A journey through a land of fantasy…

You might notice a new look to the journal.  Once I started adding stuff to the sidebar, I started to dislike the old theme because of the way it displayed the sidebar headers.  So, I’ve chosen a new look, and we’ll see how this goes.  I’m not sure I’m fond of the vertically-squeezed webpage layout that’s so popular nowadays, and I don’t know about this tiny font (isn’t the point of a public web journal is to make it easy for people to read what you write?), but I’ll see if they grow on me.

I’ve added my first session journal entry, which you can see on the right, just under “About this journal.”  The “Campaign Journal” page will have links to all of these session entries, organized into either the “past” (old sessions) or “present” (current sessions).  I’ll also have inter-session entries, meaning discussions of offline “sessions” held with usually only one player to take care of something personal (sometimes these things are held entirely in email).  I noticed the need for this while writing the current session entry — many of the things mentioned in it stem from some inquiries that Sparrow made on his own time.

The “Campaign Journal” page will always have the links to the session entries, but I plan to remove the session entries from the sidebar as they get old and new ones get added.  You can always refer to the sidebar to see what’s new (or to see just how much of a slacker I’ve been).

At this point, everything except the session entries will be kept in the main blog, just like I’ve been doing before.  Perhaps, as I write more and complete more things, I’ll organize them in the sidebar a bit better (the list of player characters comes to mind).  Any other suggestions, comments, and criticisms about the organization and presentation of this journal are welcome!

I’ve been kind of wondering how I should organize posts about the actual sessions.  Since the campaign started two years ago, I have articles to write about sessions that happened then, as well as sessions that happen now.  If I work on the former, I won’t get to the latter until I’ve forgotten about them.  If I work on the latter, you’ll never see how the campaign got this far.

What I’ve decided to do is work on both, slowly.  They’ll be written in prose, with hopefully few side comments, and written as WordPress pages, rather than posts.  I’ll have a link to them on the right side, when I finally get the first one done, and then, if I have comments about the session, those will be in a regular journal post.  (Thus, you’ll probably know when a new page has been added to the right-side link.)  I will also have two sections — one for then, and one for now.

Sadly, the older sessions will suffer from lack of detail.  I seem to have written up the first two sessions, but neglected to do so after that (mostly due to apathy — I wrote two versions for each session, one for me and one for the players, and when I posted them, the players showed no interest [except my husband, who loves seeing his own adventures], so I stopped writing), so a lot of detail has been lost.  I’m making an effort now to write session summaries as I go along.

If anyone has any better idea on how to organize this using the tools WordPress gives us, please let me know!