught off guard by the immensity of it as it towered over the Enclave. It stole my attention so completely, I didn’t look away until I stumbled over the first corpse. That brought me back to the task at hand and I kept my eyes down as I moved deeper into the Enclave, looking for Natalie.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 6 (11/06)

Wren Leave a comment

Well, day five was pretty much typical of how I expected a standard National Novel Writing Month day to go, despite staying at work a couple extra hours to prepare for a meeting I’m supposed to run today (and am running as this blog post goes up. Yay technology!) I’ve gotten over three thousand words written before working on this blog post and it should put me over four thousand. After this goes up, if I still have some energy, I’m going to do a little romance novel work or write another two hundred and fifty works in “What You Know You Need” so I’ll only be about three hundred thirty-three words behind, which is about the average amount of “extra” words I write in a standard day.

That being said, I’m still super wiped out from not sleeping enough over the weekend and still pretty emotionally distraught about what’s going on in my life. I may have had a busy enough day to avoid thinking about anything too deeply, but it’s still there, just beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to rise up and make me want to cry again. I usually manage to keep my face pretty much neutral, which is important at work. It’s hard to run a meeting about the process you’re trying to implement as a part of your software coup if you look like you’re about to cry.

My German coworkers are in town (which is why we’re doing all this stuff now instead of waiting a bit longer) and it’s frustrating to need to be putting on a social face when all I really want to do is keep my head down and work alone. Coincidentally, they were also in town the week after I broke up with my ex and I had to do the same thing then. If I were a more superstitious man, I’d find it entirely plausible that their visits to the US are harbingers of pain and sadness in my life. I’ll have to watch out for it in future just, you know, to make sure. Honestly, I’d kind of like a bit of quiet in my life, next year, so I’m hoping that this year was the only year were we have my German coworkers are harbingers of doom. I need to work with those guys. I can’t do that if my every interaction with them brings doom and loss upon my life. I’m got pretty good emotional fortitude, but even I don’t think I could manage that amount of tribulation.

Anyway, writing is going well. I’m making good progress despite my emotional state. I’ve passed the twenty thousand word mark and I’m rapidly approaching the twenty-five thousand word mark. I still suck at writing romance novels, but I think I’m figuring it out. I’ve already read two of them this month, so I’ll figure it out eventually, I’m sure. I even managed to wrap up a draft of a Coldheart and Iron post for tomorrow! I’m still waiting on review, but it should be up at some point! Two updates in ONE DAY! That’s a first. The only other thing of note going on is the ongoing war with my computer chair. It refuses to stay at its maximum height so I need to continuously adjust it and it also makes this incredibly creepy, animalistic squeak if I lean on the left arm just right. Which I do. Constantly. Because I forget it’s there. And then my heart-rate skyrockets and my lifespan decreases.

I’m rambling. I’m going to go sleepy-write some words for my other projects until I actually fall asleep at my computer. I hope day six goes well for you and I hope you’re making progress on your goals. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Despite the fact that Humans are incredibly complex individuals, our first reactions to surprises or big news tend to fall into a bit of a pattern. I tend to give placebo responses immediately and then either give a genuine response after catching myself being non-specific or give a genuine response after taking the time to examine my feelings about it. One of my roommates tends to respond logically first, entirely devoid of emotion, which he adds later on as needed. My other roommate tends to respond emotionally first but then fills in reason and shows you the logic behind his responses upon request. How does your protagonist respond to something unexpected or portentous?

 

Sharing Inspiration

Sometimes, I really just want some good music to stick in the background with an upbeat tempo, a fun sound, and a great rhythm. On those days, I always turn to Matt and Kim. Their music, which I’m pretty sure is “electric pop,” focuses on a delightful mix of keyboard synth and drums for some great dance music to listen to in your own home. Their early albums have a great deal of similarity to their songs, but that words really well for when I want to shut down the busy parts of my mind so I can focus on my writing. Their more recent stuff has a greater variety to it and it’s really good for jamming along to and signing when I don’t need to focus as intensely.

 

Helpful Tips

If you’re struggling to come up with what to write and taking a fifteen minute break isn’t helping, I suggest going for a walk. The soothing back-and-forth motion of a steady walking pace coupled with the movement of both sides of your body stimulates both sides of your brain. While you’re walking, try to think about stuff other than the story you’re working on or the frustration you’re feeling at not being able to figure out what comes next. Focus on the trees or houses around you. Do you best to be present in the moment and watch the world spin its way through the universe by observing it all around you. You may not find the answer to how to continue your story, but it’s a lot like unclogging the drain in your mind. Once things start to flow again, eventually the right idea will show up. Stagnation is the enemy and the best counter to it is a simple walk around the neighborhood. Seems too good to be true, right? That is where you’d be wrong. There’s actual science behind this that supports the reasons why the therapy I use for my OCD and PTSD is effective. Stimulation of alternating sides of the brain is linked to processing thoughts and feelings and emotions that feel stuck in your head. Clear whatever’s stuck on your mind up and you should be good to write again.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 5 (11/05)

Wren Leave a comment

Well, yesterday was an entirely normal day. I got everything done I was supposed to do for that day. There’s still more I could have done, but given how my weekend went prior to yesterday, “normal” is a damn good accomplishment. Middling productive, only marginally stressful, and entirely too long. Seriously. Daylight Saving Time always screws with my ability to perceive the passage of time so I feel like it is several hours later than the clock tells me. It was worse yesterday because of how terribly I’ve been sleeping lately, and I went to bed a good deal earlier than I normally would.

Today’s going to be a busy day, too. It’s my first day back at work after my break and I’m concerned about how I’m going to write my four thousand or more words in just the time I have after work since I might need to stay late at work on account of the projects I’m trying to wrap up. I also generally have D&D on Monday nights, but I’ve cancelled my participation in it on account of the stuff that happened over the weekend. I’m not going to have fun, nor will I be any fun, so it was best to just stay away for a week while I try to focus on getting my stuff worked out. Plus, it’s going to be difficult to maintain my nightly pace of four thousand words on nights when I have anything else to do. Ideally, I could do all that in about four hours, but the ideal is rarely the case. Planning on six hours is much more likely. And I still want to write the Coldheart and Iron post that’s supposed to go up tomorrow and that’s another two to three and a half thousand words worth of writing that almost always takes a little over an hour per thousand to write since I need to look up stuff and reference past chapters. I tried to get some of it done last night, but I just hit a wall.

I’m still really worn out, despite the sleep. This emotional stuff is taking quite a toll on me. I’m worried I’m entering the loop I took all of last week off to avoid. I’m still technically behind from Saturday’s day of rest, thought I’ve already taken steps toward catching up in almost everything. I’ve gotta confront the reality of whether or not I can actually write three stories at once (What You Know You Need, Spicing Things Up, and Coldheart and Iron) because wanting to do it isn’t going to get me through the nights of lessened sleep it’ll probably require. I’ve already got enough of an extra challenge between National Novel Writing Month blog updates and the romance novel. I don’t need to keep doing weekly updates for a Science Fiction story almost no one reads. Tuesdays are my worst days for views because almost no one cares about the story I’m writing. I know a few people who all say they’ll read it once it’s complete, but those are the people I talk to who are the closest to reading it. I could skip a month of updates, leave the last four chapters for January instead of trying to wrap it up on Christmas thereby saving myself some time and sanity… It’s certainly an appealing thought. It’s not like I don’t have enough other crap to do.

