Twenty days late...

 

May the Fourth Be With You.

 

I owe more to Star Wars than I can describe. One of the oldest dreams I remember having is hanging from the antenna under Cloud City, watching the self-destructing Enterprise over the Genesis Planet. When I was three years old and had an ear infection, my father told me to endure like Luke Skywalker did when he had his hand cut off.

 

When I say that Star Wars was a formative experience for me, that's what I mean.

 

My first actual memory of seeing the movies is sometime around kindergarten, and after that me and my best friend at the time immersed ourselves in it. We bought the toys. We built lego versions of everything. We re-enacted scenes (Jamie did a BRILLIANT Darth Vader voice for a six year old).

 

As soon as there were tie-in novels being published, I read them all (first the Glove of Darth Vader series, then the Lando Calrissian novels from the 80s, then later Timothy Zahn's new and exciting tie-ins). The Last Command was the first book I ever spent my own money to buy. And it may have been the best six bucks I ever spent.

 

I have a bookshelf full of Star Wars novels. No, not one row on a bookshelf. A bookshelf. I own... eighty-five Star Wars novels, six books about the Star Wars universe, and twelve gaming supplement, including The Death Star Technical Companion.

 

I have been writing Star Wars fanfiction since I was eight years old. My friends and I played out the saga of Prince Tiress of Iger and Tyclo, the rogue Jedi from Cantara since that point. The first online role-playing game I ever joined was a post-apocalyptic Star Wars sequel (and man could there be a post series talking about how online RP has shaped my life).

 

My imagination is drenched in Star Wars. It always has been. I dedicated myself to being the King of Star Wars geeks, and when it comes to miscellaneous knowledge about the universe, I've only ever met one person who can match me. This is one of my proudest achievements.

 

I didn't like the prequels (though I did enjoy them). I don't like where the book series has gone (though I enjoyed that, too, for far longer than most of my friends. This is not a boast, it's an admission of guilt). But I think about Star Wars every day. I don't have anything to profound to say beyond that, except... rec me your favorite fics! Talk to me about your favorite and least favorite books, characters, moments! Geek out with me!

 

Some people wanted to run away to Narnia or Middle-Earth as kids. But for me, my otherworldly home will always be the Millenium Falcon.

 

I had a list of things to do today...

... and some things had been on that list for nearly a month.  It was six things or so this morning, expanded to eight or nine as I thought of more.

And I did every last damn one of them, plus one thing that was scheduled for Monday.

One of those things was finally finishing Chapter Twenty-Six.  It should be beta-ed, revised, and posted by Monday.

Slowly coping better and better with my weird bursts of morbidity and existential terror.  They still bother me, but I don't know if I want to think about them (and thus entertain them) for long enough to construct a full post.  If the problem is fixing itself, good, though its sudden onslaught still puzzles me.  Is this a facet of getting older?

If so, then color me Peter Pan.  I want none of it.

Anyway, if anyone is interested I'd still be up for discussing it.  I just don't want to spend an hour reflecting on it alone while I compose an essay.  Three weeks ago just mentioning it in a post would have given me the screaming mimis and fifteen minutes of anguish.  Now?  Meh.

I *do* want to make a different post though, summing up the ongoing adventures of my D & D party.  They're just hitting the end of the first major plot arc I have planned, and the drama is playing out nicely in a way that lends itself very well to a narrative and dramatic summary and explanation of the psychological hell they are about to endure.

Being a DM puts one in a very weird headspace at times, when it comes to sadistic enjoyment of things...