Alright, pals?
It’s been a month involving a big birthday, which has meant a little bit of time out from Normal Stuff and consequently also a bit of time off writing. But no worries! We’re back on it, lads! Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Wot I Wrote
Progress was made on the LitRPG that remains my main focus, and I also got a bit distracted by doing some planning (involving playing a couple of indie role-playing and/or storytelling games) for another serialised story I really want to get around to. I know I need to just focus on getting one thing done, or I’ll never finish anything, but that’s haaaard, y’all.
Also made a little bit of progress on WOAD, the card game by my friend Josh at Art of Arklin. That enjoyed a successful Kickstarter campaign a few months ago, and should be available to play before too long!
And in ~~slightly secret~~ works, I’ve been building a bit of a world with my good mate and frequent collaborator Reed Reimer for something big. Something giant, even. That’s a hint. Probably shouldn’t say much more than that for now, but it’ll be a thing!
Wot I Enjoyed
I’ve started reading Don Quixote. Not sure why. I think mainly because I really like Jorge Luis Borges, and his Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote is fascinating and hilarious.
Anyway, turns out that the original Quixote is also fascinating and hilarious. I’ve got the John Rutherford Penguin Classics translation and it’s genuinely funny, bordering on surreal in a way that feels not a million miles from a lot of modern humour. The eponymous would-be knight is constantly spouting utter nonsense and getting into bizarre escapades, and the reactions of the people he comes across (who often have little choice but to at least pretend to buy into his very peculiar version of reality) are brilliantly bathos-y.
I’ve been checking out a few new podcasts, too: Lateral, a kind of puzzle-solving panel show, Escape This Podcast, which is an escape room in RPG-adjacent audio form, A Problem Squared, about mathsy things, and Lolita Podcast, a very thorough and well-considered analysis of Lolita: the text, its adaptations, and the ways in which it’s been interpreted and misinterpreted in popular culture.
Other Bits Wot I Done
There was a birthday! My wife’s birthday, and a fairly big one, so she and I and our two-year-old trotted up to the coast and had a fun time hanging out, then we dropped the little one off with her grandparents and went for a spa weekend. So that was veeery nice.
Other than that, not much to report. The pre-follow page for the Chronicles of the Crossing crowdfunding campaign is still open, so please sign up there to hear about the multiple brilliant novels (including mine!) coming to the world of D&D campaign setting The Black Ballad soon.
And that’s about it for the month, so take care and see you again soon.
Oh, one more thing: if you sign up for my mailing list, I’ll send you five completely free short stories you can’t read anywhere else. So do!
Chris Durston 