Now, for a proper September post.

First of all, one of the interesting things about being a writer is that sometimes you spend a little too much time on Google maps looking for a sign posted outside a super fund site just to see what’s written on them.

In hindsight, I should have guessed that no one would want the word “SUPER FUND” on a sign in their neighborhood. Such and Such Cleanup Project seems to be much more common.

Also, I’ve learned there are a number of websites, like “parkopedia”, that provide databases, city by city, for parking spots. Sadly, they didn’t have the information that I was looking for, but for every little need, it seems like there’s an ongoing competition to create something to meet it.

Anyway, a need to write with the internet blocked makes it easy to be wrong about very basic stuff. In my mind’s eye, I still see small towns by the highway the way they looked in movies and television of my youth: two-lane roads, family-owned businesses, ramshackle buildings. In the current day, there are a lot of stroads (IYKYK) and big box stores with expansive parking lots.

I’ve always said that I am reliant on revisions, and it’s not just stylistically.

The book is currently over 140K words long. That’s probably a little too long for a POD edition. But we’ll see.

Last post, I talked about being a DINO MASTER (exclamation points!) in the Jurassic Park ttrpg that I ran for my family, and how it didn’t really work for the game’s genre if I was reluctant to kill off a PC.

I mean, I love my family. Also, they’re not experienced gamers. We haven’t been playing for very long and we haven’t, at this point, experienced the actual death of an actual PC. We spent months playing Brindlewood Bay, for example, which has numerous mechanics that let you kill off a character and then immediately undo it.

But a game full of vicious dinosaurs? (and also technologically advanced sleestaks riding around on armored T-rexes?) That definitely calls for character death. So I psyched myself up for it.

(Un)Fortunately, in the session immediately after that post, they didn’t roll a single failure in a peril move. It was all successes and partial successes.

The session after? My son, who had chosen the playbook “The Kid” and was playing the dino-loving 12yo child of Dino Island “founder” Ethan Rusk, failed a peril move and took an injury.

In this game, you don’t get three strikes. A second injury meant you make the casualty move, which is that you do something heroic and permanently die, or you fall down and are helpless until another PC carries you to medical help.

Let me tell you, when I announced that injury, the whole tone of the session changed. Voices were hushed. Glances? They were wary. My wife looked at me like she couldn’t believe that I might actually be a man who would kill my own child(‘s player character).

But it didn’t come to that. They worked well together and had a few solid rolls, so both characters made it off the island. (Rusk didn’t, naturally).

Well, this is a little long. More to come in October. I’m hoping to catch up on a few old horror movies I have somehow missed, once Spooktober arrives, starting with Don’t Look Now. We’ll see how it plays.