"Prayl" part One

First off, Happy Christmas!

I should be in bed, but I'm not.

I'm going to do this post. Used to be Christmas Eve, but now it's Christmas, officially!

Let me get straight to business.

I had planned on spending my holiday fleshing out the story of a super hero comic I've been cooking up. And then I remembered that, I had planned on trying out my fountain pen for the first time and using my time at home to master it.

Funny thing about college.

Funny thing about vacations.

Funny thing about winter...

Neither category offer good motivation to get off your butt when you don't have to. So even though I had these plans, I decided instead to go with the flow. And that flow, surprisingly, lead me to be deeply immersed in Myth. Amazing game. A-mazing. But that's Bungie for you.

I had been thinking about general fantasy in the week previous, but playing this truly wonderful game really pushed me to develop my thoughts. That, and drawing with my beloved Alex.

My relationship with fantasy is tenuous. Growing up I fell in love with it through my father, books, movies. Before I was ten I had just a vague understanding of fantasy. I knew there were soldiers and beasts and that was about it. When I was in the 4th grade I made my first friends, and played my first fantasy computer games. There was no turning back.

I "learned" about elves, dwarves, orcs. All the rules. And yet, despite everything my friends and I remained a world apart from what you might consider "true fantasy fanatics." We all owned macs, our access to high end fantasy RPGs was cut off. No consoles either.

In the passing years none of us ever played a game of Dungeons and Dragons. I never played Magic. I never read Lord of the Rings, or any fantasy novel of any kind for that matter. I remained "touched" by my computer games, but still pure. I love the idea of Dungeons and Dragons, but it was soon made clear to me that some people take the game too far. Our new friends in high school found our understandings of fantasy to be mere child's-play at best, and insulting otherwise.

What can I say? I never heard of a beholder!

I digress. It was very political.

As I developed into a teenager I fast discovered that talking about goblins in public was risky business. With so many people frowning on my interest, I became discouraged about the whole concept of fantasy. Even in college, many of my peers refused to take fantasy seriously. You couldn't get them to read a single sentence with the word "Conan" in it.

I was humbled, if not silenced.

But then my father published his first fantasy novel, and then his next, and his next, and his next until I could boast that my dad was an accomplished fantasy novelist.

I gained confidence, seeing that you could still make money off of good fantasy.

I don't plan on fleshing out an epic. Fantasy for me, is creating worlds. And even though I may be populating it with clichés and stolen ideas, it's still better than not creating worlds.

In fact it's damned fun. Expect more, increasingly nerdier posts.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!