{"id":188,"date":"2004-09-07T03:14:24","date_gmt":"2004-09-07T10:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/?p=188"},"modified":"2017-09-11T20:32:53","modified_gmt":"2017-09-12T03:32:53","slug":"the-ol-college-try","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/?p=188","title":{"rendered":"The Ol’ College Try"},"content":{"rendered":"

Behold–I return from the wilderness.\u00c2\u00a0 Nope, no holy tablets though.\u00c2\u00a0 No souvenirs either.<\/p>\n

For those who weren’t in the loop, I took an extended leave from cyberspace to chase a writing gig at Mongoose Publishing, the publishers of several role-playings including Babylon 5<\/a>, Conan<\/a> (which is fantastic), and the new edition of Paranoia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The final verdict?\u00c2\u00a0 I just couldn’t meet the deadline.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been getting some nasty leg cramps for the last week or so, and even got a prescription of quinine for it.\u00c2\u00a0 Quinine…the stuff they used to use for malaria?!\u00c2\u00a0 Yup, the same.\u00c2\u00a0 One dose really messed up too.\u00c2\u00a0 My legs felt great, but the rest of me felt like I’d just had a nasty visit from Torquemada.\u00c2\u00a0 By mid-afternoon I couldn’t even type.\u00c2\u00a0 There were other things, the new kittens and some of the health problems they were having.\u00c2\u00a0 Minor ones, thank God.\u00c2\u00a0 Earlier in August, we also had a long humid heatwave run through here.\u00c2\u00a0 It sounds like a lot of excuses, but I was genuinely off my game these last few weeks.<\/p>\n

I didn’t just leave it at that, though.\u00c2\u00a0 Jamie’s been a real trooper, pulling for me and backing me up on whatever I had to do.\u00c2\u00a0 And I really wanted the gig.\u00c2\u00a0 Writing for B5, Lone Wolf<\/a>, Conan or whatever and getting paid?\u00c2\u00a0 I was sleeping a few hours a night for the last two weeks.\u00c2\u00a0 Last night I stayed up till 4am, throwing ice water into my face, on the hour, every hour. Then I went back to the keyboard and typed like crazy, crunching d20 stats and data as I went.<\/p>\n

I wanted it bad, but I had to be realistic.\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00c2\u00a0 wasn’t going to make the deadline no matter how good I was.\u00c2\u00a0 Exhausted, in constant pain.\u00c2\u00a0 50 pages in just a couple hours?\u00c2\u00a0 Nah.\u00c2\u00a0 I learned a while back I had to forgive myself for having limits.\u00c2\u00a0 I send a short e-mail to Mongoose.\u00c2\u00a0 I figured I’d be lucky if they asked to see what I had so far, but there’s no reason to.<\/p>\n

I didn’t get the job, but Jamie and I ended up achieving something more important.\u00c2\u00a0 We proved to each other that, despite all our missteps and nightmarish failures, we’re still a good team.\u00c2\u00a0 In sports, people would call it a character-building defeat.\u00c2\u00a0 You can have a good team, a good driver, the best technology, the best skills…and still have a bad day.\u00c2\u00a0 I think that’s what we’re having now.<\/p>\n

Okay, so we get to live and fight another day.\u00c2\u00a0 The next battlefield will probably be more Afterhell<\/i>, maybe a novel.\u00c2\u00a0 So we lost a battle.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ll win the war.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Behold–I return from the wilderness.\u00c2\u00a0 Nope, no holy tablets though.\u00c2\u00a0 No souvenirs either. For those who weren’t in the loop, I took an extended leave from cyberspace to chase a writing gig at Mongoose Publishing, the publishers of several role-playings including Babylon 5, Conan (which is fantastic), and the new edition of Paranoia. The final […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,6,27],"tags":[44],"class_list":["post-188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-livejournal-postings","category-offtopic","category-personal","tag-mongoose-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":196,"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188\/revisions\/196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.afterhell.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}