The question just remains to figure out what I really want. More rest and downtown, or to have the story finished on Christmas Day. My initial reaction says the latter, but my common sense says the former. It’s hard to argue with either side since they both have good arguments. Not writing it would be limiting myself. Writing it would be pushing myself toward a vicious cycle of doing nothing but writing and sacrificing sleep on the altar of potential productivity. To make it all worse, I’m still super tired and probably not in the right frame of mind to make a decision since my tired impulse always says “do it anyway” but also “just go to bed and sleep for a long time.”

I mean, I’ve already written over eighteen thousand words. It’s not like I’ve gotten nothing done or I’m not already doing enough. I’m doing plenty. I probably should dial it down a bit. But having time and energy for a little more is easier to allocate when I’ve got projects to switch between with smaller goals rather than “spend the extra time doing an open-ended extra amount of typing in your NaNoWriMo project!” I do most of my extra writing by rounding out word totals to interesting numbers, finishing scenes, or letting the writing carry me along when I find bits that are easy to add. Concrete extra projects and definable goals are my thing.

Anyway, I hope you’re making progress on your goals, whatever they are, and I hope the fifth day of National Novel Writing Month goes well for you! Good luck and know that you’re doing a great job! Keep it up!

 

Daily Prompt

Before your protagonist became a protagonist, they had some kind of life. Maybe they were a sad orphan with no home and nothing but verbal abuse and child labor to fill their formative years, or maybe they lived in the lap of luxury with a silver spoon in their life. Maybe their life was entirely unremarkable before this point aside from a few key traits that set them up for the circumstances of the story. Whatever the reason, it’s important to know who your protagonist was so you can figure out how to turn them into the person they’re supposed to be by the end of the story. Today, write about your protagonist’s past and how it’s relevant to the story you’re telling today.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of my favorite books that has an amazing character building experience throughout it, is Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen (Aka, Delilah Dawson). There’s a plot involving the protagonist trying to avenge a murder and bring down some kind of terrible monster in the Old-Time Fantasy Wild West, but most of the book involves the protagonist exploring and developing a sense of self that they find comfortable. Even as the story draws to a close, the protagonist is learning more and more about themselves and their past, which in turn informs the person they’re becoming as they are pushed to the absolute limits of what they are willing to put up with or what they can learn to live with. If you want to read some masterful character development, you really need to check this book out.

 

Helpful Tips

If you’re struggling to focus because you’re tired or you can’t seem to get your brain away from whatever thought it’s been picking at all day, try taking a nap or meditating! A short nap, about fifteen to thirty minutes, should be plenty to get you feeling awake and alert again, unless you’re like me and don’t actually sleep so much as crash as a result of your sleep debt every time you lay down your head. If you’re someone like that, you should probably skip the naps and head straight to the meditation. That’s what I do. A simple guided meditation (plenty of which you can find on YouTube) can go a long way to clearing your head or making you feel more mentally focused and physically relaxed. Naps are good, but meditation is usually better if you’re any good at it.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 4 (11/04)

Wren Leave a comment

Well, I’ve been pretty derailed. Yesterday was not the day I had hoped it would be. A combination of only getting four hours of sleep, from seven to eleven in the morning, set me up for a bad day. My nieghbor’s music was loud and non-stop until four in the morning and then I was too upset and frustrated to go to sleep for three hours. Also, four hours isn’t enough sleep when that’s more or less the amount I’d gotten for each of the two previous nights as well. After that… well, I got the precursor to some bad news right when I woke up, got the bad news half and hour later, and then, around two in the afternoon, finally got the context for the bad news so I could properly appreciate how bad it was.

And that was pretty much it for the day. I was just waking up enough to be able to write at that point and then I got the context for the bad news and I pretty much gave up. I still tried to write, but I packed it in around six and just played video games until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore. The only reason I’m in any kind of shape to write is momentum built up by starting with easy stuff like showering, breakfast, and laundry, along with the eight hours of sleep I got thanks to the start of Daylight Saving Time. I still feel like absolutely crap, but I’ve worked through worse. Maybe. I don’t really know. It’s not like there’s a translation table for “effort required to keep doing stuff” between the various kinds of awful stuff that can happen to people. I’ve felt worse from my own depression and kept writing, but I’ve also been dealing with my depression for over a decade. This… This is new. I’ve experience similar things before, but not this.

I’m not going to go into the specifics of what it was, but I will say that my health and life are just fine. The biggest impact this will have is the negative impact on my mood. And my focus. Right now, I very much do not want to be in my own head and it is incredibly difficult to avoid being in your head while writing. My current strategy revolves around partitioning things and trying to be a little more forgiving when I need to go do something that pulls me out of my head quickly. I’m also leaning heavily on one of my YouTube playlists. It’s full of music that has a calming effect on me and that’s super helpful because it is basically shrinking the size of the stuff I’m trying to avoid in my head which gives me more room for trying to write stuff.

Which I’m still going to do. I cancelled D&D because my heart just isn’t in… well, anything. It isn’t in anything right now and I don’t want to run a game I’m not going to enjoy because I’ve learned that’s a really good way to run a game no one will enjoy. Hell, I won’t even really be able to get into it. I played games all evening yesterday and I kept getting pulled out of it by what’s going on in my head. But I’m still going to try to write today. I owe it to myself to do the best I can to continue working on my goals because those goals haven’t changed, my plans haven’t changed, and my life still needs to continue. I can’t let this stress and emotional turmoil just bring it to a halt. So I’m going to try again today and I’ll hopefully be able to get more done today than I did yesterday. I’ve got all day, still. Twelve hours until Monday. Ten until I should go to bed (since I need more than one night of decent sleep if I’m going to survive the upcoming week). That should be enough to scrap out one thousand six hundred sixty-seven words of main National Novel Writing Month project, one thousand words of romance novel, two blog entries (since I am supposed to write the next day’s post during the last hour of the prior evening and I didn’t do that yesterday), and a bunch of reading. Ideally, I’d also get a draft of Coldheart and Iron: Part 36 done since I still plan to post that on Tuesday, but I’ll take progress on it instead of the whole thing. I’m not picky.

In fact, I’m trying to be realistic. It’s entirely possible I’ll do none of those things at all. Maybe I’ll just do a few hundred words and pack it in for the day because trying to force myself to write right now was too tortuous. Anyway, I hope your National Novel Writing Month is going well and that you had a chance to make some good progress this weekend!

Daily Prompt

Unless you’re Andy Weir, your protagonist needs someone to interact with. A friend to go to for advice, a student to mentor, a foil to highlight their strengths and weaknesses, a rival to compete against, or so on. There’s someone (or multiple someones if you want an “all-of-the-above” situation) in the world of your story who will be the main focus for the protagonist. Maybe they’re part of the reason the protagonist is driving the plot or maybe they’re helping drive the plot so the protagonist can figure out how to solve it. Whyever they’re there, your protagonist needs them to shake up your descriptions with some dialogue. Today, introduce the protagonist’s main source of interaction and give a scene that establishes their relationship with the protagonist.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of the best stories I’ve experience this year, though it’s not as good as “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing,” was the anime, My Hero Academia. What I thought was going to be just another “people with powers in high school fighting stuff” show turned out to be one the most complex and well-written anime I have ever seen. The only one that compares is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and that only came together that well because the fans demanded a faithful adaptation of the manga after it was finished. I love the way it tells complex stories using an anime genre that is notorious for simple stories about gaining more power to beat the bad guys. There’s still plenty of that in this anime, but that’s not all there is to it. It constantly defies my expectations and I love any story that can surprise me in a good way.

