My anniversary with Rhoda - six months of Hipster Feminist

I have officially been doing my joke Twitter feed Hipster Feminist for six months now. In that time period I've posted a joke almost daily, missing only a Sunday here and there. I'm up to one hundred and seventy-four tweets. They haven't always been as perfectly hilarious as I hoped they would be, but some of them turned out pretty damn funny, and I'm really proud of myself that I've kept it up. It would have been easy to space on it or get bored and quit, but I've enjoyed it and kept myself to it pretty well. Our girl Rhoda is even up to fifty-one followers now, double from three months ago, so I guess some people are liking it. :-)

I am thinking now about starting to do "storylines," chains of tweets that follow a plot about something going on in Rhoda's life. I'm not sure how feasible that is in the one-hundred-and-forty-character-per-post limit, but it might be trying it might be the logical next step. I do know some details from her life-- she comes from a totally regular, WASPy, upper-middle-class background that she wants strongly to disavow. Her parents are divorced and both remarried, and her hatred of her stepmom often makes her the target of Rhoda's feminist rage. (Which translates to I make her the whipping boy for a lot of the humor, poor woman.) Rhoda's dad is quite well-to-do, so she tries to distance herself from that privileged status while not realizing how much that privilege has shaped her. She has had and broken up with at least one boyfriend during this time. I never did settle on a last name for her, but I feel like it needs to be something dorky-sounding. That's not quite enough for a plot on its own, but I can flesh that out into something worth exploring. You know, as Charles Dickens showed us with the invention of the cliff hanger, creating the desire to find out what happens next in people is often the way to get them to follow your work.

Heh, that's what I need, more writing to work out, what with schoolwork, Tailor, and everything else on my plate. But work on my projects, the achievements I make on them, and the enjoyment of them by others gives me a lot of joy and satisfaction. So I'll take a stab at this. Of course any suggestions are welcome, particularly from those like morethings5and blendedchaiteawho have offered hilarious ideas that I ended up using in the past.

Festival schedule almost ready

Our lovely Festival con chair ninja_report just sent out the preliminary schedule for Larpocalypse. It looks to be a very good con. Shannon looks to have balanced the schedule nicely, meaning there should be a good variety of games in every time period with an appropriate number of slots. And she and natbudin have arranged to have tiered signups-- as in, one signup total per person for the first round, two signups total for the second round, and then as many signups as you like for the third round --which Festival has needed for a while now. We've had a problem in the past when people who logged in at 7:03 rather than 7:00 when signups opened and got shut out of their preferred games in every slot. Everybody should get a shot at getting into at least one of their first-choice games.

Oh, and I don't believe I ever mentioned the final verdict on which games I would be running. I did bid The Stand first, as I am quite proud of that game and it's only been run twice before. I'm excited to put it on again. My one concern is that maybe the map needs one more GM, so more traveling and exploring can happen at once. But after some discussion with my co-writers, we elected to run Paranoia as the second one. Despite having debuted it in 2009, if I remember correctly, because of its particular space requirements and the need for the right players (not everyone's into that style of game or the Paranoia setting), we've only run it two times. Bernie in particular has wanted to run it again. We've been waiting for the right time and place, but it did well at Festival in its maiden run so now seems as good a time as any. The edit we made for the second run was really strong, so players should be in for a treat.

Creative restlessness

As you can perhaps tell by the fact that this is my third post of the day, I am feeling ruminative and mentally unsettled. I certainly have a lot on my plate, most of which I put there myself, but I am trying to determine what I should be focusing on that will soothe a certain creative restlessness I'm feeling. I am not sure if I need more things to do to serve as light alternatives to my big, work-intensive priorities, or if I need to not take anything else on so I can balance my project load with relaxation.

Schoolwork is the big priority; my first due date is February 13th, about two and a half weeks from now, so I'd better get cracking. I think this Sunday, which is mostly free, will be devoted to homework. I usually need big chunks of time to really dig into writing. Then there's also The Tailor of Riddling Way. I am proud of myself that I've finished writing the first two episodes, and even gotten one scene recorded. But I think it's going to need two more episodes at least, so at best I'm only halfway through, and there's a ton more recording to do. I am feeling good about and getting satisfaction out of this project, but it's requiring a lot of mental energy. I kind of wish I was working on something easy that gave me the same feeling.

What with all the talk of larps, naturally my thoughts turn to my own larp writing. One of the reasons I got so absorbed in larp writing was that it has a built-in audience and is easy to find a venue to get that "feedback from the public" to give me the validation I crave. So right now, the idea of working on my Ancient Roman larp idea Imperium has become very attractive. But I do not want to let larp writing get in the way of the other writing that I should be prioritizing right now. And of couse this excitement never takes into account the fact that larps too always eventually hit the point where writing it is a slog. It's just something different, something that hasn't become tough yet, that I can imagine the fun of running to player adulation.

I wish I had an idea for a short, sweet, easy larp that I could write without a lot of time or effort that would still turn out well. Sadly, as many times as this has occurred to me, I've never been able to think of anything that I could pull off in that way. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be open to hearing them. It would be nice to have such a larp that I can run, easy for me and fun for the players.

I think one of the reasons for my restlessness is that I miss acting. I've done a lot of writing and directing recently, two of my major passions, but it's been forever since I've acted in anything, and I'm feeling the deficit. It was looking like I might have been able to go out for a part in Lenny's indepedent study show, Cymbeline, which I was excited about. But it turns out that it goes up the same weekend as Festival of the Larps, one of the most important weekends of my year, so participating is out of the question. For some reason, Titus is also the same weekend as Intercon, making both larp cons happening over shows. I am very disappointed about Lenny's show. I have another audition lined up for this Sunday night, but I'm not optimistic that it will work out any different than the last twenty-odd times before it.