2018

            Another year has come and gone. Can you believe that I started this blog back in 2013, and it’s still here six years later? Six whole years of a new blog every week – plus the bonus stories of my D&D games, for those who read them. I never thought I could keep it going this long.

            While 2018 may not have been the best year globally, it was a pretty good one for me. I mean, for starters, we didn’t have any rats in the house, which was fantastic. Aside from that, though, it seemed to be a year of growth and change.

            One of the biggest changes is that this was the first year since it started Ringcrafts, my chainmaille business, didn’t attend any conventions or festivals. While we were sad to miss out on the events and seeing the friends we made there, we stand by the decision we made – with the increased success of Colleen’s Green Door Life Coaching, there was no way she could commit to the shows, and the set-up and tear-down of the shows couldn’t be done by me alone. Apart from freeing up a great deal of time, the lack of shows has also greatly reduced stress, making for a more relaxed year.

            For me, that extra time has been divided between a number of enterprises. The first, and by far most obvious of those, is Dungeons & Dragons. Last November, I switched from playing D&D weekly at the Devil’s Bench to running it, and I’m keeping a record of the ongoing adventure. That campaign has been running for over a year now, and has also led to me being invited to several other games. Not only that, but come the New Year, I’ll be starting a second campaign at the Bench! Crazy, I know.

            Apart from that, I’m still teaching myself computer programming and steadily advancing my skills. It’s both fun and useful, and I’m slowly understanding more about how these machines work (they could have run by magic, for all I knew). The stories I could tell you... but I won’t, because I know that if you’re as interested in the subject as I am, you’ll go and learn for yourself! (It’s easier than you think!)

            My writing projects, on the other hand, have slowed down drastically. I’m still working on them, of course, but the pace has slowed to a crawl. Why is that, you ask? I really don’t know. My best guess is that with all the creative energy I’m pouring into D&D (and the time spent recording the story) and the brainpower being absorbed by coding, my mind just doesn’t have enough juice left for my previous writing productivity. That’s alright with me, though, because I’m still quite happy with my other projects.

            Over the summer, I discovered what promises to be an amazing game, and got involved with a community awaiting its arrival. I could talk your ear off about it, but I’ll spare you by simply saying go check out Chronicles of Elyria – you won’t regret it. Your wallet might, if you get obsessed with the game, but you won’t.

            Right now, the most interesting thing is to look back over the year and see what I can best describe as a steady improvement in life. I couldn’t point at specific things and say, “That! That is better now!” but, when viewed as a whole, the world (at least my little corner of it) is just a little better than it was before, with promises of a continuing trend.

            Now it’s time to look forwards into 2019. As with all years, it’s certain to have its ups and downs, but I have high hopes for it.

            To you and yours, I wish a happy New Year. May it be full of joy and wonder, empty of sorrow, and an experience worth remembering.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Necessary Compromises

            The latest event in preparation of the upcoming game Chronicles of Elyria (now that we’ve overcome the plague) is map voting. It’s an extraordinary opportunity for the future players of this game to vote on, and determine, what the map of the world (well, the starting continent) will look like. And each server will have its own unique map – making for a very different game depending on which server you play on. Of course, to me, the most interesting part is how the community reacted.

            I can’t speak for the whole community – only the small piece I interact with – but I suspect it’s a fairly accurate representation of what happened elsewhere as well. It all started with the releasing of the maps...

            I promptly looked through all the maps. Taking into consideration the needs of my kingdom, duchy, and county, I promptly narrowed what I felt would be the best maps for us down to 3 or 4. Within an hour, I had chosen a favorite, which matched one of the favorites of the count of my county.

            At the duchy level, we had a discussion on each of the maps. I was happy to see that the map I’d chosen was also popular at this level of our organization, and I believe it even made it into the top three.

            After a few days, there was a meeting of all the duchy leaders at kingdom level. Each of them had brought their favorite maps – and then they selected the map that they felt suited everyone’s needs, and announced it to the community at large – saying they were free to vote however they wished, but this was the map the leadership felt would be best for our kingdom’s needs.

            I was surprised, and disappointed, that the map was one that hadn’t even been seriously considered in my duchy. I wasn’t fond of it at all, and I wasn’t the only one. A fair number of people were expressing their disappointment in the choice, and demanded answers from the leadership.

            Our king then answered the questions, expressing that this map wasn’t the best pick for anyone, however it was the map that best suited the combined needs of all the groups in our kingdom. He went into further detail about the process that was used, and it was more than enough to make me (and others) accept this map. I promptly switched my train of thought to figuring out how to adapt to this new map, and I was satisfied that, while it was far from the best map, it was quite adequate.