 

Helpful Tips

Don’t be afraid to take a break if you need one. You can always make up for it in the future or you have probably over-written on a few previous days so you’re not even really missing a full day of progress. The most important thing you can do this month is maintain your mental and physical health. Writing is great, and finishing a story feels great, but none of that matters if you make yourself incredibly sick as a result of pushing yourself too hard. So take breaks, take a day off when you need it, or, at the very least, don’t hold yourself to a word goal for a day. Try to write a little bit and be content with getting anything out instead of being disappointed that you fell short of your goal. Take it from me, building a daily writing habit is more important than writing the same amount every day and keeping yourself from getting sick or over-stressed is more important than both. Figure out what your hierarchy of needs is and make sure to stick to it as well as you can.

 

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 3 (11/03)

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In the grand scheme of things, Yesterday was a decent day. I got plenty done despite staying up super late the night before and forgetting I had a therapy appointment first thing int he morning until it was too late to get more than five hours of sleep. I then caffeinated myself to compensate and pretty much ruined any ability to focus I might have ever possessed so I only got another six thousand words written. Which, you know, it still a crap-ton of words. It’s just also not as many as I wanted to get done. Eight thousand would have been good for today. It’d have gotten me back on track. That being said, if I can do another six thousand tomorrow, I’ll be all caught up since all of the support writing stuff is done except my daily reflections and tips for these posts. It’s hard to write a reflection on a day that hasn’t happened yet, but it’s fine. This is about one thousand words of stuff and I can jam that out in thirty to forty-five minutes these days. The only question is how good my focus is when I write this and, seeing as I’m writing this after midnight again, I can confidently say my focus is crap.

I should probably stop complaining. I wrote six thousand words today and that’s only if I actually go to bed after this is done. If I decide to stay up a little later to get some more work done on the romance novel that’s been sitting at the bottom of my priority list, then that could easily go up. Once I’ve got the opening worked out, stories usually tend to go pretty quickly at first. Thanks to the outlining I did on the first, I’ve already got that part worked out so it should be pretty easy to do one thousand words before I decide to pack it in for the night. Or maybe I’ll just got to bed and get some freaking sleep for once in my freaking life. It’s like I’m allergic to a good night’s rest.

To be fair, the loud music that is coming from my neighbor’s side of the duplex, like it does every goddamn Friday from ten in the evening until two or three in the morning, discourages sleep. It’s a been a bit quieter than usual, lately, mostly after midnight, though. I wonder if one of my roommates complained. I doubt it. They could sleep through a tornado. Maybe the neighbor on the other side complained. There’s an air gap and the exterior walls are thicker than the one separate the two halves of the duplex, so it seems unlikely. Maybe he just decided to stop being an asshole before I lost my temper and called the cops on him. Originally, we were going to ignore it because we can be loud at times and it’s usually best to try to stay on good terms with your neighbors, but this is every Friday like clockwork and we maybe noise late at night once every few months.

Night like tonight are a bit easier. I can turn my fan to the max setting, set up some quiet music I can sleep through (from long practice. This has been my sleep music playlist since I was 13 and had my own room for the first time), and turn on the Rainy Mood app. The calming sound of rain and thunder always helps cover up the shitty bass pounding through the walls. Some days I’m pretty sure it only feels worse. Today, it’s pretty quiet, but I can’t unhear it tonight, no matter what I do, so it’s incredibly grating. I might need to meditate myself to sleep tonight to forcibly get my mind off the frustrating bland club-style music he listens to.

Anyway, that’s probably a good summary of my day. Unfocused, frustrated by petty shit I refuse to address in a constructive manner, and so focused on trying to get more writing done that I’ve ruined any real chance I had at productivity by continuing to try to focus instead of letting myself take a break. Honestly, if I’d just gone and played video games for a few hours this afternoon instead of mindlessly procrastinating on writing Inspiration segments, I’d probably have gotten eight thousand words written and been asleep for an hour by now. Lesson learned. I’ll try again in the morning, once I’ve gotten more than 5 hours of sleep at night. That’ll be a nice feeling.

Good luck today! I hope you’re hitting your targets and making solid progress on your goals!

 

Daily Prompt

Most stories have a star. The Protagonist. In some stories, there are several protagonists. Whoever they are, however many there are, they are the people who the story happens to. They have agency and they use it to push the story forward. No protagonist chooses to lay down and die when it’s that or fight back somehow. If they do, they’re not the protagonist. They might sacrifice themselves, but that’s still their choice. Behind all this, though, they have something that drives them. This is their reason for making decisions, for choosing to act, for resisting whatever is happening. Today, write about what drives your protagonist(s) toward the end of your story. You could work it into their introduction or figure out how or when you want to reveal it later, but it’s important to establish why they do what they do.

 

Sharing Inspiration

In the last year or so of the comic, Order of the Stick, we have seen some amazing developments that have been years in the making. We have seen the resolution of stories that began when I first started reading this comic back during the Azure city sage and we have seen stuff I thought was a throw-away gag come to fruition. Stories that were foreshadowed have come to pass and events long prophesied have finally made their dramatic entrance. Low, have I wondered about the various colors of the gods and now we finally have our answers. This gets me excited about the potential for long-term storytelling available in forms like comics and dungeons and dragons that generally require a big chunk of time to come to an end.

 

Helpful Tips

While National Novel Writing Month prioritizes a word-count goal, you probably shouldn’t focus on that yourself. If you’re constantly checking how many words you’ve written, you’re just going to continuously break your concentration. Instead, try pages. A little bit under three pages using standard fonts and pages in most word processors should be your goal, if you’re writing single-spaced. You can get about get about six hundred words on a page, as long as you’re not constantly breaking onto new lines for a bunch of short lines of back-and-forth dialogue. If it’s double-spaced, you’re at about three hundred fifty words a page and you should aim for five and a half pages.

Really, though, the goal of this thinking is to stop you from focusing on getting enough words written to stop and keep you focused on telling the story. If you focus on sitting down to write every day, you’ll get your words in eventually. Don’t worry about the count, worry about who is going to move the scene along. Stop when you run out of writing time, start to doze off, or otherwise reach a logical end point for the day. If you write more than your daily amount, that’s not a bad thing. I guarantee there will be at least one day where stuff keeps coming up and you barely get anything written. Then you’ll be glad for that extra few hundred words a day you’ve been producing. So don’t mind the word count (and disable it if it’s easily visible anywhere in your word processor), and just focused on the act of spitting out more words for your story.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 2 (11/02)

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Well, Day 1 went pretty well. I got my daily word count in for my NaNoWriMo project and did about three thousand other words of writing. By the time I’m done with this post and whatever else I do before bed, I’ll probably have done about six thousand words today. Which isn’t as much as I’d have liked since that’s a whole day of writing and only 50% more writing than I need to do during my average day if I wind up closer to my maximum word count than my minimum one. Which is going to be my daily goal because I’d hate to get to the end of the month at ninety-five thousand words only to have fallen short of actually finishing the romance novel or updating my blog every day. Plus, it’s usually better to front-load so long as you’re not pushing yourself past the point of sustainability.

