Iain Banks isn’t here anymore, and it doesn’t seem fair.

The death of ‘famous’ people – whether actors, writers, or just people I look up to – doesn’t always hit me that hard. It’s sad, of course, and sometimes it’s so out of nowhere that you barely get a chance to process it, but usually it’s cause for a little sadness and reflection, and also the chance to celebrate and remember what was great about them.

It doesn’t usually land like a punch in the stomach the way it did when Iain Banks announced that he had terminal cancer. I’ve spent most of the last two months hoping that whatever treatment he was receiving would work out, and that maybe he’d get more time than the ‘less than a year’ with which he’d been diagnosed, but instead it’s turned out that he got much less, and fate seems utterly fucking cruel today.

There are other people writing tributes – people like Neil Gaiman and Charles Stross – in a way that’s much better than anything I could express. I didn’t know Iain Banks. I never properly met him – I got a selection of books signed by him (including one that I accidentally got signed by him twice), and I was lucky enough to see him when he was Guest of Honour at a recent Eastercon. He’s a writer who wrote books that expanded my idea of what you can do in a novel, and who really made writing novels seem like something I wanted to do – he showed me that novels could be fiercely intelligent, experimental, wise and humane, but they could also be gigantic fun, full of invention and craziness and ferociously sarcastic spacecraft. It was one of those sad moments when it hit me that I hadn’t truly appreciated what Banks’s books had meant to me until I heard that he was dying – no more Culture novels, no more insane spaceship names, that a man I admired so much could just be brought to a sudden stop. One of the few things in this situation I’m grateful for is that there was a Guestbook set up online, where fans could leave messages, so I could write something to say exactly what his work had meant to me. I’m glad he got the chance to see how much his work had affected people, and I do think he’s an author who’ll last – people are going to be reading his books, both with the M and without, for a long time.

Below is what I wrote on Iain Banks’s online guest book. I don’t know if he got all the way through the many, many pages and read what I wrote, and I don’t care if he didn’t – it was important for me to write it, to put down in words what was churning around in my head at the time. And while I never know at times like this what’s appropriate and what isn’t, I want to just throw this open letter out there, like a message in a bottle, just to voice as clearly as I can how important Iain Banks was to me, and many, many others:

Written on 8th April 2013:

Dear Iain,

The covers. That was what first pulled me in – those black and white covers on the paperbacks of your first few ‘M-less’ books. In the world of mid-Eighties book design, they just leapt out and grabbed my attention. I can’t remember how I got to The Bridge – I think I’d heard that it was strange and interesting. I’d also heard of The Wasp Factory, but that sounded a little ‘extreme’ for me at the time (a gawky teenager growing up in Cornwall), so I went for The Bridge instead, just to see how it went.

I wasn’t quite expecting something quite so experimental and mind-expanding. The Bridge was one of those impossible to classify books that got into my head and wouldn’t go away – I was fascinated by the construction of it, the layers of reality, the way it flipped from fantasy to science fiction to everyday life and back again. I’d never read anything like it, and it made me want to read more.

So I did.

Ironically, despite having started with your most experimental book, it took me a few goes to get into your science fiction. Not the right age, not the right mind-set – I ricocheted off Consider Phlebas a couple of times. Then I tried Use of Weapons, and couldn’t get my head around the structure. But I didn’t give up, and I gave The Player of Games a try… and then suddenly, it all clicked.

I’ve loved and enjoyed all the books by you that I’ve read, but there are two that I simply can’t imagine my world without. Feersum Endjinn and Excession are my lodestones – they’re the standard I aspire to. I’m a fiction writer who’s been trying to get published since 2005, and while I haven’t made it that far yet, the aim to one day manage something that gets close to either of those books is one of the things that keeps me going. The weirdness and inventiveness that goes into those books – the pace and the world, the phonetic chapters and the mad spaceship names, the humour and the sheer humanity that are packed into those pages… that’s what I look for in science fiction. I don’t always find it. But in your books, I do.

