Went to an awesome Quark writing group activity tonight with Dan Wells. It was great. We critiqued stories, had a Q&A, and then played the Battlestar Galactica game. Good, good times.
The new series of BSG is amazing. It quite literally inspired my first novel: a story set in a universe where a cylon-style humans vs. robots went down three hundred years previous, and the surviving federation contacted a primitive civilization of fellow humans who thought they were the only survivors. And then I threw in a first contact story, just to shake things up.
Anyway, BSG is a surprisingly fun game. It’s kind of like werewolf, in that there’s lots of potential for betrayal and secret combinations. Basically, the players are putting out HUGE fires the whole time (like cylon fleets coming out of nowhere to blast your fleet out of the sky), and you have to work together but you don’t know whom to trust. It follows the BSG story remarkably well, with enough room for unanticipated twists to make it interesting.
The learning curve is incredibly steep, but once you learn it, it’s way fun. We didn’t have enough time to finish the game, but we did pretty well, I think. Dan claims that he betrayed us heartlessly, but the truth is that our interests aligned pretty well for the duration we played. He probably would have betrayed us had we played much longer, but we didn’t make any egregious mistakes…I think…
Anyway, didn’t get much writing in today (just about 500 words over my lunch break), but the fun and networking at the Quark event was worth it, I think. I’m very much looking forward to World Fantasy, though I’ve got a TON of stuff to do first.
One thing I realized tonight was that I’m in a perfect position to do nanowrimo this year. With the Mercenary Savior rewrite coming to a close (hopefully) before the end of October, I currently have no writing projects planned for November.
I was thinking of doing a sequel to Mercenary Savior next, but I don’t want to do that as a nanowrimo–I want to do quality work for that one, and the whole point of nanowrimo is to allow yourself to splurge and write crap. Maybe I’ll randomly throw all of my characters from all of my projects so far into one giant mesh and see what happens. I don’t know.
That’s what’s going on here. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to crash.
