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After we graduated boot camp my friend, way back in 1979, introduced me to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and I have been playing and game mastering tabletop role playing games ever since.

As a game master I often had a fairly good but still vague idea of what course adventures would take as the players explored and completed them. The path could not be nailed down with precision as players are a tricky and chaotic lot with a tendency to divert the best laid plans into something wholly unexpected. Because of this one of the skills required to keep a game running is the ability to make crap up on the fly and keep it consistent with what has already transpired.

This skill is now in full force with my latest work-in-progress.

The vague concept of using old nitrate film that had been cursed, or such, has rattled around in my brain for some time, but earlier this year it became a little more solid. Executing it required some research into San Diego during the summer of 1984. That occupied time and with the passing weeks the motivation for the story began to ebb. In order to keep it from dying without being written I simply dove straight into the project.

As of yesterday, I am about 15 thousand words into the text and while I have that vague idea I am chasing and a little more solid conception of the act structure, much like so many games I have run over the decades, I am inventing it as I go along. Characters don’t really exist until I put them in a scene and then I have to make fast notes on the side so the details that came alive in the moment are there to be referenced when they return.

It’s all so haphazard and yet I can feel it working. I have little doubt that the novel will be completed and right now it’s also very exciting.