            And, as usual, it got me thinking about the whole scenario, and applying it to the world at large. No matter what decision is made, at any level of an organization or a government, there are always people who speak up and are unhappy about it. It always seems the most remarkable when the leaders, who made the decision in the first place, are unhappy with it – why would they make the decision if they knew it wasn’t great?

            Often (not always!) it comes down to being a compromise. The more people you add to a group, the harder it becomes to make everyone happy about any one thing – and it’s outright impossible to make everyone happy about multiple things. So, in comes the compromise – the decision that nobody particularly likes, but is the best that can be done to make everyone happy.

            Yet, so many people insist on raging and being angry about these decisions. They will shout their anger to the world at large. Strangely, I don’t blame them – because the only thing that is usually presented is the decision, not the means of reaching it. Once a decision is made, it tends to be presented as the best option available, even if it clearly isn’t the case – the goal being to show confidence in the decision. I can’t help but wonder, would it work better if the leadership expressed that it was a compromise? It seems like people are more willing to accept a decision that’s a compromise if they know that’s what it is (provided they actually care about trying to make as many people happy as possible). At least, that’s how it worked out in the case of my little Elyrian microcosm.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

The Chronicles of Elyria

            This week I happened upon something that I found so exciting that it’s captured all my attention and it is scooping up all of my free time. Naturally, that means you get to hear about it now. It’s called... The Chronicles of Elyria.

            The Chronicles of Elyria is a new Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game that won’t even come out until next yet – and here I am, waiting for it as I haven’t waited since the days of waiting for the new Harry Potter books to come out. And I’m not the only one! There’s a huge community waiting out there, some of whom have been desperately waiting for this game since 2016 or earlier. That’s how awesome this game is!

            So, let me tell you a bit about the Chronicles of Elyria. To start off with, I suppose I should tell you how I found it. It was through an online add I saw for the game. Normally I ignore adds, but this one caught my attention – informing me that this was a game where creatures could be hunted to extinction. This was such an intriguing notion that I clicked – and was dragged down the rabbit hole.

            Now, for those of you who don’t know about MMORPGs, basically they are video games with large worlds where you can interact and play with other people. However, aside from that, they’re an awful lot like any other video game – there are real people around, but you don’t have to interact with them. Everything you need is still provided by the Non-Player Characters, and you have a set of quests that you do – and if you get stuck, you just have to look up a guide to figure out how to get unstuck.

            With CoE, everything is different. For starters, you don’t get sent on quests by NPCs waiting around to send you on a mission – when you create you character, an A.I. generates a storyline unique to your character that will appear randomly in the game, with larger events only occurring if you do something in the game that triggers them – such as stealing for the first time, or travelling to a specific town. Rather than chasing around after stories, your story follows you.

            And that’s not all! The kingdoms and towns in the game are primarily run by the players – that’s right, you can climb through the ranks and become a king, bringing whole new levels to the game – shifting from being and adventuring game to a resource management game if you so choose. This, coupled with the resources in the world being finite (they’re usually unlimited), including species being able to go extinct, makes for an incredibly in-depth survival game.

            But, wait, there’s more. Apart from all the wondrous gameplay elements that are too numerous to mention, one incredible aspect of the game is that your character actually ages and dies. That’s right – not only are the resources finite, but so is your time. A character lives for roughly one real-world year, then dies – but their soul lives on. You can then create another character, who inherits skills through the soul, and who might even be part of your own family (yes, you can have families and kids).

            And, the final and most interesting element is that, to maintain the continuity of the game – keeping everyone aging at the same rate and whatnot – when you log out of the game, the A.I. takes over your character and it keeps playing! You leave instructions, and your character continues on in your absence – perhaps saving you tons of time training skills, or performing other tasks.

            There is so much more to tell about this game, but those – at least for me – are the key highlights. The community waiting for the launch is also wonderful, friendly, and welcoming – at least, the one I joined up with is. I was welcomed so warmly when I joined that even I – antisocial though I am – am actually interacting with them. I’ve even contributed to the Lore they are creating – which, it is worth noting, the awesome game developers are incorporating into the game.

            So, if any of that interests you, go check out the Chronicles of Elyria! If you poke around and decide to join the community, I strongly encourage you to consider the Duchy known as the Conclave of Aritaur located in the Kingdom of Vornair on the NA-East server. If I see you mentioning that I sent you, I may even be able to get you welcomed into the county I joined.

            And if you know me in person, I strongly encourage you to send me a message if you plan to sign up on the Chronicles of Elyria website; I can give you my friend code, which will not only earn me points, but it will tell the game we’re friends so it can try to place us relatively close together in the game world – otherwise we might have literal hours to walk if we want to play together. If we can even find each other.

            That’s it. Now, go! Become madly obsessed with Elyria that you might share in my torment as we await its release date!

