Reviews: The Dresden Files

You may or may not know this, but Changes, the newest book in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, comes out on April 6^th.  In honor of this momentous event, I’m reviewing a pair of Dresden-related products this week, Butcher’s own original graphic novel (OGN) Welcome to the Jungle and the Sci Fi Channel original series The Dresden Files. 

In many ways, this week’s reviews are all about expectations.  This is to say that I was super-excited when I saw Welcome to the Jungle at the Westport library, but despite—or perhaps because of—my anticipation, the book itself was disappointing.  Meanwhile, I didn’t expect much from the TV show, but y’know, so far that’s been excellent.  But let’s start with the book:

Look, I really like Butcher’s prose.  He has an amazing grasp of Scene and Sequel structure that keeps his stories moving, and his work is terse, witty, and evocative in spots without ever being overwritten.  Plus, the man has a solid sense of humor and an utter reluctance to take himself seriously that I find both appealing and entertaining, a fact that’s doubly impressive considering that it never undermines his story’s inherent tension or drama.  If anything, the fact that our Hero is a little guy in a big world heightens the suspense.  After all, the world is rarely on the line, so that means that pretty much anything can happen.  Often, it does.

With that said, the witty prose just didn’t translate in Welcome to the Jungle.  Instead, I thought it was often redundant with the images in the book and generally lacking in the kind of cynical self-reflection that makes the Dresden novels so damned entertaining.  On top of that, the artist didn’t do my man any favors.  If you’re gonna write a book about a down-on-his-luck PI, then you have to make him look like he’s down on his luck.  You can’t simply draw him straight out of the superhero playbook and then surround him with beautiful and sexy role-players who look like they might start grooving on him at any moment.  That’s not the way the world works, nor is it the way the base novels portray their protagonist.  Because look: people hate the guy who gets the girls.  And in any event, our Hero Harry is definitely not that guy.  That’s not even how the story’s written.  But that’s the way it’s drawn, leading to all manner of unfortunate chaos, confusion, thematic dissonance.

Eh.  To tell the truth, I’ve seen this problem with a lot of the art out of the various Dabel Brothers’ adaptations.  With the Dabels, the story always looks like it came out of what I call the Top Cow House Style, a storytelling mode entirely dependent on fanboy lingerie fantasies and their occasional fangirl equivalents.  And again, that style can suit—sometimes.  For example, it worked wonders with the Anita Blake adaptations.  But it’s rarely appropriate to the subtler world of losers-made-good who tend to inhabit so many sci fi and fantasy genre stories. 

Case in point: the pic on the left is from Top Cow’s Aphrodite IX.  On the right is from the Dabels’ adaptation of Patricia Briggs Cry Wolf:

Oddly, where the graphic novel went wrong—and this despite Butcher’s personal involvement—the TV show got it right.  Why?  I think it’s because the TV show succeeds in making Harry Dresden look like Harry Dresden.  He’s a broke, down-on-his-luck working stiff, and the show goes to pains to show this.  For example, my man can’t afford a real magic staff, so he uses an old hockey stick.  Brilliant!  Different from the books but entirely appropriate given the character they’re trying to create.  Plus, Harry is a guy with a sordid past but a heart-of-gold.  Again, this is something that the show takes pains to show.  That, plus a heapin’ helpin’ of narrative wit and a smattering of plot drawn from the various early novels are more than enough to keep the TV show entertaining.

“So,” you’re thinking, “where I can I find this TV show?”  Well, it’s available for live-streaming on Netflix, which is where I found it.  Alternately, you can go to Blockbuster and rent the DVDs.  Sadly, there’s only a single season’s worth of watching, but it’ll at least keep you going through the first half of this summer’s ocean of summertime reality television.  The graphic novel, on the other hand, seems to have been pretty successful.  It’s out in hardcover, and I’ve seen it in a variety of local libraries and bookstores.

No News, Need Some Filler

Your regularly scheduled book or TV review will be back as soon as I have time to write it.  In the meantime, here's the trailer for a movie based on one of my favorite comics of all time, The Losers.

