Matthew Supert

So this past Friday I had my second role playing adventure with the Pathfinder Society. As with the first time, I had a blast and I am now starting to get a handle on how the game works a bit more. Our group was thrown for a bit of a loop at the beginning of the game as the GM who was hosting the game asked all of our characters to introduce themselves to their fellow companions and state why they decided to join the Pathfinder Society. I had to on the spot think up of a a background story for my character, but I think I did a pretty good job. 

I think I may start a little sort of side blog posts going forward that summarizes these adventures. Could be sort of fun. In the mean time, I will do a quick summary of the introduction I did that evening for my character. 

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So we are a couple of weeks into the new year and already I am beginning to just feel a bit worn down by everything. This often happens to me. I work in the basement of my building so we don't have any windows. This time of the year is actually a sort of slow time for me as well, which normally would be a good thing because it allows me to work on some of our longer term projects. These past couple of weeks have been a bit hectic thought with the weather and this week as followed up with people coming out of the woodwork with complaints. 

It is sort of exhausting to an extent and I feel like I am constantly putting out little fires, without getting any real work done. It is all really making me itch to get out of the house or something. Get on my motorcycle or go paint-balling or something. I was able to get out and go cross country skiing a couple of weeks ago, but unfortunately I haven't had an opportunity since the weather was too cold to go outside here. 

Let's hope things open up here a bit over the next week or two. 

So, Nanowrimo is long gone, but I am still slowly chipping away on my book. I have absolutely slowed down over the past month, a lot more than I had initially planned, but it was probably good to step back from everything for a bit of time to catch my breath. Nanowrimo was a mad sprint in November and nothing I have ever done before. It was exciting, but it wasn't really something I could keep on doing since I was basically neglecting other parts of my life. 

That being said I hope to get back into the writing part a bit more through the month of January. I am amazed at how much of this story I am discovering myself as I write this book. I am sort of just making things up as I go along and writing what feels like what would naturally happen in a scenario. I have found myself and my characters going to places I never imagined, wondering why we were all here and acting upon motives they never would have at the beginning of this adventure. 

I had to write my first love scene, which I admit was a bit awkward because all I could think about was if people reading this would just think it was my own sexual desires coming out. I had one of my characters commit a horrific crime out of pure impulse upon the moment. Everything is just sort of falling around me in this story, but I think I will get to where I need to be in the end. Ideas about solidifying the world seem to be coming together around me. I hope to keep plugging along with this. Eventually I may even allow people to read it. 

Well, it is that time again, when we look back upon the year we had and then think about what we want to do moving forward.  This past year went pretty fine for the most part, but for some reason I wouldn't really call it a satisfying year on the whole. I took two wonderful vacations this past summer to Yosemite and on a cruise. Apart from that though I didn't feel like I had much else from the summer that really stood out for me. 

My biggest personal accomplishment was probably my participation in Nanowrimo this past November. I found that I actually enjoyed writing quite a bit and I hope to continue going forward this year. My biggest disappointment was that I really did not get to ride my motorcycle as much as I wanted. I didn't participate in as many group rides as I would have liked and I did none of the weekend trips I wanted to. Somehow my weekends felt really full with other work. 

This year I think I want to keep my goals a bit simpler. 

1. Music Mondays - I should use Monday evenings to work on more music 
2. Continue to write at least once a week. Perhaps even get a book finished. 
3. Ride more Motorcycle. 

I am not sure if I posted this earlier, but back in November I decided to pickup a Wii U on a sort of whim. I figured now would be a good time to get one and the system had a new package deal out that had the Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker HD packed in. The Wind Waker Zelda is my favorite game of all time so it was pretty hard for me to actually pass up on it.

I also decided to get into Skylanders and bought a package of that game on sale over the holiday break. That game is incredibly well produced and truth be told, those little action figures are incredibly addictive to collect. I know that game is supposed to be for kids, but I can't help but have fun while playing it. This Penny Arcade Comic is not too far off from the truth of these things. 

After playing Skylanders and Zelda the past few weeks i have to say that they overall felt really refreshing. Both games are just really well made games and not just "kids" games. The overall atmosphere and feeling while playing them was completely different than most of the games that I found while playing on the Xbox. I didn't have any of the stress or tension around my gaming sessions that I normally had with other games. 

