Tis the Season

You know how it is – you sit down to write a blog post about Thanksgiving and then the next thing you know Christmas has come and gone and it’s almost 2011. I’m not really sure if a recap of the past few weeks is even possible – especially not right now while I’m just thoroughly baffled that tomorrow is the absolute last day of 2010.

I don’t normally get a lot of time to reflect this time of year – January 1 is traditionally a big content release day at the Vault and all of my energy is usually focused on adding new features, writing descriptions of new and exciting things, and prepping for the 12-or-so hours of downtime we often have to roll out the new stuff. I haven’t cooked (or had time to) in about a week – tonight is going to be a leftover night, too – and the usual staples are scattered about: the white board is crammed with half-finished ideas, a dozen notebooks are sprawled open on the dining room table, my Pandora only has about two hours left of it’s free time, and my parents knowingly sent two boxes of Junior Mints to get me through. It’s that time.

Yet, this year – it’s hard not to reflect. I always found this kind of thing cheesy – after all, Saturday is going to be just another day; another blip on the calendar that’s hardly worth noting. But this year…this year has actually had plenty to reflect on.

This time last year I was holed up in my bedroom at my parent’s house, after having moved back home. I was going to make either the stupidest or best move of my RPG-running career: the site I’d been running for eight years or so was getting a name change and a complete overhaul. Turns out, this was the best idea I’ve had in my life.

I’ve moved several times this year, picked up new hobbies, abandoned some old ones. My life is completely different – far removed from the sand and wind blowing off the ocean and tucked away in a typical middle-American town where people still say please and thank you and use checks at the supermarket. It’s perfect.

I’ve got a good feeling about next year – even if I have to sludge through all this last-minute work over at the Vault to get there. Here’s to a repeat of all the good things from 2010 – only better than ever before. :)

“It’s Real For Us.”

Nine years (and a few weeks) ago I was baffled by the idea that my favorite book was going to become a movie. That had never happened before – this book that I had been obsessing over for weeks, and had learned to role play because of, was going to come to life.

Another year I remember standing outside a movie theater with two of my best friends having our picture taken by my mom. I have no idea what happened to those pictures (the internet doesn’t want to fess up) – but I was wearing a cloak my mom had made, another girl had an old graduation robe. We had sticks and chopsticks as wands and Hogwarts badges pinned to our chests that we had made ourselves and laminated and hot glued to safety pins. We had waited weeks for that day.

Years passed. More movies. More books. I remember rushing home from Busch Gardens the day the last book came out so that we could be the first people in line to get our books. My best friend at the time got the first copy of Deathly Hallows that the bookstore sold. I got the second.

Slytherin ties, school robes, knee high socks gave way to an elaborate Bellatrix costume that my mother painstakingly tied me into not once, but twice in a several week period so that I could attend the midnight release of both the book and the movie in costume. That gave way to my glamorous howler costume I’ll be wearing tonight – perhaps with some alterations to survive the cold.

It’s funny, I don’t think I would have told you back when I was a kid that Harry Potter would have shaped my life. I was in middle school participating in Battle of the Books when I first picked up Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I had wanted to read it, but another girl was assigned it instead. Then her parents said she wasn’t allowed to read it because of the witchcraft. My parents didn’t care. I read the book.

And then I read the next one.

And stayed up all night pouring over the third one.

I went to summer camp the same week that Goblet of Fire came out, and I had been obsessing over it for weeks. I was allowed to take it with me in the car, but not allowed to take it to camp. Order of the Phoenix came out. More movies. More books. The group of people I was role playing with grew stronger, more tight knit. We sent each other Christmas cards and birthday presents. We became The Slytherin Dorms.

Fastforward to 2010. My small roleplaying group is now one of the biggest Harry Potter RPGs on the internet. I’ll be going to my second to last midnight showing ever with my boyfriend that I met because of Harry Potter. I live in this town because of Harry Potter. It’s the reason I managed to go on a cross-country road trip with someone I’d met for the first time, knowing that we had been best friends online for years. I went to Disney World for the first time because of these books, made friends because of these books, learned to sew and to create costumes. If it weren’t for Harry Potter, my graphic design skills would have fallen by the wayside, or never existed. I would have never learned to code PHP.

Tonight, I’ll be lining up in the twenty degree Wisconsin weather – a far cry from the last midnight showing, middle of summer in eastern North Carolina – and I’ll have a smile on my face. It might be almost over, but it’s been a journey worth taking. I now have a “real” wand to replace the chopstick I took to the first couple of films. I have photos of me standing in front of Hogwarts Castle. For a ton of people, I’m sure tonight will be just another movie. But for some of us…

“It’s real for us.”

