The Cat Lady – part 3

She smiled at me and held out a tray of cookies. Her white hair was exactly like I remember. I started to reach out for the tray, but stopped.

“My grandmother died when I was twenty five.”

“I know dear. Have a cookie.”

“How are you here?”

“I live here.”

“But you’re dead.”

“No dear, your grandmother is dead.”

“Why do you look like my grandmother?”

She smiled. “Have a cookie.”

“What happened to Kevin?”

She frowned. “Who?”

I pointed upstairs. “The boy that died.”

“Yes, I remember, he was once a nice boy. He fed my kitty and I gave him cookies. He was sad and later he was angry. Very angry.”

“How did he die?”

“He was angry. I am tired. Have a cookie so I can rest.”

I took a cookie off the sheet. It was warm and sweet. For a moment I felt like I was five years old again.

When I finished, I found myself standing next to my cruiser. I had no memory of climbing out of the house. Looking back at the house, I could no longer smell the scent of baking. As I approached the house again, the only thing I could smell was cat piss. A big fuzzy tomcat stood guard outside the rotten outside door. As I approached, the tom growled and hissed. I was not supposed to enter.

I tried to walk past but the tom latched onto my leg and I had to kick it off me. More cats lined up and blocked my path, each one hissing and growling. With a little bit of intimidation, they scattered.

The smell of cat piss burned my nose as I walked into the back hall. I suddenly knew why Ron had struggled for breath while looking for me. Coughing, I made my way to the kitchen, which I found in a similar state to the rest of the crumbling house.

I turned and went up the stairs. Cats were now following me and getting in my way, hissing and spitting.

At the top of the stairs, the twelve year old Kevin stood in my way. “Why?” he said.

“I need to know what happened.”

“I told you.”

“You said that he got angry. That doesn’t explain what happened.”

Something moved in my peripheral vision. It looked like someone was sneaking up to attack me. I instinctively flinched, but when I opened my eyes again, no one was there and Kevin was now gone.

I entered the cat food room, the tuna can I had brought was partially eaten, but there was no cat around.

My eyes were watering from the smell of cat piss. As I blinked away the tears, something moved in the back corner of the room. Shadows flickered up the walls and across the ceiling. I drew my pistol and pointed it at the motion.

I blinked hard to clear my vision again. For a moment, I was pointing my gun at my own chest but then it was pointed at the shadows that still moved in the back corner.

“He was angry.” I said.

There was no answer.

I put my pistol back in its holster. “And you used his anger against him.”

The shadows shrank and a white and black short hair stepped out of them and lay on the ground breathing heavily.

“You’re the cat lady.” I walked up and scratched its head. It was exhausted. “And this is the only way you could show me what happened.”

After that, the cats cleared out of the old cat house. The white and black short hair knew it couldn’t stay after it had been discovered.

We humans always fantasized that we would be the ones that developed abilities like telepathy and mind control. Would this cat’s special talents be passed down to her children or will this anomaly end with her? She knows to stay hidden. She’ll no doubt pass that inclination on to her children. We won’t know if they’re around, and even if we found them, they might be able to trick us into forgetting they exist.

The Cat Lady – part 2

“Tell me more about this woman?”

“She bakes cookies for you if you feed her cat.”

I tried to comprehend what he was saying. “So if you feed these cats she gives you cookies?”

“Not these cats, just her cat.”

“Which one is her cat?”

Kevin looked confused again. “I don’t know.”

“How do you know which one to feed then?”

“I’ll show you.”

The sweet smell hit me again. This time I could figure out the scent, it was the smell of baking cookies. Something wasn’t right. Kevin moved up the rickety stairs and quickly rounded a corner. I followed after him, being careful to not fall through the steps.

The air was dusty. I could see the tiny motes of light drifting through the air. I made it to the top of the stairs.

“Watch out for that hole.” Kevin pointed to a hole in the floor where the boards had rotten. There was graffiti on the walls but there was something odd about it. Most of it was incomplete. At the end of the hall, green spray paint said “Mart.” That’s it, “Mart.” Kevin walked up to one of the doorways.

