Insomniac

At least tonight's insomnia didn't wait until 2 AM to strike - this time, it just didn't let me get to sleep at all. I should probably think of something witty to write about, but nothing's coming to mind.

I am thinking about my Skull & Bones game from Tuesday, though. We had our first formal meeting, after a smokey but delicious dinner at Denny's (where I ordered something other than Moons). The campaign is shaping up nicely. We've got a Voodoo priestess who casts her spells using a Voodoo doll; a half-English, half-Dutch navigator; a Spanish military deserter; an English fop; and an Irish girl disguised as a cabin boy who is learning the art of surgery. The NPCs round out the party: the first mate (who will soon be captain) is an English adventurer, and the Bo'sun (soon to be first mate) is a slightly off-his-rocker Brit who calls himself Commodore and has adorned his uniform with hundreds of military medals and honors. Yes, it's going to be a great campaign. There is only one spellcaster, and her class is pretty weak in Skull & Bones, but I don't anticipate that will be a problem - on the contrary, it will be interesting to play a campaign that is almost entirely fighters and fighting classes.

I'm starting to get sleepy. That's a good thing.

We finished organizing our books tonight, which means that we're almost done unpacking. The last few things we have to do involve selling a few things on Ebay, donating a few books we have duplicates of to the library, and picking up a few loose odds and ends. I hope to finish this before Crabby gets here for Thanksgiving, which is going to rock. I have to plan a nature hike for that - if the weather is good enough, we may ramble down to Mt. Rainier. Brook and Wendi have a book of local hikes, so I'll see if I can borrow that.

Speaking of Wendi, she lent me a great book called Silverlock by John Myers Myers (not a typo). Silverlock has been out of print since the 70s, but it is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of fantasy literature. In it, the main and title character finds himself shipwrecked on an island continent inhabited by hundreds of figures, places, and scenes from Western literature that all interact with each other. Half the fun is finding what the reference is; the other half is the happy-go-lucky story. Anyway, Wendi lent me her copy and I read it and liked it, and then she gave me a copy yesterday afternoon that she found at a book sale. It was a great find - it's in pretty good shape, and has that old book smell of dry paper and aged glue. It now has a place of honor on my fantasy shelf.

Before I tried to go to sleep tonight I finished George R. R. Martin's novella The Hedge Knight, which is supposedly being rendered as a comic book but no one has ever seen anything but the first issue. Anyway, it was a nice companion piece to his Song of Ice and Fire series, even though it was much more of a PG-13 story. It appeared in the Legends collection that Michael Victorine got me as part of the Terry Goodkind series he gave me as a present before I graduated. Speaking of, I just realized I never finished reading that series, just like I didn't finish reading the Green Angel Tower series that Jessica started me on in London. I guess I don't have a very good record on finishing fantasy series'.

Before I tried to lay down for some Z's, I picked up Love in the Time of Cholera again. This is supposedly a fantastic book. It's written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who also wrote 100 Years of Solitude, one of my all-time favorites. I read the bulk of that book on the train from London to Edinburgh. But, I've tried reading Cholera twice and failed. The first time, I got about 50 pages into it and quit. The second time, I made it about 60 pages and quit. This time, I'm determined to finish the book. I even skipped ahead a little to give myself some incentive to keep reading. I really enjoy the magical realism Marquez uses (it's certainly something that has appeared in my own writing), so you'd think I could finish the damn book, but so far no luck.

On that note, my eyelids are feeling droopy. It's past midnight. If I'm lucky I can still get six hours of sleep.