One-Hundred Days

That's how long we have left before Gen Con indy. I made my flight reservations yesterday. The way I saw it, the seats aren't going to get any cheaper; plus, I'm about a month late buying my airfare compared to last year. The only difference is that this year, I'm paying for them with money I earned writing, as opposed to adding another debit on to my credit card statement.

I checked Gen Con's event listings and found my games. I reckon that since they're listed there, they must be more or less bulletproof. For anyone who plans to be in Indy and who wants to sign up for one of my three Thieves' World sessions, the event numbers are as follows:

RPG01315, 8/10, 4pm - 8pm, "One Night In Sanctuary"
RPG01316, 8/11, 2pm - 6pm, "One Night In Sanctuary"
RPG01317, 8/12, 2pm - 6pm, "One Night In Sanctuary"

One night in Sanctuary makes a hard man humble, and so on and so forth.

The last game of my Midnight campaign went off relatively well on Saturday night. For more details, feel free to check the Shadows of the Past web log.

A co-worker asked me if I find writing to be less fun now that I'm doing it for money. This was due to a discussion we were having about people who say you should try to get a job that you love, and you'll never work a day in your life, and whether or not that's strictly true.

Reflecting on it, writing/game design is work. It always has been. This doesn't mean I don't enjoy it, though I'll admit to enjoying certain aspects of what I do more than others. So long as the enjoyment I feel outweighs the discomfort, I'll continue to do what I do. As time has passed, I've learned tricks that speed up the work, or that make the less-than-fun tasks more tolerable (if not enjoyable).

Gardening, after all, is work; not that I'm a gardener, but I've pulled my share of weeds and mowed my share of lawns. I figure that an avid gardener might enjoy the end result of his toil: the blooms, the vegetables and fruits, and the fresh air and sunshine. In exchange, there's a certain amount of toil that goes into gardening: the weeds I mentioned, the mowing, the pruning, the digging, the manure, the pests.

To me, writing is like gardening. I pull my metaphorical weeds, true, but I also get to smell the flowers. As it stands, the scent of the literary roses, the sight of them in the figurative sunshine, and the allegorical flavor of the fruit, is well worth the labor involved in pulling a few weeds.

Enough for now. Back to work soon. My thirty minute lunch break is nearing its end.