Playing Games

I haven't written more of my rom-com, and that's okay. Everything I've been working on lately has been full of deadlines. First it was NaNo in November, then it was that serial story I had to add to every week, then it was Camp NaNo in April, where I felt guilty every minute I wasn't trying to revise. I put all this pressure on myself, then I start to hate the project I'm working on because I have to work on it.

I know, I know, if you want to be a "real" writer, you have to treat it like a job and write all the time, on a schedule. But see, I have a job. Writing is supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be my escape. Yeah, sure, I want to get something published one day, but not at the cost of despising the finished story for all it put me through.

That said, I have had several thoughts about this rom-com, and the sorts of things I'd like to see happen.

I had an idea for a vague sort of love triangle that I could totally see showing up in a story like that, but then I reminded myself that I hate love triangles, so that's probably not going to happen. Because, you know, I don’t want to hate my story.

Thanks to my last posts and comments to it, I've been thinking about lesser known card and/or dice games that a family might play at the holidays. The advantage of card and dice games over, say, board games, is that they're typically not copyrighted, unless they have a special deck, like Uno or Skip-Bo. Usually they're just passed down from person to person, often with a variety of names and rule variations. I mean, my high school and university days were full of all kinds of weird card games, like Egyptian Rat Screw, Lucky, Bullshit, Spoons (that once ended in bloodshed), Mau, and probably several others that I have forgotten the names and rules of. Although, most of those games seem very… teenagery, so you probably couldn't get a whole family to play them.

With that in mind, I think I need to create characters for at least some of her relatives, because that would give me an indication of what kind of games they would play. How rowdy are they?

Ohhh… The Land of Coffee. I was just looking up games with secret rules that new players have to deduce. Which reminded me of The Land of Coffee, a purely spoken game (or maybe it's a riddle?) that I have literally played for days on end. It all starts with something like, "There is coffee, but no tea." And then something like, "There are spoons but no forks," or, "There is grass, but no flowers." People keep making declarations like this, with new people offering their own versions and hoping they fit the criteria. That could be kind of fun to put in a story, like they've been doing this at family gatherings for years, and Cousin Donna still can't figure it out.

So anyway, the story is happening, slowly. I'm not going to rush it. I need something casual to work on for a while, before I go all crazy with the deadlines again for Camp NaNo: July Edition. Consider it a vacation of writing before I go back to writing. Maybe I need other hobbies.

Nah.

I'll see you Wednesday.