Case in point is the latest Tomb Raider game. I also started playing that game the past few weeks. That game in its own right is really well made and is probably my favorite game that was made this year, but the whole environment and atmosphere while playing it is obviously quite different than the Nintendo games I am playing on the Wii U. The game is gritty and intense. It is fun but also to a point stressful. I don't exactly feel relaxed while I play it and while i do enjoy the story and the game immensely it doesn't quite put a smile on my face like Skylanders does. 

So, over the Thanksgiving weekend, Megan and I went to our new favorite small business, the Wandering Dragon over in Plainfield to support small business Saturday. I think we are going to start a tradition of buying a game or two every small business saturday there. Browsing around the store I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to pick up. Then I saw sitting on the shelf the Pathfinder RPG starter kit. 

This is an RPG I have heard a lot of people talking about over the past year. For those who don't know, it is an RPG just like Dungeons and Dragons. There is a dungeon master who leads several adventurers on a quest to go and do something. Paizo created the RPG back in 2009 after Wizards of the Coast decided to change their publishing rules. Forbes of all sites actually has a really good review on the box and an interesting insight on how the whole thing got started. 

So I picked up the starter kit and spent the weekend going over the box and I really found the whole system interesting. Call it luck or call it good planning, but I noticed that the Wandering Dragon that very next Thursday was having a Pathfinder Society night. The Pathfinder Society is Paizo's world wide sort of story following the RPG. Players around the world in the society all play the same modules and stories together and then report their stats and details online to the site for tracking. It is sort of like and MMORPG but on paper. 

Suffice to say I had an absolutely blast last Thursday playing the game. I just loved every minute of it and everyone else who was playing was really cool with me and made my play time really fun. I have to say I am hooked. 

It is really a shame that I didn't get into this stuff more when I was growing up or even in college.

So the past couple of weeks saw the advent of the next generation of gaming consoles. I went out and decided to buy a Wii U with the new Zelda Wind Waker HD remake. Ohh, I want one of the new consoles, but I cannot decide quite yet what to get. Anyways, I will get to that next week in another post. 

This week I am going to post though my favorite games of this last generation. These are in no particular order, but simply the games that left me with the best impression. 

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Day 29th Check in and I have to say "YES!!!!!"

I finished the day today with 50,329 words and I successfully complete Nanowrimo. Now, my novel isn't complete. I feel I still have ~15,000 words left to flesh out some of the story. There are huge plot holes and all sorts of other things that would need to be revised, likes names for about 90% of the characters, but I wrote 50,000 words this month into something that conceivably, could sort of may be look like an actual story. 

Hopefully this is just the first part of this journey with this story and I hope to keep going on with it. That being said I am going to take a couple of days off the rest of this weekend to enjoy my victory. 

So this past week I thought was pretty difficult. However, as I finished up Sunday night I found myself sitting at 41,476 words completed. That puts me at just under 9,000 words left to complete this week. The ring is within reach. Unfortunately I didn't get any writing done today. Let's make up for that tomorrow. 

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So this past week was the dreaded and infamous week #2 for Nanowrimo. It is said that most authors really hit a wall during this second week in their novels. I am not sure if it is because they have gotten past the introduction portion of their books and are now in the setup phases or if the realize how big the mountain is that they have to climb in front of them. 

Whatever the case is, I have to say that I did find this past week to be pretty difficult. Early in this week I had some real problems trying to get my book going. I found that I have run across a lot more auxiliary characters and locations than I originally anticipated. I spent a good portion of this early part of this week just wracking my brain on how my characters were going to get from point A to point B, or why they cared about risking their lives to do something. I ultimately found a good path for their progression, but not without some turmoil on my end. 

One thing that has helped tremendously is talking with someone about my ideas and bouncing the ideas off of them. Getting the words out of my head and asking for advice on how to approach a scene or on how someone would act helped a lot. My wife was that person this week and she actually responded back to me with some really good suggestions. 

I finished off this evening with 25,159 words. I am technically a few thousand words behind schedule, but my goal was to be "half way" to 50,000 at the end of week two here and I am proud to say that I accomplished that this evening. I also left my novel in a good spot to allow me to pickup tomorrow with the next section of the story.  Let's hope that this next week goes more smoothly. 

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