Late last year, I was in a bit of a confidence spiral in both work and my writing, I hadn’t read for pleasure for a long time (I read a lot for work, and it’s easy for that kind of thing to invade all your free time), and almost all the books I tried simply didn’t make me want to read any further. And then, a bound proof of The Hydrogen Sonata turned up, and I tried it, and I was hooked, and I haven’t enjoyed a science fiction novel that much in a long time. It really gave me my faith back in the kind of things I look for in a novel, and what reading can give me, and the kind of books I want to be able to write.

I’ve never met you, not properly. I’ve seen you at signings (I’ve got signed copies of Inversions, Excession, Surface Detail, and Matter). I’ve seen you at Eastercon, and at other events (you actually read from my proof copy of Matter at a London University event back in around 2007/2008-ish). I wish I could have met you properly – because I’m grateful for all those times when I did get to hear you speak about writing with intelligence and humour. I wish I could have had the chance to just overcome my nonsensical bloody English neuroses and just shake you by the hand and thank you for writing books that have given me so much, and for giving me something to aspire to as a writer.

But this’ll have to do.

I hope you’re able to make the most of whatever time you have left.

And thank you. Thank you so much.

SAXON

*  *  *

Rest in Peace, sir. And thanks for making my imagination a crazier, more adventurous place.

Five years ago, I got an agent.  It was a wonderful thing to happen, and wonderful in the way it almost happened by accident – a process I’d imagined was going to be long and laborious and probably go on for months ended up taking about forty-eight hours. Within about two weeks, my book was going out to publishers, and my life felt like it was accelerating in a wild, unpredictable direction. Maybe it was going to happen. Maybe I was actually going to get a book deal. My imagination rushed through all the possibilities, of finally getting to realise what I’d dreamed of. And, at the back of my head, there was a tiny note of caution, a little voice of insecurity that said: You know what? This is a bit fast. Things don’t normally go this quickly for you. I bet the next bit’s going to take longer than you’d like.

I hate that voice. I wish I could switch it off. Most of the time, despite the amount I listen to it, it’s wrong. 

Unfortunately, sometimes it isn’t.

As it turned out, life intervened. The book got turned down by one publisher, and then another, and the cycle pretty much repeated like that. It’s happened to plenty of authors before, and it’ll happen to me plenty of times to come, I’m sure. But on top of that, a few months later, my four-year marriage came to an amicable but pretty damn final end. I went from getting an agent and dreams of publication to having to pack all my belongings into a van, move to a brand new city (Manchester, which I’d only visited twice in my life, twelve years previously) and reboot my entire existence. 

A lot’s happened in the last five years. I’ve built myself up a modest freelance income as a proofreader of novels, alongside doing editorial reports and regular reviews for SFX magazine. I met someone new, fell in love, and now we’re living together. There’s a whole number of ways in which my life has immeasurably improved over the last five years. But it’s hard to get to this point in the year, and once again have to think: “Nope. Still not published yet.”

You have to have confidence. You have to believe that you’re going to make it, that no matter how long it takes you’re going to reach your goal. I’ve been working in publishing (in one form or another) for ten years now; I know how difficult it is, and how long it can take. I know all these things, but the fact of the matter is that it’s gotten a lot harder for me. My confidence has suffered a lot over the last couple of years, to the extent that I’m having to look myself in the mirror and say: “Yes. I have a problem.”

Because, I do. I’ve had a problem with my confidence all my life. It’s rather like having a very annoying alter-ego – as if Tyler Durden from Fight Club has turned up, and instead of leading me into a life of anarchic terrorism and bare-knuckle fighting, he’s simply made it his mission to make me feel as crappy about myself as is humanly possible. My confidence problems manifest in a variety of different ways, but they still have the power to cripple me, and lock me into a spiral of self-doubt and anxiety. There’ve been points where I’ve been really good at fighting back against this – but ultimately, a lot of that’s sometimes been dependant on outside sources, on life actually giving me reasons to feel positive about myself or my writing. And of course, life isn’t always in the mood to do that. The trick is not letting that stop you, but it isn’t a trick I’ve completely mastered. 