Eh...  I don't know what it's gonna look like as a movie, but it was a bad-ass comic.

Busy Weekend Blues

Hey guys, sorry there was no post over the weekend.  I honestly meant to post something, but y’know, some weekends are easier than others.  In fact, lately I feel like I’ve been running at a dead sprint all the time, and there just isn’t enough of me to go around.  I hope it’s just a phase ‘cause right now I’m exhausted.  It’s hard to stay focused and motivated all the time, even for me.  I can’t remember the last time I had a relaxing day where I just didn’t have to do anything.  For example, what passed for relaxation this past weekend was seven freaking hours of ironing!  SEVEN HOURS!

Heh.  At least we have Netflix now.  I sat there and watched back episodes of the old Sci Fi Channel original show The Dresden Files (based on my very favorite series of novels) using Netflix live-streaming feature and an RGB cable plugged into the back of our TV.  I’ve had worse times.  And I made a decent-sized dent in my kiddo’s clothes’ pile.  And yeah, if you’re wondering, my wife refuses utterly to iron.  Don’t ask me why.  But my kids need clothes, and like it our not, there’s only one way that they’re gonna get ‘em.  I’m not one to shirk these implied responsibilities.

I also managed to spend some quality time in the saddle this weekend.  I pulled a muscle in my groin a few weeks ago—at least that’s what I hope happened because the alternatives all require some much more serious recuperation time—and since then, I’ve not been able to run.  Granted, this is not my first running-related injury, but it is annoying.  I seem to get injured every time I start feeling good out on the road these days.  So anyway, that left me with little to do in the way of workouts besides swim—which I can only do for so long any more—or ride.  Riding takes the longest of any of my disciplines, but it’s easily the greatest, most awe-inspiring thing I do in my day-to-day life.  If I could change one thing about my life, I’d like to have a commute that would accommodate a 2-hour ride every other day.  Truly, there are times I wish I could go back to high school and ride instead of swimming.  Anyway, I didn’t get quite two-hours a day in over the weekend—and I’m not sure that my pulled groin would’ve liked that much saddle time, in any event—but I did manage put in some time, and I even rode some hills, which was glorious.  It’ll be more glorious when I’m closer to 100%.

Sadly, there’s always Monday and the office to come back to. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like my job.  I like the fact that I have a job that’s both secure and decent in a way that keeps Sally from having to work.  These are good things.  But I get tired of my commute, and more to the point, sometimes I wish I could just train like Lance and ride and run and swim all the time.  Someplace where it’s warm.  That’d be nice—at least for a while.

‘Course, it’s raining today.  So maybe I’m just cranky.

Storyteller’s Playbook #5: Conflict and Development

“We have war when at least one of the parties to a conflict wants something more than it wants peace.”

    ~Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

Last time we had Storyteller’s Playbook, we laid out a basic formula for story structure.  Since it’s been two weeks since that last SP, let’s start this one with a review: 

  A – Open on Action  
  B – Backstory 
  C – Conflict 
  D – Development 
  E – Ending

Recall that the actual order in which we tackle the elements of our story is not important beyond the fact that we want to make sure that we open with some kind of action or conflict.  But then, what is Conflict?

Well, that’s the real question, right?  Why are we here?  Why should we care?

One of the real tricks in writing is to open your story at the right spot.  Just as a lot of beginning writers tend to want to open on Background, so too do they tend to want to start their stories too early.  The two tendencies are related.  In both cases, the writer wants to make sure that there’s enough context in place ahead of time so that when the real story starts the reader understands what’s going on and why.  The thing is, just as opening on Background is generally both boring and unnecessary, so too is opening too early.  Readers like the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on.  They do not like to get bogged down in twenty-five pages of basically mindless back story that ultimately has little to do with the main character’s actual problem and its resolution.

So then, what is conflict?