The room was littered with open tuna cans and cat food tins. In the middle was a young man lay on the ground. I rushed over to him, kicking cans away as I moved through the room. The floor crunched under my weight in a few places. I felt for a pulse but he was already cold, possibly dead for some time. The murder weapon, a carving knife was still in him but he had been stabbed four times.

When I pulled up, I was tense and agitated but I realized that I lost my sense of urgency when I arrived. Now it returned. “Dispatch, this is Evans. Confirmed, one deceased male approximate age twelve to fourteen years old.”

“Understood. Your backup is almost there.”

I would have to secure the site for the detectives to investigate. When I turned around, Kevin was gone and Ron was standing in the doorway.

“Dude, are you okay?”

“Ron, I didn’t hear you coming up.”

“I don’t know how, I’ve been shouting to you for ten minutes. I thought you were dead. God, how can you stand the smell of the cat piss?” Ron held his sleeve over his nose, he put his pistol back into his holster.

“Did you see that kid leave?”

Ron looked around. “No, I didn’t see a kid.”

“How did he get past you? It’s okay, I got his address.” I stood up, being careful on the dry rotted floorboards.

“Are you okay? You weren’t answering your radio.” Ron said.

“I just talked to the dispatcher.”

“That was fifteen minutes ago. You called in, I arrived and started radioing you and shouting.” Ron said.

I tried to tell if he was just messing with me but he seemed more interested in covering his nose. All I smelled was the sweet scent of cookies baking. Was I okay? Was there some kind of gas leak? “Maybe we should wait outside?”

Ron and I stepped back outside and waited. The detectives and paramedics arrived and recovered the body. They were able to identify the victim. The name they got back was Kevin Jacob, age fourteen. Ron remembered busting him for vandalism a year ago. He described an out of shape kid that seemed smart but was moving in the wrong direction. The fourteen year old was taller and leaner than the Kevin he remembered.

I went to the address, 544, that I had been given. I should have known the number. It was the address of the drug house I helped shut down. How could I have not recognized that address?

A few days came and went. The investigation was ongoing, but the coroner said the wounds appeared self inflicted.

I drove by the cat house and tried to ignore the strange experience I had. The most bizarre thing was that I could smell cookies each time I drove by, even with my windows up.

By the third day, I couldn’t let it go. I held the can of tuna in my hand as I looked at the cat house. I could smell the cookies. The whole house smelled like my grandmother’s kitchen.

I walked up the rickety stairs and around the hole in the floor. The pull tab on the tuna can peeled the can open, placing it on the floor of the old bedroom.

The sound of an elderly voice, humming a tune filtered up from the kitchen below.

“The cookies are done, come and have some.” The voice was familiar.

I made my way down the stairs. My foot went through the third step.

“Be careful dear.” came my grandmother’s voice.

The kitchen wasn’t like the rest of the crumbling house. It was old, but clean, just like my grandmother’s kitchen.

“Thank you for feeding my kitty. I can’t get up the stairs anymore.” my grandmother said.

The Cat Lady – part 1

I had seen the house, plenty of times in my on my patrols. The neighborhood is not the best. It’s in a poor rural town. It was called the cat house. Even though there were plenty of places that cats could go, and even though cats aren’t supposed to like each other, dozens of cats would go in and out of this house.

There are three abandoned houses on that block and I was involved in shutting down a drug house that sprung up in one of them, so I knew the area. I never expected a murder in the neighborhood.

The call came in from a scared kid. There wasn’t much to go on at the moment. He hung up after saying there was a body that looked like it was stabbed to death, and we should get over there. I was the closest patrol car.

There was plenty of drug activity. I spent most of my days making traffic stops and busting minor crimes. In ten years, I had never heard of a murder. I kicked on my lights and stomped on the gas.

Outside the house, a kid was slipping out the back. He saw me and started to run, but he was out of shape. I stopped and stepped out of my patrol car. “Stop!”