We’re all made of neuroses in different combinations, and the best way of summing up the entertainingly conflicted state of my mind is that on one hand, I desperately want to be accepted and appreciated for who I am – to fit in, and be part of the crowd; to be someone who’s valued and appreciated. On the other hand, I don’t want to have to change myself to fit in. Not in any way whatsoever. I want security, and life to be easy – but I’m immensely bored by routine. I want a sense of creative achievement, but I’m also looking for it by trying one of the hardest creative acts you can possibly do. I want to be a published writer – but I’m also trying to do it by writing big, complex, genre-mashing novels that require a tremendous amount of work. I want things to be easy, and I absolutely hate the idea of making things easy for myself. 

As someone with a lack of confidence, some of the feedback I got from my book being sent out did hurt, of course – but a lot of it was positive. I even ended up, for a few months, being seriously considered for publication by one imprint. Just being in a situation where I was able to take feedback I’d been given on a book and turn it into solutions, to figure out ways of streamlining the beast of a novel I’d written and make it work better… it was one of the most thrilling times in my life. I wrote like a maniac, and loved pretty much every minute of it. Problem-solving is one of the aspects of writing I really enjoy – that, and constructing worlds, plots and characters so they all fit together like a finely-tuned swiss clock.

It didn’t work in the end, and the book got rejected, but I kept the enthusiasm going. I told myself that I could get there, and get another book finished, and then another and another. I already had another idea that I wanted to work on, so I got going. A year, I wanted to aim for. Maybe eighteen months, tops. As long as it took less time than my first novel which, on and off, took me two years to properly do. I had my target, and I knew what I wanted to do.

That was November 2009.

Life gets in the way. It’s not supposed to, of course, but it does. Writing is a weird, difficult existance, and keeping my confidence going at the same time as trying to build up a genuine freelance career doing proofreading – something I only started getting experience at in back in 2008 – isn’t the easiest thing. The freelance life is all about momentum, any time spent away from work feels like time you *should* be spending on work, and it’s very hard to say “No” to a job if it’s offered, even if it suddenly means that week I was planning to get loads of writing done is suddenly going to mostly consist of proofreading. 

I’m learning as I go. It’s taken me a while to get into the right headspace, to stop trying to be other writers and just try and be myself; to say to myself “It’s okay not to write short stories if you don’t want to write short stories.” For some people, it’s a brilliant way of honing their craft. There’d probably be a lot of good reasons for me to write short stories. But ultimately, I don’t enjoy short stories, I don’t want to write short stories – and at a point when I’m still mainly writing for myself, I want to write the kind of things I’m actually going to enjoy.

That’s an important lesson. I thought I’d learned it, but the last couple of years proved me wrong. 

I’m not the fastest, most productive writer in the world. I write in splurges – mad bursts of activity over the course of a few weeks. I managed to get about half of an entire first-draft of a book written in the space of about six weeks last year – and then momentum ran out, work intervened, and my confidence subsided. I’m also trying to get myself into the habit of writing every day, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Especially when I’m busy, it simply isn’t always possible to fit it in – especially when I’m doing something as brain-intensive as proofreading. When you’ve had to spend six hours staring in detail at proofs of a novel, with maximum focus to spot any mistakes, very often the last thing you’ll want to do afterwards is immediately rush to the keyboard and start banging out words. 

And of course, that’s one of the many areas where the whispers begin. The nagging doubts. The sense that if I’m not desperate enough to write every single day, if I’m able to let confidence issues get to me, then I’m not like the writers I admire, and from there it’s a hop, skip and a jump to: Maybe I’m not meant to be a writer. Maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe this has all been a waste of time, and nobody’s ever going to be interested in looking at the weird, sprawling, frothy SF/Fantasy adventures I’m trying to write. 