To be entirely fair to myself, I didn’t start writing right away. My whole morning was off because I had to deal with the maintenance guy coming to fix the broken garage door motor, feeling loopy and slightly disassociated from tiredness because I slept like crap and stayed up until past three in the morning, and I then had to leave to meet my friend for lunch right away so I didn’t get ANYTHING written until after 4pm. Because I also had to spend some time playing video games with a friend (oh no, poor me) since I’d promised to join him and, honestly, I need to not spend all of my time working on stuff. I did that for a month and a half just recently. I was so burned out that I needed three full days of rest and gaming to recover at all. So I got a lot done yesterday, all things considered. Even if I didn’t make it to bed right when I wanted to last night, I still did better than I expected in total words and in boxes filled-in on my to-do list.

I did outlines for both projects, but I had to do them by story beats rather than chapters because I’m not as firm on my National Novel Writing Month story or the romance novel story as I was on Coldheart and Iron (the story I did my first chapter-by-chapter outline for). I wish I was, but Coldheart and Iron started as a dream and I rarely get to see an entire story unfold like that before I write it down. Even with all that, it changed significantly as I went, with half again as many chapters added in as I went and a lot of shifts to the events of the story to make it fit with how I was writing it. “What You Know You Need,” which is what I’m calling my NaNoWriMo project, is still evolving and solidifying. I know most of the major points of the story and have some ideas about what I’d like to be in there, but nothing is certain yet. I have never written a romance story, so “Spicing Things Up” is still a giant mess of nothing but story beats as well. I mean, I barely even read romance novels so I fully expect this to be a travesty that changes as I write it and read actual romance novels for reference. Neither one of my stories can afford to be pinned down right now.

Finishing up the outlines (well, turning them into outlines instead of plot summaries) was one of my big tasks for yesterday, along with writing as many of the Inspiration posts ahead of time as I could. I’ve got two weeks of them finished and all of the writing prompts already done, so now I’m trying to get the rest finished and start in on daily progress on my novel projects. I also need to think about this month’s four Coldheart and Iron posts since I want to keep those up as well so I can finish it by Christmas Day. Which means I still have plenty to do with my weekends and days off. Today is my last planned day off, so I’m going to do my best to make the most of it. Maybe I can knock out my daily novel projects early and then pump out two big Coldheart and Iron posts. That’d be nearly ten thousand words for the day right there. I’d at least like to get one done. Hopefully two since I’m going to be incredibly busy next weekend. I’ve still got this weekend free, so who knows what all I can get done. Maybe I’ll get all four Coldheart and Iron posts done, get the Tips pre-written as well, and even get a few days ahead in my novel projects.

It’s nice to imagine. I’ll be happy just getting my daily allotment in so long as I can also get some work down on the Coldheart and Iron post. I’m going to be really busy most evenings for the next month.

 

Daily Prompt

Today, think about where your story is happening. Develop a setting. Set a scene. Write a little about the world it takes place in–how it differs or is similar to our world. Maybe just set the stage rather than set a scene. You can always add more detail later or change how “present” the world is, but you the writer need to know a lot about the world that will inform the characters’ actions. These thoughts, this knowledge, doesn’t need to be anything other than notes to yourself that you’ll pull out when you edit it so you can focus on what’s important to your story, but it’ll make your job a lot easier if you write this stuff down somewhere so it doesn’t need to constantly tumble around in your head. Free up some space and just jot it down in the margins.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of the best books I’ve read this year, if not the best, is “An Absolutely Remarkable Thing” by Hank Green. If you have not read it, you should read it. It appealed to me on a lot of levels and it was one of the first good books I’ve read of what I believe is an emerging genre (which I am also trying to write in for my project this month) of 20-something literature. I see it like a sort of second coming-of-age that is more focused on learning to live in the world we have rather than the world we were promised instead of simply accepting responsibility for oneself or being “an adult.” Beyond that, it also made me feel like a part of something larger than myself as someone who uses the internet. It had a positive effect in that it has reminded me that we can do good and that Human connection is still a goal for the internet.

 

Helpful Tips

Yesterday, you started writing. Or maybe you’re playing catch up today since you were too busy yesterday. Whatever you’re doing, however much you’ve done, remember to cut yourself some slack. No one has ever sat down to start a project and magically produced 40,000 actual words of a story in a single day. You could do that if you copy and pasted a bunch of words, but that’s not even close to the same thing. People like me take years to get to the point where we can sit down for forty-five minutes and write our daily allotment of words. I literally practiced writing every day for a year to get to this point, and that’s not counting all of the words I wrote in my life leading up to the start of that challenge. I have spent literally half my lifetime working on this. So, seriously, cut yourself some slack. Don’t measure your accomplishments against other people, especially not people like me. Measure it against the person you want to be and the person you were before you started this challenge. As long as you’re making progress, then you’re doing a great job! Keep it up! I never would have dreamt of doing something like this when I was starting out. Believe in yourself and take things at your own pace. As long as you work on it every day, you will get there. Persistence is key.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 1 (11/01)

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Well, I feel like I’m not really ready for this. I had all these plans for everything I was going to prepare and I COULD have finished it “yesterday” since I define a “day” as whatever time elapses between periods of sleep (which means I probably would have stayed up until 2 or 3 trying to get everything worked out, but I’ve “pantsed” National Novel Writing Moth before and I’m clearly about to do it again. Which means I’ve just made it all up as I went along rather than planned anything out before. The fact that I have ANY writing prompts and bits of inspiration prepared before today is a friggin’ miracle on its own. Sure, each group wound up being far-fewer words than I expected (about 4000 instead of 8500), but it is still a lot of work to come up with prompts that don’t completely suck. It’s even more work to come up with inspiration since most of mine tends to be little things that happen during a day that give me an idea rather than something I can discreetly isolated and point out.

The thing I’m still going to do, even though I wasn’t able to get it done ahead of time, is outlines for both the stories I’m working on, along with a review of last year’s NaNoWriMo project since I’m re-doing it this year and a bunch of research for the romance novel I’m writing because I’ve never written a romance novel before. I have a lot to learn and think about yet and that all still needs to needs to happen before I can start. I’ve still got all day off of work and another three full days free on top of that, so I’m confident I can still do all of my daily writing and do the research I need to do. I’m confident in a lot of things and, if I’m being honest, I’m also pretty confident I wrote a check I’m not going to be able to cash this year. I’m looking at an estimate of anywhere between ninety-five thousand and one hundred twenty-four thousand words this month. The most I’ve ever done is about eighty thousand and that was with the support of my new girlfriend, a few extra days off spaced throughout, and a great deal of emotional fortitude. This year, I’m short the girlfriend and emotional fortitude, but I’ve also stepped up the game.

Like I said on Saturday, the fact that it feels impossible only means it’s going to feel great when I hit that goal before the end of the month. If I fail, at least I tried. I’ll probably still set a personal best for “most words written in a month,” even if I also set a world record for “most stress contained in a human body” during the same period. It’s going to be a good time. I don’t mean that sarcastically. Flippantly, sure, but the distinction feels fine enough that I can still earnestly try for my goal if I’m flippant instead of sarcastic. Flippant is a defensive mechanism. Sarcasm is defeatist. I believe in my ability to pull of stupidly big stunts and that’s exactly what this is. No more sense in dreading it now, though. I’ve got work to do.