He was the kind of kid that knew he was way in over his head. He was still carrying his school backpack and it was full of books. I didn’t even have to chase him. He turned and faced me. The look on his face just said “I am in so much trouble.” He was probably a honor student or something.

I waved him toward me and he complied. “Are you the one that called?”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything more. Slowly he trudged up to me. His overloaded backpack shifted back and forth, forcing him to swagger back and fourth as he made his way to me.

I turned off my lights to not draw more attention from the neighborhood. “What’s going on?”

“I’m going to get in trouble if I don’t get home soon.” He said.

“Where do you live?”

He pointed down the street.

“What house? What’s your address?”

“544.”

“What’s your name?”

“Kevin Jacob.”

“I’ll explain it to your folks. I need you to show me what you found.”

He rolled his eyes, took a deep breath and turned towards the house. He started to trudge in his signature swagger towards it, and I followed.

“How old are you?”

“Twelve”

The kid walked like his life was over. “I just need to know what you know and you won’t be in trouble.”

“I know that police are allowed to lie.”

“Hey kid, as long as you didn’t do anything wrong, you’re not in trouble.”

He just said, “Trespassing.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’m not going to charge you, just don’t do it again.”

He looked back at me, this kid had some major trust issues. We reached the back of the house and he shoved open the door. It wasn’t much of a door anymore, it was rotten and had been kicked in years ago. There were five or six cats lounging in the long grass. Something seemed off, the cats weren’t spooked, but beyond that, they were all watching us intently. Kevin noticed me looking at them.

“They’re on guard.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something has them worried.”

Their eyes stayed glued to us. Do cats get worried about a dead body?

Kevin pushed through the door and ducked under a collapsed beam. I had a harder time. He carried the weight of his backpack, but I was carrying the weight of ten years of riding around in a patrol car.

We went through a porch door with a hole kicked through it. The smell of cat piss hit me hard and made me gag a little, but the smell quickly disappeared and was replaced by the faint sweet smell. I didn’t know what to make of it.

The house was old, probably built a hundred years ago. Plaster and wallpaper peeled off the walls leaving just the wooden lath. Three cats watched us enter and scattered. Kevin entered into a the narrow hallway and immediately turned to the left and started up a steep set of stairs.

“Be careful, the steps are rotten, only step on the edge of the stairs.”

“Is there another way up?”

Kevin thought about it for a moment, like he was trying to remember. “You don’t want to go that way.”

“What way?”

He seemed confused. “She’s angry, you’d have to go through the kitchen.”

“Who’s angry? There’s someone here?”

Kevin stopped and looked around like he was listening. “I don’t hear her. She might not show up.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know her name. My friends just call her the cat lady.

Vier – Book 4 of the Glyph series

Over twenty years have passed in the events of the Glyph series. Audee has attacked a Glyph and assumed to be dead but before that, she joined forces with Ferkiz Joota and started something in motion. Mechal wants nothing to do with it but his son and daughter are sucked up into the conspiracy. The two siblings must now find their way through the puzzle left for them to solve. If they don’t, the Vier will destroy them all.

You can find Vier along with the other Glyph series books on amazon or on itch.io

The whole Glyph series is available in one hardcover book here.

Player Choices

When playing a role playing game, the idea that players should not be Railroaded is recognized as an almost universal truism. The problem with this truism is that its in the negative. It tells you what not to do.

What follows is a set of tools you can use to avoid railroading that are simple and intuitive. They may even help to start interesting stories for your games. Simply stated, they are broad questions to start off with. They allow the players to select a path to travel down and give the Game Master a rough structure to build an adventure from. 

One thing to consider while asking players to make choices is how often are you asking and how complex are the choices. If you ask complicated questions very often, the players will feel overwhelmed and probably not enjoy the process. The more complex or long term the choice, you’ll need to give more time to make that decision.

