Jun 17 2009
Anniversary (or Ravyn and the Writing Desk)
When I first started this blog, one of my friends wondered how long my material would last. I can’t say I blame him. Here I was, unable to get new topics with every game supplement like my more system-specific counterparts, determined to avoid the Edition Wars and its corresponding cornucopia of topics, and insisting on holding to a daily schedule, no exceptions. The odds of my making it to the 100-day mark seemed pretty low. Two hundred, a strain. Three hundred, a shot in the dark. Yet here I am.
On June 17th, 2008, I applied for a slot on the Today network. In the evening, I learned I was accepted. But I was a little distracted that night by a game—something about gods and mysteries, I think, the days tend to run together—so I missed the day I wanted to start on and posted after midnight. But the first day was the 17th. (That’s also where the posting at midnight came from; it was the earliest possible time I could post and get credit for the next post, and it gave me plenty of time if I went past my deadline, not that I let myself all that much.)
Since then, it’s been an interesting year. I began Impractical Applications, and discovered that lining up a week’s topics, or even one topic in a week, with a planned game session was much harder than it had sounded when I got the idea. An incident involving the local recycling center and a ranty mood led me to discover the Generic Villain, and a four-part sequence inspired me to turn the series into a weekly feature. Looking up the right blogs at the right time got me onto the RPG Bloggers’ Network, and to the strangest mental contradiction of my life as I discovered my first featured post on that network and heard about a death in the family within about five minutes of each other. (The fact that that post is one of my best-known only confounds matters further.) I’ve talked about everything from writing tricks in movies to the first social obligation of the game table, from characterization to biology.
As the blog has evolved, so have my goals. Originally, I had been trying to get writers into role-playing to improve their technique, particularly those unaccustomed to characters who wrote themselves. But soon I found myself branching out, like when I declared war on badly-written fantasy, or when I decided to try to make this blog one of the hubs for characterization articles on the Internet. (Both, unfortunately, are still a work in progress.)
To the friends I’ve made and the people I’ve probably offended, to the game group that’s been with me from the beginning and the people who Googled in through my Up reviews, to the unofficial editor who’s vetted most of my posts and the GM who semi-unwittingly provided a lot of my GV material, to those who have listened to me rant about this project or about things I can’t put on this project because they’re still spoilers: Thanks for sticking with me, I hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves, and I’m looking forward to another year.