It’s completely ridiculous, of course. Yes, it helps if you write every day. (Plus, I suspect that if/when I finally get a publishing deal, motivation for writing most days ain’t going to be anywhere near as much of a problem…) But, contrary to some writing advice that floats around online occasionally annoying the living crap out of me, you don’t automatically drop out of the ‘being a writer’ club if you’re not able to write every day. It’s okay to take a while to find your voice. Being on Twitter can sometimes give the impression that a thousand tremendously exciting things are happening in publishing every single day, and there’ve been plenty of times in the last five years when it’s been rather demoralising watching other people outpace me – getting an agent, getting a book deal, getting their first book published, and then another, and then another…

It isn’t a race. It can sometimes feel like a race, but it isn’t a race. And I do feel like, slowly but surely, I’m starting to believe it. 

2012 was supposed to be ‘the year’. My second book took me just over two years to get into the shape I wanted it, but finally it was ready. It had been a long hard slog – I’d tried something ambitious, something with a lot more depth and emotion than my first book, and it took me a long time to get it right. I wanted to get this book as good as possible, to impress people with it, to make the crazy ideas in my head work for me, to throw them out into the world and make stuff happen. There’s a style of story that’s in my head, and I want to get it out there – whether it succeeds or fails, it’s my voice, the story that I want to tell, and that’s what I’d tried to do with my second novel. I was looking forward to going through the same process as I had back in 2008 (except this time, it’d go out to even more publishers, with even more chances of being accepted). Whether it rose or fell, it was going to give me something to be proud of, a real sense of achievement.

Instead, things went wrong. A selection of events over the summer basically took my confidence out into the street and gave it a damn good kicking. Oddly enough, the least of those events was my book getting turned down by the first publisher it got sent to – for various reasons I wasn’t immensely surprised (and was kind of relieved it had only been sent to one publisher – one important thing about novels being submitted is that you only ever really get one shot per book with a publisher, so you’ve got to make it count). I got some extensive feedback which smarted like hell for the first two hours, and then did bring into focus a lot of nebulous issues with the book I’d been struggling with. There were solutions. There were things I could do. But it was going to take time. 

And then, late last year, I also made a major breakthrough. Without spoiling anything, a large chunk of my second novel revolved around infidelity in a relationship, and the ultimate result of this was that the relationship broke up at the end of the story. I’d known my emotional baggage from the end of my marriage had played into this an awful lot, but I’d never really realised exactly how much until I was rewriting the opening half of the book (the section which, at that point, I thought needed the most work), and there were certain sections I just couldn’t get to work – the early scenes involving the relationship, before the infidelity becomes clear. I wanted the relationship to feel real, but also be empathetic, charming and believable, so that the revelation when it came would hit hard, and be truly upsetting. Trouble was, I couldn’t get the early scenes to feel right. I can always tell when a scene is working – there’s a music or a rhythm to the writing that gives it life and momentum. When that music isn’t there, it’s the most frustrating thing on Earth – the scene just sits there like a damp sponge, doing everything it’s supposed to but feeling utterly mechanical, getting the plot from point A to point B and nothing more. I was trying to figure out why this was, talking it through with my girlfriend, wanting to find the solution…

…when it hit me. And for at least a minute or so, I kind of wished it hadn’t. 

Solutions sometimes hurt. They’re great, because the problem’s solved, but sometimes they can expose mistakes, and leave you cursing yourself for being so blinkered. Novel-writing is such an intensive job, and it’s easy as hell to get distracted by the micro-detail while not noticing the problems at the macro-level. Story-elements can set like amber, to the extent that aspects of the plot can be there for draft after draft, and yet they don’t necessarily have a reason to be there. They’re just there, part of the architecture of the story, an ingredient that feels integral when actually it can be left out without affecting the recipe in the slightest – and in fact, the ingredient’s absence might be the key to the whole thing.

When this brainwave hit me, I realised that I didn’t want to write a story about infidelity. I didn’t want to write a relationship plotline that had an unhappy ending. I’m still proud of what I wrote – I tried something challenging and difficult, something that was emotionally gruelling and pushed me in different directions as a writer. I tried something that was more of a literary approach, something more intense, something that wasn’t the traditional way of doing things. I’d also worked through a lot of emotional baggage without realising it – sometimes, writing can be tremendous therapy, a cathartic experience. But sometimes, that kind of writing can topple over into self-indulgence. And sometimes, you’re ready to move on, even when the story isn’t. 