What choices do the players have to make? Is there a limited set? These questions are very common in adventure games. This list is intended to make this part of the process a little more conscious and in that way allow a GM to inspect their own game structure.

Is this reward worth the risk?

Which is more valuable, this or that? Tradeoff

Which is more costly, this or that?

What is more valuable a reward now or a bigger reward later?

What are you willing to sacrifice for a goal?

How can this be survived?

What method should be used to reach a goal? (aka which way should we go?)

How to express yourself?

These questions are almost never asked directly. It’s best if the question is implied by events the characters encounter. 

While there are plenty of ways you could use these questions, let’s look at several methods.

  1. Select a question you want the players to grapple with for each scene of your game. When thinking about the next scene the characters will be in, pick one question that you think will present intriguing answers. What are the consequences of either choice? If the answer to one of these questions would change the overall course of the game, try to put it at the end of the game.
  2. Select three questions that will come up in the next game. They can come up whenever it’s appropriate but it’s probably a good idea to give them to the players one at a time. They could be presented in a set order or each question could be linked to a place or person.
  3. Select a question that the next adventure is designed around. It could be asked at the beginning of the session and the implications of the player’s choice is explored throughout the game or the game may build up to the choice.

Let’s take a more in depth look at each of the questions and give some ideas about how to integrate them.

Is this reward worth the risk?

This is a subset of “Which is better, this or that?” which most questions are going to be. In this case, the full question would be “Which is better, taking this risk and possibly getting a stated or imagined reward or avoiding the risk and not getting the reward?”

This is probably the question players are most often asked at the beginning of taking up a job or quest. If you’re looking to inject some novelty into games, this could be a question to avoid. That said, it’s not a bad question. There’s an enormous amount of utility in it.

“Should we delve this dungeon? There’s supposed to be riches down there.” is the starting point for many adventures. In this case, it’s a question that is sometimes answered before the players even make their characters as that is the setting of the game. It’s assumed that if you have a character in the game, they’ve asked themselves that question and decided to go with the risk.

In sandbox games, the players are implicitly asked this question whenever they explore a new section of the map. They might stay in an area and try to extract what they can from what’s available. This often has some challenge associated with it which they will risk.

A twist on this question comes up when the players have an obligation to take on tasks. For example if they are part of an organizing group like a military or police force, they are assigned tasks. The question then becomes “Is avoiding risk worth the penalty?” The reward here is to keep your job and/or good standing with an organization. The risk is any hazards the task requires along with what the organization can do to you if you don’t do your job.

Which is more valuable, this or that?

This question could be interpreted very broadly, so broadly in fact that it loses any differentiation from other questions. For the purposes of this list, we’ll constrain it’s interpretation to mean choosing between rewards.

For this question to have any meaning, the two (or more) offered rewards have to be mutually exclusive, meaning that you can’t have one and then go get the other.

For an example: Which is more valuable, saying up and watching youtube videos until late at night or going to bed early, getting a good night sleep and making your significant other happy with you?

You can do one or the other but not both. There is a condition that prevents the players from just saying “Yes please” to both.

The easiest constraining factor to imagine for these situations is time. (And that only works if the setting doesn’t have time travel or super speed.) That’s because time is a resource that gets used up. So realistically, this question is akin to “What would you rather spend your X on?” with X being a finite resource.

Another way to bring this kind of choice out is to have some kind of a door close when the other choice is achieved.

“When you pull the sword from the stone you’re made king, you cannot go back to the quiet anonymous life you once enjoyed.”

Building an impenetrable door is hard though. A determined player may quickly find a loophole and claim both prizes. This might not be all that bad, after all, the players are showing initiative and thinking ability. Maybe they deserve both? It would be bad though if getting both destroys the tension in the story and makes play boring.

In most cases, this kind of choice is interesting when the types of rewards reflect different values because they reveal something about the Player Character. A choice between two +1 swords is not interesting. A choice between protecting a relationship or gaining power says something.

