Annette: Not disappointed

During a creative writing class sophomore year, the teacher brought in his old Dungeons & Dragons set - I know it was old because a couple of kids kind of snorted, and what's up with that? You find out that someone likes the same kind of uncommon thing you do and your first reaction is to mock them for not looking it the same way or enough? Anyway, he brings this in, has us "roll up" characters, and then once we've got these attributes all in place we start to play. It's fun, but the point of the lesson is to get us to think about building a character organically - we may be starting with certain things arbitrarily set, so we've got to work backwards to figure out how he or she got to that point, and then once the game starts, we were told to invent an explanation for why we passed our failed on any dice throw. It was hard, especially since you weren't allowed to contradict what anyone else said. And "what she said", obviously, wasn't allowed. That's kind of where I am right now; every time I think I've got a handle on what I want to write when we get some sort of signal to do a change, I'll find someone already done it or it doesn't fit, or, you know, real-world stuff that's not easy to research on my phone. (Or maybe I'm just saying this so that I can set up an "oh my good, it really happened and it's not like I thought later) Fortunately, Gretchen is much more sensible than me, and whenever she sees me writing ideas down in a notebook, points out that I can do that on the beach, and then once we're there, she finds other stuff for us to do, or we meet some folks, and I remember that this is a vacation, and there will be plenty of time for writing challenges and the like come fall. Truth be told, I think she kind of resents my spending time on this. It's tough to say this without sounding like a swollen-headed bitch, but who knows how many more chances to hang out like this we'll have? She's going to Orono in the fall, which is a good school, but it'll make hanging out together difficult. So I'm not going to write much more at all unless I get super-inspired, and just hang around with my friend. -Annette