Well, as Ms. Kirkpatrick notes above, Conflict is what happens when somebody wants something more than they want peace.  Put another way, conflict is story.  Something Happens, and our Hero can no longer sit idly by.  He or She must act, decisively, to meet the challenge, deal with the crisis, survive in the midst of danger, or escape an untenable situation.  Whatever.  Regardless of the situation, we have Conflict starting at precisely the moment when our Hero can no longer continue on as before but must instead Do Something Different.  It is that pivotal event that starts our story, and it is there that we as writers should start our story’s telling.

Our Hero wants something.  Passionately.  From this, we derive our story’s plot.

In my experience, this concept has two primary applications to gaming.  The first is that as with any other kind of writing, writing for gaming requires choosing the correct story starting point.  In this, newbie DMs are by far and away the most common offenders.  Most often, a newbie DM will start his or her campaign in a tavern somewhere long before the campaign’s primary conflict is set to emerge.  DMs do this on the grounds that starting this way provides the game’s Players with a chance to do some freeform role-playing up front and/or because it allows the Players to set the game’s general direction.  The problem with this is that character in general is formed through conflict.  Without an objective or an obstacle to stand in their way, the Players are left to act out their characters’ pre-determined traits and tendencies in a vacuum.  There’s no growth going on, and there’s no challenge.  Bottom line, nothing important is going on.  And the result is often confusion and, if I’m being honest, boredom.  In an online setting, Players soon start to disappear until, before you know it, the game has unraveled before it even truly got started.

The other application that gets overlooked by even experienced DMs is the problem of motivation.  Why are we here?  Why should we care?

In one sense, Opening on Action will resolve at least part of this problem for a DM because action necessarily involves conflict or challenge, and overcoming conflict is a fundamental part of character development.  And character development is ultimately what drives the game.  I mean, look, the game is fun—even addicting—because of the way that we get to watch our characters grow and mature over time.  As Players, there’s a sense of ownership there that makes gaming more fulfilling than any kind of passive ingestion of purely external story material no matter how well conceived or executed.  In gaming, we’re actually part of the story.  We’re part of the storytelling.  We’re actively winning when our characters are overcoming the obstacles that are set in their way.  That’s the good part.

And that’s fine.  I mean, as a technique, punishing characters is one of the most reliable methods by which a writer can make his audience bond with his protagonists.  That’s as true in gaming as it is in comics or drama or film or prose or any other storytelling medium that you want to name.  But simply hammering the PCs is not precisely the same thing as providing them with motivation, although it can lead to a certain kind of motivation if it’s done often enough and by the same antagonists.  Still, even D&D can be about more than either seeking revenge or saving the world because that’s just what heroes do.  The game works better when the PCs want something for a reason that they can easily understand and explain, and at least for my money, if that something is tangible and personal, it’s going to be a lot more effective than if it’s ephemeral or somehow “transcendant.”

One of the things I’m proudest of about my game The Sellswords of Luskan is the fact that against all odds, I think my Players actually care about the fate of Luskan, a city that, not to put too fine a point on it, has done them wrong a time or two.  But by living in the city and experiencing its hardships first hand, I think they’ve actually developed real motivation.  In storytelling terms, I’ve treated the city itself like a character, punishing it repeatedly in a way that has built my Players’ sympathy—or at least interest—and as a result, they’ve started to care passionately about what happens in their adoptive home and why.  It’s not so much that they care for the people of the city or that they want what’s best for them.  Instead, for the Sellswords, if anyone’s gonna conquer Luskan, it’ll be them, and death to any with other ideas.  But that’s still an emotional investment.  It’s still motivation—and a good one.  And this, to me, makes the game a lot more than a simple struggle for money, power, or revenge… although all of those things are and will remain part of the story we’re collectively telling.

The other thing I want to talk about this week is Development.  This is where we ask that favorite question of mine: “What else can go wrong?”  Because look, if the ABCDE formula with which we started this week’s column were written mathematically, then Development would be MOST of the equation.  In fact, it should be a full 80% of your story.  Or, to put it another way, you can pretty much screw everything else up, but if you develop and complicate your conflict competently, then the odds are good that you’re going to be writing entertaining and useful fiction.  When I was writing comics, I considered this so important that I would actually go through by page count and make sure that at least 80% of my pages were complications to the existing plotline.  Considering that some of my best-known work is actually composed of 6-page webisodes, this was no mean feat.