A twist on this would be to only hint that the choices are exclusive. The question of “Can we do both?” can be very exciting and even get the milage of having the PCs try for both only to find their fears confirmed. As a warning, it’s best to not spend too much of the player’s time trying to achieve both or they’ll just get annoyed. A quick attempt is better if that’s the way you want to go.

Which is more costly, this or that?

This is similar to the the question “Which is more valuable, this or that?” but instead of choosing between two rewards, the choice is between two penalties. 

This choice is usually the most palatable in the middle of a story as a second act. It is the basic idea of being “between a rock and a hard place.”

This question structures itself easily because the players will want to avoid as many of the penalties as possible. 

In one form of this question the two penalties are rushing toward the characters. The primary structure that the GM must build has to do with making the paths to avoid facing both penalties obvious but each path leads straight through one of the dangers.

For example, the PCs are being pursued by the king’s guard and the only way to avoid them is to hide out by begging the forgiveness of a crime lord that they’ve had bad dealings with.

Another way this can be structured is for a player character goal to be situated behind a barrier and the penalties are the easiest path to get to the goal. 

Do you go through the Gap of Rohan or through the Mines of Moria?

Impenetrable barriers are tough things to create and the players may figure out a way straight through one without paying the penalty. If they do so, is it really that bad? Maybe they deserve to skip through the danger for being so clever. Maybe they could face a less daunting penalty they didn’t expect because of their plan, but whenever possible, it’s best to reward good thinking.

A twist on this is that one or both of the penalties may be illusory. Maybe it’s only rumored that the king’s guard is hunting down the characters. This is usually an interesting twist when both options seem unsurmountable. Tension rises while the players think that impending doom is knocking on their door only to find out they’ve been running from nothing. Going to the crime lord might go badly, but the characters are given a chance to get away finding no shelter. They then panic thinking themselves about to die when… nothing happens. Maybe the crime lord planted the rumor? Maybe the rumor was planted by a weaker rival?

What is more valuable a reward now or a bigger reward later

This choice balances instant with delayed gratification. This choice shares a lot of ground with “Which is more valuable, this or that?” but is specific in that the choice is about time and value. 

With the other question, it’s not clear which reward is more valuable until the players choose one. In this case the immediate reward is expressly less valuable.

The need to prevent the players from claiming both prizes still applies. Since they are time shifted, it’s much harder to frame this choice as an issue of not enough time.

In most cases, this choice will be presented by a character who can give one reward or the other for deeds done. It could also be a matter of something that needs time to progressively improve and drawing on it too early means it does not reach its full potential.

A twist on this could be that the reward gets greater for a while, but if left too long the reward will diminish. The idea here being the idea of fruit on a tree. If picked too early, it’s not ripe, if not picked soon enough it drops off the tree and rots.

Another twist on this is the idea of an investment where time is not the only requirement, but another resource is also required that would have been useful in other ways had it not been set aside.

What are you willing to sacrifice for a goal?

This is an open ended question and it raises some problems of how to ask it of your players. Simply telling your players “You must give up x to achieve your goals” is not a question. The goal here is to extract a cost, but that cost is determined by the players.

This is a traditional structure in storytelling where the author decides that their characters need to feel some pain before reaching a goal. Without the pain, the goal has little emotional value. The same thing can be true of in game goals but the GM can’t as easily set the stakes for what ought to be sacrificed.

So how can you set this question up? If the goal is to marry into the royal family, what is a proper sacrifice? The players might offer money. In sufficient quantities that could work. What if they offered up their identity? Can that work? I sort of does in a bunch of classic stories. Think Aladdin for example, although he’s also sacrificing a wish. What if they offer up their best friend? That’s not going to be so straight forward but it could work given the right circumstances.

Marrying into a royal family is probably going to be a long term goal. Shorter term goals can work the same way. What if the goal is information? You can offer money to gather information. You could go undercover to sacrifice your identity and do some hard work tailing people and making contacts. You might even sacrifice a friendship (somehow).

It helps to have an idea of both the size of the goal and some types of sacrifices that might make the goal attainable. It’s also important to have an open mind to solutions the players may present.

