Welcome to the new year!

Greetings from the other side.

And thus I return from the holiday season, bringing wishes of well-being and happiness for you all. I hope you have all had a wonderful Christmas and New Years together with family, friends, loved ones, etc. I also hope that the new year will be a good one, for everyone on this blue marble in space that we live our lives upon. May this new year at least see the beginnings of an end to wars, abuse, poverty, loneliness, and all the other things that ails the world. At least that is what I hope for, and pray for.

The night before yesterday I sat up until 4 or 5 am playing a tabletop roleplaying game over the internet with my friends. It was so much fun, and I have missed it dearly. I don't get to do that too often these days. Then I ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep, before I got up because I had to be at work the next day. Granted, I didn't need to be there until 1 pm, but I had some other stuff to do before-hand as well. It is safe to say that I was pretty knackered by the end of the day. So early night for me last night and then I slept for about 10 hours. I guess my body needed it. It's good that the weekend is here now.

So, my last post was on December 20, which you can find here. Since then I have had my first Christmas here in Finland, and it was a fun and enjoyable time together with my fiancee and her family. Next year we will be celebrating Christmas with my family in Sweden, and then probably do an every-other-year kind of thing. Anyway, focus on this year, and this was the first time I had ever celebrated Christmas away from my family, so it was a bit of a strange feeling. In the end though, it was an enjoyable time surrounded by good people and a warm atmosphere. It is definitely something I am looking forward to do again another year! :)

Even the family dog, Bamse, got excited about Santa's visit and all the presents. Sadly I don't have a picture of him at that moment, but here's another picture of him taken on the same day at least:

He's a big Newfoundland boy, and at 10 years of age he is currently older than the average life-expectancy of dogs of his breed.

There were a few new food-items among the Christmas food that I hadn't tried before. I honestly don't know what to call most of them in English,so I won't attempt to. I will say however that I enjoyed everything that I tried.

Oh, and I also worked during Christmas service on Christmas Eve, as well as during mass on New Years Day.

Christmas Day was spent taking it easy and having lunch with my fiancee's parents. On Boxing Day (Annandag Jul in Swedish) we went to visit my fiancee's sister and her family.

In the days before New Years both my fiancee and her mother got ill. We had intended to celebrate New Years with my fiancee's parents, but in the end we went over for dinner and then went home again. My fiancee went to bed early and I stayed up chatting with friends online for a while. Luckily they are both feeling better now. Though her mother had to go to the hospital and was diagnosed with pneumonia, something which she has since then been going to the health clinic 3 times a day and gotten regular doses of antibiotics intravenously. My father-in-law and myself have luckily managed to stay healthy so far.

All in all it has been a good time, and I can look back to it with fond memories. Now we have a new year in front of us. Let's do the best we can out of it! :)

I wish you all a happy new year. May the new year bring happiness, peace and love to all.

Until next time.

See you all on the other side!

Campaign reflections & A short story

Greetings from the other side.

Feeling a bit tired today, but hopefully I can get some creative stuff done this evening. Would like to continue writing on my world-building, as the idea of one day running a tabletop RPG campaign in it is growing on me quite a lot. Will of course need to find players for it, etc, but that'll be a problem for further down the line. :) And yes, I know I said in a previous post that the world was a separate project that I was making to see what I could create if I gave myself no deadlines and complete creative freedom, not tied down by a specific tabletop rpg system or any specific campaign ideas. I have found however, that as I am building this world, a lot of ideas for campaigns are starting to take form based on the information I write down about this world. So in a sense, it is not the campaign that gives birth to the world, but the world itself that gives birth to the campaign, if that makes sense. I still have a lot of work left to do though, before I feel comfortable with using the world for a campaign, but it is coming along nicely. The fact that I have now started making maps for it is also a huge boost to me. It is 'only' world maps of individual continents or lands at the moment, but they really help me put everything into perspective a bit more.

The creative process is really calming to me. It almost becomes meditative at times, as I loose myself in the process of writing and coming up with ideas. Sometimes, I don't even have a pre-planned idea of what I want to write, it just comes to me as I sit there in front of the screen with a blank document in front of me. It is kinda like when I write this blog. I don't always have an idea what I want to write about. I just start and the words just start flowing. A good example, tying back to the tabletop RPGs, I had a character (well, I still technically have the character, it is just that the campaign is on ice for a bit) who was an elven ranger in a 4e D&D game. I initially wrote up about a page or two of backstory for the character, which were mostly bullet points to be honest, but then one day I decided I was going to expand on it to give my DM  (Dungeon Master) a bit more to work with. So I sat down with a blank document in Word, and had the two pages I had already written on the side, and started writing. After a fairly short while I had about 11 or 12 pages written, plus reference lists of people the character had met in their backstory, a list of locations, etc. It was about at this point that the DM begged me not to write any more stuff. So I stopped, even though I could have fleshed it out more and written a lot more information as well, and ended up with far more pages than I already had, but I decided to be kind to our DM. ;)

See you all on the other side!