Procrastinating the TaleMaster

I haven’t written a thing this week, its already afternoon….Aaaargh!

A suggestion had been made the other day, that I tell how I …do it, I guess. The specifics of how I found my story…or rather how this story found me.

Just before my kids started into teenage years a bookstore opened in town that had an arcade in back. We all read sci-fi so we started hanging out at the bookstore on Fri. nights playing Gauntlet & ordering pizza to be delivered. We met a kid who had been to Darcon and played Dungeons&Dragons and got to talking about it.

I thought it was really cool…an adventure basically in shared imagination.

And there were so many learning opportunities for the kids: how to work together as a team(& kill the beast!), consequences (you can’t scale a wall if you didn’t bring a grapple), budgeting(meager rations can mean a better sword) and so much more.

So we began doing D&D at my house…great adventures starting Friday afternoons and ending really late Saturday/early Sunday. Then sleep through till Mondays. We got so into it we even did live-fantasy role playing adventures in the summer…local kids (high school/college) would come play.

And one late summers day we started a new campaign…new characters, a new world. Everyone’s character was to be from a different area, the maps put together to make a world. We were told to do a 2-3 page character/area sketch & a map. By the time we played I had 8 pages on the city of colours & 3 on my character.

That is where the origins are. As it happens the campaign only lasted 2 games…a new school year changed everything. But the story continued for me…

I dream about what happens…or pieces of it anyway & start writing it down…more just comes…a distillation o all I’ve read and believe I guess.

Its kinda like being a god, in a weird sort of way… because it is my world…and can be anyway I say.

But it has to make sense…the logic of it has to work… for the characters. and the world. and the majik…all of it makes sense. to me anyway 🙂

And then the characters take over, many times surprising me with what they do next.

The names just happen…I don’t really know how. I type with mostly one finger- 2 for shifting. When I need a name I put all my fingers down & play piano…then I make some of those letters work into a name….except for the GoldSmith…the generations of GoldSmiths are done so I can keep up with which generation I’m in…and Sethhh…I just love the sound of it…like a silk curtain blowing across a brass bedpost.

Theres a lot to this world you haven’t seen(& prolly never will); maps, timelines, geneologies. and the city itself- how things work, the agreement between the dwarves and the men & how others came & stayed…. but I just needed all that to be able to tell the TaleMaster.

I’m working on 2 or 3 whole other story lines that connect…well, kind sorta in a wierd kinda way….

The rest of The TaleMaster is Here.