Twists on this question might be that someone suggests a sacrifice that benefits themselves. They have the power to make the goal happen in formality but often the sacrifice is used to nullify the true intent of the goal. Achieving the goal in the true sense now requires defeating the trickster.

How can this be survived?

This is a very open question that often the GM might not know the answer to. Usually a dangerous situation is presented and the players have some warning that it’s coming. This does not have to be a physical danger, it can be financial, emotional or social. In most cases it should be obvious that this danger cannot be opposed directly, that doing so will cause ruin.

The question is answered with a plan made by the players. The plan does not need to defeat the danger, only prevent the defeat of the Player Characters. Plans may take the form of running away, parlaying an aggressor, hiding out until the coast is clear, feigning an attack to buy time, or any number of tactics.

When asking this question, it’s best to not set a single method of survival. It could be useful to have a few rough ideas of how to survive so you have thoughts on how to structure any tests that come up. 

Whatever the actual plan is, it’s the GM’s job to attempt to make it viable. Enabling a plan too far would however invalidate the question so it’s fair to set up costs for the plan and if the characters are able to discern those costs, warn of them.

A twist on this is if the goal is to trap the characters. This changes the stakes and it may be a viable plan to simply allow themselves to be captured.

What method should be used to reach a goal?

This question is all about choosing a path to get to a desired destination. This includes tactical choices like turtling or rushing an enemy.

You set out to find treasure in the underground catacombs. There are several small tunnels that go left and a large tunnel that continues forward. Which way do you go?

Or.

He’s been murdered, that much is certain. How do you want to go about investigating?

There is an obvious intent that the players are going to move toward but there isn’t any one method that is clearly better than any others. This question is useful for getting the players exploring. Along the way, their explorations are likely to bring them into conflict. 

For sandbox games, this question is the one most frequently asked of the players. There is no main path to take, the only thing that gives the characters direction is that there is a goal to reach for.

The primary twist for this question is that while the characters are finding their own path, new goals are presented. This is often in the form of someone asking the characters for help.

How to Express Yourself?

Players want to make the game their own by their expressions. While all the questions are a form of expression, the rest have some kind of goal in mind. In this case the question exists solely for the character to add flavor to their experience.

What color will you paint your race car?

or

Describe how your character looks.

This is often a question that the players start off asking in order to establish their character. If the question establishes a vision for the character early on, it can have a large impact on the direction of game play.

A twist to this question is to make what would seem like a frivolous choice become critically important. The player chose to buy a hat but that style has political meaning to the people in the city and wearing it changes how people view them.

Talking to Humans

This one’s a little different than what I’ve done here before. I wrote a non-fiction book. What’s even stranger is that it’s a kind of self help book for those of us that have difficulty relating to others. It walks through different goals for interaction, identifying effective strategies and warning of pitfalls. It’s a big mass of concepts that I’ve collected and tested.

It runs just over 200 pages on a novel size paperback with generously sized print. If I keep editing and expanding ideas it may end up more.

It also features an off kilter narrator that may or may not really understand humans. They may not even be human themselves.

Right now it’s in the editing phase. It needs polish to make the information clearly understandable. It’s kind of a herky jerky rollercoaster ride right now, but I almost like it better that way. I’ve had some readers with positive feedback so far, but of course I could always use more.

Let’s see where this takes us.

Hi tech memory

I had a strange thought this morning for a feature of a high tech world. What if materials in a high tech setting had a way of remembering things? What kind of things? That’s where this gets interesting.

The initial thought was a material that knows who owns it and who owned it in the past. Basically a blockchain stamp that records a trail of ownership. The idea being that there are molecular arrangements that act as a watermark. Some device would be used to brand the memory into the material. The information is read externally, possibly via x-ray. This is what I’m going to call Memory 1 material.