Fortunately, Development is a lot less tricky an issue in gaming than it is in other types of fiction.  Every time you have an encounter, you are essentially putting a new obstacle in the way of your PCs, developing the plot by way of creating ever more difficult hoops through which your Party must jump.  That’s at least one of the reasons why D&D is such a combat-oriented game.  Combat Encounters are the easiest and most effective forms of plot development available to a Dungeon Master.  And since combat is such a large part of heroic fantasy as a genre, why shouldn’t it be?

Still, the need to actively complicate your plot is important, so let’s look at an example using the 80% rule:

1.  The Sellswords are shipwrecked on an island.

2.  The island is deserted.

3.  The ship’s primary cargo was defenseless child-slaves.

4.  The waters around the shipwreck are infested with sharks and sahaguin.

5.  Once the Sellswords reach land, there is no shelter, and the kids are starving.

6.  The ruins of an old pirate settlement were obviously destroyed by a large Black Dragon.

7.  The dragon’s lizardfolk minions attack to seize and eat as many of the child-slaves as possible.

8.  The dragon’s lair turns out to be very dark and spooky.

9.  The dragon itself is a massive beast.  Mean and deadly!

10. After killing the dragon, the Sellswords seize the beast’s horde, which turns out to have a small ship in pristine condition.  They sail away and live happily ever after.

And there you have it.  Sentence 1 Opens on Action, tells as much Background as is necessary, and introduces a Conflict.  Sentences 2 through 9 make the Conflict even more perilous.  This is the essence of Development.  The actual climax of the Story takes place between sentences 9 and 10, and then in 10 we have resolution and a happy ending. 

Voila!  80% Development, 20% other stuff.

So there you have it.  Creating conflict and motivation is not necessarily easy, but it is necessary if you want to have a campaign story that’s more than just a series of randomly collected encounters with no over-arching theme.  Once you have a conflict and a reason for your PCs to pursue their objective, creating complications is easy.  The key is to make sure that there are enough complications to make the ultimate reward feel fulfilling.  After all, the harder the heroes have to work, the more heroic they will ultimately become.  Punish your PCs relentlessly, and ultimately your Players will thank you for the experience.

Wednesday Round-Up: Attacking in a Different Direction

To the extent that there’s any writing news this week, it’s this: I’m working with my old high school friend Niki to adapt Bronx Angel: Politics By Another Method for the stage.  The backstory here is that I used to own a little comic book company called Proletariat Comics, LLC.  I founded PC LLC with a friend named Jerry as a way to promote our work.  Because look, unless you’re writing a franchise property for one of the existing Big Two comic companies, the simple fact is that comics is a pay-to-play game.  Which is to say that if you want to write and produce original work of your own design, that’s fine, but no one is going to pay your art costs up front.  As with prose writing, would-be comic producers who’re starting out need to be prepared to produce fully finished work that they can take to a publisher or agent.  In many ways that’s unfortunate, but then again, it’s also reasonable from the point of view of the publishers.  I mean, I’ve been on both sides of the issue, and you can trust me when I tell you that the number of folks who think they can write comics is exponentially larger than they number who actually have any talent and/or any desire to take formal training or in any way hone their craft, and beyond that, there is a literal TON of great comics out there that are totally unknown to even the most hardcore of comic fans.  And publishers need to make an actual profit to stay in business.  They cannot afford to take on “development” cases, and even if they could, there isn’t any need when lots of folks are already willing to pay their own costs up front or basically write and draw on spec.  So since the game was a loser anyway, Jerry and I opted for max freedom and started from scratch under our own homegrown brand name.

While we’re talking, let me take this opportunity to note that “Proletariat” was a really crappy name for a comic book company.  It wasn’t meant to be half so incendiary or counter-culture as it came out, but bottom line, where we merely wanted to “revolutionize” comics by promoting new creators with high-quality non-superhero ideas (giving power to the comics “workers”, the creators), most folks instead saw us as a bunch of quasi-pinko Leninists living in New York City.  And what’s worse, the whole thing framed Bronx Angel in an entirely unintended genre-space.

