Do it because you want to
This post represents the one thing I never wanted to do with this blog: disappear, apologize, return and make excuses and promises. It happens all too often with so many web projects, including blogs and webcomics. I wanted to use this blog to develop good habits, but sometimes there are things that are just out of our control.
After Day Five of the 31 Character Creation Challenge, I was struck down by a norovirus that has been rampaging across my area of southeastern Ohio. Bedridden and unable to hold down food or even water for my medications, all I could do was sleep for eighteen hours a day or more. That left absolutely no energy (or, indeed, much time) for creative efforts, and as the days passed, the mental weight mounted until I decided that continuing to punch myself in the face with guilt was much less important than doing my best to recover and handling life matters.
And so, I've dropped the challenge. And with that, I finally have something gaming-related to say a week and a half later: don't push yourself because you believe you have to. Gaming is a hobby. We do it for enjoyment. Thirty-one characters in a row after several years of little gaming was probably much too ambitious a goal. I managed (almost) a week before being struck down; five days in a row would have made a very good goal, I now think. The practical upshot is simply, do it because you want to.
The challenge did push me to achieve another goal, which was simply to open some books I haven't touched in quite a while in addition to newer acquisitions. I enjoy reading my books, not just having them. In this, I am content. I got a couple of interesting surprises by letting the game (cards, dice) make the decisions with only minimal input from me on the framework, and I reaffirmed something I've known for a long time, which is that characters for very simple systems can be just as fascinating as those for much more mechanically crunchy ones.
I don't have any idea what I'm going to do with the rest of the month at this time. I am hugely appreciative of the views I got for the characters I posted. Even though Bearblog (bare blog, heh) doesn't offer an internal away to obtain feedback, just knowing eyes were on the pages made me happy. One thing I would like to do is set up some sort of way for readers to comment / reply, but I'd like them to be able to reply to each other was well as me, so I may be looking at something like an old-fashioned forum. Blogs and forums? What's next, MySpace? Haha!