Memory 2 material can form it’s own memories but it’s not intelligent. This means that the material only “remembers” what it’s told to remember. Some kind of nanotech material that can be written to is dispersed in the material and can re-write itself. There’s a pathway to communicating with the material so that information can be encoded. That pathway could be any number of things like a laser or radio waves or something more exotic if you don’t want people to alter it’s memory.

Memory 3 material has external senses and can remember events that happen to it. These senses may be very limited to strain, temperature and possibly chemical detection. Each time there’s a change, the material remembers it.

Memory 4 is when a material can communicate with other local objects to gather data about what’s going on with it. The paint talks to the metal it’s on and they share events.

Memory 5 materials are intelligent and can make choices about what is important or unusual. Instead of simply collecting events, these materials look for outliers and significant patterns to record from the materials and devices around them.

Memory 6 starts to display sentience. It is aware of itself, the things around it and the people (possibly chemical signatures) around it. It gathers data from materials and can actively communicate with devices designed to talk to it.

Memory 7 displays a distinct personality. It has preferences of it’s own and has a concept of how it wants to be used and manipulated.

Always Starting

The last few years have been rough. They’ve taken a lot out of me and I often wonder if I’ll get back to where I was before them. I don’t even feel like I’m the same core person I was before and that’s deeply disturbing because for most of my life I’ve had a concept of myself that I aspired to. It’s not that I couldn’t aspire to that person anymore, it’s just that I don’t know if I can remember him.

That’s the context. What I want to write about is the stress that has hurt my ability to work on projects. I definitely don’t want to give up on them but I’m struggling. The side effect of that struggling is I keep coming up with new projects to start and not finishing anything.

The reason is it’s easier to conceptualize an idea than to pick one back up. Why? because I have to essentially load the current state of a project into memory, to manipulate it and move forward. If I’m uninterrupted, this feels like a flow state and it’s pleasurable. Unfortunately that takes time and effort. I have time. That’s not the issue. I spend my time watching youtube videos on science, making and literature. I’m not sad that I’ve learned a lot of interesting things but it isn’t my goal.

What I don’t have is the emotional energy to discipline myself and focus. I worry that this might be a permanent state. I don’t think it has to be. If I were to force myself to work on a project and finish it, I think I could get my focus back. So why haven’t I?

Finishing games or stories takes a good deal of concentration. Being able to do that concentrative meditative work, I feel, makes me sharper. It also takes effort and big chunk of my effort, my mental energy has been going into averting disasters. My creative pursuits have rightly taken a back seat.

I’m in a relatively calmer place right now but I’m not sure when the next crisis will pop up. Actually I’m in the middle of one right now. I’ve sold my house and the house we were going to move to was snatched out from under us by another buyer with better connections and probably more money. Even with that going on, things have improved for the moment.

The problem is I’m not sure if the other fires are fully out. They could come roaring back and that has me hopping back and fourth between thoughts. I’m not sure I should take my eye off them right now. Staying in that fight or flight mode trains me to be vigilant but prevents me from thinking deeply and that bothers me greatly. I want to be able to think deeply.

So here’s to hoping things keep calming down and the fires are out. I hope I’m able to settle down and rebuild the habits that get me to finish projects. That’s not an empty hope, I am still motivated to get them done, I’m just hedging my bets at the moment. The longer I stay in this mode, the more it’s going to take to get back to where I was, so I’m eager to find a way.

Why

I’d like to make things that help friends communicate with each other who they truly are. There are plenty of barriers to authentic communication. Trying to break down those barriers so you can earn trust is hard work. I believe those barriers can be circumvented when we “play” and that’s what I want to use to help people express themselves to their friends.

Working On Station Keepers

Hey, I can finally say I’ve run a successful Kickstarter! Station Keepers is a go and I’m furiously working on it. The first phase of getting a functional structure is in place and now I’m working on infusing it with some more meaning. Not that I’m trying to shoehorn meaning into it, but each design speaks in it’s own voice. Station Keepers has a specific voice and I’m trying to find it. Maybe I have my metaphor, but I’ll have to see if I can make it work.