To all of you embarking on a NaNoWriMo journey this month, be it 50,000 words, a smaller personal goal, or some big honkin’ idiotic goal like mine, I wish you the best of luck! Remember, the point is to get writing. Whatever that means for you. Figure out a reasonable goal, something that will be challenging but not impossible, and then shoot for the stars. Even if you don’t believe in yourself, know that I believe in you. You got this. I got this. It’s going to be crazy and difficult, but it’s going to be a good experience. Go for it!

 

Daily Prompt

There is a beginning to everything. For a lot of people when they’re coming up with a story, it starts with an idea. From there, you need to decide where it’s happening. Today, as you start working on your National Novel Writing Month Project, take that initial kernel of an idea and make it bigger. Develop it. Do what you can to spin it out into something bigger. Not the whole story, that’s what the novel is for, but whatever little thought, mental image, lightning bolt of inspiration, or bit of conversation sparked this whole project. Take that and see what else you can get out of it. While your story will likely grow and change as you develop this idea over the month, this initial thought will go a long way toward direction what kind of story you wind up telling.

 

Sharing Inspiration

As one of my favorite songs by my favorite musician, “Take Courage” by Andrew Bird is exactly the song I go to when I’m feeling wiped out and like I can’t keep working. If I stop whatever I’m doing and give it a listen, from beginning to end, I can usually find a way to keep going after that. The slow build, the lyrics, and the beautiful instrumentation mix to create a song that softly picks me up, sets me on my feet, and then lets me choose when to start moving forward again. I can’t promise this will heal your soul and destroy whatever is getting in the way of you writing, but I can promise it’s a good song and it’s worth taking the seven minutes of this song to stop for a while.

 

Helpful Tips

The best advice I’ve ever gotten, that I’ll ever give, and that probably exists in the entire universe when it comes to writing is this: Write. It is that simple and that difficult. Do it bird by bird. Art should serve life, life should not server art. And so on. Just sit down at your desk, on the floor, in the bathroom, at the coffee shop, at the kitchen table. Then write. One word, then a second, then a third, and then go for entire sentences. Once you get those down, aim for paragraphs. After that, try to fill a page. Stare at the empty space that needs to be filled with text and then ruthlessly crush it with as many words as you can. Find the switch and flip it. They don’t need to be good, who cares if they’re bad, just get them out. Put them down. Stop carrying them inside you and store them somewhere else. On a page or in a complicated bit of lightning and processed rock. Don’t make excuses, do your best to avoid thinking, and just get to work. Like I paraphrased from Neil Gaiman above, “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It’s that easy, and that hard.”

Get on that.

The Words May be Broken, but My Streak Sure Isn’t

Wren Leave a comment

Today is the day. This is post 365. One year of writing every day and posting to my blog every day ends today. What a fucking journey it has been. The best part is I get a nice little bookending thing with it because I’m completely re-doing the story I wrote for last year’s National Novel Writing Month project for this year’s NaNoWriMo project. I’ll be able to see how I’ve changed and grown by reflecting on how the story has changed. It’ll be a good time! That being said, there’s still plenty of growth I can see immediately!

In the last year, for this blog alone, I have written 349,403 words (including today’s post). Those words were used to create 79 musing posts, 30 posts about mental health, 43 posts about tabletop games or gaming, 40 posts about video games, 42 reviews, 3 descriptive exercises, 55 poems, 39 flash fiction works, 30 posts about National Novel Writing Month, 36 chapters (including the introduction) of a science fiction story, and 3 short stories. If you did the math, that totals up to 400 exactly, but that’s because some of the posts had more than one category (including today’s), which is what I’ve been listing here.

As a result of all of this writing, I’ve grown as a writer. I no longer make the same mistakes my editor would catch when I first started out. She only does the serial story and poetry, which is why I tend to have so many typos in my other blog entries, but they all improved as result of her work and constant patience with my inability to actually get things done along the timelines I lay out for myself. I send her a chapter of Coldheart and Iron for review and she gets it back to me within twenty-four hours, which is great because I’ve probably sent her half the chapters on the day I’m supposed to post them. Same for the poems. She’s a saint, really. I also really hope she reads today’s post so she knows how grateful I am for her constant help. I thank her constantly and do my best to let her know how much I appreciate her help all the time, but that still never feels like enough. She’s helped me grow as a writer just as much as my college creative writing professor did. In a different way, but just as much.

Ideally, I’d like to have a space to thank everyone that got me through this year of posts, but people do stuff for me so constantly and often without drawing attention to it so I’m worried I’d miss out on someone import. So I’m going to do my best. My roommate was a huge help when it came to guns, military stuff, and medical references since he’s an air force medic studying to become a doctor. I have a whole raft of friends who view my blog, but none as regularly as my French friend and I can always tell when she does because she’s my only reader in France, so thanks for reading me more consistently than anyone else! I’d like to thank my Twitter friends, specifically the ones who do Bad Book Idea Duels, Edward Van Winkle and A.M. Hounchell, for making one of the largest time-sucks on the Internet actually fun for me. They’re both incredibly friendly, creative, and wonderful people. Their books are on my review list and I’ll do my best to get to them once National Novel Writing Month is over. I’d like to thank Andrew Bird, though I don’t know if he’ll ever see this post (I sincerely doubt it) since he’s an actually famous musician I’ve never met, because his clever lyrics are a delight to listen to and the way he weaves the vocals and instrumentation together in his music makes me want to sit and just listen to him sing instead of have him on in the background. I also want to just generally thank my friends for not telling me to shut up about my writing or blog. I talk about it constantly and I’m just glad you all are the kind of people who don’t make a habit of being discouraging. I’d also like to issue a special thanks the fiance of one of my friends, who I would now qualify as also being my friend since I finally got to meet her this year, for helping me contextualize social media and marketing myself online when I went semi-viral after asking Writing Twitter for books to review (I SWEAR I’m still working on processing all of those suggestions–here are just so many and I’ve been so busy). I’d also like to thank my boss for letting me take a week off out of the blue when I realized I’d forgotten what it was like to be in a good mood and that I was too burned out to continue how things were going. This isn’t super recent, but I also really want to thank my creative writing teacher from college because I would have given up on writing a long time ago without her help, guidance, and support. She was the first person who convinced me that I was worth believing in and she believed in me enough that I started to as well. She helped me build the foundation on which I’ve since built everything else, so I cannot stress enough how thankful I am. I don’t talk to her much, but I kinda hope she see’s this some day. Or she buys whatever book I first publish because she’ll be named on the dedication page. Whichever, really. I’m not picky.

I probably missed some people, but life is about moving forward so I’m going to try to make sure I recognize what people do for me as they do it and express gratitude immediately. And I’m going to keep writing! I haven’t missed a day in a year, so now let’s see how long I can keep this streak going! New goal is two years of daily writing and blog posts! And this time I’ll also get a proper amount of exercise every day I am physically capable of doing so. I can’t just repeat a challenge, I’ve got to step it up! There’s no point in just doing the same challenge over and over again. There’s no growth! There’s no forward movement! This will still probably be easier than my National Novel Writing Month challenge of writing 50,000 words, a terrible romance novel, and still updating my blog with NaNoWriMo posts and weekly Coldheart and Iron posts. I mean, that’s 90,000-120,000 words in a single freaking month. My current record is 80,000-ish, from last year when I updated my blog every day on top of writing 50,000 words. It feels pretty impossible from where I’m sitting right now. Which means it’s going to feel super kick-ass when I actually do it! Nothing held back! No reservations! All in!

