Gaming in the new year

One might notice my general lack of gaming topics lately (which in turn, has caused this blog to slow down considerably, since gaming topics is its primary raison d'être, while other topics of which I'm a fan and occasionally like to blog have largely been removed to other blogs of mine.

Which are also moving slowly, I might add.  Part of this is simple; I've just been really busy, and I feel little intellectual capital remains to blog about things.  This can also be seen by anyone who's noticed that the books I'm reading haven't been updated in a long time either.  But with regards to this particular blog, and it's particular niche, I thought maybe a little more was in order.

Our gaming group has gone largely fallow lately.  We're at the point where we play, if we're lucky, once every two or three months or so.  And even then, I haven't been to the last two sessions that we've had, because they ended up falling on days where I had a conflict, but since everyone else was available, they decided it wasn't worth it to hold up the session on my account (a determination that I completely agree with, by the way, for what it's worth, etc.)  This means that gaming has kind of fallen into a state of disrepair when it comes to hobbies that are getting active attention and interest from me.  I've also been feeling that, while it needs a brusque restructuring and reorganization, my own DARK•HERITAGE setting is largely pretty complete--it doesn't really need a lot of new material in order to be useful to me.  Rather, it needs a project to put it to use.  This could be a game I run, although clearly I don't have anything in the hopper that's likely to happen in the near future.

Because I'm busy (and tired) when blogging, I'm not able to get excited about blogging about a hobby that I'm doing very little with, currently.  So, in a nutshell, that's why it's slowed way down and gotten very quiet.

What do I intend to do, then?  A few things:

• Probably mothball some of my esoteric setting development exercises, specifically SOLNOR, ODD D&D, REALMS TRAVELER, AD ASTRA, and HYBRID DREAMLANDS.  I'm not cancelling them exactly, but they are going into "development hell" as they say in the movie biz, to be pulled off the shelf and discussed maybe some more when conditions are more favorable again.
• Continue (or start, really) the restructuring and reorganizing of the flagship DARK•HERITAGE setting that was precipitated by the dying of free wikispaces wikis, and migration to Google Sites.  One thing that I've been very interested in doing for a long time is literally redrawing the map, renaming a few sites, and having it all established as a digital file that I can link to.  Discussing my setting in the abstract without showing a map has been difficult for me, as I'm a bit of a cartographic kinda guy; I've always loved a good fantasy setting map.  Give updates here as this progresses, including cutting and pasting some of the content that I think is interesting enough to warrant it here.
• Continue with my development of a 1,000-years Post Jedi Star Wars setting.  Maybe even attempt to run something in this space for my younger boys.
• Continue to update my other blogs, including my hiking and backpacking blog in particular (my paleontology, electronic music fan-dom and fighting game blogs don't have much going on, and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future.)
• Figure out some way to jump-start my long lingering fiction attempts in my flagship DARK•HERITAGE setting.  Finding time and mental energy to devote to to writing fiction has proven difficult at the end of long and busy days, but I'm going to come up with something, because if I don't, I'll be extremely disappointed.