Dislikes the Sea, but Will Venture Upon It If Necessary
BY GREG PAK
This was supposed to be hilarious.
But at the age of 49, I’m sitting at my desk staring at hundreds of pages of character sheets, drawings, histories, blueprints, maps, Centaurian language notes, castle budgets, and constitutional documents I created for my imaginary Dungeons and Dragons world as a kid in the 1980s, and I’m overwhelmed.
Individually, every document is hilarious, full of sentences like, “The unicorns, primarily, pay no tax and roam freely.” I’m absolutely delighted with the kid-me who wrote hundreds of sentences like, “Goblins listed as citizens are a small tribe of neutral druidic goblins. They are generally accepted by the rest of the community, for they have none of the violent tendencies of their evil cousins.” I could write for days about all of this glorious detail and worldbuilding and how it clearly paved the way for me as an adult to write books like Planet Hulk, Kingsway West, and Mech Cadet Yu.
But the deeper I dig into these notebooks, the more stressed I get, a heady mix of embarrassment and protectiveness for the boy I was and the adult I’ve become.
link: https://uncannymagazine.com/article/dislikes-the-sea-but-will-venture-upon-it-if-necessary/