I meant to review my own blog for today’s post. It was going to be witty, poke fun at some of my bad habits that make it into blog posts (such as saying everything with as many words as possible because I just love to slap them all together), and cleverly weaving in my gratitude to the review by mentioning how reliant the author was on his editor at first but how much he has grown since then. I also realized it was going to be as long as a recent Coldheart and Iron post and that is a LOT to ask of random strangers on the internet. I mean, not a lot of people writing 3000-4000 word blog posts. They’re usually quite a bit shorter than that if they’re frequent or about the length of this post if they’re not. Even my love of using all of the words I can couldn’t convince me that it was a good idea. So you get this. A plain, unadorned thank you with some interesting numbers and the knowledge that I’m grateful to you, whoever you are, for reading this post and participating in my journey to grow as a writer. This year has been all about me but I’m greatful I got to share it with you.

Also, shout out to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Twitter account–and the man himself, of course–because getting his unbelievably uplifting “Gmorning and Gnight” tweets has made my days better. You should check them out or buy his book.

 

Coldheart and Iron: Part 35

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

Thanks to Camille’s habit of directly approaching people to tell them what she wanted, the fact that I was looking for Wayfinders to join my group doing jobs out of the Chicago Enclave did not stay secret for long. She eventually admitted that she’d started talking to people the day after I said I was interested, but it still seemed incredibly fast to me when I found a line of people waiting outside my office two days after I’d told Camille I was in.

There were fifty people waiting, more even than I saw during the busiest days leading up to the Wayfinder application deadline. Even five would have been way more than I was expecting to see as I hadn’t even told Will that I was leaving yet. I stood, stunned, for a moment, taking in the general hubbub of fifty people crammed into spaces made for two or three people at once while they waited for me to arrive. Once they noticed me, there was a moment of silence before the noise broke out again, even louder this time since all of it was directed at me.

I put on my friendliest face, did some good public relations work, and managed to get into my office after only half an hour of chitchat about everything but why they were there. They all wanted to talk about it and I had nothing to say about it. I closed the door on the foremost of them, shouting that I’d start letting people in one at a time once they formed a proper line instead of that tangled mess and turned to Will once the latch had clicked.

“Shit.”

“You said it, Captain.”

“Will, I’m going back to Wayfinding. Soon. Just based out of the Enclave, but for long enough each season that I’ll need to find someone to do the work I’m doing now.”

Will didn’t even look up from his desk. “I’d heard.”

“How do you already know?” I hung my jacket on the coat rack and started taking off my boots while I did my best to ignore the increasingly loud voices from outside the door. “How does anyone know? I only made up my mind yesterday morning!”

“We’re Wayfinders, Marshall.” Will shrugged. “We chat. We share intel. Everyone knew as soon as someone overheard someone else talking about it.”

“I’m the person doing the interviews and I haven’t even started talking to people about there being a position for them to take. How could anyone know?” I moved over to my desk and collapsed in my chair.

“I mean, it’s you.” Will looked up from his desk and looked me in the eye. “You’re a legend, Captain Marshall. It’s like finding out you’re one of a few hundred people in the world trained to play an instrument and the leader of your favorite band is holding auditions in your city for someone who plays that instrument. You’d tell everyone you know because you were so excited and it wouldn’t even occur to you that other people who love this band would try out even though they’ve never even seen the instrument being used.”

“I have rock star status?” I sat up, eyebrows raised, and looked at the door. “I knew I was popular, but really? Rock star?”

“Really.” Will looked down at his desk and got back to work. “Now you have maybe half an hour before the mob out there decides to try impressing you with how inventively they can circumvent the door. You should use that time to get organized.”

“You’re right about that.” I sighed and got myself situated at my desk. After a moment of idling pushing papers around while I let my thoughts click into place, I turned to Will again. “Want a promotion?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Not on your life. This is exactly what I want to be doing. I like being able to be disinterested and cold toward most people. I’d hate to suddenly need to start being polite to them.”

“You’re not nice to the people who come in here?” I frowned. “Will, I think we might need to have a discussion about your attitude.”

Will lazily waved a hand at me. “No. I think I’m quite alright. They just see what I’m missing, not how I’m acting and I’m fine with that. As soon as I become the boss, though, that all changes. Plus, it’s important to have someone who can kick a little ass in that chair.”

“I have never needed to physically intimidate anyone who came through that door.”

“You wouldn’t have to. No one thinks they could take you.”

“Which is hilarious.” I picked up a stack of paper and shuffled through it until I found a blank one. “Pretty much anyone of my Wayfinders from my old group could have kicked my ass. Most of them still could.”

“And thus you see the power of a legend. I hope it helps you during this difficult time.” Will smiled at me and then went back to work.

“Fine.” I grabbed a pen and started jotting down a quick analysis of the strengths of my Wayfinding group as it was. “Be that way.”

Twenty minutes later, when the first person knocked on the door, I had a list of all of the gaps that needed to be filled and had worked out a system to interview everyone who came through that door. After I let the first person in, a man a few years younger than me, I directed him to grab his personnel file out of the cabinet before sitting down across from me. We had a brief discussion about his strengths and what my group was looking for before I had him put his personnel file back into the cabinet backwards as he made his way out the door. That way, when I went to look for additional candidates, I could more easily find files I hadn’t already looked at.

All told, I did almost one hundred interviews that first day. After that, I did about twenty a day and it only took me three days for some of the interviews to be ones that I had called for. Two weeks after I had told Natalie about my plans, I had a dozen candidates who would fit well into the team I was building. I was looking for another weapons specialist to help Camille, two scouts to assist Lucas, and a technician who was also a backup medic. I’d gotten at least two candidates for each spot, though I had a good deal more weapon specialists than the rest, and all that remained was to see how well they worked with our group.

Finding someone to replace me was easier than I thought. One of the Wayfinders I’d contacted five years ago, when we were preparing for the monster attack, had gone out of their way to help me set up the Wayfinder office. She’d even recommended Will to me and it turned out that she’d been a commander before she lost an eye and decided to retire. It only took one interview to know I’d be leaving the organization in capable hands while I was away. Replacing Camille was similarly easy. One of the specialists I interviewed decided last-minute that they didn’t want to leave the Enclave because of their family so I offered them Camille’s job. They also offered to help around the office as needed, so everything was taken care of except doing test runs with the candidates for my team.

Since we only had six weeks until the blizzard was supposed to start, I planned one trip every week with two of the candidates, lasting five days with two days before the next one to rest, resupply, and review the candidates’ performances. That was long enough for us to get out of town, wander around for two days, and find some bandits or monsters to ambush. For the weapon specialists specifically, we even had a couple abandoned bandit hideouts to clear so they could demonstrate their specialties.

