Hills and Valleys, Mostly Valleys

Stray Cat Sorrows

Been feeling despondent since Wednesday the 22nd when I heard a stray cat crying in our driveway while I was washing dishes. I don't want to revisit the details, but it had been struck by a car. We took it to the local vet in hopes of saving it and instead had to put it down to end its suffering. We stayed with it while the vet worked, because to leave it alone after all it had been through would have just been cruel. The whole situation angers me for a variety of reasons, and I keep running through my head what I would do differently now given what I know and how it all unfolded, but it also just makes me grateful that we've been able to give three kitties a loving forever home. I've been showering them with more attention than usual the past couple days.

Perhaps it's needless to say, but that bit of misfortune colored the rest of my day and week. I still did most of my workout in the afternoon, but my heart wasn't in it, and I gave up on the last 2 sets for the final 3-move superset. We also went to our weekly boardgame night even though we were, "meh," on the idea, but it was a nice temporary distraction.

Yesterday was my fiancé's day off, so it was mine as well. The closest to anything "work" related I touched was doing a small session 0 scene from the time before our campaign, but I wasn't as energetic for it as usual, partly because of the other day.

Unfortunately, the former half of the week also came with its own set of challenges.

Forced Writing

If last week demonstrates how a good week of writing might look, this week showcases the opposite.

Since my fiancéhad last weekend off and I try to use those days as mental and physical recovery days myself, I had Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning to accomplish my writing goals. I was, again, rewriting a journal that I had written about a year ago. It had focused on Efiál's guilt concerning the idea of eradicating more of the Ankhrav after disposing of the queen, but because of the subject matter from the previous journal, I felt the tone no longer fit as a focus for this particular entry. It's still a valid feeling they have, one that will likely appear in the "How I'm feeling" portion of their journal, but I knew after rereading it I wanted to shift the topic elsewhere:

Valen, you would never believe the adventure we went on today.

Okay, so, after we rested, Brod and I continued our descent through the tunnels, following the instructions our new Dwarven companions had given us, which seemed straightforward enough, but in my eagerness to Locate more Ankhrav eggs and potentially the queen, we detoured into another burrow and discovered a man who’d just felled a small group of Ankhrav himself. He introduced himself as Father Jakhturim Ambien and is not only a priest of the god Phusyn but also a collector of ancient, usually religious, treasures. 

The Dwarves yesterday mentioned visitors disappearing from the watchful eyes of Themfaruhm recently, which makes me suspicious that Father Ambien is one of the people to whom they were referring, especially since he left the city in search of a temple belonging to a long-forgotten Dwarven god named Moradin.

And you know what, Valen? We found it.

This massive temple sealed and abandoned to the vestiges of time until the Ankhrav dug into it and turned it into their nesting ground. We used the Ankhrav entrance as our own since the main door wouldn’t budge, lowering ourselves in through a hole via some rope, touching down into this enormous chamber that was definitely not constructed by the Ankhrav. From the design and layout of the temple, my guess would be that it was an assembly hall of sorts, where people would wait to be admitted into the temple proper where they could pay tribute to Moradin.

In order to gain access to the tribute chamber, however, we needed to locate these runic tablets scattered throughout the rest of the temple. I imagine they, along with such puzzles as the seemingly never-ending stairwell, were part of a security measure to prevent thieves from filching the treasures.

I don’t think the massive cocoon hanging in the middle of the post-stairwell room was installed as part of these security measures though. It was impossible to discern what sort of room it was before the Ankhrav turned it into their nest—maybe a place for special ceremonies?—because broken pillars and rubble littered the floor, which was cracked and sunken in some places. A large portion of the back wall had caved into the room, and the rest of the chamber was covered in eggs.

It reads...okay, and it's peppered with important kernels of information, but writing it felt like a chore beyond the usual difficulties that accompany writing. I slogged through this draft mostly on Monday, continuing into Tuesday before I had to stop and analyze why I wasn't enjoying the writing process when the previous week felt like such a success.

Once upon a time, I would have sunk my heels deeper in the mud and would have grit my teeth through it, but I've since begun listening to when I myself am unsure of how to proceed and when I'm trying to write about something in which I just have no interest.

If your writing feels forced, that is if you're writing descriptions for the sake of writing descriptions or entering a character's headspace because it's what you feel you should do, then I think it's important to take a step back and study the wall into which you've bumped, because it's only going to torture you if you try to work against the grain. Your writing will reflect that in unique ways, like maybe overcompensating with descriptors to evoke a scene you otherwise find boring.

Sometimes you'll find that all you need to do is approach your draft from a different angle or ask yourself what is truly unique and interesting about this new place a character has entered. The information may be too valuable to discard, but the way it's presented can make all the difference. In my case, for the draft I started Wednesday morning before everything else happened, I returned to the inside of Efiál's head:

Valen, what sort of ancient, long-forgotten ruins exist in the Plane of Shadow do you think? There must be many, right? What truths do you suppose we could find in that barren, dangerous wasteland? Could records exist detailing the truth of how our moon was destroyed, or would they have decayed and crumbled to dust by now? That is, assuming we did live once upon a time without those barriers. We must have, ja? Why else would our songs lament the destruction of the “Plane of Night” and the rise of the “Plane of Shadow”? 

I ask, because we met an archaeologist of sorts today. Well, more that he’s a traveling priest of Phusyn who happens to also hunt for forgotten temples, lost civilizations, and the ancient treasures housed within. He has me wondering what kind of world we lost when our ancestors fled and isolated themselves within major cities like Shadow Ezada. What precious memories have we sacrificed in the name of self-preservation? I’d like to know. 

No, I need to know, especially if the past can shed any light on Nim or provide the answer to creating the body with which she was never born. I’m still suspicious that Maryn may have done something to us while we were in utero, since it’s a high probability that Matra went to him during her pregnancy, but unless I can gather some evidence to condemn him, it will remain my hypothesis. 

So far, I'm enjoying this draft more because I'm approaching it with an open curiosity. Efiál is asking questions based on their experience exploring the Dwarven Temple of Moradin, and that will eventually lead to me describing the actual temple and the confrontation with the Ankhrav queen, hopefully with more gusto and interest than the previous draft. While Efiál does enjoy learning and exploring new areas, without relating their discoveries back to their own problems that need solving, the physical description of the temple in the previous example reads as detached and dry.

Now, that said, when I edit this draft, I'll probably work on truncating their barrage of questions to make them more succinct, or I'll experiment with spreading them through the rest of the entry so that they're not all lumped together in the beginning. We'll see though! It's all part of the process.

This Week's Other Notable Accomplishments

(Not many this time...)

• Worked out every day my fiancé was at work

• Experimenting with walking 10 minutes every hour instead of lumping my 10k steps into a single walking session. I'm iffy on whether or not I prefer this method yet

• Started working on a secret project related to the campaign; am keeping some notes of my progress down on paper; not a huge priority at the moment

This Week's Obligatory Cat Pic: Qiri