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[As usual, three weeks lag here, if you aren’t reading this on my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/blazeward). If you’d like your news fresher, and the monthly Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef newsletter, all I ask is a buck to help keep the lights on around here.]

Occasionally, shit gets weird. And I mean by my standards. Coloring FAR outside the lines y’all folks are used to.

I am, however, both a professionally trained philosopher and a professional writer, so I have learned to roll with it.

Yesterday, the usual Monday morning DND game got canceled when the GM got held over at the fire station. (Usually, he gets off shift at 6am, but obviously someone called off sick and he was there until noon.) Had that message when I crawled out of bed at 7, but decided to keep my Monday as close to normal as possible anyway.

Went down and got breakfast as usual.

Went over for coffee and sat to write for an hour. As usual. Essay for an upcoming anthology where I got to guest-edit.

The usual would be to hit the bookstore when it opened and game. Instead, I had brought stuff with me to work on the tabletop game I’m designing, spreading my shit out all over the table and making notes here and there on a lot of papers.

Game is coming together nicely. Couple of playtests that revealed problems with the economic system. Changes yesterday made things flow faster (I think) and easier. Probably recruit a group and run a test at some point. Need to collect tokens and shit, but that’s easy enough.

But on the drive south, I had a nagging pain in my kidneys that turned out to be a new character poking me to get my attention.

You folks know me. I like playing (and writing) against type, because after 45 years of DND, I have played all the basic configurations of characters at least three times.

Same in the writing. Normal characters are boring, which is why so many writers invent Chosen Ones™ to have destiny thrust upon them with all of the Tolkien/Rowling bullshit thrown into the gumbo.

</Yawn>

But there was a meme I saved years ago about playing against type. Or casting against type. It was for Star Trek: Next Gen era. (Gotta be specific because the amount of time from Captain James T. Kirk (TOS, 2266 CE) to Captain Nahla Ake (Academy, 3195 CE) is only slightly shorter than the period between today and when William the Conqueror died in 1086.)

The Meme talked about playing against type. A Betazed Weapons Officer who was hungry to kick ass. A Klingon counselor who understood that mental health was just as much an honorable battle as anything in an arena. That sort of thing.

Driving, that little voice quoted the old saying, “It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.” He’s not Klingon, but they would adopt the guy. Broken. Recovering from naval service (and I know a lot of veterans that came out broken and more than a little crazy) by working in his garden. Embodying the warrior in a garden ethos.

Then somebody shows up to ruin his day. And recruit him back to active duty, helping someone else that needs it. Someone who has been there, and can understand. Someone who has a personal connection that will make things both easier and harder.

Putting it into a space adventure setting, because that’s me. It could just as easily be private detective fiction or anything else, because it will be a story about relationships and recovery. Burnout that doesn’t kill you. It merely makes you shift to doing the job on paper and nothing more.

We’ve all worked there. You want to make a difference and make things better. Eventually, most institutions grind you down and you are just there for the paycheck. HR is not your friend. They work for the bosses as boot lickers protecting the corporation from being culpable for how they treat employees.

Eventually, you are just treading water and don’t give a fuck.

We’ve all worked there.

That’s the sign you need a new job. A new employer. A new career. A new industry.

Something.

I was lucky enough to skip across several industries in my computer days, from property management to paratransit to health to legal claims settlement.

Every corporation reaches a certain mass and metastasizes into a beast that consumes lives and spits out profit.

And you can’t quit the navy. Not really. You can serve out your time and get honorably discharged if you want benefits later. Or lose your mind and get tossed into the corner like a broken doll. Known a few folks who danced that line. And were broken civilians.

So I wrote a story yesterday. Out of the blue. New universe, new setting, new everything. Literally writing story, then switching files to record details as they emerged from the subconscious. It’s short. You’ll probably get it June 1. Might be more of them, because Mick has opinions and will give us a really different take on the classical (semi-)military space adventure.

You have been warned.

🙂

shade and sweet water,

b

West of the Mountains, WA

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