I’m sewing up my D&D campaign for a couple months. I’ll be redirecting my creative brainpan on the Lelia story.
I hate to put D&D on hiatus, but I believe in the finite resources of the creative well, and I know when mine is starting to dry up. I am not a bottomless pit of creativity. No one is, and anyone who claims to be otherwise is either a) lying, b) insane, c) a college student, or d) on some really great drugs.
A good chunk of my creativity is automatically eaten up by work. I am building a world and cultures from whole cloth, and while a genre writer can temporize and finish the culture when she gets to book three of the trilogy, a creative team actually needs to know what’s going on in my brain before they can concept oh, say, the jellyfish energy-being race that got wiped out in the cataclysm that almost imploded the universe.
This is where writing for genres and writing for games differs wildly, and I suspect it’s one place where genre writers find difficulty in working on games. If you’re used to giving away your secrets slowly, in prose, it can be a rude shock when the publisher/producer/lead designer demands to know exactly why This Race died out and how you expect to bring them back in a way that will make sense to the players.
And over on the personal side…well, I am contractually obligated to write about Lelia, and I have enough of a lead that I’m ready to let my scruffy muse-Bard hook me by the nose and drag me back down into the depths of her world. She’s gone to a slightly dark place, but I have ordered her not to get emo on me, and she has solemnly sworn not to.
So the D&D campaign gets sacrificed on the altar, and I get some of my creative energy back as a result. But every ending leads to a new beginning. One of my players has expressed interest in continuing with a different campaign, and that’s groovy.
