Fortnight notes, 9/30/24 - 10/13/24

Trying fortnight notes today.

I finally got W’s fancy watch back to him, with a nice new battery and glass that isn’t cracked. A belated anniversary present but handled all the same.

I had grand dreams of embracing my Jew-ishness (the hyphen is there because while I’m ethnically ⅜ Jewish, my family assimilated so thoroughly that I am completely disconnected from the plurality of my heritage) by making a Cheerwine brisket for Rosh Hashanah but was thwarted by migraines.

On October 5, W and I built our 12 foot skeleton with the help of our neighbor and in the evening, I went to see & Juliet with our friend who has gotten tickets from some friends of hers who couldn’t use them. I wasn’t sure I would like it because jukebox musicals rarely work for me, but it was a lot of fun. The second act has more ballads in a row than I would have liked but overall it was a great time.

One of M’s friends was born the exact same day as him. We went to her birthday party which was Taylor Swift-themed with karaoke. Many of the other guests were students I work with and their families. I was the first grown up to actually do karaoke. I sang “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” and while I didn’t do as well as I wanted to, people said nice things. Kid reactions ranged from saying to a parent with pride, “I KNOW HER!” to a confused, “Why is the school librarian singing?” A couple parents said I was so brave to get up there and I told them that I’m a karaoke hustler (not actually, I’m a ringer if a DJ knows me and needs somebody to jump in with an upbeat song but I’ve never participated in a contest) who’s spent lots of money on voice lessons, so that made it easier.

On the way home from the party, I took M to Fresh Market and he picked out a delicious vanilla cake from their bakery to have as we celebrated with W’s mom. When we got home, we finished building a big trampoline which was M’s main birthday present.

The next day was M’s actual birthday and we gave him quite a few books, a LEGO Friends cat playground set, and the Pokemon Battle Academy box that teaches you how to play the trading card game.

It was a mostly normal work week. Friday was a staff development day so M got to stay home with W while I went in and caught up on some work and learned about the development of our campus safety plan.

Then I ran errands! I picked up library holds and a new belt and returned a nightgown I didn’t love. This was big as I’d been sitting on these errands a little while.

Saturday we went as a family to a local farm that does a corn maze and hayrides, has a spooky nature trail, and lets you pick your own pumpkins. It was a gorgeous day and we were outside for about 4 hours.

Today, W and I went to the local theater’s horror series and saw The Thing and They Live. I ate way too much popcorn and have felt pretty gross tonight. Next time, no popcorn or a smaller order of popcorn.

How have the past couple of weeks been for you?

I love the idea of week notes or month notes but honestly the rhythm of my life is such that neither one quite works for me. I might play with life notes, sharing stuff whenever but trying to share more.

🍿 Also watched They Live. A very different flavor of Carpenter. Two great tastes that taste great together!

🍿 Watched John Carpenter’s The Thing. I love practical effects so much.

Finished reading: The Pairing by Casey McQuiston 📚

I love it. I’m a sucker for a second-chance romance. Casey McQuiston always does a great job. This book made me want to eat and travel and love with my whole heart. 🔥🔥🔥🔥

My website should be automatically cross-posting to Threads now. Hi Threads friends! (Hi everyone else, too.)

Finished reading: The Villa by Rachel Hawkins 📚

This is a modern gothic. I bounced off of it in print but audio worked beautifully for me, as there are different perspectives and time periods, plus documentary-style bits. Highly recommend.

Epistolary RPGs have me writing fiction again. 📝

I mentioned in my month notes for September that I’ve been playing epistolary RPGs with my friend K.

K lives three states away from me and is a trailing spouse; his husband got a tenure-track professor job and as one does, K moved with him to the area where the university is. Unfortunately, the gaming scene there was… not what K was looking for. So in the hopes of combatting some of K’s trailing spouse isolation, we started a D&D game that we play over Zoom with a couple of our other friends who are local to me and thus also far from K.

But getting 4 busy people together at the same time is hard and that group will often go 9 months or more without playing.

I buy charity bundles on itch.io sometimes and I noticed that some of the games there are for only two people and are easy to play asynchronously, so I asked K if he wanted to try some of those and he did, so here we are.

The obvious benefits of this kind of game are that you can play it whenever one of you has time and the other can then catch up at their convenience. There are a lot of different ways of doing it, but we play in a shared Google Doc we create for each game.

So far the games we’ve played have used a deck of cards, either standard playing cards or Tarot, to randomly select prompts for you to address in writing as you play.

I anticipated the gaming benefits of this style of play, but what’s been a delightful surprise is the effect it’s had on my writing and my writerly identity.

I thrive as a writer of fiction when I know there is an audience of at least one. In fifth grade, we had to write stories using vocabulary words and I wrote a series featuring characters based on my classmates. They eagerly awaited each new installment. In ninth grade, I wrote a story called The Hog Prince and shared it with friends.

I prefer writing fanfiction to writing original fiction partly because I know where to publish it and know that someone will read it.

An epistolary RPG means that the other player(s) are going to read what you wrote, so that audience I crave is built in, with no delays for publication.

Like fanfiction, when you’re writing in these games you kind of get to play with someone else’s toys. And when the players know each other well, you can give each other gifts in the text. You can make something appear that you don’t have a plan for but that you know another player will do something great with. Which is even nicer, I think, than just picking up and playing with toys that weren’t built for you.

A third piece of these games that makes them really work well for me is that they inherently require you to be creative within constraints. Kate Bingaman Burt gave a great TEDx talk about the value of these kind of constraints. I’m the kind of person who gets paralyzed by the number of choices available when doing something creative. I could write anything, so I don’t know how to begin, so I write nothing. The prompts in these games and the contributions of other players mean that I don’t have to choose a starting point, and that’s huge. And if I get stuck, well, soon I’ll have a new prompt to work with.

If you’ve been struggling to do creative writing, maybe find a way to make it a game. There are solo RPGs you can play this way, too, and maybe I’ll try one of those soon.