In The Garden Living an RPG Life

Spoonflower Marketplace is open to the public!

Believe it or not those two things are quite connected.  The business in the world I’ve created to write about is all things fiber related.  Think Silk Road.  And, the fiber business is also my real life RPG goal.

Quick review: I like the order that playing  Dungeons and Dragons imposes on keeping track of lots of different personal (in the form of the characters) material.  The only place I can think that would have such useful tools as a skills sheet would be a school counselor’s office.  Unfortunately, the school counselor’s office wouldn’t have a place on that sheet for magic spells or equipment.

Funny.  I’ve never made that connection before.  The connection between school and RPGs.  OK, I have, but not in the way of what kinds of information I might actually get from school.  From a counselor or good teacher.  For me, the structure of the RPG fills in blanks I didn’t really recognize till now.  Mostly, I think, because I have a friend with some of the same blanks that I feel.  Like how to have so many ideas and not get overwhelmed by them.

I think this is what life coaches are supposed to be good for.  Me, I’d rather make up my own character sheet and do a personal inventory of all the skills I have to see if I have enough to level up. I also need to find other Adventurers who want to take this –what would you call it?  No one has aksed us (me) to slay a dragon or search for something or rescue someone.  Ooo.  That’s what I need to figure out?  Not what the task is, but who is asking it to be done!  Cool.

Meanwhile, I have my project completed for the next Spoonflower contest.  It’s a doll panel.  Nice combination of what they are asking for and what I like.  It helps that I also want to give it as a gift.  Or, that the actual image has sparked a few more ideas.   I don’t know what goes into the Etsy shop, now.  Have to take the Spoonflower market into account for fabric.  Final products?  I still have a few of those ideas to develop.

And this last novel will give me ideas and help focus my plans.  It’s about the business of the world and how it collapses.  We also get to hear more about goblins and dragons.  Drawing, too.  It’s all in there.  Isn’t that what Nano is about?  Getting it all in and editing later?

With One Thread is the name of my Etsy shop.  There’s nothing there at the moment. The name is all there is of an idea that came from the devastation of 9/11.  I wanted to know, for myself, what it was that I could do to heal the world.  It came to me that the women of the world at risk might be empowered through their ability to process cloth. The idea of the fabric trade comes from the ancient Silk Road. It also comes from hearing an article about someone I like a lot–Kaffe Fasset–who was commissioned by an organization to license his designs to a Third World women’s community.  His designs were to be used in their work and sold to create a viable economic practice.
I wanted to be him, to be someone whose work of the mind would be such that others might find empowerment.

This is the source of my novels’ world. Yes, my novels’ world is also the world I created for playing my Dungeons and Dragons characters. The nature of the breach that 9/11 created in my heart needed more than just a game.  It needed some kind of personal commitment.  I didn’t then and don’t think now that I can serve with my best as I am now.  While I could teach English with the best of the others who volunteer for the Peace Corps (my model for world service), I don’t think that is what I am best suited for.  No, I don’t know what else I can do better.  However, it came to me that the world I want to create as my own reality, the world of fiber, is the world serves the women of the world best.

Writing this now seems to have lost it’s power, somehow.  I don’t think that I have failed my intention, or that I have failed in my intention to serve.  I firmly believe that, given some other impressions and coincidences, that I have only begun the true Adventure of Service.  This last novel presents definitions and suggestions that, without the direction of a world service of fiber, would not feel so powerful.  There is something deeper that wants to speak through my intent, my focus.  I am willing to let it come out; I am willing to be dissatisfied with the appearance of my ordinary life in order for the extraordinary to seep through.

I don’t know what the outcome of The Falyns and its inspirations will be.  I am willing to risk certainty in order to discover the power of the bigger picture, the design that creates opportunities for all.

I am listening to the latest season of Cast-On, the knitting podcast.  It’s referring to the post WWII world of Make Do and Mend .  It’s the closest we have–we of the post 9/11 century–to understanding what to do with what happened.  What do we do now?  How do we go on?

By “we” I don’t really know who I mean.  I identify with creative people.  With knitters and makers and hackers of all descriptions.  I identify with the Rogue archetype, the persona that believes the rules of ordinary life do not apply.  I am the one who steals your ideas and transforms them to serve The Greater Good.

So, With One Thread,  what mischief might I achieve? What might be achieved at all?