If I Had A Hammer… And A Blowtorch

So, I see that the bloom is off the rose.  That’s right.  Wake up.  Wipe that crusty film out of your eyes.  See, I knew you’d fallen asleep.  I saw that you weren’t reading here anymore.  Remember.  I have people watching you.

Actually, I don’t blame you.  Things haven’t been that exciting around here lately.  But I haven’t abandoned this place.  I still come here and redecorate every now and then.  Sometimes with a chainsaw and a blowtorch.  Today, I just have a hammer and a paintbrush.  I’m not knocking any walls down yet.  I’m just giving you something fresh to look at.  You’d just better hope I don’t catch you sleeping again.  I swing a mean hammer (though not as mean as Annie Wilkes).

There have been some decidedly Non-Geekcentric developments this week that have taken me away from here.  Unfortunately, none of them included Kathy Bates with a sledgehammer.  Because that’s what I need.  I need some crazy bitch with a big-ass hammer to kidnap me, tie me to a computer, and force me to write.  There’s no making excuses when that hammer starts swinging (“Now that’s an oogie mess”).

The truth is, I have actually been creative over the last few days.  I haven’t stopped writing.  A lot of the writing has just gone into my head or onto the Notepad app in my iPhone.  I have also been brainstorming.  Or at least braindrizzling.  The thankless day job has just sapped a lot of my energy and brainpower lately.  Which reminds me…  You should definitely check out Chuck Wendig’s post over at Terrible Minds today.  He speaks the truth. Aye, verily so.

I need to refill my Brain Juice jar.  Like I said, my day job has been smashing my Brain Juice distillery and pouring the precious Juice out all over the ground.  I need to find ways (and days) to make some more Juice, to refill my Brain Juice bottles and “keep them damn revenuers offa my property.”

I like Chuck’s imagery.  I’m actually a fool for imagery.  Whether it’s Annie Wilkes with her hammer or my rusty old illicit Brain Juice still out in my mental back woods, I just find that it helps.  When we first met, my wife told me about a mental image that she used to help her remember things.  It’s the trusty old secretary in her brain, with all of her memories in a bank of filing cabinets along the wall behind her desk.  Whenever she wanted to remember anything, she just sent the poor old lady in her sweater and librarian’s glasses over to the appropriate filing cabinet and let her find it.  It really does help.  If you’ve read Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher, he uses the same image of a mental warehouse as a safehouse from the intrusive Mr. Gray while he digs through his memory files.  Personally, I fired the old bag who was working as my memory secretary.  I needed someone to give the place some energy.  Whatever works, right?

This is the point where I share with you some of the projects I am working on:

• Though running a weekly game was draining my brain juice like crazy, I’ve found the time to give a lot of thought to what an ideal (for me) game would look like.  This caused me to go all the way back to the drawing board and become a student of rpg’s again.  In short, I’m working on a survival horror tabletop role-playing system.  I will be chronicling the build here on Geekcentricity in the form of regular posts (at least weekly) featuring my thoughts and ideas on how I want this game to look.