Saturday, April 06, 2002

 

I just finished reading The Silver Wolf by Alice Borchardt (Anne Rice's sister). It was very good. There was one short lesbian scene though that I thought she could have left out. Also, I almost needed to keep a dictionary handy. It was set at the beginning of the dark ages and many of the terms for things she uses I had no idea what they were. I had to laugh at one place because she talked about the 'faggots' that were placed under the woman chained to a stake. At first I pictured people lying there; it was about a page later that I laughed out loud at my stupidity. I'm not used to that word being used for that meaning. :)

Sometimes she lost me in the tangled web of the politics too. One central character was the pope and there were two rival factions that wanted to gain control of Rome. Trying to keep straight who was who and who was double crossing who made my head swim!

But despite the above mentioned items, I thought it was an excellent story.

I've been being lazy lately. Xander got a cold that hit full force Tuesday and Wednesday. I got it Wednesday and James' slowly got worse until yesterday and today he's pretty bad.

So, I've been spending my time reading and playing video games. A local rental place is going out of business and they were selling their NES and Super NES games for $5 a piece. We got Monopoly, Othello, a baseball game, and Wizardry. I've been playing Wizardry mostly. It's pretty good, although the maze is truly a place to get lost in. I killed off numerous parties before I got a good group (3 fighters, 1 samorai, 1 thief, 1 mage). I used some battle tactics, i.e. choose battles carefully, to gain exp and levels. When I was creating characters, I was surprised by that samorai. I was aiming for a nuetral Human fighter. I ended up getting 50 bonus to add to my rolls! I couldn't believe it. I've tried since to re-create another one, but it must have been a glitch. I'm not complaining. I named him Wicked, because he is a wicked figher. I later realized that only 3 people could actually fight, so I dumped a fighter from my party and gained a cleric and I'm happy for his healing spells and his AC lowering spells.

My March dare didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped, but I am glad I did it. Even though I didn't completely meet my goals, I did have more days of working on those things than if I hadn't been doing it. Instead of the normal approximately 4 hours per month I would have spent on writing, I think I spent about 15. This new story is beginning to take shape and I'm learning as I go along how to create a world. Having the world created is helping me understand the characters more fully. And understanding the characters will help me know what they are going to do. I need to do some more work on it so I can get to writing. Not sure when I'll make time to do it. I'm behind in housework and behind in my work at the library. And this blasted cold is still hanging on...

Dawn posted this at 5:28 PM.

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