The first three weeks went well enough. There was a little strife in the group here and there, but nothing I didn’t expect from a bunch of people in close quarters who are just getting to know each other. The fourth week was a disaster because the weapon specialist demanded to be referred to as “Combat Specialist Graves” despite his name and rank being Private Reese Mathison. It was like he didn’t realize that we all had access to his personnel file, which he clearly should have because we all interviewed him at the start of the trip and read stuff out of his personnel file. Then he refused to stop trying to one-up Camille when it came to guns or fighting, despite being only a couple of years older than Tiffany.

When we got back after that week, I double-checked all the other candidates to make sure there weren’t any other red flags I missed, which is when I realized almost no one had a “reason for retirement” in their files aside from those who retired due to injury. I looked back through a lot of personnel files only to find the same result. Maybe one percent of all non-injured retirees had a reason listed for their retirement. Which meant people like Mathison could be listed as retired despite clearly having been forced out of Wayfinding.

I left a few instructions with Will and Elise to start trying to track that down during the slow periods between Wayfinder classes. After that, though, the fifth week went surprisingly well. We had a scout and a technician in this group, so we mostly ran around the fields west of the city and quizzed the technician on how to handle computers and injuries. He seemed almost as knowledgeable as I was, and I had basically done everything but become a full-time surgeon once I started getting bored in the Enclave. The two of them got along with the group better than anyone else and they performed just as well as everyone but Mathison did.

By the time the sixth week was wrapping up, with a weapons specialist who’d trained under Camille and a scout as our last two candidates, I was ready for a few days of rest in a comfortable bed that the blizzard would give me. And I missed Natalie. One night a week of seeing here wasn’t enough. She shifted her schedule around so she’d be more available the days I was in the Enclave, but I only had so much time between trips and a lot of that time needed to go toward preparing for the next one.

The latest two candidates were good at their jobs, but nothing special. I had them take last watch in the early morning on the last day before the blizzard was supposed to arrive, so I could talk with Lucas, Tiffany, and Camille about who we wanted to bring with us. I made breakfast while they started comparing notes and we’d just started to eat when we heard a gunshot. Camille and I looked eyes for a moment before we sprang into action.

We tossed our bowls to Lucas, grabbed our guns, and ran toward the roof were the shot came from. The weapons specialist was up there, keeping an eye out from the roof of the three-story apartment building we’d picked as the previous night’s camping spot. As we dashed away, Tiffany started throwing things into packs and cleaning up the campsite in case we needed to get away quickly.

When we got up to the roof, we found Jack, the weapons specialist, lying on his stomach as he looked through the scope of his rifle at something a few blocks away. I shouldered my rifle and looked in the same direction he was while Camille crouched down beside him. “What was it?”

“It’s between the building on forty-fifth street. That’s almost a mile away.”

“You shot something that far away?”

“Yeah! Can you believe that? What a shot!” The kid looked up at Camille, a giant grin on his face, and promptly flinched back.”

“What. Was. It.”

“Um, it was… It was a-a…”

“A monster.” I lowered my rifle and fought the urge to sit down on the roof. I couldn’t stop my heart from sinking into my stomach, though. “He shot and destroyed a monster.”

“Yeah! It’s a new record on a distance kill for a monster!”

“Jack.” Camille grabbed the gun out of his hands rolled him onto his back with the butt. “What is the number one rule I drilled into you about hunting monsters?”

“Uh, never shoot unless you know you can destroy it in one shot?”

Camille nodded. “And the second rule?”

“Never shoot a monster three days… before…” Jack’s face fell as the size of his screw-up finally dawned on him.

“Before a blizzard.” Camille finished. She stood up, shouldered the rifle, and looked down at the young man lying on the ground in front of us. “Why?”

“Because no one survives if one of the monsters gets destroyed this close to a blizzard.”

“What do we do?” Camille was still looking at Jack, but I knew the question was directed at me. I look at the shattered remains of the monster again and then shouldered my rifle as well. “I don’t know, Camille. Alert the Enclave, get prepared for whatever is coming, and try to ride it out? There’s never been an instance where someone killed a blizzard monster near an Enclave before, so maybe we’ll be fine.”

“No one’s been dumb enough to do it for over a decade, is what you mean.”

“I just wanted to impress you guys!” Jack pulled himself to his feet and looked at us. “I’m sorry!”

“‘Sorry’ doesn’t un-kill that monster.” Camille signed and turned towards the stairs. “Let’s hurry and get back. The blizzard isn’t supposed to arrive for another twenty-six hours. Maybe we can get far enough north that it ignores us.”

“Cam.” I followed her down the stairs, both of us ignoring Jack’s whimpering. “We don’t know what’ll happen. We can’t just leave the Enclave to fend for itself. They might need us again.”

“I’m not saying we just head north right now. If we go back to the Enclave, grab our bug-out bags and Natalie, we can still warn them before we head north. We might be able to make it to the edge of the city if we run. That should be far enough.”

“Let’s just focus on getting back for now.” I looked over at Camille, trying to meet her eyes, but she wouldn’t look up. By the time we got back to Lucas and Tiffany, camp was packed up and so we filled them in on our way to collect the scout, Henry. Once we’d grabbed Henry, we started jogging back toward the Enclave. This time of year used to be summer, so it was a bit warmer than most of the rest of the year so the snow wasn’t as heavy, so jogging got us pretty far. Around noon, Jack had caught up to us and we took our lunch break in an old sky scraper so we could get an idea of what was going on around us before we went back to the city.

When We got up to what was left of the eighteenth floor, we sat in a ripped-out apartment with a view of the Enclave so we could eat our lunch of power bars and sterilized snow while still scouting the path ahead. We were so focused on what was between us and the city that we didn’t notice anything until Lucas looked around at us and asked “does anyone hear that?”

Once he pointed it out, the noise was unmistakable. It was some kind of droning sound. Sort of like a the buzz of an industrial machine, but one that was happening at a high enough frequency that we could barely hear it. After a few seconds, Henry turned around and pointed to the west. “It sounds like it’s coming from that way.”

It took us a few minutes to find an apartment with an open wall to the west, but it was worth it. The blizzard should have still been a pile of dark clouds on the horizon, but we could see the shadow it cast falling over the edge of the city already. I watched as it grew noticeably closer with each passing second and knew it would be upon us before we could make it to the Enclave, even if we ran. I looked over at Camille and Lucas, and saw the same knowledge on their faces. Tiffany was still figuring it out, but Henry and Jack were just looking at me instead of the storm.

“Fuck.”

“Marshall, not in front of the kids.” Lucas gave a half-hearted chuckled and then sat down on the floor.

“Shut up, Lucas. I’m your superior officer and I can say whatever the fuck I want when we’re going to die in an hour.”

“God damn it.” Camille sighed and turned to Jack. “This is why we don’t shoot monsters when a blizzard is fewer than four days away. It knows. Something in the blizzard, the parts that destroyed the armies, leveled the military bases, creates an unending number of monsters, and that slowly takes the tops off the skyscrapers, knows when a monster has been destroyed. You probably weren’t even ten yet, the last time this happened.” Camille shook her head. “You still should have known better. Everyone knows better. You never attack a monster when a blizzard is coming.”

Jack didn’t say anything. He just sat down on the floor and put his head in his hands. Henry looked at Jack, then back at me, and finally let his vision come to rest on the storm. “Captain. What do we do?”