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Faraway Friends

            One of the great opportunities we have in our modern society is the simplicity of communicating through the internet. We take it for granted now, but just a couple generations ago, it didn’t even exist. If you wanted to talk to someone on the other side of the world, you either wrote a letter (and waited forever for the response to return) or made an expensive phone call (although, if you go back just a little further, even that wasn’t available).

            Now we just pop open the internet and within moments we’re having conversations with people all over the world. Marginalized groups, who previously felt alone in the world, have a way to discover they aren’t as alone as they thought.  People who otherwise would never have met become fast friends.

            Having spent much of my younger life playing online games, I’ve been lucky to have many such friends. More recently, though, my online friends have come in the form of my writing support group, the Alliance of Worldbuilders. We started out as a group focused on giving constructive criticism on each others’ writing, but grew into something much more – a group of good friends from around the world. We even published an anthology of short stories together.

            This week I had the great opportunity to meet one of those friends in person – she was on vacation nearby and she suggested we could get together (last month she had met up with a number of the others in the group who, like her, live in England and previously had met a number of others around the world as well). Opportunities like this rarely arise, so even though it meant leaving my house (blech!) and driving to and in one of the largest cities in the country (blargleblech!!!), Colleen and I decided to go meet her.

            After arriving late because I’d only planned for half the bad traffic we encountered, we the three of us hit it off fantastically. I think we actually got along better in person than online. I had expected that we’d visit for maybe an hour, but we ended up chatting for over three hours an everything from writing to social issues to plotting global domination (forget I said that last one). My first meeting with an online friend was a huge success.

            For me, it highlighted the wonderful opportunities afforded to us through the internet. It had the marvellous capability of bringing together people who, in a past age, could never have met. What’s so great about this? The discovery that all the people across the world aren’t all that different from ourselves. Previously, all we could go on for picturing people of other nations was derived from meeting a few here and there, maybe travelling, and hearing from other peoples’ descriptions of then. This, of course, all gets simplified down into the stereotypes that still survive today.

            Yet, now, those stereotypes are tempered by the ability to go online and talk to almost anyone. We can really meet and find out about each other; discover how similar we are. In spite of the people clinging to the past – insisting it’s us against them – cultures from around the world are being brought closer and closer together.

            What a wonderful potential this has for changing how we view the world.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

We Need Diversity

            Something I see talked about a lot in the online writing community is getting accurate diverse characters written into books (people of different ethnicities, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, etc). Why? To ensure that everyone from every background and belief has characters they can relate to and, more importantly (in my opinion), to show people how much variety there is in the world and make them more accepting of people different than themselves.

            This is actually something that is very challenging to, for several reasons. The biggest challenge is fighting the social conditioning we have that leads to us simply using stereotypes – we’re exposed to them through all the media that’s out there already. Many of the books that inspire current authors are written either with an absence of diverse characters, or with them represented in stereotypical ways. It’s far too easy to follow the well-trodden paths.

            Then there is fighting the comfort zone. We are brought up with many taboos, and some can be very uncomfortable to push past. How do we write about people with different colours of skin when we’ve been told all our lives that pointing out someone’s skin colour is racist? How do we write about a disability or a gender identity we haven’t experienced ourselves?

            That leads into the third challenge: research. Research takes a lot of time and energy. It’s so much easier to run with the stereotypes, or just avoid unfamiliar topics altogether.

            Yet, we live in a diverse world, and therefore we must push past all out boundaries to include everyone in our writing. Once we do that, we need to choose how to present this diversity: do we highlight it, by making the story about modern issues related to it, or do we blend them in and treat them like we would any other character?

            While there is a need for the first, I feel that the latter option is the most important for the future. There are many parts of society that have been characterized in certain ways, marginalized or outright abused throughout history. This had been built into our media – movies, shows, games, books – and many of them will last for generations to come. We’ve become aware of the problem, and it’s getting talked about more and more – but it won’t be solved until we stop talking about it and make it normal.

            What really needs to happen is for diverse characters to be added into the media, but without them being treated any differently than anyone else. By doing so, we normalize them, and by extension show future generations that not only is it normal for people to be different – but it’s perfectly okay.

            Gone are the days when everyone needed to be made with the same cookie cutter. As a society, we are moving closer and closer to accepting people for who they are. By allowing people to be true to themselves the world becomes a happier place. But we can never achieve complete acceptance until our sources of entertainment – which shape us and our ideas in more ways than we realize – represent diversity as normal. Diversity in media starts here and now, by making the extra effort to put it in and make sure it’s accurately represented.

            The world is a diverse place. We need to celebrate it, not stifle it, and make it perfectly normal to be whoever we are.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.