Election, NaNoWriMo, Annihilation

Election, NaNoWriMo, Annihilation

We had a local election this past Tuesday. It was a small one for mayor and city council seats. The ballot didn't even fill a whole page. Everybody i voted for lost. Even in the race for the "At Large" council seat, where the top three vote-getters get a seat, i picked all three losers. I think it's kinda funny.

NaNoWriMo is going very slowly right now. The idea i had suddenly got very boring when i started putting it to paper. So now i either retool it extensively or start over with something else.

This week i started reading Annihilation V1, and so far i'm liking it. The first section is the Drax mini. The small-town Alaska setting is cool, but maybe that's b/c i have that sense of Romance for small towns, though i've never chosen to live in one. I don't think i would have liked this story as a monthly comic. It would have felt sparse, plot-wise. But collected, it's a satisfying little prelude/setup to Drax's involvement in the bigger story.

I knew nothing of Drax before reading this. There are a couple of flashbacks that show his old costume, which i recognized from comics i've seen but never read, so i vaguely know he was involved in some of the "cosmic" Avengers stories from the 70s. That's all fine though, b/c this story doesn't depend on any of that. What background you need to know is told here, and the rest is new.

Now i'm at the part where the Annihilation Wave enters the scene, and the action rachets way up. It will be interesting to see how the various minis collected here flow as a unit. Will the pacing be choppy, or balanced? How much will the tone vary? What effect will different creative teams have?

Nanowrimo!

I've taken the plunge and signed up for nanowrimo, aka National Novel Writing Month. That might mean a) i don't blog at all, b) i post novel segments here, or c) the nanowrimo writing inspires stuff for me to blog about.

It almost certainly means that i won't be planning any rpg sessions in November. There's not enough time for both, and i think they are different-similar enough that i can't do both effectively. For a while (and this helped me decide to do nanowrimo) i've felt that the kinds of worlds i want to create and the stories i want to tell are suited more for fiction than games. My interest in designing rpg elements has waned while my interest in fiction has increased.

Anyway, i'll at least post updates on my progress during the month here, and encouragement will be appreciated.

Big thanks to the hosts of Secret Identity, without whom i probably would've forgotten all about nanowrimo until February. (On the CGS forums i'm known as blockhead.)