Pre-Writing

It just hit me today that I have been letting this blog languish (and now I'm wondering if anyone noticed).  I have been posting at my gaming blog a lot, though.  In fact, most of my leisure thoughts keep turning to role-playing games lately.  I should probably step back from that a bit.  Not that I will.  But I probably should.

Anyways, a while back I posted a status on Facebook about how dumb I feel when I can't remember how to spell a character's name from a previous story.  Apparently I'm not the only one who does this.  However, all of my friends who commented have characters with complex and oddly-spelled names.  Which made me feel kinda dumb, since my character has a pretty simple name.  In my case, it's a matter of replacing an "a" with an "e" every time.  Need to work on that.

One thing that came up was that most writers keep some kind of reference document, or "cheat sheet" handy when writing, just for this kind of thing.  I have rarely done that, and when I have, I always seem to forget about it, or not need it.  But, I think for my next project, I am going to do it, and do it right.

The project is basically "orcs in space."  The idea is one that has been rolling around for ages (it originated with a Dragon*Star campaign I ran in San Diego).  One day a few weeks ago, I lamented that I was feeling creatively dried up, and a friend, who knows well my love of orcs, as well as my love of Stallone movies, suggested "The Expendables with orcs."  Holy cow!  That's awesome!

So, here I am dreaming up some ideas for Sgt. Gorm and the Reavers (though the team name might change, as I use Reavers in my fantasy stories).  Interestingly, I posed the question of what kinds of missions would you expect a mercenary group to go on, looking for things like rescue, destruction, assassination, etc.  What I got were pieces of advice on how to make the stories interesting.  Not what I was looking for, but I appreciated the input.

Something else I am doing is writing up a background for orcs as they exist in the Star Frontiers universe.  This serves the dual purpose of keeping the race consistent, and providing some background for that game.  I'm having fun with that too.

Too bad I have homework to do.  And we're moving soon.  And life keeps handing us lemons and stuff.