Behold–I return from the wilderness. Nope, no holy tablets though. 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 verdict? I just couldn’t meet the deadline. I’ve been getting some nasty leg cramps for the last week or so, and even got a prescription of quinine for it. Quinine…the stuff they used to use for malaria?! Yup, the same. One dose really messed up too. My legs felt great, but the rest of me felt like I’d just had a nasty visit from Torquemada. By mid-afternoon I couldn’t even type. There were other things, the new kittens and some of the health problems they were having. Minor ones, thank God. Earlier in August, we also had a long humid heatwave run through here. It sounds like a lot of excuses, but I was genuinely off my game these last few weeks.
I didn’t just leave it at that, though. Jamie’s been a real trooper, pulling for me and backing me up on whatever I had to do. And I really wanted the gig. Writing for B5, Lone Wolf, Conan or whatever and getting paid? I was sleeping a few hours a night for the last two weeks. 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.
I wanted it bad, but I had to be realistic. I wasn’t going to make the deadline no matter how good I was. Exhausted, in constant pain. 50 pages in just a couple hours? Nah. I learned a while back I had to forgive myself for having limits. I send a short e-mail to Mongoose. I figured I’d be lucky if they asked to see what I had so far, but there’s no reason to.
I didn’t get the job, but Jamie and I ended up achieving something more important. We proved to each other that, despite all our missteps and nightmarish failures, we’re still a good team. In sports, people would call it a character-building defeat. You can have a good team, a good driver, the best technology, the best skills…and still have a bad day. I think that’s what we’re having now.
Okay, so we get to live and fight another day. The next battlefield will probably be more Afterhell, maybe a novel. So we lost a battle. We’ll win the war.