Tick Tock - A 5 Minute Freewrite

Tick tock. It's 3:08 and you haven't made a post yet, WB. What's up? We've got a streak going right now. 11 posts in 6 days! Eleven! Now, we're using two accounts to do that, but we're getting it done. I don't want to come across as a Steem Spammer and ACTUALLY make 11 posts on one account in 6 days, but I do want to post more. I feel like that constant tick tock of the clock gets to me. I've been working on upping the quality of the content I'm creating, but there are so many directions that I want to go in that it's hard to dedicate the time required.

Writing is something that I did as a teen almost constantly. Right up until two days before Christmas when I was in grade 9 and we had a house fire that seemed to have a personal vendetta against me. My mom left an iron plugged in down in her sewing room. It was on a light switch, and she was showing off the room to her friends during a Christmas party. 5 minutes are up My room was directly above it and all the fabric, dozens and dozens of bolts lit up in an instant.

Someone noticed smoke in the bathroom and since it was 2 in the morning and they were keeping me up I got out of bed and went to investigate. By the time I got halfway down the hall, I knew the smoke was from a fire in the house. It wasn't just 15 people smoking cigarettes in the living room. I turned back to my room, looking at the smoke and poof. My bed bursts into flames as the heat of the fire below forces its way through the furnace vent and ignites my bed.

Courtesy of Pixabay.com

Fun fact. You have about.... negative two seconds to get off your bed before it's fully engulfed. Fire moves insanely fast. Tick-a-tick-a-tock!

Anyway, because I was only wearing PJ bottoms at the time I dashed into my room and grabbed a handful of clothing from my dirty hamper and started forcing the people drunk at the party out of the house. Once I was satisfied that they got the message to "GTFO" I, myself ran out into the -15 Celcius December night and started banging on neighbors' doors yelling fire. It took two attempts to get someone to answer. A family friend across the street. From thereon out the night is just a blur of tears and fear, not knowing where we'll live or what we'll have when it's all said and done.

I slept at the family friend's house and when I woke up I discovered that what I grabbed out of my bedroom hamper was a pair of jeans and a towel. Later that day I would find that those were basically my only possessions. I didn't even have my glasses, and they were melted when we did find them. The firefighters showed up in time to prevent the fire from spreading to any other parts of the house, but my mom's sewing room and my bedroom were gone.

Two things hurt the most. 1- I lost my stuffed animal from my childhood. 2- I lost ALL my writing. hundreds of pages, dozens of short stories. That killed writing for me. I didn't write another story for years. I would try, with my cousin @oblivioncubed, but the passion was dead. Burnt to a crisp in that godawful fire two days before Christmas.

But that fire has been rekindled. Dungeons and Dragons leaves me wanting to write again. A game. A silly tabletop game that I often call funions and wagons, because we spend more time eating snack chips and not being in a dungeon that calling it D&D seems wrong. Our table prefers trying to get the best deal out of a merchant by learning his weaknesses rather than bash a skeleton's head in... again...

And that merchant only has a weakness if I give it to him. His whole life only exists if I give him one. And my players, my friends, get to interact with that person and befriend him (or make him trip over an invisible black cat companion) and get to know him as if he was real. It reminded me of the power we have with these words. Entire universes spring forth at the brush of a pen, the touch of a keystroke. Worlds created to be our playthings with people in them that hear, see, feel love. All because we gave them life. There is something really beautiful about that when you stop to think about it. How many fictional characters have you "met" on the pages. Seen in your mind's eye. That person was as real to you as the author who wrote them. The same way the merchant was real to my players.

In the next few days, @oblivioncubed and myself (I also go by @lacking if you want to see my more general tomfoolery, that's what the first paragraph is about) will be starting a contest for a worldbuilding community. One that is ever so slightly geared towards ttrpg's over writers specifically, but the writing community would benefit from this as well. It will be a map-making competition where you create a rudimentary "battle map" that can be recreated for use in dungeons and dragons as a playfield for an adventure to take place. For example, the floor plan to the tower where your evil wizard is hiding out.

Everyone is welcome to join and more information will be following very shortly. The one thing I will tease is that there is more than 50 steem in total prizes up for grabs! So find some paper, dust off the Wacom tablet, or simply fire up msPaint and let's get map making!

Phew, that was quite the freewrite. And totally different than all my prior ones. Thank you for taking the time to read this, I hope it's at least somewhat coherent. I'm not going to edit it much beyond spelling. I just kinda got going stream of thought and wanted to explain why a 32-year-old is just getting into writing again. I want to keep worldbuilder laser-focused on writing so that I can continue this trend of writing every day. Apologies if using two accounts like this offends you, but I want the account running my contest to be a real person that contestants feel like they can talk to without their voice getting lost in the randomness that is my main account.

The last 5 Minute freewrite, #831; brussel sprouts. Ugh! :D

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Tick Tock - A 5 Minute Freewrite

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