I have come to the realization that I don't like writing adventures. I'm not sure why this should be a surprise: in 45 years, I don't think I've ever actually written a full adventure. What I do do is take what other people have written and make it my own. I suppose this is good information to have and my little brother is trying to start up some kind of a gaming company, and would like me to be a part of it. I fear he may be disappointed.
Here is a true story related to this issue. In the summer of 2003, I decided to finally write a novel. At that time, Wizards of the Coast was still publishing many, many fiction books set in their de facto campaign world, the Forgotten Realms. The things that had always held me back from my dream of becoming a writer were no longer an issue. I had a full-time job, I was happily married, I was no longer in school. My life had settled down into a very happy and comfortable place, and now--now at last!--I could do the thing I had dreamt of doing for most of my life: write. I had the summers off. I had a genre I loved. I had time, time at last, to be a writer.
And...I fucking hated it. I wrote one chapter then stopped (it was a good chapter, I'll say that much). I would put off writing, write then delete, write a little, write a lot, disregard, avoid, and generally not do the thing that I had told myself I wanted to do for (at that point) twenty years. I felt guilty. I felt frustrated. I felt disappointed. I felt a bit angry. I felt sorry. Finally, by mid-August of that year, I gave myself permission to stop putting so much pressure on myself and just stop. When I did, I felt this enormous wash of relief come over me. I knew then, 23 years ago, that I was not a writer, that I wasn't going to become a writer, and that the gap between how I imagined it and how is actually was was unbridgeable. I don't think I've written a single piece of fiction longer than five or six pages since then.
So pecking away at module/adventure writing over the past six months or so has reminded me that I am, in fact, not a writer. I don't enjoy it, I'm not that good at it, and I feel the same kind of pressure that I did in the summer of 2003. I am stopping. I don't want to. And that's fine.
My wife is a writer. She writes full-time. She published books, goes to author signings, and makes mad money. The sheer amount of work that she does--most of it not related to actual writing, but rather to the running of her business--is exhausting to simply watch, let alone do. Living with a real-life working author has only underscored the reality that I am, in fact, not one. So be it.
What does that mean going forward with the inchoate Wicked Place Games? Well, my super power--the thing I absolutely love to do-- is run games. I am a game master, and I am good at it (I think). Running games, creating stories, connecting things together, taking an idea and running with it, and using my imagination to cobble together disparate parts from all of the bats flying around in my belfry--books, stories, movies, songs, legends, lore, myths--is the part of the TTRPG space that gives me energy and gets my mind roaring. So Dennis and I will work out something; some way to make this a part of our lives as we approach retirement and begin the next phase of life. But writing is not going to be it, I think. I just isn't something that I enjoy.
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