I didn’t want to go to that place again, in order to do the rewrite. I’d had enough. Yes, the choice was there to just walk away from the book, or to leave it for a few months, but then another solution occurred: take the infidelity out. Make it a happy ending. It meant re-engineering certain chunks of the plot… but then things started clicking together in my head. There were ways of figuring it out. I knew right then that, if I could do it, the resulting book would be much closer to the kind of book that I wanted to write – an emotional but satisfying adventure – something that went to some dark places, a story that was wild and crazy and unpredictable, going from daft and surreal to twisted and scary, but ultimately turning out okay in the end. My mind isn’t always the easiest place to be, and I’m sometimes more cynical and pessimistic than I want to be – but I’m also a sucker for a happy ending. 

In many ways, this is a good thing. There was a problem, and now there’s a solution. I’ve got a way forward. But, as I started to sort things out in my head, I got to grips with exactly how much of the book I was going to have to rewrite almost from scratch… and the doubts began. The nagging little fears. And the voice at the back of my head that said: You should have spotted this earlier. You’ve spent two years fumbling around trying to get this to work. Maybe this is another bit of proof that you’re not a writer. 

It’s insidious, the way these doubts can eat away at you. My insecurities have gotten so bad, I’ll occasionally find myself getting a little worked up and insecure at seeing someone else’s writing getting praised on Twitter. It isn’t just a childish (but sometimes inescapable) burst of jealousy – my brain somehow manages to interpret that kind of thing as: Nobody will ever say that about your work, and I end up bothered and weird, and once again feeling like instead of being a short distance from finishing my journey, I’ve gotten lost and am now just stumbling around on a featureless moor, hoping that whichever direction I randomly choose will be the right one. It’s frightening, and it’s difficult, and I wish there was an easy solution. But there isn’t. 

So. It’s the difficult road for me. 

I know I have a problem. My insecurity and confidence has stopped me doing a lot in my life, and it’s frequently prevented me from being able to appreciate what I have acheived, and the genuinely good things that have happened to me. But I’m not letting myself get away with it anymore. At the least, I feel like I’m fully aware of it right now – I’m getting better at recognising the signs when my brain is heading in an unhealth direction, and while I can’t quite stop it, I can ride it out. Of course, there aren’t any quick and easy fixes for this – it’s going to be a gradual process of setting myself acheivable goals, and not beating myself up over any potential missing of those targets. I’m going to have to take it slowly, step by step.  I already know what I want to do in 2013 – I’ve got a new novel to finish, and I want to get the rewrite done on my second novel, and I’m aiming to get them done by November, when my girlfriend and I will be heading to the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton. I’m also applying to get onto an MA course in Creative Writing at Manchester University, and if that happens it’ll open up a whole series of interesting directions.

But I’m going to keep going. And no matter what that voice at the back of my head may whisper, I’m not going to let it win. Not anymore.

I’m going to have a good 2013.

And I hope you do too.

The Dungeons and Dragons team, in Lego form, triumphant! From L to R: Sunder (Rachel), Challa O’Fee (Saxon), animal familiar Harry Otter, skullhead Brook, Bluebell Sparklefluff (Emma) bearing the severed head of chief bad guy Logarr, pet horse Big Mac (wearing a fake unicorn horn provided by Bluebell Sparklefluff), Metalfist (Jehan), Kleeve (Jay), pet crab Citizen Snips, and Gayfist Fagballs (Tom)

(UPDATE: 1/1/13 –  I’ve now been able to include a whole selection of sketches done by my friend Jay (known as @uglynoodles on Twitter), all during the D+D games we played in 2012.  Described as ‘doodles’, they’ve never failed to amaze me, and they’ll also give a better insight into the craziness that has been our D+D campaign…)

It’s the end of 2012. Like everyone else, I could do a round-up of the year at this stage (The short version? A few more downs than up, and many lessons to take through into 2013). But frankly, there are enough ‘here’s my take on the year’ posts out at the moment to last a lifetime. Instead, I’m going to talk about one of the highlights of my year, something which rarely fails to raise a smile – my 2012 experiences with the roleplay game Dungeons and Dragons.

