James's Strange Eons

So here I am in day three of Mexico, and I{ve decided to spend some time on my blogg. With beaches, cheap beer, and excellent food in my immediate area, what does that make me? A LOOOOOOSER! But a very happy one. My one complaint right now is the keyboard. It{s kinda weird, and I{ve tenetively decided not to correct any typos because it{s too much work to try and find the right buttons. The @ for example is [alt gr] + Q of all things. It{s a mess. So far my favorite meal has been from a little hole'in´the´wall place around the corner from our hotel. Enchilladas. Very simple, but very good. My beer of choice is still Corona, though Pacifico has made an appearance once or twice. Today we{re thinking about exploring [Gringo Gulch] an area of Centro where the rich movie stars used to live. Really nice achitechture, but quite a walk from our usual haunts. It should be fun. One last note...I fought the sun, and the sun one. I{m officially Very Badly Burned, from day one. I{m getting clos

Just came from a very interesting Writing Group. Jumpgate has a monthly writer's group that I'm proud to be a member of. This month, a local author and comic book writer was able to make an appearance. Here he is, with Jumpgate's owner, Hector Diaz. It was really a pleasant evening. Mr. Hill was well spoken, genuinely interested in our writing careers, and freely shared his ideas and advice with us. He seems like a great guy. It was genuinely inspiring too. I always get recharged by talking to people who "made it", who were at one point where I am now...working on the novel you're not sure's going to go anywhere and churning out short-stories trying to get one to hit. He made a really great point about short-stories, though. He said that when he was in college, he'd made a comment to a professor that he thought short stories were mostly a dead end. They were only ready by people who were writing short stories in the hopes of getting their sto

I was going to try and define Ted. But I can’t. There’s no one thing about Ted that can sum him up, no true name which would give you power over him. You can’t distill Ted into a few syllables. Ted is far more than that. Ted is my brother. He was born two years after me, and I remember being pleased that we were born on the same day, the 10th. Yeah, it was two months and two years different, but to me it was the same. I remember being excited that I was getting a little brother. I remember standing next to Mom, putting out my finger for Ted to grab a hold of. I remember playing Mask with Ted in the hospital when Sam was being born. I kept saying to Ted, “Tell me more. Tell me more!” as he made things up and I lived them. I think, looking back, that Ted was the first person to take me to another place. Reading was okay, TV was neat, but playing in the back yard with Ted? It blew them away. The things we saw, the things we did. The villains we dispatched. The games we

I'm strangely Dissatisfied with my role-playing efforts of the past twenty-four hours. Despite the fact that we role-played for a good thirteen hours, had a full retinue of nine players, including my buddies Branden and Mike, who are usually out of town, and the copious amount of prep-work I'd completed...I still feel kinda lacking. The problem was, and I kinda saw this coming ahead of time, was that we'd just ended the previous adventure with just the six-person core group. It was a big turning-point sort of ending where the PC's had just discovered a secret military base embroiled in any number of dubious, devious, conspiracy-like activities. I spent multiple hours preparing and typing up the documents they'd find, creating a history of conspiracy that reaches back thirty years. Which was all good. I'd initially planned that the next adventure would largely be wrap-up. It would give the PC's a chance to revel in their victory, sift through the papers,