The written word

[caddyman]

It’s odd how even in a short period of time, your memory can play you wrong.

Having received (finally) my copy of NWO Transylvania from the printers, I have taken a very quick moment to reacquaint myself with some old friends. The interesting thing is how few of the characters I contributed to that volume; in my memory there were more.



I can’t remember precisely the first thing I ever wrote because I wanted to, rather than because I had to. The first thing that comes to mind dates back to when (and I’m guessing, here) to when I was about 14, when for some reason, the future telemeister and I embarked upon an ill considered project called Spider Island which we painstakingly wrote out in an exercise book in longhand. There were maps, too. It was unstructured, directionless, almost certainly dire and derivative. The best I can say about it is that I haven’t seen it for about 32 years and it probably no longer exists (unless telemeister knows different.

After that, between the ages of 16 and 18 there was a brief flirtation with song-writing. Stephen recently scanned some of these and emailed them to me. He has a rather higher regard for their quality than I do. I shan’t share them with you, don’t worry.

After that, to the best of my recollection, all voluntary writing stopped and any creative projects I continued with were all in the realms of sketching and painting.

Then came play-by-mail (for me) in the late 1980s. I played in a number of games, primarily postal variants on En Garde including one during the mid 1990s edited and run by immerwahr and ysharros. Just prior to that, I even wrote and edited my own play-by-mail game with a vague rule set I created myself, derived from friends’ games that were beginning to wind down as I started up. I managed to do this for an entire three turns on a manual typewriter and illicit use of the office photocopier, before lethargy and then apathy did for ”Tales from the Old Beallucas and Codpiece”, the journal printed from the tavern of the same name in my fictional world.

The En Garde games together with a few others, prompted me to write some short vignettes around the characters I was playing and slowly I developed an interest in writing for its own sake. This was made possible by the advent of the PC in my office (yes, folks, when I started working, computers were fabled things in locked rooms, to be used only by acolytes in white coats) and finally when I bought my first PC sometime around 1995.

I got involved for the first time in Freeform Games when I was dragged off by colonel_maxim to Machiavelli Games’ Grand Tribunal, written and organised by, amongst others pax_draconis, manamar, ysharros and caffeine_fairy, in October 1996. Start at the top if you start at all. And then a couple of years later I went to and played in the same group’s Levant game, which was to have been the first in the Lion and the Serpent sequence. That would have been, I guess, about 1998? Then it all went quiet, though I seem to recall that the PBMs continued for a while. Machiavelli Games folded and that was that.

And then in 2001, I chanced upon a troubled colonel_maxim labouring a character sheet for what became known colloquially as Levant II. A reworking and expansion of the original Levant game, but this time for a group called NWO Games which had grown up from the ashes of the old Machiavelli group and which, initially at least, included a significant number of members from that period. I stuck my nose in and contributed a page and a half to get the good Colonel over a touch of writer’s block and then got involved with the game itself, though only in a “monstering” capacity. However, the seeds had been planted and I rather rashly volunteered to help with the writing of the follow up, Thebes and that was that.

I was on the rollercoaster for four of the five games until we finished in May 2006 with the Grand Tribunal of 1204, set in a besieged Constantinople.

By God, but we wrote a lot of words in those five years. In strict percentages, I think that my greatest input was for Thebes, my first one, when I was still fresh. My best character (in my own opinion) was written for Transylvania, my most consistent stuff for Rome and the Grand was just a bloody slog. In hindsight I am torn: maybe I should have got off the rollercoaster after Rome, but sometimes you just can’t help turning the next page, to see how it all turns out.

I’ll be interested to see just how much I actually did write for those games – evidence over memory. All I do know is, that even at this remove I still cannot fathom how pax_draconis managed to write in excess of 2/3 of our material, co-ordinate the plotting, edit and organise the entire project without going insane. Or indeed how he found the time. I suspect he doesn’t know, either.

Anyway, that’s all done and dusted now, and I find that with the exception of the odd short piece, the only other sustained writing forum I have is this journal, which is one month short of its fifth birthday, would you believe?

I feel the stirrings of the need to write something more sustained, more focussed, but they are as yet easily sat on and outweighed by lethargy and that is a strong force, if the complete and continueded collapse of my artistic output is any measure. I think I need someone to spark off; I do not work naturally in a vacuum. Even if I do something solo, the good (or at least better) stuff only happens when I am trying to outdo someone else.