Home Sweet Nowhere

So we signed the lease on the new apartment yesterday.

It’s sort of a bittersweet affair – I’m glad to finally have some space that will be all my own, but since freelancing has become sort of a full time gig, it sort of has me a little nervous. We’ll be moving in with basically nothing to start with, and while I love to cook the prospect of starting from scratch is a little daunting. No flour and sugar and spices. No pots to boil things or a pan to brown meat. No vacuum. All of these things are expenses, and me being the obsessive worrier that I am, I feel like I’m wearing some strange shades like in that old movie They Live, except instead of seeing subliminal advertising I’m seeing dollar signs on everything. Bread and Sandwich Meat. $. New dishes. $$. Gas to keep shuffling around town moving stuff and running errands. $$$.

On the bright side, the apartment is in a pretty kickass building – it’s a refurbished junior high school turned apartment complex that we’ve had our eye on since I first toured it over a month ago. The common hallways still have all the old lockers in them, and our door – complete with a frosted glass window and mini blinds – used to lead to the old Principal’s Office back in the day. The smaller of the two bedrooms, my office, already has a bulletin board built into it (teacher style!) and will be perfect for my frantic notecard arranging. I’m pretty excited.

I’m starting to get a little worried about the weather, but that’s just going to be one of those things I’ll have to deal with – unless I start working part time doing things that don’t involve code and photoshop, at least I’ll have my office at home to bunker down in. Not looking forward to driving in the snow, but eh – it’s about time, right? The only unfortunate thing is that this will be the first Thanksgiving and Christmas I’ll have spent away from home. None of my mom’s pumpkin pie or corn pudding. None of dad’s complaints about how he hates cooking (even though he does it anyway). No cheesy tree decorations or old school cardboard star on top. No stupidly labeled presents from our dead dogs or the cats or the guy next door to make it seem like we have more people who care about us than there actually are. Just someone else’s traditions, some other part of town, and maybe trading my yuletide wind and rain for a snowman and some icicles.

Nothing like the holidays to make you realize just how far away a thousand miles from home really is.

At any rate, things are going generally good, and those keeping up with my Not-NaNoWriMo… I couldn’t tell you how many words of worldbuilding I’ve gotten done, but I can tell you that what I’m working on is quite possibly the coolest thing that will hit the play-by-post RPG world in 2011. At least, I hope. I’ve got a pretty good feeling about it and it should be fun to present a completely original setting to the world. I think I’ve also got it worked out so that the same setting can be used for D&D or Pathfinder, so I may give that shot as well.

Anyone else writing? Working on big projects? Gearing up for the holidays? Have snarky commentary regarding the fact that I am relocating (again)? Leave a comment. You know you wanna.

On Not Being A Writer

Ah, November. How are you? It’s been awhile.

This time of year usually brings to mind two thoughts – firstly, OH MAN IT’S ALMOST CHRISTMAS (paired with, naturally oh-man-I-need-to-start-working-on-Vault-Christmas-Stuff) and secondly (unfortunately) – Great. Time to steer clear of the internet.

It’s NaNoWriMo time.

I hate NaNoWriMo, and not for the task of “Oh no, writing 50,000 words in a whole month!” thing or the “I’m going to WRITE a NOVEL!” thing… it’s the people that do it. Not all of you, of course, because at this present moment I’m sure at least one person is reading this and thinking BUT MANDA, I LOVE NANO AND DO IT EVERY YEAR AND I AM ON MY WAY TO BECOMING A FANTASTIC NOVELIST. I’m sure you are. Just sit back on the rug for a minute and grab your juice box.

I get the whole thing behind NaNo, of course. Writing on a deadline! Writing for the sake of writing! I can support that. Writing is good. We need more writing and writers and things and people who understand the general process. That part is good. The part that is not good is the people who put their entire life aside to write this novel (last I checked, a lot of the people who write novels professionally still manage to, you know, have a social life and friends) and worst yet, the people that think having written a novel equates to having written a good novel.

In fact, lets all just take a minute and head over to Chuck Wendig’s Blog and see what he has to say about the subject.  Chuck is a fantastic writer, and I mean a really fantastic writer. This guy makes money off of writing! He does it for a living! And he’s telling us – to… do it? What? Chuck, I had faith in you. What gives?

Anywho, a few weeks ago when all the NaNo buzz started going around, the story outlines, the plotting, I thought to myself – hey, maybe I should do this thing. This thought was brief, and lead simply to this tweet:

Refusing yet again to do NaNoWriMo this year – sure I’ll just end up with 50,000 words of worldbuilding/backstory with no novel to speak of.