Look, BA: PBAM was never meant to be a specifically anti-war book.  In fact, I started writing it well before the Invasion of Iraq made it timely.  The original high-concept came out of a story I started writing when I was stationed in Korea back in 1999, and it was based a little on my father.  At the time, my dad was suffering from some pretty severe PTSD, and it occurred to me that a lot of action heroes out of the movies would probably also suffer from PTSD if they were ever given the time on-screen to develop their characters in that direction.  But no one in Hollywood ever wanted to look at it that way back then; they preferred the summer popcorn formula of happy killers who cheerfully blow away legions and legions of bad guys without ever suffering the consequences.  So I decided to write a story about a Scottish knight who returns from the Crusades with PTSD, only to discover that his family’s place in local politics has been usurped by a local villain.  And I got about 30 pages into the manuscript before I realized that this story had been done before—in the form of the classic legend of Robin Hood—just not with the PTSD angle. 

The idea kind of sat that way for a few years, but I eventually dusted it off in 2002, about the time I started working in the South Bronx.  The imminent invasion of Iraq provided a new Crusade from which our returning Robin Hood could emerge, and with that in mind, I started writing.  The final form of the story changed a good deal, especially when I cut it from 135-pages down to the 68 that are in the version that’s currently available on WOWIO, but even now, that core idea remains.  Angel is a guy who’s dealing with his post-war demons, and half the characters are named after characters in Robin Hood, including Little John, Angel’s spotter in BA #0, and MaryAnn, Spice’s ill-fated girlfriend whose role in the original full-length script was much different than it became in the version that actually got published.  The original version also had a Father Tuck, but his storyline was one of the casualties of the cut-down.

But, you know, events kind of got away with me.  Our company was named after a widely reviled revolutionary idea, the story in PBAM actually offended my father, and when the Invasion of Iraq went so quickly sour, I wrote a new Foreword for the book that put my personally feelings about the thing front and center.  And then, too, at the time that PBAM was actually published, things were so bad that most would-be readers just didn’t want to think about the war—at all—under any circumstances.  And having passed over In the Valley of Eli any number of times at Blockbuster myself, honestly, I can hardly blame them.  The war was on TV all the time, and folks didn’t want yet another reminder of it.  Ironically, any number of reviewers later came back to me and expressed confusion about the actual story’s lack of anti-war sentiment, but of course, that was never the point.  The point was and is about my dad, and he was in Vietnam.  I wanted to show the costs that soldiers pay for their heroism on his behalf.  If readers—including me—see that cost as being disproportional to the gains achieved, well, that’s not the fault of the story.  It was more like a sign of the times.

So anyway, now it’s 2010, things have been looking up in Iraq for a good while, and I think maybe it’s time to try bring the full Bronx Angel out of the dustbin of history and find a way to get it out there—again.  I want to tell the story the way that it was meant to be told, and I want to do it in a way that doesn’t require some artist to spend 8 hours drawing each page.  So Niki and I are trying to re-write it as a play, and we’ll see how it goes. 

Here's Niki's prototype set design for the first scene:

Book Review: Runaways, Volume 2 HC and Dark Avengers: Assemble

We finally got back over to the fabulous library in Westport, CT, weekend before last for the annual book sale.  While Sally and the girls spent their time wandering amongst the rest of the bargain hunters, I headed upstairs, intent on pillaging Westport’s awesomely well-stocked graphic novels section.  I took home nearly a dozen GNs, including the two books I’m reviewing this week: Volume 2 of Marvel’s Runaways hardcover series (collecting issues #13 to #25) and the Dark Avengers: Assemble hardcover (collecting issues #1 to #6).