*   *   *

I’m not a roleplaying newbie, by any stretch of the imagination. I’d done a fair amount in my teens (although I had been put off D+D by one group of about ten people, where I’d essentially ended up spending most sessions waiting for the chance to do anything), and while some of it was fairly shambolic (especially a short Call of Cthulhu campaign which I ran and, for reasons I fail to remember, essentially played as a comedy), some of the games I did were exceptionally well planned – especially a DC Heroes campaign at University, where I ended up as a sunglasses-wearing amnesiac superhero in a version of Superman’s home city Metropolis that had been infested with vampires.

Once I left University, roleplaying was off the menu for a long time, and didn’t really return to my life until I moved to Manchester and fell in with the bunch of wonderful nutcases I met via my local independent comic store, Travelling Man. It had been ages, but I found myself tempted back into a little roleplaying – there were some Warhammer 40,000-related games, and a very brief bit of a fun post-apocalyptic game called Atomic Highway (where I played a truck-driving Gorilla who was also an ex-circus ringmaster). Then, when my girlfriend Emma moved to Manchester, we ended up experiencing a Warhammer 40,000 campaign involving plenty of mayhem, and more Al Jolson songs than you would have thought possible.

At the beginning of this year, Ollie – a wonderful shouty bear of a man, like Brian Blessed’s punkier, more aggressive little brother, and the Gamesmaster of our little group – was hankering to get a proper Dungeons and Dragons campaign going with our gang of players, but the venue was a problem – until Emma and I realised that as we’d recently sorted out our flat enough to make guests a possibility, there was no reason we couldn’t have a go at hosting it at our place. It’d make getting to games a hell of a lot easier. We figured we’d give it a go, and if it didn’t work out, we’d come up with something else. The longest of our previous games had lasted a couple of months, so it was probably going to be about that – especially as I’d found my previous experiences with D+D a bit finickity (especially when it came to combat).

The D+D gang (aside from Rachel, who hadn’t joined at this point) – Emma, Me, Tom, Ollie, Jay and Jehan.

So, we had our team: Ollie (aka @Hanbidge) as Dungeonmaster, ruling the game with an iron fist, always ready with an evil cackle when making dice-rolls that might do hideous damage to our characters. Tom (aka @ThermobaricTom), playing a fight-happy pixie with a love of yelling “ADVENTURE!” who started out called Tingle Treblebutt, but whose name eventually evolved into the slightly more worrying monicker of Gayfist Fagballs. Jay (aka @uglynoodles), who went through two separate characters before settling in as a seven-foot wolf-like Gnoll called Kleeve, with a chainsword and some truly terrifying personal habits. My girlfriend Emma (aka @emmajanedavies), playing a pixie named Bluebell Sparklefluff, who ended up developing Delusional Unicornosis (a mental disorder where she was convinced she was turning into a Unicorn) and varied between camp cries of “Darling!” and suggesting some of the most fantastically unspeakable things I’ve ever heard. Myself (aka @saxonb), playing a Dragonborn named Challa O’Fee whose usual response to anything going wrong was “Oh, COME ON!!” and who indulged in over-the-top acts of vengeance while still being convinced that worshipping a soul-stealing cult didn’t actually make him evil. There was Rachel (aka @Rachamuffin), who joined the game later on as a Revenant Palladin Dark Elf named Sunder, and who wasn’t having anything to do with any goddamn skeletons. And then there was Jehan (aka @Maustallica) – one of the most genuinely, wonderfully demented roleplayers I’ve ever encountered – who started out as a dwarf druid named Beardface Goldberg with a habit of nibbling on corpses, until he did something so jaw-droppingly horrifying that our party simply *had* to kill him – at which point his new character entered the scene, Metalfist the communist robot (actually a Warforged), who then spent the entire game failing to get any peasant masses to rise up against their oppressors (while regularly setting castles on fire).

