Pain eventually goes away…

I got another chapter done today. I’ve only been doing one a day in December to give my hands a chance to recover. It’s working pretty well. They aren’t hurting as they were, which is no fun, of course; and a rather dismal prospect for the future.

I might have gotten more done, but I had to take a computer in for repairs. The folks at the Apple Store were very nice (thanks, Gabe) and did a bunch of things before deciding the problem was probably the logic board. So the machine is off for several days to have its brains replaced. I’m good with that. Kind of wish I could have that done to me…

Or at least have my directory rebuilt.

In the mail today I received a reprint of a Tunnels & Trolls fanzine called Raven. I’d ordered it online because, according to a catalog listing, I’d written an article for it. If you look at my list of works here, you won’t see that article listed. I’d completely forgotten I’d written it, and I’m 100% sure I never saw a copy of the fanzine when it came out in late summer 1987.

What’s even more interesting is that the article chronicles the fate of the Tunnels & Trolls solo adventures when they got published by Corgi over in the United Kingdom. For those of you who don’t know, I got my start in publishing by writing for games. My first article came out in 1977, and my first solo adventure in 1978. I graduated from college in 1979 and moved to Arizona to work for Flying Buffalo Inc., the publisher of Tunnels & Trolls. T&T was created by Ken St. Andre, whom you can find at the website Trollhalla.com

The article is vintage me, and in reading it over, I can almost remember writing it. What I don’t recall at all, however, are the circumstances I chronicle in this article. Reading between the lines, the whole business of getting the solo adventures (choose your own adventure games) ready for publication in England made my life hell for the better part of nine months. I vaguely remember writing the solo adventure Red Circle in the space of two weeks, which was really fast back then. I would have been writing on my Osborne computer, which had a whopping 64K of RAM, and saved things on 5.25″ disks. (The first draft of Talion: Revenant got written on that same computer.)

What’s kind of funny about all this is that twenty-two years ago, dealing with that problem was the center of my life. The article makes it pretty clear that I’d been worked up about the whole project. Now, I can look at my shelves and whereas once the solo adventures would have been all that were on it, now I don’t even have them on display. Most all the gaming stuff has been replaced by novels in a variety of languages.

So, the pain of that time, like the pain in my hands very soon now, has been forgotten. All that will remain will be the work turned out. And that’s pretty cool. That work, and the pleasure folks get from it can live forever, and the pain will just evaporate. Which means I can do more work, endure a bit more pain, and keep having fun.