Although writer Brian K. Vaughn is better-known for his long-running Vertigo series Y: The Last Man, Runaways was always a personal favorite of mine.  The series’ premise is a kind of teenaged coming-of-age/rebellion story: a bunch of teens whose parents are friends discover together that their parents are collectively a bunch of super-villains.  They slowly come to realize that the adults they’ve spent their entire lives respecting are in fact bad people, and indeed, that adults of all stripes are generally people who’ve compromised their ideals in one way or another—who’ve generally given in to “evil” somehow—regardless of their overall intentions or motivations.  The series’ first story arc of 18 issues deals with the ramifications of this initial discovery and its inherent rebellion against the authority of the kids’ evil parents, so that by the second hardcover volume, we’re left with a bunch of lost and scared kids living under the unforgiving maxim that ALL adults are evil.  Or at least fundamentally self-interested.

Volume 2 of the Runaways is in many ways similar to the second season of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  In Buffy’s first year, we spend the entire season setting up the premise and dealing with the first of what proves to be a goodly number of threats to The Entire World.  The second season, then, is a little better because the premise is established, and we can just do characterization—and the trials and tribulations of being a romantically active teenage girl.  In this second volume of Runaways, we’re also dealing with a mature idea and finally getting into the meat and potatoes of what it means to be a teen trying to live on your own in a tough city like Los Angeles.  And like Buffy-scribe Joss Whedon, Vaughn takes his idea in a bunch of clever and unexpected directions that in retrospect seem obvious given the characters and the story’s over-arching thematic elements.  Which perhaps explains why Vaughn has since worked some with Whedon, and indeed, why Whedon himself took over the scripting duties at Runaways when Vaughn himself left the series to work on the TV show Lost. 

Runaways’ art, by Adrian Alphona, adds to the story main through style.  It’s good stuff, but it’s in a style that’s well outside the typical heroic comicbook fare—and for good reason.  In business terms, Runaways was originally greenlit by Marvel as a means to appeal to the Manga crowd.  At that point, Marvel didn’t yet have a successful movie studio, and its appeal was limited to either the mainstream name recognition of its established brand-name characters—like Spider-Man—or to the long-term interest of overgrown fanboys in their 30s who’d had a subscription to either the X-Men or Iron Man since the company’s heyday back in the 1970s and 80s.  And unfortunately, the latter is a diminishing resource since fanboys grow up and move into new interests, especially in tough economic times.  So then, the company needed a fresh way to appeal to the kids.  And that was, at least in part, Runaways.  It’s an open question whether or not Runaways succeeded in its primary goal, but the point became moot with the massive success of Marvel’s independently produced Iron Man film and its subsequent acquisition by Disney.  And regardless of the series’ place in the long term history of the industry, Runaways remains an excellent idea that was well executed by a pair of masters at the tops of their games.

So if Runaways was a move to recruit new fans, then Dark Avengers: Assemble is something totally different—a move to extract even more revenue from the industry’s core demographic, the overgrown fanboys.  Which is ironic in a way but not at all unentertaining.  It’s ironic because Dark Avengers was written by Marvel uber-scribe Brian Michael Bendis, a guy who made his name writing witty banter-based indies but now turns out volume after volume of the flagship company’s flagship products, each more action-based than the last. 

Well, we’ve come a long way since Who Killed Retro Girl?

But like I said, though I picked up Dark Avengers: Assemble because I was hoping for some of that old-time Bendis repartee, I enjoyed the book despite finding the actual dialogue ultimately uninspiring.  I’ve not kept up with recent events in the Marvel Universe, but the story here was still pretty easy to follow.  In the aftermath of an abortive invasion by a legion of alien Skrulls, S.H.I.E.L.D. grand-poobah and one-time Secretary of Defense Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) is fired by the President and replaced by the national political flavor of the month, Norman Osborn, the man who was once the super-villain The Green Goblin.  Which is brilliant plotting—at least from a business and marketing standpoint.  Because look: the story is intricate.  It involves several layers of Marvel B- and C-Listers, a fact that ultimately plays to the hardcore fanboys.  However, all of the major characters are either characters from classic mythology—like Ares, the Greek god of War and Morgan Le Fey, the arch-villain from the King Arthur mythos—or they’ve been in successful movies in the past five years—like both Stark and Osborne.  All of which means that even casual fans will understand and be able to follow the series’ central plot point, that the U.S. government is on the verge of being taken over by super-villains. 