Our gang of unhealthy reprobates: Challa O’Fee, Bluebell Sparklefluff, Gayfist Fagballs, Metalfist, and Kleeve!

Now, the plan was to play short-ish campaigns, because there was a selection of games people wanted to try (and some were possibly going to be GM’d by other people as well). It’d be a revolving cycle, and we’d start off with D+D, but the game probably wouldn’t take too long. Maybe 8-10 sessions, tops.

Initially, things went fairly smoothly. We were hired by a magistrate to take out a skeletal sorcerer. We fought swamp-dwelling frog-men called Bullywugs (whose menacing cries sounded worryingly similar to ‘The Frog Chorus’ by Paul McCartney). We even sorted out a whole issue with the weather in the region, thanks to a totem that had been hi-jacked by some fellow adventurers. Unfortunately, our method of sorting this out – ambushing the adventurers in a bar and killing them – resulted in us also getting banished from the city by the local magistrate, and even our newly liberated castle was taken away from us. Our response – and I have to admit, this was largely my idea – was to say “Bollocks to that!” and try and get revenge on the magistrate by killing him and taking over the country ourselves.

Now, this seemed to be where Ollie was aiming the end of the game – that we’d defeat the magistrate and then we’d shift on to play something else. But then, in a session that started off feeling like it’d probably be either the last or the next-to-last, everything exploded in a rather surprising way. Having been ‘escorted’ from the city by the magistrate, we had escaped and were heading back to the metropolis – and we were also extremely mad at Jehan’s character, Beardface Goldberg, whose decision to nibble on a decaying skull had ended up with us having to spend ridiculous amounts of money saving his life. So, we took the completely moderate strategy of sending him into prostitution (complete with a costume featuring assless chaps). It was the kind of decision that comes up a lot in our demented, anarchic gameplay, and we weren’t expecting anything to come of it.

Jay’s character Kleeve, in full action mode.

What *actually* happened was that within half an hour, we’d ended up running the city’s main brothel, and alongside our new duties as adventurer-pimps, we were also planning an assasination attempt that involved us being smuggled into the magistrate’s castle hidden inside giant dragon-sized books. I think everyone around the table knew that something kind of wonderful had happened – it’s unique to roleplay, a kind of fabulous synthesis where the game acquires its own energy and starts heading in its own direction.

Pretty soon, we weren’t just adventurer-pimps – we were running the country as puppet-dictators, although rather annoyed at the religious atrocities that had been pulled off by our ‘backers’, the Church of Tiamat, courtesy of their leader Logarr (who soon turned out to be a deeply frustrating thorn in our side). Pretty soon we were engaged in diplomatic tangles, trying to prevent a war with nearby country Shorwyn, and also attempting to figure out how to correct all the mildly horrible things that had happened courtesy of the Church of Tiamat. Ollie was now talking about taking our characters all the way to level 30 (and because of our gameplay style, that’s going to take a loooong time), and the end result was that a game we’d thought was going to end within a couple of weeks simply kept going. And going.

And going.

Challa O’Fee and Kleeve (along with Bluebell and Gayfist)

It hasn’t stopped yet. We’re taking a brief break for a couple of months in order to play a different game, but we’ll soon be back to D+D, and up until now we’ve played for virtually the whole of 2012. While there have been plenty of points where I’ve gotten a little frustrated (either with the story – especially on the very lengthy journey we ended up stuck on at one point – or with the epic combat sessions which, with D+D’s complex rules, could go on for a long time), and Monday nights haven’t always been the ideal time for me (thanks to regular deadlines that usually fall on a Monday morning), any downsides have been more than outweighed by the sheer amount of fun I’ve had. Roleplaying is an art that does sometimes get a bad reputation, but there’s nothing quite like embarking on a freeform adventure with nothing more than your imagination, and a gang of friends who are determined to have fun. It’s also helped that Ollie’s sense of humour has resulted in the year-long saga of our attempts to defeat Logarr being crammed full of unexpected homages to things like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and the Dolph Lundgren 1994 action movie ‘Men of War’. Combining this with Jehan’s lunatic gameplay has resulted in plenty of sessions where I’ve spent most of the time laughing my head off.