And the internet responded with a resounding DO IT DO IT DO IT DO IT. And Chuck says do it, and Maureen Johnson and John Green and all these other people say Do It and you know internet maybe I don’t want to write a novel, even though I kind of dig the idea of having a writing deadline while I have nothing else to do.

So here’s what I’m going to do, internet. I’ll NaNo with you. I’ll play your silly little games. I refuse to write a novel, though. That ain’t happenin’. Maybe I’ll write you 50,000 words (or try to) of some foreign land, or come up with my own World of Darkness add on (I can see it now – Rainbow: The Splendor, or Unicorn: The Alliance or something equally as … well, you know.) …but I’ll write something. I’ll see what I can do. 1,600 words a day isn’t really much for me. I mean, I’m verbose. I talk a lot, and I write more than I talk. So we’ll see how that goes. I’m going to spend some time doing some serious worldbuilding and you all can work on your extremely rough drafts of the next Harry Potter or something.

Maybe I can also achieve 50,000 words blogged in November, too. Would that be some great feat? 100,000 words? Do I get some kind of champion crown for that? A gold star, perhaps? Inducted into the Freelancer Hall of Fame?

So there’s that. We’ll call this…erm… MaWriAShiOWoAbAFiWo. Perhaps that’s too verbose.  I mean who would participate in MandaWritesAShittonOfWordsAboutAFictionalWorld, and it’s certainly not very catchy. How about just Manda’s Worldbuilding Adventure. With Unicorns. And Rainbows.

Here goes this. No promises. Are you NaNo-ing too? Post in the comments, we can suffer together. Oh, and follow Chuck on Twitter. Why? Because he knows whats up. You’re going to be a writer damn it, and so am I, and we-are-going-to-do-this-thing even if it means banging our heads against our desks. Write something, even if it’s not a novel. After all, we waste hundreds of thousands of words each week on things like Twitter and Blogging and emails and text messaging… we can certainly make the time for 1600 piddly words about… something. Shoe tying. Pterodactyl burgers. A novel. An Epic Poem. Something. Just write. Right?

November, bring it.
Worldbuilding Words Written: 0
Words Blogged: 761
Days Left to Go: 29

Tricks and Treats

Ah, Halloween.

This year is my first time ever giving out candy, and it’s enjoyable despite having to get up every four or five minutes, and despite having a headache – which is making the whole getting-up-and-going-downstairs-and-talking-to-people thing a bit hnngh, but such is Halloween.

I’m kind of disappointed by the sheer volume of store-bought costumes… and, naturally, the amount of you-are-obviously-too-old-for-this teenagers coming around for free candy handouts. Shouldn’t the, like, have jobs? And be able to buy candy? There’s also the interesting volume of “I have these wings, and these cat ears, and this makeup, lets just throw it all together!” which is, I suppose, a bit “classic” of them – but I’m all about the costumes.

I was incredibly fortunate that my mother was as enthusiastic (or, at least, acted that way) about making sure I had a “cool” Halloween costume as I was. Last year was the first time I ever purchased a costume from a store – before that, everything was handmade. Even the year before when I went as Eve from WALL-E. Besides the costumes, my mother had tactics. One year we went trick-or-treating twice in the same neighborhood; I had two costumes and swapped out once I’d hit up all the houses. Another year she brought a second bag for candy – I’d go to a house with an empty bag, they’d take pity on me and give me extra candy, and I’d dump it in the bigger bag. Tactics.

So my mother’s home-made costumes. The earliest one I ever remember wearing was, against my own selection I’m sure, a clown, with sewed on pom poms and everything. Another year I was the yellow Power Ranger, down to the little white flaps to go over my shoes. Then there was the flower costume – I don’t know why I was a flower, but my mom was very adamant about every costume can be created out of a sweatsuit. I have no idea how many years I dressed in a sweatsuit with other costumes.

Two of my favorites were, one year and the next, my best friend and I dressed as the red and blue M&Ms (I was red) – my mom made sandwich-board costumes with two big, red, circular pillows (That she made herself) and strapped ‘em over our sweatsuits. The next year was the same tactic, but the sandwich board was made out of hard foam core and we were playing cards. This would have been a much better idea but it was astonishingly difficult to move with a giant sandwich board strapped to you.

I know I had other costumes over the years, but those were some of my favorites. This year? I’m recycling my bee costume from last year while I hand out the candy. Did you have a Halloween costume this year? What was your favorite from past years? Share away in the comments!