Instant accessibility in a fundamentally hardcore title?  Brilliant!

The art in Dark Avengers: Assemble is about what you’d expect.  It’s done by Mike Deodato, whom I know primarily from his previous work on The Amazing Spider-Man, and it’s in the arch-superhero style.  All of the men are super-ripped weightlifter types, and all of the women are ultra-hot Barbies dressed in a super-tight bustier, corset, or deep-dipping V-fronted lingerie top ala Jennifer Lopez from the Oscars a few years ago.  And if that’s not enough, they also wear the kind of ass-hiking swimsuit bottoms that leave their butt-cheeks hanging out.  Not that that’s a bad thing.  It’s just a stylistic choice that I personally get tired of after awhile.

Anyway, I don’t know that I would recommend that you go out and actually buy either Runaways or Dark Avengers, but that’s mainly because comics are just so damned expensive these days.  For my money, I prefer novels because there’s more story per dollar spent.  With that said, both these books are easily worth your time, especially if you’re hankering for a superhero fix and can find them at your local library.  There may also be some online sources, but I’m not as familiar with those.  Still, Marvel at least used to have a pretty advanced online comic reader.  And surely somebody’s got an iPhone app for that, right?

Back in the Saddle

So it’s Monday after the big storm and the even bigger birthday party over the weekend, and I’m headed back into the office for the first time in a week.  Feels a little strange to be back on my routine, but it’s good, too.  Don’t get me wrong: it was nice to take a little break from the normal.  But at the same time, I got off my routine, had to put my game and my tri training on hold, and was generally at a standstill with my life all week.

If you’re wondering, my daughter Emma’s 5^th Birthday Party was a whopping success.  We had it at the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, CT, our local zoo, and while I think the zoo folks in general could have been a little more accommodating, I also think the kids had a good time.  The party was short and to the point—and we managed to have the party without destroying our house in the process, which is a bonus when you’re dealing 5-year-olds.  On top of that, the kids all got to see some really cool animals.  The zoo has a pair of tigers which are right near the carousel building where we held the party, and then, too, the party’s main attraction—aside from Emma and the carousel itself—was a giant blue-tongued gecko that everybody got to pet.

After we got home, I loaded up Scooby Doo: Where’s My Mummy on my laptop via Netflix, and Emma, Hannah, and I sat down to watch it.  And I gotta say this: Emma LOVES Scooby Doo.  Hannah, on the other hand, had started to feel a little under the weather while we were at the zoo, and with that in mind, Where’s My Mummy was just too much for her.  She got scared (of Scooby Doo!) and eventually started crying—and she’s 6!  After the movie, I put her down for a nap, and that seemed to help, but she still had nightmares, eventually crawling into bed with my mother, who was in town for Emma’s birthday.

The other news of the weekend is that I finally got my bike back from the shop and got back into the saddle.  It seems that when I did my 8-miler two weeks ago, I pulled a muscle in my lower back and groin, and after running on it on Thursday last week, I was pretty sore.  So getting my bike back was key, especially since the pounding of running was making me hurt worse.  So Saturday afternoon, I headed out for a little ride, putting in about 13 miles and basically taking it easy.  That seemed to help.  Sunday I headed out again, this time for about an hour and twenty minutes, which was even better.  Sunday evening I felt better still, but I’m still sore, and at this point, I’m starting to think that I have a real injury and will have to do real recovery if I want to get better.  Argh.

Meanwhile, racing season is right around the corner.  So I need to get better ASAP.  There’s a little duathlon I want to do in late April and then a 10K in early May and a much bigger duathlon at the end of May.  Bottom line, I don’t have time to be foolin’ around with no injuries.

In other news, the Sellswords finally defeated Scylla the Black Dragon.  It was touch-and-go there for a while, but as is often the case with upper-Heroic Tier characters, they started using their Daily powers and turned the tide pretty easily.  That said, they don’t know what’s coming next.  It’ll be interesting to see what they do now since they’re pretty much out of super-powers. 

Cue the evil laugh: Muwahahahaha!