The Creative Process #49 - Smoothing the Edges

We're deep into winter, although you couldn't be sure of that thanks to climate change. There's sufficient cold to invoke the usual slower, more thoughtful pace. I'm spending my time being quieter, planning out the seasons ahead and preparing.

My IF Study Course continues. It's a stew - bubbling away softly, providing a background to my month, but never having enough energy to be a concern, or really insisting upon a deadline. I've posted four exercises now, roughly monthly. On the half-month I've published my own attempts at the creative exercises, although I haven't settled on a due date. I don't know if being more strict on deadlines would improve it.

In terms of longevity, I have decided that twelve exercises is a good stopping point. Enough to establish a rhythm, continue that rhythm, and then a stretch of having to maintain it. The first part is fun and exploratory. The second is finding what works. And the final is whether the practice continues after the novelty is gone.

Our gaming group finished our Delta Green campaign of Impossible Landscapes. The immediate plans have been a few small campaigns made by other members. I've signed up to GM a future campaign of mine called Iron Horizons, a train ride from West to East in an alternative weird west USA. I plan to run it in 2027 after others in the group run campaigns about superheroes or mechs, and before a campaign about surviving the Nordic north. I feel like Iron Horizons will fit nicely into the roster as something different and fun.

I had been reluctant to start writing for Iron Horizons until had a better idea of the shape of the campaign I wanted to run. I had to scope out the system I wanted to use (and how much of it). This month I've nailed this down more and so feel confident to stick a flag in the 2027 deadline, and put a 4-6 month scope on the campaign. The campaign story has a fixed start and end, and nothing beyond it. My previous long campaign just multiplied and multiplied, and the arc to bring it to a conclusion was too long. I'm trying to avoid that.

For some reason I was also reluctant to do any world-building for the campaign. I had mentioned that I was doing my darnedest to not learn a single thing about real-world USA history. Well that was dumb. Once I got into building up ideas and painting in detail, every dive into a question about US history just gave me more flavour and ideas to use. I had also not wanted to learn anything about trains, because I'm Not A Train Guy. Well now I'm reading bits of The Standard Code of The American Railway Association "Train Rules", 1915. It's much better read as campaign source material than anything else. I mean, twenty pages in and they explain the use of torpedoes by flagmen to signal danger up ahead. I just hope learning all this information doesn't awaken anything in me. Steam also just ran a train game sale, so perhaps I'm doomed.

Over the next few months I want to make a Player's Guide and a World Guide for the game, assemble some pieces of gameplay and then be ready for 2027. Some proportion of this work is trying to smooth out the issues I've had with previous campaigns or ones I've seen elsewhere, and do better this time around. One of these problems is overstuffing the campaign with characters and plotlines. Ironically this whole train game campaign is learning to avoid railroading the players.

My own interactive fiction needs a deadline to start forcing things to happen. I don't know if I actually have the bandwidth for it, but the desire to get momentum for these projects has been in the background for months. Same goes for my desire to do some 3D art. Time is limited in these cold months.

Well, I say that and I'm also helping out behind-the-scenes at IF Comp. I don't have a game in the competition this year, so I'm free to help out. A Google Sheet I created a few years ago for organizing things is still being used.

I also took two days off recently. The first day was to go see The Odyssey, since everyone else was. It's well worth seeing, although not how I saw it, which was during the "Bring Your Baby" session where they keep the lights up a little, and turn down the volume a little. The Odyssey is full of bright scenes and dark scenes; quiet, muffled scenes and deafening loud ones. Why you'd take a baby to that, I don't really know. Why I went to a session alone with like 20 babies, I also don't know. My excuse is the time was convenient for me. In any case, if I worry about the dialogue I lost underneath the baby who had just learned how to shout for three hours, I hear there's a book version.

My second day I spent most of it making soup. Our team had a soup night and I decided to make soup. I made soup mindfully. There was no family, no TV. I had some light music, not a podcast or audiobook. I took care with every ingredient. I had fresh vegetables from the market. Of course I overdid it and made two different soups: a classic French Onion soup made the laborious way over a few hours, and a celeriac, pear, walnut and blue cheese soup. Both turned out fantastic, although the latter didn't fare as well in the refrigerator overnight.

This is my mode at the moment. Trying to make good, quiet things, mostly for myself but willing to share it. Preparing, but not obsessing. Doing a little bit more than I should do, but being honest about it.

Maybe in the rambunctious Spring I'll start throwing creative punches. But for now it's smoothing out the world before I put a dent in it.

What's your best soup recipe? What's the wildest soup you've ever made?