Tingle Treblebutt, aka Gayfist Fagballs – complete with his legendary tattoo of his own face on his arse. Because of ADVENTURE!

Highlights? Almost too many of them to count, and some of them involving humour so deeply wrong that it’s probably not the best idea to recount them… but there was our extended sea-voyage in the company of Captain Bulge-Eyes, a grizzled sea-dog with a crew of children and a romantic attachment to a flock of scat-hurling Harpies. There was the ‘rescue mission’ we were hired to perform, only to find out halfway through that instead of rescuing people we were actually kidnapping them (an act which then went on to cause a gigantic calamity in the war against Logar). There was the unexpected bout of turnip sculpture, as Metalfist tried to win over villagers with his artistic side (during which Kleeve also tried to sculpt a nearby tree with her chainsword, but ended up flattened beneath it). There were Shorwyn’s batallion of amphibious dwarf soldiers, known as the Iron Snorkels. There was the extended period during which we had to prevent Bluebell Sparklefluff from being forced into an arranged marriage, which was only solved (in an accidental way) by Metalfist deciding to burn down the castle we were staying in. There was Metalfist’s trip to a wizardly gay bar (and Bluebell’s unexpected debut as a drag artist). We also had the trip to the Island of the Sadness Monkeys, where I managed to nearly get killed by being pelted with coconuts (following a brief bout of illness thanks to being pelted with dung from the Harpies), and our epic journey to the Kord-Mania festival, a wrestling competition where we finally had to face off against the Muscle Pope himself, Randall Sauvage (who of course, bore no resemblance at all to WWE wrestler ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage…). There was even the spirited argument I tried to put up in insisting that despite the whole vengeance-seeking and soul-stealing, my character wasn’t really evil, resulting in someone else saying the line: “Of course he’s evil, IT SAYS SO ON THE CHARACTER SHEET!”

My ultimate highlight, and the proudest moment of my gaming ‘career’, came late in the game – we’d defeated several major villains (including Keefer – taken from the aforementioned ‘Men of War’, an insanely macho bare-chested mockney with an overstyled goatee), and having snuck back into Logarr’s capital city, we were trying to figure out a way of disrupting Keefer’s state funeral (Keefer having been turned into the most improbable ‘hero of the people’ ever) which would stand any chance of messing up Logarr’s plans. Having gone through one of my brief bouts of feeling a bit frustrated with things in the game, I didn’t have any clue as to what we could do to make a real difference – until I came up with the idea of trying to fake Keefer’s ghost so that he could pull a Banquo, accuse Logarr of having killed him, and incite the people into a full uprising. Amazingly – everyone in the group went for it, we gave it a try – and it actually worked. We ended up with a ghostly version of Keefer stirring up rebellion and almost emptying the city before the final confrontation, and I couldn’t help feeling oddly proud of having pulled off such a wonderfully ridiculous result.

It’s had its ups and downs, but our D+D games have also pulled me through some difficult times this year, giving both me and Emma a bit of socialisation and fun at times when we’ve needed it. All of our friends have had difficult or trying years in one way or another, but D+D has given us a way of getting together, forgetting our cares, and revelling in the art of pure silliness (as well as a selection of completely unprintable jokes that had us howling at their sheer wrongness). And, at the end of the year, if I’m thankful for anything, it’s for a brilliant group of friends, and for Ollie, who’s done a wonderful job of marshalling the game for the whole year and steering us the right way. It’s been a riot in the best sense, and I hope we’ve got many, many more games ahead of us…

Kleeve, and Metalfist (sporting his specially made false beard of Unicorn Hair).

Jay’s character Kleeve – hairy, fanged and not-to-be-messed-with.

Beardface Goldberg’s animal familiar – the late, lamented Owlbear known as ‘Party Bear’…

One of the extremely mournful Sadness Monkeys…

Some exceedingly cute Manga-style Dragonborn.

Tayzah – the second character to be played by Jay (and who ended up leaving the party in a bit of a bind…)