From Grimble Crumbol’s The World of Olkhar Volume IV, “On the Heroes of the Third Age.”

Much must be said about heroes, our world owes so much to them, and yet they are a topic of much complexity.

During my university years, my main focus was ancient-medieval history, and the subject of my thesis was the fall of the Roman Republic. As such I’ve spent the last decade wondering if I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing or just experiencing the world’s worst case of confirmation bias.

It might be time to acknowledge I have a problem. I can’t stop building new worlds for stories or even entire series of stories to be set in.

Having written three novels that range from dystopian to outright apocalyptic, I’m trying hard to write more optimistic science fiction and fantasy these days. Skipping right past my fear that optimism isn’t really in my wheelhouse, I have a couple reasons for making this switch.

Paul Darrow passed away on June 3rd. 

Paul Darrow is best known for playing the character Avon on the British science fiction show Blake’s 7. I remember clearly that one of the first times I genuinely wanted to write was watching that show. 

Baseball season has started and with it comes the dichotomy of emotions. On the one hand I love baseball, it only enhances my two favorite hobbies: drinking too much and napping. On the other hand the arrival of baseball season means my mood will be on a rollercoaster based on a ridiculous sport that I have no control over and is essentially meaningless. Not like politics, which is a ridiculous thing that I have no control over but could end up meaning everything and also leads to drinking too much.

When I write, I do a lot of drafts. I’ve blogged about this before. 

The thing that’s new is, I’ve realized that with the current overly ambitious work in progress…

Since it is St. Patrick’s Day this weekend, three things come to mind: 1) This is the one time a year I will not, under any circumstances, go to an Irish pub, 2) Related to the first item on the list, probably a good time to remember our old Blizzard tradition of going for Mexican food on St. Patrick’s Day and to an Irish pub for Cinco de Mayo, and 3) It’s probably a good time for a blog post about whiskey.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to get things done these days. The news cycle has gotten dire enough that some mornings it’s difficult to get out of bed. Other days there’s so much going on, and so much of it is infuriating that it’s almost impossible not to spend the entire day distracted. 

I got started making a big list of movies that had an important influence on me and I was trying to remember when I saw those movies, and when I confirmed via IMDB that I’d gotten it all wrong, it got me thinking about memory and the ways we use to remember things or attach them to our timeline in our memory. 

When I write, I do a lot of drafts. I’m lucky if I can keep it under double digits of drafts before I feel comfortable querying a publisher with anything I’ve written. 

Currently I’m running one D&D Campaign and playing in another. Like writing though, the ideas for new campaigns keep coming, much faster than my available time, made exponentially worse by the fact that roleplaying games being a group activity requires that several people’s schedules… several adult’s schedules… line up. The phrase “Gaming while adult” is spot on for the difficulties it implies. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to play more often, just like not having time to write every story that comes into my head doesn’t mean I don’t wish I could somehow write them all. 

I often make playlists for writing. Usually they’re just songs that play well for certain genres, but when I’m writing something longer, I make a playlist for that specific project. Here are the top songs from my Four Corners playlist. 

When I was growing up it always seemed like I could only like one type of music. Maybe that’s a folly of youth, maybe it’s a sort of binary brainwashing that takes education to overcome: just because something’s good doesn’t mean the other thing is bad.

I recently read two great books: A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman and Fire And Blood by George R.R. Martin.