“Run. Hide. Wait. Doesn’t matter.” I shrugged, my mind thinking of Natalie and fervently hoping for an afterlife so I could apologize for breaking my promise to her. “Whatever you want, at this point.”

“Anyone want to have end-of-the-world sex?”

Only Tiffany looked at him when Henry said that and she shook her head. “I’ve got better things to do with my last hour than you.”

Henry shrugged and then sat down never to Jack. I looked at them for a minute and then back at the blizzard. “You two can leave if you want. Try to make it back to the Enclave if you want. I won’t stop you.”

Jack leapt to his feet, hauled Henry off the ground, and started backing out the door. “I’d rather die trying to live than standing around waiting for it to happen.”

I waved over my shoulder as they left, my attention cause in the mesmerizing swirl of the blizzard as it came nearer. A couple of minutes later, Camille walked back into the room and took us all to one a few doors down, where we could sit on the edge of the building and watch it come. We sat in silence for the most part, each of us content to silently wait for the end in each other’s company.

When it was almost upon us, when we could see the snow falling only a mile away at that point, I noticed something. The edge of the cloud closest to us was bulging, like there was something pulling that particular at a faster rate than everywhere else. I watched it for a few seconds, as it grew larger, before pointing it out. “What’s going on?”

“There’s something in there.” Lucas pulled out his binoculars and spun the focus knob a bit. “Yeah, there’s definitely something there, but I can’t tell what.” Neither Camille nor I could tell what it was either, but it was now a pronounced lump, impossible to miss.

As I watched it, it suddenly bulged larger and then burst in a swirl of wind and cloud. Suddenly, instead of a blizzard approaching us, it was an object. I fumbled with the binoculars in my hands but, before I could get them to my eyes, it had shifted in the sky and rocketed past us with a deafening roar. I scrambled back into the room, trying not to drop the binoculars, as I shouted at Lucas. “Stay here and keep an eye on the blizzard. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Without waiting for a response, I dashed through the building back to the place where we’d eaten our lunch and managed to get the binoculars to my eyes in time to see the giant thing stop moving over the Enclave. When I finally got it into focus, pulled the binoculars away from my eyes in disbelief. After a moment of trying to zoom in on it without them, I put the binoculars back up to my face and examined it more closely.

It was obviously made of the same greenish material as the monsters and it seemed to share some of their features, but it was taller than the Enclave walls. It hovered over the Enclave like something out of a giant monster movie, all tendrils and thick limbs like the monsters on its lower half, but much more humanoid on the upper half. It had a torso, shoulders, two arms that ended in hands with fingers, and a head. The head had no features beyond the basic shape, but it spun as it hovered like it was trying to look at the Enclave.

A moment later, it lowered into the Enclave, ripping its way through the signal catch and the heat baffles with a crash I could hear from almost three miles away. It stood there, head swiveling but otherwise still, until it felt like my heart was going to burst with fear, and then it started swinging its arms. It moved through the Enclave, each step accompanied by the screech of warping metal and the rumble of explosions. I watched it for a moment longer before running back to find Lucas, Camille, and Tiffany in the room I’d left.

“Guys.” I tossed the binoculars to Lucas and just collapsed on the floor in utter bewilderment. “There’s a giant robot attacking the Chicago Enclave.”

Tabletop Highlight: Games You Never Want to End

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You’ve been running a game with the same group of people for years, now. You’ve done your best to play weekly, but it has still taken the better part of a decade to get from the beginning of the game to the end. Maybe the end was a total party wipe because the fighter did something stupid. Maybe your players resolved all the open plot hooks they were interested in and, after amassing an incredible amount of wealth, have decided to retire. Maybe they finally killed that demon/elder dragon/Tarrasque and they’re officially so strong not even the gods would lightly make a move on them. Whatever the reason, the game as you know it has come to an end. Except no one wants it to end because they all get along, it’s tons of fun to play tabletop games with people, and they had this idea for a character they made a while ago that they’re dying to try…

So you extend the game. If the party-wiped, you’ve got a couple of really fun options and one simpler option. If you want to just keep it all going, then you can have some kind of fail-safe alert a new group of adventurers that the people previously trying to solve some big problem died. They get sent out to collect corpses (maybe revive the players who want to stick with their old characters), and then they carry on in the stead of the previous group. It’s easy, it makes sense in a lot of scenarios, and it makes it easy to get down to playing again. If you want something a little more challenge but that would add some depth to your world, start the party over. Everyone rolls up a new character, maybe not level 1, but probably at a lower level, and a new adventure starts. Whatever the old group was trying to prevent has come to pass during the intervening years (any number is fine, but I like to make sure it’s at least a couple of generations so everyone has a chance to discover all of the ramifications of their failure) and the new group is trying to either fix the problem or facing some new threat in the world created by the death of the older group. This, of course, necessitates that the issue the old party was trying to prevent wasn’t something truly world-ending. If that’s the case, you could always throw out some kind of “incarnation cycle” spin and have the players basically play themselves reincarnated on the new world the gods made in response to the destruction of the old world. There’s a lot of fun opportunities their, including relics from the old world and maybe some kind of special, inherited powers from your previous incarnations. The sky is the limit here.

If all of the characters have decided to retire from their lives of adventuring with their dubiously gotten gains, that opens the door for a generation-spanning game! Maybe the players can roll up the children, adopted or biological, of their old characters. Or, perhaps, the child of someone else’s character. Students or protégés are also fair game. However it happened, they’re playing someone who grew up under the tutelage of a character from the old game and, as a result of something happening (anything from the tragic death of their mentor to a decision to emulate their mentor’s life of adventure), has hit the road to find our what’s on the other side of the horizon/save the world/strike it rich by looting the long-dead corpses of other adventurers and the private homes of the various races who don’t live in the same kind of societies that your adventurers grew up in. Maybe an unresolved plot hook the previous generation chose to ignore has come calling again, perhaps grown more urgent as a result of the passage of time. Maybe one of the magic items or artifacts collected by the previous generation is the key to some plot a new villain has hatched and they used the old hero’s advanced age as an opportunity to put their dastardly plan into motion.

If your players have all gotten to the point where there is nothing left to truly challenge them besides the gods, maybe just start a new campaign in their shadows. The new characters grew up in a world forever changed by the actions of the old characters and are inspired to set out on their own adventures by the legends still living and walking on the mortal plane. This creates a lot of narrative fun for the DM because whatever problems the new characters are given to solve, whatever legends they chase, can’t be big enough to draw the attention of the more powerful adventurers who still live and exert their will upon the world. This can also create a lot of fun situations because you can have players reprise their old characters in role-playing moments, maybe because the new characters are hirelings who the old character is paying to take care of some problem that’s probably beneath their notice or that they don’t really have the time to solve on their own. Or that they just don’t want to deal with, similarly to how most people pay someone to change the oil in their car rather than learn how to do it themselves. Whatever route you choose, it’ll be memorable so long as the incredibly powerful previous characters are still around to pop up now and then. Plus, most players love to see their old characters crop up in a campaign.

Whatever you decide to do, just make sure you talk to the players about it beforehand. Most of them would love to figure out what their characters decided to do after retiring or getting too powerful to be stopped, so that’s a good opportunity for them to become more invested in whatever game comes next. The idea of playing in a world where your old character is walking around and living their life is incredibly inviting. The opportunity to maybe run into them and to see them play out a scenario again is one I, personally, would never pass up.