“Harry Potter Fandom: the Game” is a piece of art, a visual representation of my experiences in the fandom. However, it can also function as a board game for 2-7 players, should anyone be interested in playing.
You can play as one of seven different pieces: Muggle (a newcomer to all things Harry Potter), Squib (an HP fan, but not active in the fandom), Word Witch (avid reader, fanfic writer, etc), Wizard Activist (someone passionate about social change, a card-carrying member of SPEW… or the HPA), Crafty Witch (craftsmen and fan artists), Computer Wizard (someone who frequents fan sites, messageboards, chatrooms, podcasts etc), or Wizard Rocker (someone who expresses their fandom through music). (There are seperate scarves in different house colors that can be attached to each game piece.)
The gameboard winds through many different areas of fandom, taking players from their first discovery of Harry and his world all the way to LeakyCon 2011 and the “End of An Era.” Collect tokens representing significant events (“midnight release,” “fan conference,” “wrock show,” etc.) and gain points for accomplishing fandom-related tasks. The game ends when the first player reaches LeakyCon ‘11, but the winner is decided by a tally of points and tokens. By the end of the game, the players should feel well-equipped for whatever the future may hold. This may be the “End of an Era,” but with these collected experiences and their fellow wizards at their side, the fun is only just beginning.
Day 83: In addition to working at the library I'm also paid to clean the two buildings at my church every week. I'm probably not supposed to do this, but since we don't have a piano at home anymore and my keyboard is too much of a pain to set up and put away frequently I often play a bit on the piano and/or keyboard in the sanctuary while I'm there. The keyboard especially is nice because it has a "record" option where you can record yourself playing then play it back again later. I came up with a nice chord progression and recorded it a few weeks back, then this past weekend when I went to clean I brought my laptop and recorded myself singing along with it. It's short, but it came out better than I expected:
Day 84: If you haven't figured it out by now, I often have ideas for stories, jot them down quickly, and abandon them for several months. Then I pull them out, add a bit more, then set them aside again. In a way this is fun because you get to revisit stories over time and you may have better ideas for them than you would have had if you'd tried writing it all in one go. But mostly this isn't a good habit: you tend to have many beginnings and not nearly enough endings.
Today I worked on another of these story ideas, one I've nicknamed "The February Faery." When I originally had the idea, the thought was to send it out as a belated Christmas letter. The protagonist is a faery who is never on time for anything, so the thought of sending it out as part of a holiday letter a few months late seemed pretty funny. If I manage to work on it later this year, I may finally get around to sending it out by February 2012.
Here's the intro:
Someday when you're bored and tired of being indoors, wander down to the bottom of your garden. This is one of the best places to be near the faery folk. If you're like me, you're bound to have heard many a story about the faeries. You may even count yourself as something of an expert. Surely you'd know that there are many kinds of faeries (from the tiniest pixie to the most towering giant), and that many of them - no, most of them - aren't meek and innocent at all, but wild and mischievous and dangerous. You probably have a favorite kind of faery (I like gnomes myself), and I'm betting you know your fair share of fairy tales.
Have you heard of the Littlewings? Of course you have! That's what my grandmother always used to call the flower faeries, the little winged people mere inches high that have a special bond with the seasons. The Littlewings were always her favorite kind of faery, which is why she told me this story. Have you heard it? Perhaps. Stories like this one tend to spread. But in case you haven't, let us begin the tale of the February Faery.
Day 85: Twice in the past few weeks I've had dreams of zombies. The last one I had was more a body-snatcher-alien kind of zombie. The one I had on this particular night was more of the infecting-virus kind of zombie. It didn't have enough of a narrative for it to make a good "13 Days of Halloween" story candidate, but I did write it up on my other blog, and you can read it HERE.
Day 86: More on the "The House Between Worlds," including this description:
The “For Sale” sign—the kind that hung from its post on two chains—was so old that one of the rusted chains had broken and the faded letterboard now dangled listlessly. The untended yard was a tangle of weeds, the gutters clogged with many years’ worth of dead leaves. The whole place had an air of having been wonderful once, but now it was just tired and sad.
Day 87: Carrie Ryan, author of the Forest of Hands and Teeth trilogy (which, fittingly, is about zombies), is coming to our library to do a reading/signing on May 15. I got to design the flyer:
Day 88: My Oma and Aunt Barbara drove down from Indiana to visit for a few days. In their honor, I switched the message on the chalkboard guitar:
Day 89: More on "The House Between Worlds," including this:
I awoke to the sounds of Em screaming. Not a shriek of something like terror, but more of a loud, deep moan. A horrified sound, and utterly chilling. Like something in her had broken and her soul was seeping out of her mouth.
Day 90: I was hoping to come up with some elaborate April Fool's Day prank that would involve creating something, but alas... inspiration abandoned me. Instead, for some reason I was feeling a little hormonal or something and I wrote this poem:
PANACEA
I troll the internet and books for poems
that will express what it is I feel
because I do not know what it is I feel
but I suspect that reading a poem
will tug at whatever it is,
will dislodge it like a magnet
might tug metal fragments
up to the surface of a wound.
I did not know till now that I was wounded.
I do not feel - really, have not felt,
not felt in a while.
Could this be my wound, then?
And could the very fact that I now
sense this twinge or pulse of something
mean that, though I can't name it,
I'm feeling my own cure?
Day 91: There's an tradition started a couple years ago by author Maureen Johnson called "Blog Every Day in April" (BEDA for short). A lot of YouTubers have adapted it for video blogs, so if you ever see VEDA on the title of a video, that's what it means. Anyway, I figured in addition to Good Madness I'd give BEDA a try this year. Those posts are over on my other blog. I only intend to count a BEDA post as Good Madness if it involves a good amount of thought, effort, or polished writing. The ones that are just me venting, more personal-journal style, won't count.
Anyway, the one I wrote today was about an adventure with a stalled train, a gravel road leading seemingly nowhere, and a hidden graveyard. I posted it as a note on facebook HERE.
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